EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/31/2024 10:00 PM
My Worship Time Focus: “Those in
Darkness”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 1:6
Message of the verse: “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth;”
Now to say that a person is in darkness would mean
that they are not a true believer, and so John is writing some of these verses
in this first chapter of 1 John to those who are not believers, those who walk
in darkness. They claimed to have
fellowship with God, to share common aspects of life with Him, that is eternal
life. I want to look at John 17:3 “"This is eternal life, that they may know You, the
only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Now back to our look at 1 John 1:6, However,
that claim is meaningless if one continues to walk in the darkness. Walk refers to manner of life or
conduct. I have a list of verses that
goes along with this last sentence: Rom.
8:4; cf. 13:3; Eph. 4:1; Col. 1:10;; see also Deut. 10:12-13; Ps. 119:1; Mic.
6:8. Now it is there that genuine
salvation is manifest, not in a mere profession that one possesses eternal
life. There are some people that you
talk to about how to be born-again and they will tell you that that happened to
them at an earlier time in their life, and then you can see from their life
that there is no fruit. To profess one
thing and live in contradiction to it is to lie and not practice the
truth. MacArthur writes: “Jesus indicted the Jews’ superficial earthly
religion by declaring to them, ‘The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if
your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will
be full of darkness. If then the light
is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!’ (Matt. 6:22-23). In this analogy, the Lord argued from the
lesser to the greater. If it is a
negative thing to be in the dark physically (blind), it is much worse to be in
the dark spiritually. John in his gospel
taught that Jesus was the true light for a sin-darkened world (John 1:4-5; cf.
8:12). But since sinful humanity prefers
darkness over light (John 3:19-20), no one who claims to be a Christian and yet
lives in darkness (meaning that they continually practice evil deeds) is
actually saved (1 John 3:4, 9, cf. Matt. 7:17-18; 13:38; John 8:42-44).”
Now we will look at James 1:22-25 to show that those who
really embrace the truth heed what James has written here:
22 But prove yourselves doers of the word, and
not merely hearers who delude themselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the
word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a
mirror; 24 for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has
immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. 25 But one who looks intently
at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having
become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in
what he does.
The truth is that believers posses
God’s life and that makes them new creatures in Christ made for good works, and
have the indwelling Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:11; 1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Tim. 1:14). MacArthur
concludes: “Thus they cannot ignore the
existence of personal iniquity and walk in darkness (cf. Col 1:12-14). No matter what anyone claims for himself, the
genuineness of faith can always be seen in one’s life by the love of
righteousness (Matt. 7:15-20).”
8/31/2024
10:25 PM
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