SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/5/2025 10:23 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-4 “Lovers
of Self”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 2 Timothy
3:2-4
Message of the verses: “2 For men will be lovers
of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents,
ungrateful, unholy, 3 unloving,
irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of
good, 4 treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers
of God;”
Perhaps what I am about to write may seem a bit strange,
but I believe it is true and so think about it before you think it is
false. “It is that it is widely claimed that
a person cannot love God and others rightly unless and until he loves himself
rightly, completely reversing what both the Old and New Testaments teach. As
already noted above, Jesus said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great
and foremost commandment. The second is
like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’’ (Matt. 22:37-39). Instead of taking the worst ‘as yourself’ as
an assumption of self-love that is natural to sinful man, many interpreters not
only take these words as a command but as the first and greatest command writes MacArthur!” It seems that by loving
God and others are the first thing a believer is to do, as loving self can
certainly cause many problems.
MacArthur goes on:
“Throughout church history, many Christians, both true and nominal, have
been guilty of perverted self-love.
Self-love always has been associated with worldliness, but heretofore it
was never taught as a doctrinal tenet in the church, even in its most corrupt
periods. It was universally acknowledge
to be the sin it is. Even most neoorthodoxy
theologians have recognized self love, or pride, as the root sin of all
others. But psychologists Carl Rogers,
Erich Fromm, and many others strongly denounced that God-centered view and
boldly claimed that lack of self-love
and self-esteem is the root problem of man.
That false and damnable twist has permeated the church to an alarming
degree.
“In The City of
God, Augustine wrote, ‘Two cities have been founded by two loves, the
earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God. The heavenly by the love of God, even to the
contempt of self. The former, in a word,
glorifies itself, the later the Lord.’
IN his great theological work The
Institutes of the Christian Religion the Swill Reformer John Calvin said, ‘For
so blindly do we all rust in the direction of self-love that everyone thinks he
has good reason for exalting himself.
There is no other remedy than to pluck up by the roots that most noxious
pest, self-love.’’
I believe that all one has to do is to go back to the
Garden of Eden where it can be seen in the third chapter of Genesis that after
sin entered into mankind that the love of self began, and so that is why it is
sinful, because people put self before God, and all one has to do is look at
the life of our Lord while on earth and see His love for His Father, for if He
would have loved self (which was impossible for Him to do) then He would have
not gone to the cross. Going to the
cross to pay four our sins was maybe the most selfless act ever seen on planet
earth. No not maybe, but for sure was
the most selfless act ever to take place on planet earth. Now if you are reading this and are not a
true believer in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, then you can take
care of that by realizing that you were born a sinner, and you sin because you
were born a sinner. Once your recognize
that you can then ask the Lord to come into your heart in order to save you,
because Jesus died on the cross for you and so He will gladly forgive you
because of what He already did for you. Pray
to the Lord and tell Him that you are a sinner in deed of His free gift of
salvation. Ro
10:9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as
Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be
saved.”
One more paragraph from MacArthur’s commentary and
we will stop for today: “The concept of
self-love as a positive characteristic did not find its way into the church
until the late twentieth century, and lamentably, it has spread quickly to
broad portions of evangelicalism.
Contrary to the unambiguous teaching of Scripture and contrary to its
clearly destructive consequences, the heresy of self-love continues to find
acceptance among those who claim Christ.
Spiritual Meaning for my Life Today:
I truly have to admit that when I do things for my own pleasure and
leave God out of it, then I am sinning against the Lord.
My Steps of Faith for Today:
To love the Lord with all my heart, soul, and mind, and with the aid of
the Holy Spirit who lives in me to follow Him who saved me.
4/5/2025 11:01
AM
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