EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/8/2025 11:03 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
“That We Belong to God”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 5:19
Message of the verse: “We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.”
I mentioned in my last SD that tonight’s SD will be
very short, and then after that I will have one more section to look at which
will end my study of 1 John.
I think that it will be best if I just quote from John
MacArthur’s commentary and then make some comments after that. “Despite the existence of countless
political, cultural, and social entities in the world, there are in reality
only two realms. It is the comforting
privilege of believers, in addition to having eternal life, answered prayer,
and victory over sin, to know they belong to God. Though they exist in this world, they are not
part of it (John 15:19; 17:14); they are children of God (John 1:12-13), whose
true citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20).”
I wish to quote Philippians 3:20 here:
“For our citizenship is in heaven, from which
also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” I suppose that there are times in a believer’s
life when we wait more eagerly for the Lord Jesus Christ to return to the sky
above planet earth to rapture all of those who belong to the true church. I am in one of those time periods, although
because the Lord used the end time prophecies to bring me to a saving knowledge
in Jesus Christ some 51+ years ago, but now with the illness that my wife has I
think more about the rapture to come and take us to be with the Lord.
One the other hand, the whole world—its politics, economics, education,
entertainment, and, above all, its religion—lies in the power of the evil one. The evil world system is hostile to God and
believers (John 15:18-19), as John noted earlier in this epistle… It takes its
cue from its ruler, Satan (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; cf. Eph. 2:2; 6:12), the
archenemy of God and His people. Because
the world is completely under Satan’s influence, believers must avoid being
contaminated by it (2:15-17; cf. James 1:27).
“There is no middle ground, no third
option. Everyone is part of God’s
kingdom, or Satan’s. In the words of
Jesus, ‘He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with
Me, scatters’ (Luke 11:23). Or as James
scathingly declares, ‘You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with
the world is hostility toward God?
Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an
enemy of God’ (James 4:4).
I
have to say that I will miss looking at 1 John, and as I look back on my study
of this great epistle I think that perhaps I could have learned more from it
than I did.
4/8/2025 11:22
PM
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