EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/07/2025 6:57 PM
My Worship Time Focus PT-2“Loved”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Jude
1c
Message of the verse: “beloved in God the Father,”
The first thing I want to do is to see what the
apostle John wrote about God’s love for believers, and I can say that John is a
great example of having his life turned around after walking with Jesus for
three years as at one time John wanted to bring down judgment from heaven on
some foes that were harming Israel, and now he is called the apostle of
love. Let us look at 1 John 3:1 “1 See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that
we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the
world does not know us, because it did not know Him.” Now let us look at what the expression
rendered how great” is in the Greek. This
is from potapos, which originally meant,
“From what country?” I know that this
may seem a bit strange. This describes
divine love as something that is alien to human beings and outside their
natural realm of understanding—and other worldly kind of love—as if it were a
concept from a foreign culture or unknown race, and I guess that if you think
about where God is from and even though He is everywhere, we can see from
Scriptures that He is in heaven and so this does make sense to me. MacArthur writes “People do not usually love
strangers; and they especially do not love their enemies (cf. Matt.
5:43-48). Yet, God chose to love elect
sinners even when they were defiant
sinners (Eph. 2:1-10; cf. John 15:13, 16; Rom. 5:8; 1 Tim. 1:12-16; 1 John
4:19).
“In His High Priestly Prayer, Jesus
further described the kind of love that His Father has for His children:
22 "The glory which You have given Me I
have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; 23 I in them and
You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that
You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. 24 "Father, I
desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that
they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the
foundation of the world. 25 “O righteous Father, although the world has not
known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; 26 and
I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You
loved Me may be in them, and I in them.’”
All believers did nothing to gain His
affection (and, in fact, did everything to invite His wrath), the Father loves
redeemed sinners with the same love that He has for His Son. It is a love that is infinite, eternal, and
completely secure. John wrote his Gospel
that He ‘loved his own…He loved them to the end’ (13:1), meaning to perfection
as well as forever. In fact nothing will
ever separate believers from it, as Paul declares in Romans 8:38-39):
38 For I
am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor
any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
The
other day I picked up a book that I have on my bookshelf that was written by
Joseph M. Stowell, and when he wrote this he was the president of the Moody
Bible Institute. The title of the book
is “Why it’s hard to love Jesus,” and this was updated and revised edition of
his book “Loving Christ.” It was written
in 2003 and as I picked it up and began to slowly read it at night before going
to sleep I got to thinking that it goes along with what I am studying in Jude
at this time. The first chapter speaks
of the Pharisees and how believers act like the Pharisees during the time of
Jesus. I know that sounds kind of
difficult to believe, but he presents a good case. He is an excellent writer and I have great
respect for him. My former Pastor who is
now with the Lord knew Stowell’s father and actually called him and asked him
to pray about the decision as to whether or not his son should take this job at
Moody. I am going to quote from the end
of the first chapter of his book which he entitles “The Eclipse of Devotion:
The Pharisee in all of Us.” He makes a
convincing argument in this chapter. The
chapter is about what happened in Luke chapter 7:36-50, something most
believers have read and reread. It is
about a Pharisee who invites Jesus to dinner and then a sinful woman who I
believe was a prostitute came into where they were eating and began to cry and
used her tears to wash the feet of Jesus.
She also had an expensive bottle of perfume and put that on Jesus as
well, This is not the same woman, Mary
who did this to Jesus before He was about to be crucified. Now of course this strict Pharisee became
upset, but Jesus turned the tables on him showing that this woman loved Jesus
more than he did. Take some time to read
these verses. Now I about to quote from
Stowell’s book, at the end of this first chapter where he quotes a man named A.
M. Hunter who observes that “the new thing in Christianity is not the doctrine
that God saves sinners. Now Jew would
have denied that. It is the assertion that
God loves them and saves
them as sinners.”
Stowell
goes on to write: “That helps explain
why Luke included the story of Simon and the sinning woman. He wanted us to see ourselves somewhere in that
scene. It’s easy to feel good about
ourselves because we have faithfully conformed to what we believe to be are God’s
ways. It’s harder to look at our
Christian life from God’s perspective.
“Granted,
you’re not Pharisee. I know you desire
to serve Christ with an honest passionate love.
More important, God knows that.
What I’m advocating is honest reflection about the ways you choose to
demonstrate that love for Him and awareness of how quickly we slip from duty to
devotion. Are you relying merely on externals to show your love for
Christ? Are you ever tempted to think
that your goodness is a performance of obligation? Has your goodness become a habit rather than
a loving response to grace? Do you
believe being good is enough to please God?
Do you ever feel a twinge of jealousy toward those more revered than
you? Is there hypocrisy or duplicity in
your life? Have you ever noticed pride
lurking in the shadows of your heart but failed to confront it?
“Any
‘guilty as charged’ response to these questions should alert you to the
possibility that you’ve left your first love—you’ve been co-opted by a system
instead of being overwhelmed by the Savior.
“One
thing for sure; the ‘sinning woman’ in Luke 7 has a courageous and heartfelt
love for Jesus that touched Him deeply.
She, not Simon, shows us the way to the joy of loving Christ.”
7/7/2025 7:48 PM
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