EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/19/2024 10:45 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “General
Reassurance”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 2:12
Message of the verse: “I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven and for His name’s sake.”
I am writing this “evening” Spiritual Diary in the morning
because of the business of my life in this very busy month of October. My calendar is full with extra things to do
due to the fact that I have a number of grand-children into fall sports events,
and a daughter who is the coach of her high school volleyball team, which is
doing very well this year.
We begin to try and look more closely at these verses in
1 John that have always been somewhat of a mystery to me, and it is my prayer
that the Spirit of God will make them more clear to me as I go through them. It
is for certain that John knew that the people that he was writing to were
believers and he also knew that their sins had been forgiven them, and I
suppose that was a great comfort to the aged Apostle John as he is writing
these letters when he was very old. It
is my opinion that all of the letters that are in the Word of God that he wrote
were written many, many years after being with the Lord Jesus Christ. He wrote the gospel of John, the three
letters or epistles of John and then finally the book of the Revelation, and as
stated I believe that he may have been in his 90’s as he wrote them, so that
enforces to me that as the Word teaches is that the Holy Spirit was the One
causing him to remember and write what was needed to be written. The Bible surely would be incomplete without
all that John wrote in it.
MacArthur writes that “In this verse, and in the verses
that follow, the apostle said, ‘I am writing to you’ or ‘I have written to you’
six times, in order to emphatically state that his message was limited to his
readers, the ones who truly were part of God’s family.”
Now we want to look at the word that is translated little
children which in the Greek is teknia
and this word means “born ones,” speaking of offspring in a general sense
without regard to how old a person was.
MacArthur adds “It is commonly used in the New Testament to describe
believers as the children of God (John 13:33; 1 John 2:1, 28; 3:7, 18; 4:4;
5:21; cf. Gal. 4:19, 28). By using this
term, the apostle was addressing all who were true offspring of God, at any
level of spiritual maturity. His focus was on all who mourned
over their sinful condition (Matt. 5:4), trusted Jesus Christ as their only
Lord and Savior (Acts 16:31), and their lives transformed by the Holy Spirit (Titus
3:5), lived in obedience to God’s Word (Rom. 6:17), and showed sincere love for
one another (1 Peter 1:22).”
Now I am going to quote the verses that MacArthur
mentions in the order that he mentions them in the highlighted portion of this
SD beginning with Matthew 5:4:
4 “Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
31 They said, "Believe in the
Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household."
5 He saved us, not on the basis of
deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the
washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,
17 But thanks be to God that
though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form
of teaching to which you were committed,
22 Since you have in obedience to
the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently
love one another from the heart,
Look over these verses in relationship with the
quotation written by MacArthur that I have highlighted.
10/19/2024 11:15 AM
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