EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/30/2025 7:48 PM
My Worship Time Focus: “Divine Provision”
Bible Reading and Meditation Reference: 2 Peter 1:3b
Message of the verses: “everything pertaining to life and godliness,
John MacArthur begins this section with these words “Because of their constant sins and failures as Christians, many find it hard not to think that even after salvation something is missing in the sanctification process.” I have to believe that this is true in pretty much every believer who has truly been saved. He goes on “This faulty idea causes believers to seek ‘second blessings,’ ‘spirit baptisms,’ tongues, mystical experiences, special psychological insights, private revelations, ‘self crucifixion,’ the ‘deeper life,’ heightened emotions, demon bindings, and combinations of various ones of all those in an attempt to attain what is supposedly missing from their spiritual resources. All manner of ignorance and Scripture twisting accompanies those foolish pursuits, which at their corrupt roots are failures to understand exactly what Peter says here. Christians have received everything in the form of divine power necessary to equip them for sanctification—they have no lack at all. In view of that reality, the Lord holds all believers responsible to obey all the commands of Scripture. Christians cannot claim that their sins and failures are the result of God’s limited provision. There is no temptation and no assault of Satan and demons that is beyond their resources to overcome (1 Cor. 10:13; 12:13; 1 Peter 5:10). To stress the extent of the divine power given each believer, Peter makes the amazing statement that saints have received from God everything pertaining to life and godliness. Syntactically, the term everything is in the emphatic position because the Holy Spirit through Peter is stressing the extent of believer’s self-sufficiency.”
Now I have mentioned that when I became a born-again believer that it was not in a church service, in fact I did not attend a church service for around four years after I became a believer. The reason for this was that I actually got saved in a friend’s house after listening to a series of tapes entitled “Two Years After The Late Great Planet Earth.” The book “The Late Great Planet Earth” came out in the late 1960’s or early 1970, and was written by Hal Lindsey. He has a very interesting background as to how he came to the Lord that I don’t have time to go into now. The first place that I went to after accepting the Lord was to a Christian bookstore where I picked up a “Living Bible,” and began to read it while there in my friend’s house in Florida. He said if I was interested in the end times that I should read the book of Revelation, not recommended to a new believer. The reason I did not go to church was because I went to a Christian book store near my house in Cleveland Ohio. I am still friends with the owner of that book store that has been long gone for many years. The reason why I am writing this is because my ground in the faith did not happen like most new believers, and I remember when I first heard about tongues and the charismatic movement I did not know much about it, but the Lord saved me from it and after my daughter was born in late 1976 my wife and I began to go to church around late 1977 and we both became baptized and have gone to church ever since. God has truly been good to us all these years and I am thankful that the two churches that we have attended have been good churches.
Lord willing I will finish this section in tomorrow evening’s SD.
9/30/2025 8:16 PM
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