EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/9/2024 11:29 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “Confessing”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 1:9
Message of the verse: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
While getting a treatment this afternoon I was listening
to a sermon by John MacArthur giving a kind of review on 1 John 1:9 and he said
that he had been learning new things from this verse for the past five years,
so that means that there is much to know as we continue looking at this verse
in my SD for today.
I am going to start this SD by quoting from John
MacArthur’s commentary and to understand what he is writing here it would be
good to look at the last SD that I posted yesterday. “With that established, it is possible to
understand the place of ongoing confession.
The word translated confess (homologeo)
means ‘to say the same thing.’ Thus
believers are those who confess their sins, agreeing with God about their sin—they
seek acknowledge its reality and affirm that it is a transgression of His law
and a violation of His will, the presence of which the truly penitent seek to
eliminate from their lives (3:4; James 2:10-11; cf. Rom. 7:24). What John is actually saying here about
confession is that since believers are forgiven, they will regularly confess
their sins. Stated another way, their
forgiveness is not because of their ongoing confession, but their ongoing pattern
of penitence and confession is because of their forgiveness and
transformation. As the Holy Spirit
sanctifies believers, He continually produces within them a hatred for sin (Ps.
97:10; Prov. 8:13; Rom. 7:15-25; Phil. 3:8-9; cf. Ps. 1:1-2), which results in
penitent hearts and a sincere acknowledgement of their sins. The more believers grow in Christ, the
greater their hatred of sin becomes and the deeper is their penitence. Paul, the most devout and dedicated
Christian, at the end of his earthly sanctification, saw himself as the
foremost of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15).” “It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance,
that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost
of all.”
“If
confession is genuine, it will always stem from proper sorrow over sin and a
real longing to turn from sin. In 2
Corinthians 7:9-11 Paul wrote:
9 I now rejoice, not that you were made
sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance;
for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God, so that you
might not suffer loss in anything through us. 10 For the sorrow that is
according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading
to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death. 11 For behold what earnestness
this very thing, this godly sorrow, has produced in you: what vindication of
yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what avenging
of wrong! In everything you demonstrated yourselves to be innocent in the
matter.
With that said I have to say that the most difficult
part of this verse for me is to understand that this verse can be directed to
both non-believers and also to believers, but when it is read by non-believers
it is actually a salvation message. To
the believer who has already had all of their sins forgiven through Jesus
Christ on the cross this verse is a reminder that when we sin that we are to
then agree with the Lord that what was done wrong was sinful and it is your
desire to change. Looks like maybe one
more SD on this verse unless I decide to use some quotations from MacArthur’s
sermons to help us better understand this verse even more.
9/9/2024 11:50 PM
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