EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/5/2024 10:39 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Christians Remain Faithful”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
1 John 2:24-25
Message of the verses: “As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father. This is the promise which He Himself made to us: eternal life.”
I begin this last section in the ninth chapter from John
MacArthur’s commentary which he entitled it “Antichrists and Christians.” Notice that both of these words are plural,
meaning that there are many Antichrists and many Christians. Now we probably are not surprised of the many
Christians, but that there are many antichrists may surprise us a bit, so that
was something that we all needed to learn about.
I am not ashamed to say that John knew that the true
sheep could never lose their salvation (John 10:27-29; cf. 1 Peter 1:5), he
exhorted his audience to persevere, to let that [truth] abide in them which they
heard from the beginning. Now just for a
moment let me talk about this statement about the truth that once a person
becomes a believer that they can never lose their salvation. I will do this by once again talking about
what happened when I became a believer.
It was in January of 1974 about five months before my wife and I were married
that I took a trip to visit a high school friend of mine in Florida. I have mentioned that my life before becoming
a believer in Jesus Christ was not good at all.
I could hardly say a sentence without swearing and I had gone through a
heartbreaking divorce a few years earlier and did not have the correct
understanding of women. When I got to
Florida at my friends house he had a series of tapes which were sermons from a
man named Hal Lindsey that were references the bestselling book that he wrote
entitled “The Late Great Planet Earth.”
He said that I might want to listen to these tapes, which meant I had to
stay at his house to listen to them. I
think that it was about the third day of listening to these tapes which were
about mostly of the end times that the Spirit of God opened my heart to
salvation. How did I know this, well the
Lord took swearing away from me, which to me was a miracle. I called my wife and had her fly down so that
I could talk to her about the Lord by telling her what had happened to me. It would be sometime in April of that year
when she became a believer. All I can
say was that time in Florida changed me, changed my life, and it also would
change the lives of our two children and eventually seven grandchildren. I received salvation from the Lord at a time
when I really did not know what that meant and so I know that it was the Lord
through His Spirit who saved me that warm winter day in Florida, and so I know
from that experience that this gift of salvation that was given to me will
never be taken away from me. That does
not mean that I can go back to the life that I was living because that is not
what I desire to do, as I want to serve the Lord, doing what He has planned for
me to do from eternity past.
I will finish this first SD on these verses by quoting
the rest of the first paragraph from MacArthur’s commentary. “Believers are commanded to actively
persevere in the truth because it is the
gracious means by which they are sanctified (John 8:31; 1 Cor. 15:1-2; Phil.
2:12-13; Col. 1:22-23; 2 Tim. 3:14) even as faith is the means by which they
are graciously justified (Rom. 3:24-26).
The word twice rendered abide and once abides is from meno, which refers to a continual action
of remaining (cf. it use in John 6:56; 8:31; 14:17; 15:4, 9-10; 1 Cor. 13:13; 2
Tim. 3:14). Those who continue in what
they have heard show that what they have heard from the beginning abides in them,
and they also will abide in the Son and in the Father (1 John 3:17; 4:13).” I think that what I just quoted goes right
along with what happened to me almost 51 years ago, and for that I am so very
thankful to the Lord and desire to serve Him.
12/5/2024 11:10 PM
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