EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/29/2024 8:51 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Test Started”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 2:3
Message of the verse: “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments.”
Paul in writing to Titus emphasized the difference
between false knowledge and true knowledge as he wrote the following in Titus
1:16 “They profess to know God, but by their deeds they
deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any
good deed.” Comparing this verse with
our verse from 1 John we can see that a person who is a true believer will keep
the commandments of the Lord. I know
that when a person becomes a true believer that they still have the old nature
in them and that means that there is a battle between the new nature that God
gives a true believer and so as stated there is a battle that goes on and so
that means that there are times when a believer will not follow the law of the
Lord but that does not mean that he or she is not a true believer.
MacArthur writes something
similar: “But this is not true of the
Christian faith that John and the other apostles taught. The people who truly know God are those who
pursue holy lives, consistent with God’s new covenant. The prophet Jeremiah spelled out the nature
of that covenant:
31 “Behold, days are coming," declares the
LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with
the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in
the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant
which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. 33
“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after
those days," declares the LORD, "I will put My law within them and on
their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My
people. 34 "They will not teach
again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’
for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of
them," declares the LORD, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and
their sin I will remember no more’’ (Jeremiah 31:31-34).
In
my understanding of this passage from Jeremiah it is speaking of both the New
Testament believers and also those who will belong to the Millennial Kingdom
which comes after the Tribulation Period.
Now New Testament believers do have the Holy Spirit of God in their
hearts the moment that they become true believers, and this was not the case of
Old Testament believers where the Spirit could come and go as was in the case
of King Saul as when the Spirit left him we read that the Holy Spirit came into
David, but when David sinned with Bathsheba he wrote in Psalm 51 the following: “Do not cast me away from Your presence And
do not take Your Holy Spirit
from me” (Ps. 51:11).
I will quote another rather long paragraph from John
MacArthur’s commentary that has a lot of Bible references in it, but it goes
along with what I have been writing about above. “Now covenant people have God’s law written
on their hearts, and what is in a person’s heart controls how he or she
lives. As the writer of Proverbs
observed, ‘For as [a person] thinks in his heart, so is he’ (Prov. 23:7, NKJV;
cf. 2:10; 3:1; 4:4, 23; Pss. 40:8; 119:10-11; Matt. 6:21; 12:34-35; Rom.
6:17). Israel illustrated will the
connection between knowing God and obeying Him.
Even though the nation claimed to know Him, she demonstrated the
emptiness of that claim by her continual disobedience (Ex. 32:9; Num. 14:11;
25:3; Deut. 9:7, 24; 32:16; Isa. 1:2, 4; 2:8; 29:13; Jer. 2:11-13; 3:6-8; 6:13;
8:5; 31:32; Ezek. 16:59; 33:31; Matt. 15:7-9; Acts 13:27; Rom. 10:3; 2 Cor.
3:13-15). Of course, the obedience that
accompanies salvation is not a legalistic obedience, imposed externally or
observed superficially and hypocritically; it is a gracious attitude of
obedience that flows from the truth embraced internally, following the Holy
Spirit’s revealing of it through the Word.
Even though believers still wrestle with sin (cf. Job 13:23; Ps. 19:13;
Rom. 8:13; Heb. 12:1, 4), they can agree with Paul, who wrote,
21 I find then the principle that evil is
present in me, the one who wants to do good. 22 For I joyfully concur with the
law of God in the inner man, 23 but I see a different law in the members of my
body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law
of sin which is in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free
from the body of this death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but
on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (Rom. 7:21-24).
These
verses go along with what I was writing about earlier when I was talking about
the battles that we go through as believers.
9/29/2024 9:21 PM
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