EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/4/2025 8:04 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 “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 have been listening to sermons from John MacArthur
on these verses and as I was listening today it seems that the Lord is opening
up my understanding of these verses, and that was good for me as I have to say
that this has been very hard for me to understand, but becoming clearer.
I
ended the last SD by giving a list of verses that are found in MacArthur’s
commentary that have to do with the New Testaments emphasis on repentance and
the fruit that should be expected in the heart of a person whose heart has been
changed through the new birth.
Some
have wrestled more seriously with the text, and thus has sometimes
misinterpreted what John say about the believer’s relationship to sin. There
are those who are what we call perfectionists who usually are Arminians who
believe that Christians can lose their salvation, assert that believers can
gradually overcome sin until they become completely sinless. I have heard about these people who think
that they can become sinless, especially when I first became a believer, and
the Lord was gracious to me in putting good teaching so that I could understand
the truth of what the Bible is teaching.
Now as the Arminians arrived at that point, they can no longer lose
their salvation, that is they arrived at the point where they say that they are
completely sinless. However this
directly conflicts with what John himself says in 1 John 1:8 “If we say that we
have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
MacArthur
adds that “in a similar error, others say John means only that the believer’s
regenerated nature cannot sin. But that
makes too great an artificial a separation between a believer’s regenerated new
nature and his unredeemed humanness (flesh, or old nature) and can lead to
antinomianism, since one may become comfortable with the unredeemed flesh’s
being unable to do anything but sin.
Every saint is a unified person, with both righteous aspirations as well
as sinful tendencies. Sin comes from the
flesh (Rom. 7:18, 25; cf. Matt. 26:41; Rom. 6:12; 8:3), but each believer must
take personal responsibility for his or her sinful actions.”
There
are others who have attempted to explain John’s instruction here by asserting
that he is just describing an ideal but unrealized goal in sanctification—though
Christians cannot become perfect in this life, they at least can strive for
sinlessness. There is a primary problem
with this idealistic interpretation and that is that it does fit with the
down-to-earth, realistic character of John’s letter. John was learning of issues that the people that
he is writing to and so that is one of the reasons that he is explain these
things to them. I have mentioned that it
is my belief, and of course others who state that John wrote this letter to his
readers around 90 A.D. That means that
the church is now around 60 years old and certainly Satan has had time to begin
to affect those who are worshiping in different churches including the one that
John is writing to.
I will now quote one more paragraph from MacArthur’s commentary as he continues to explain different views of those reading this letter. “Another view sees the apostle’s statement applying only to willful, deliberate sin by believers. As someone commented, ‘A Christian doesn’t do sin; he suffers it.’ But nowhere in the text does John portray Christians as helpless victims of iniquity. Believers sin because they willfully choose to yield to temptation (James 1:14-15.) “14 But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. 15 Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.”
1/4/2025 8:34 PM
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