SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/22/2024 7:05 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The
Certainty of Christian Assurance”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 2:3-6
Message of the verses: “3 By this we know
that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 The one who says,
"I have come to know Him," and does not keep His commandments, is a
liar, and the truth is not in him; 5 but
whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By
this we know that we are in Him: 6 the one who says he abides in Him ought
himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.”
Today, September 22nd is the first day of
autumn, of fall as most of us call it. I
can say that the beauty of the fall season is something that I like as I can
see God’s creation full of colors. Today
is the first of what will be probably a lot of Spiritual Diaries on this topic
from 1 John 2:3-6.
I
want to begin with the topic of Assurance and will quote from the
seventeenth-century English Puritan Thomas Brooks, who writes:
“Assurance is a reflex act
of a gracious soul, whereby he clearly and evidently sees himself in a gracious,
blessed, and happy state; it is a sensible feeling, and an experimental
[experiential] discerning of a man’s being in a state of grace…assurance is a
believer’s ark, where he sits, Noah-like, quiet and still in the midst of all
distractions and destructions, commotions and confusions. (Heaven
on Earth: A Treatise on Christian
Assurance [reprint; Edinburgh:
Banner of Truth, 1983], 14, 11).
Now assurance will cause us to
rejoice with the hymn writer, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a
foretaste of glory divine!” Now to
Posses assurance is, in a sense, to experience heaven on earth. However it is sadly as Brooks goes on to
lament, assurance
Is a pearl that most want, a
crown that few wear…Little well-grounded assurance…is to be found among most
Christians. Most Christians live between
fears and hopes, and hang, as it were, between heaven and hell, sometimes they
hope that their state is good, a other times they fear that their state is bad:
now they hope that all is well, and that is shall go well with them forever;
anon [shortly] they fear that t hey shall perish by the hand of such a
corruption, or by the prevalency of such or such a temptation; and so they are like a ship in a
storm, tossed here and there. (Heaven on
Earth, 15, 11).
This
is how John MacArthur begins this fifth chapter of his commentary on 1
John.
Today’s
SD will be a bit shorter because it is Sunday morning, and I must go over my
Sunday school lesson on the book of Colossians this morning. I have to say that Assurance is indeed not
only a privilege; it is also a birthright that true Christian possess as
members of the body of Christ as we can see in Romans 5:1; 8:16, and can
compare that with Ps. 4:3; John 10:27-29; Phil. 1:6; 1 Thess. 1:4). Now if we don’t have it, on the other hand,
and thereby doubting one’s salvation, it will produce uncertainty and fear that
brings misery and despair.
Lord
will we will continue what is actually an introduction to the verses from above
in the next SD.
9/22/2024 7:32 AM
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