EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/2/2025 9:58 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “Loving in the Truth”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 2 John 5-6
Message of the verses: “5 Now I ask you,
lady, not as though I were writing to you a new commandment, but the one
which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. 6 And this is
love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, just
as you have heard from the beginning, that you should walk in it.”
I will look at what John MacArthur has to say about
these verses as I pick up where I left off on the 27th of April
which was two days before I stopped writing Spiritual Diaries because of my
wife’s cancer surgery.
“But
through the commandment John spoke of was from one perspective an old one,
viewed from another it was new. In 1
John 2:8 John wrote, ‘On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you,
which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the
true Light is already shining.’ There
are three senses in which the commandment is new. First, love is ‘true in Him’; that is, it has
now been perfectly modeled in a human life by the Lord Jesus Christ. In his
gospel John wrote concerning Christ’s love, ‘Having loved His own who were in
the world, He loved them to the end (lit., ‘perfectly,’ ‘completely,’ or ‘to
the fullest measure’) (John 13:1). Jesus
offered Himself as an example of how to love when He said, ‘A new commandment I
give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also
love one another. By this all men will
know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John
13:34-35; cf. 15:13; Phil. 2:5-9). Paul
exhorted believers to ‘walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave
Himself up for us’ (Eph. 5:2).” There
are different works in the Greek for love that are found in the Scriptures and
agape is the kind of love that God has for His children.
“Christians
also have a new understanding of love through the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit. As John pointed out in his first
epistle, it is only possible for us to love ‘because He first loves us’ (1 John
4:19; cf. Eph. 3:16-19). Paul wrote in Romans 5:5 that ‘the love of God has
been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.’ The supernatural love is one aspect of the
fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22); thus Paul could write that believers are
taught by God to love one another’ (1 Thess. 4:9).
“Finally, the commandment to love is new in that it
belongs to the new age inaugurated by the coming of Christ. We now live in the spiritual kingdom (Luke
17:20-21), which is growing (Luke 13:18-20) into the glorious millennial
kingdom to be established when Christ returns, and after that the eternal
kingdom. During this present spiritual
kingdom ‘the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining’ (1
John 2:8). The ‘true light’ is Jesus
Christ (cf. John 8:12; 9:5; 12:35), through whom God has ‘rescue[d] us from
this present evil age’ (Gal. 1:4) and ‘from the domain of darkness, and
transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved son’ (Col. 1:13). We are blessed ‘with every spiritual blessing
in the heavenly places in Christ’ (Eph. 1:3), including divine supernatural
love, which is a way of life for those in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
“The
defining characteristic of love is that we walk according to His
commandments. Love and obedience are
inseparably linked, as Jesus made clear in John 14:15 when He declared, ‘If you
love Me, you will keep my commandments’ (cf. vv. 23-24; 15:10). Believers manifest their love for God by
their obedience to Him. In his first
epistle, John wrote, ‘For this is the love of God, that we keep His
commandments’ (1 John 5:3). The Old
Testament also views obedience to God as the ultimate expression of love for
Him. In Deuteronomy 11:1 Moses commanded
Israel, ‘You shall therefore love the Lord your God, and always deep His
charge, His statutes, His ordinances, and His commandments.” Moses successor, Joshua, gave Israel a
similar charge: Only be very careful to
observe the commandment and the law which Moses the servant of the Lord
commanded you, to love the Lord your God and walk in all His ways and keep His
commandments and hold fast to Him and serve Him with all your heart and with all
your soul’ (Josh. 22:5). Love and
obedience are also linked in such Old Testament passages as Exodus 20:6;
Deuteronomy 5:10; 7:9; 30:16; Nehemiah 1:5; and Daniel 9:4).
“Repeating
himself to stress the importance of this truth, John wrote, This commandment,
just as you have heard from the beginning that you should walk in it. Those who truly love will walking obedience
to biblical truth and vice versa.”
AV-love 169, lover(s) 19, friend(s) 12,
beloved 5, liketh 1, lovely 1, loving 1; 208
1) to love
1a) (Qal)
1a1) human love for another, includes
family, and sexual
1a2) human appetite for objects such as
food, drink, sleep, wisdom
1a3) human love for or to God
1a4) act of being a friend
1a4a) lover (participle)
1a4b) friend (participle)
1a5) God’s love toward man
1a5a) to individual men
1a5b) to people Israel
1a5c) to righteousness
1b) (Niphal)
1b1) lovely (participle)
1b2) loveable (participle)
1c) (Piel)
1c1) friends
1c2) lovers (fig. of adulterers)
This
is the word love which is found in Deuteronomy 11:1, which comes from my online
Bible dictionary.
5/2/2025 10:43 PM
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