SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/10/2025 11:17 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-8 “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;”
Yesterday we look at those who were boastful and a
person who is boastful is invariably arrogant. Those who are characterized by
these twin evils are perpetually self-exalting and determined to have their own
way. MacArthur writes “Huperephanos (arrogant) has the literal
meaning of placing above, hence the idea of superiority.”
He
goes on to write “The arrogant are best illustrated in the New Testament by the
Jewish religious leaders mentioned by Jesus
‘who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and view others with
contempt’ (Luke 18:9). He proceeded to
tell them the well-known parable of the Pharisee and the tax-gatherer, or
publican, who went to pray in the temple:
11 “The Pharisee stood and was praying this to
himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust,
adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 ‘I fast twice a week; I pay
tithes of all that I get.’ 13 "But
the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up
his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to
me, the sinner!’ 14 “I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather
than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who
humbles himself will be exalted."
Quoting from Proverbs 3:34, both James and Peter declare that ‘God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble’ (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5; cf. Ps. 138:6).”
John MacArthur next quotes
from William Barclay as he gives a comparison of boastful and arrogant:
“The
braggart is a swaggering creature, who shouts his claims to the four winds of
heaven, and tries to boast and bluster his way into power and eminence. No one can possibly mistake him or fail to
see him. But the sin of the man who is arrogant, in this sense, it is his
heart. He might even seem to be humble;
he might even seem to be quiet and inoffensive; but in his secret heart there
is the contempt for everyone else. He nourishes
and all-consuming, all-pervading pride.
In his heart there is a little altar where he bows down before himself,
and in his eyes there is something which looks at all men with a silent
contempt. (The Letters to Timothy, Titus
and Philemon [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1957], 214)”
The truth is that the boastful and the arrogant are much
more alike than different. Now it is a
rare instance when a person who is one is not also the other. Even in the modern church it becomes harder
and harder to find those who are meek and humble and equally difficult to avoid
those who are proud and conceited.
4/10/2025 11:41 AM
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