EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/26/2025 9:59 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “Gratitude For God’s Grace”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
1 John 3:19-20
Message of the verses: “19 We will know by
this that we are of the truth, and will assure our heart before Him 20 in
whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart and knows all things.”
We have been talking about the security of salvation from
this section, but the apostle John understood that at times true believers can
struggle with their assurance. Now let
me just say something that is going on with the church where John MacArthur is
the head Pastor. I listen to MacArthur’s
sermons on an apt that has all of his sermons on it, and at the end of each
sermon there is an announcer who says that “Grace To You” website will give a
booklet on the security of salvation. It
is free if you contact Grace To You.
That seems to go along with what we are looking at from 1 John at this
time and so I thought that I would mention it for anyone who wants to contact
them. Now one thing they do say that this
good in North America and Europe so anyone outside those areas would not be
able to receive it.
Some of John’s readers may have been so overwhelmed by
the memory of their past sins and awareness of present ones that they found the
thought of God’s forgiveness nearly impossible to accept. While working at my main job in the Cleveland
Casting Plant run by Ford Motor company when the opportunity came up I would
witness to some of my co-workers about being saved. One man who had a very difficult history from
WWII told me that there is no way that he could be saved because of all the bad
things that he did. There was no talking
to him because he thought he could never be saved. Now back to comments on
these verses by John MacArthur: “Their
overactive consciences, beleaguering them with their own short comings, perhaps
made it difficult for them to have a settled confidence in their right standing
before God. So John wrote to encourage
those believers and enable them to accurately evaluate their own spiritual
condition. In so doing, he sought to
solidify their conviction, rightly inform their conscience, and strengthen
their assurance with a true understand of their transformation and its evidences.” John MacArthur has written a book that goes
along with what he was writing about entitled The Vanishing Conscience.
“The phrase we will know translates a form of the common
Greek verb ginosko, which means ‘to
know’ ‘to learn,’ ‘to find out,’ or ‘to realize.’ John’s use of the future tense indicates that
what his readers would eventually grasp was not something intuitive or
indefinite, but a promise based on an existing reality. This point is strengthened by the next short
phrase by this, which most naturally refers back to verse 18’s admonition for
brotherly love, When believers know they are of the truth (the phrase literally
reads, ‘out of the truth we exist’).
Only those who have been genuinely converted through the supernatural
work of God possess the sacrificial love that John describes in verses 14-18,
which issues in the submissive obedience that John delineates in verses 4-12).
“The truth in view here is the written truth of Scripture
(Ps. 119:160; John 17:17), which encompasses the truth incarnate in the Lord
Jesus Christ (John 1:9, 14; 7:18; 14:6; 1 John 5:20). Belief in the truth marks all who repent and
believe (2 Thess. 2:10, 12-13; 1 Tim. 3:15b).”
I believe that I will be able to complete this section
tomorrow evening.
1/26/2025 11:00 PM
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