EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/1/2025 8:50 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Christian’s Incompatibility
with Sin”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
1 John 3:4-10
Message of the verses: “4 Everyone who
practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. 5 You know
that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. 6 No
one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. 7 Little
children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just
as He is righteous; 8 the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the
beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of
the devil. 9 No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and
he cannot sin, because he is born of God. 10 By this the children of God and
the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is
not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.”
I think that the best thing to say about these
verses is to buckle up for this is going to be difficult
and will take some time to understand these verses. I have mentioned before that the Apostle John
never seems to use any big words that are hard to understand, but you put all
of his little words together and it makes for some difficult times to
understand them. I will do my best to
cause us to understand what John is saying in these verses. I did take the time to listen to the sermon,
the first sermon that John MacArthur preached on these verses on my walk this
morning.
“Throughout
its history the true church has always maintained that Scripture clearly sets
forth certain basic standards of belief and behavior as necessary marks of
genuine saving faith.” Ok each true
believer is saved in the very same way, and once a person becomes a true
believer his or her life will change, change because of being a new person, a
born-again person. “An affirmation and
acceptance of the biblical gospel, and a life that is characterized by a worthy
walk, have rightly been seen as accurate indicators of the work of the Trinity
on a person’s heart. And when such fruit
is absent in an individual’s life, the church has appropriately called into
question his or her profession of faith.”
What we have just looked at is what could be called something that is “normal”
but as one looks at the history of the church throughout the church age, then
one will probably not find out “normal” times in it. In my studies of the book of Revelation which
can be found on my blogs I found out that in the second and third chapters of
that wonderful letter that John, through the inspiritation of the Holy Spirit
writes about seven churches. No it is my
belief, and not everyone’s belief that the order that John puts those seven
churches is the order of what the dominant church is during that time. Now the truth is that every church spoken of
in those two chapters will be around through the entire church age, but there
will be a dominant church and that is in the order of the way the churches are
numbered. In his commentary, MacArthur
dates the different dominant churches, and he is not the only one who does that
as Hal Lindsey did the same thing in his commentary on Revelation “There is A
New World Coming.” It is my belief that
we are in the very last part of the church age as this time represents the Laodicean
church age, and in the description of that church Christ is on the outside of
the church trying to get in, and there is a picture that was painted of Christ
knocking on the door of the church, but there was no handle for Him to turn to
get in, those in the church have to open the door to let Him in.
1/1/2025 9:14 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment