EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/4/2024 9:12 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
“Reasons Believers Are Not to Love the
World”
Bible Reading & Meditation
Reference: 1 John 2:15b-17
Message of the verses: “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.”
Now please think for a moment about this truth: The kingdom of the world and the kingdom of
God are inherently incompatible. Here
are some verses to show this is true: 1
John 4:5-6; John 15:19; Gal. 6:14. As
one compares the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God they will find out
that the two are mutually exclusive and opposed to one another. They are opposing, and cannot peacefully
coexist. Now when God created the world
it was perfect, and that includes both Adam and Eve, but once they fell then
the kingdom of the world began. When a
person is born-again they are born into the family of God and are then opposed
by the Devil and also the kingdom of the world, and as stated they are
opposite. Now true Christians therefore
will not be characterized by a habitual love for the world, nor will worldly
people demonstrate a genuine affection for the gospel and its Lord. Again we will look at some verse references
to help us better understand this truth.
John 3:20; Acts 7:51; Acts 13:8-10; Acts 17:5, 13; Rom. 8:7; Col. 1:21;
and 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16.
John MacArthur writes:
“Clearly, there is an unmistakable line of demarcation between the
things of God and the things of the world.
The ongoing moral and ethical deterioration of contemporary culture makes
this obvious. Even brief consideration
provides a lengthy list of cultural agendas that are aggressively hostile to
biblical Christianity: an attack on the traditional family by feminism; and
active promotion of sexual promiscuity and homosexuality; and hedonism by the
secular media; a steady decline in standards of personal integrity and business
esthetics; an undermining of right and wrong by post-modern relativism; and so
on.”
The commentary that I have quoted from was from John MacArthur,
and it was printed in the year 2007, and I’m sure that the sermons that he
preached that are the background for the commentary were preached earlier than
that. My point is that things are very
much worse now than they were in 2007.
As we move closer to the time when the Lord will return to take His
Church to heaven in the event entitled the rapture the Bible says that things
will continue to grow worse and worse.
Now what we are looking at in today’s SD is just a
preview of things to come as these verses will be broken down and written about
as we move on from SD to SD.
MacArthur now gives us a preview of things to come in his
commentary by writing “In order to support his admonition, John does not offer
a long list of specifics or detailed illustrations. Instead, he presents three general reasons
believers must not love the world:
because of who they are, because of what the world does, and because of
where the world is going.” These are the
three elements that I will be writing about as we continue to look at these
verses.
11/4/2024 9:33 PM
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