EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/24/2025 9:21 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “Perfect Love And The Christian’s Confidence in
Judgment”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
1 John 4:17-21
Message of the verses: “17 By this, love is
perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment;
because as He is, so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts
out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected
in love. 19 We love, because He first loved us. 20 If someone says,
"I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who
does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not
seen. 21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God
should love his brother also.”
Now I want to begin this SD from where I left off
yesterday and that means I will continue to talk about love. We see the word perfect in verse 18 and this
means to be complete, mature as love demonstrates the reality of their
salvation need have no fear of the return of Christ or God’s judgment, and the
reason is because
perfect love casts out fear. So that kind of love dispels fear and the
reason is because fear involves punishment, and believers perfected in love do not face final
punishment. “Much more then, having now
been justified by His blood, we
shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him” (Rom.
5:9). MacArthur writes “However,
anyone who fears God’s judgment is not perfected in love. Someone who professes Christ but fears His
return evidences that something is seriously amiss, because all true saints
love His appearing (2 Tim. 4:8; cf. James 1:12).” I am very happy to have this important verse
(18) more thoroughly explained from MacArthur’s commentary. This way of understanding it is different
than the way that I was understanding it, as I was thinking about any reason to
fear different events and not thinking about not fearing judgment, something that
ever since I became a believer, as I first learned about the rapture, did not
have fear of judgment, something that I certainly did before I became a
believer. I have mentioned that my wife
is to have a kind of surgery tomorrow and I have to admit that there has been
some fear in me as to the outcome of it, but I truly realize that the Lord is
in control and I believe that this kind of fear that I am experiencing may be coming
from the evil one or some of his cohorts.
MacArthur then goes on to write “The motive for those who
have such confident assurance regarding the future is obvious we [Christians] love,
because He first loved us. It was God’s
perfect and eternal love that first sovereignly drew believers to Him (4:10;
John 15:9, 16, 19; Acts 13:48; Rom. 5:8; Eph. 1:4), thus enabling them to
reflect His love to others.”
One of the things that I have learned from my study of 1
John is that he repeats things, but the reason that he does this is because he
continues to add things to what he has already wrote, as he does not give it
all at once, but he continues to build.
So I want to talk more about this in my next SD as this one will be a
shorter one, but an important one, so think over what we have learned from 1
John 4:18 as you meditate on this great verse and Lord willing I will try and
finish this section in tomorrow’s SD.
Please if you are reading this I would appreciate your prayers for my
wife who is to have surgery tomorrow afternoon.
2/24/2025 9:48 PM
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