PT-2 "Authored by God" (Matt. 5:17)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/7/2020 8:48 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                                        Focus: PT-2 “Authored by God.”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Matthew 5:17

 

            Message of the verse:  “17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”

 

            We are going to look at more of the things that were traditions that came from different laws that God had given to Moses.  We have been talking about things that could be done on the Sabbath according to what the Scribes and the Pharisees added to that law from God.  Was in unlawful for a tailor to leave his house with a needle stuck in his robe?  Well according to the Pharisees it was.  Was moving a lamp from one place in the room to another considered work? MacArthur adds “Some strict interpreters believed that even wearing an artificial leg or using a crutch on the Sabbath constituted work and argued about whether or not a parent could lift a child on the Sabbath.  The decided that to heal was work, but made exceptions for grave situations.  But only enough treatment to keep the treatment to keep the patient from getting worse was allowed; he could not be fully treated until after the Sabbath.”

 

            All of these “crazy rules” were external laws that had become the essence of religion for the scribes and the Pharisees and also for many other Jews as well.  To the strict religious leaders and others during the time when Jesus came to earth the law was a plethora of extra-spiritual rules and regulations.

 

            Now when it came to the phrase the Law and the Prophets, this however was always understood to refer to the Jewish Scriptures themselves and not the rabbinical interpretations.  We find that this phrase is used some fifteen times in the New Testament as it reflected the common Jewish understanding.  (Matt. 11:13; Luke 16:16; compare Luke 24:27, 44 and other passages.)  With this in mind when Jesus said “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” His Jewish hearers knew He was speaking of the Old Testament Scripture.

 

            I think that is important for me to quote the following two paragraphs from MacArthur’s commentary in order to help us understand an important truth:  “The foundation of the Old Testament is the law given in the Pentateuch, which the prophets, psalmist, and other inspired writers preached, expounded, and applied.  That law of God was composed of three-parts:  the moral, the judicial, and the ceremonial.  The moral law was to regulate behavior for all men; the judicial law was for Israel’s operation as a unique nation; and the ceremonial law was prescribed to structure Israel’s worship of God.  The moral law was based on the Ten Commandments, and the judicial and ceremonial laws were the subsequent legislation given to Moses.  On the plains of Moab Moses reminded Israel that ‘He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, that is, the ten commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone.  And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that you might perform them in the land where you are going over to possess it’ (Deut. 4:13-14).

 

            “Because Matthew does not qualify his use of ‘Law,’ we are safe to say that it was God’s whole law—the commandments, statutes, and judgments; the moral judicial, and ceremonial—that Jesus came not to abolish but to fulfill.  It was also the other Old Testament teachings based on the law, and all their types, patterns, symbols, and pictures that He came to fulfill.  Jesus Christ came to accomplish every aspect and every dimension of the divinely authored Word (cf. Luke 24:44).”  “Now He said to them, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’”

 

7/7/2020 9:17 AM

 

 

PT-1 "Authored by God" (Matt. 5:17)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/6/2020 9:03 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                                        Focus:  PT-1 “Authored by God”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Matthew 5:17

 

            Message of the verse:  “17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”

 

            We begin looking at the first section today and will probably take two days to get through it.  Notice the highlighted word “the” which is the definite article that Jesus used to make clear to His Jewish audience exactly what “Law” that He was talking about, which is the Law of God.  Let us go back and look at Exodus 20:1 which is where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.  “Then God spoke all these words, saying.”  As we continue to look at verses 2-6 of Exodus we will see that God gave the law personally and directly:  “2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3 "You shall have no other gods before Me. 4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. 5 “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.”  These highlighted words and phrases show us that the law was personally given by God.  MacArthur writes “The law given there is the only law because the Lord is the only God.  The Lord does not change (Mal. 3:6), and His law does not change.  It does not change to meet the whims of society or even of theologians.  It was not given to be adapted and modified but to be obeyed.  It was not given to suit man’s will but to reveal God’s.”

 

            The Jewish people of that day referred to the law in four different ways.  In the most limited sense it was used of the Ten Commandments.  Then in a broader sense it was used as in the Pentateuch which are the first five books of the Old Testament, written by Moses.  Then is a still broader sense it was used to speak of the entire Old Testament, which was all that the hearers of Jesus had.  

 

            There is another, a fourth as mentioned and that is what was thought of during the days when Jesus visited the earth and that referenced to the rabbinical, scribal traditions which were the thousands of detailed and external requirements that obscured the revealed Word of God as the traditions were supposed to interpret what was written in the Old Testament, but was surely not accurate.  This is the kind of world that Jesus came into.  Jesus, being God in flesh was certainly upset about what the Scribes and the Pharisees did to His Law and therefore would collide with them telling them that what they were teaching was tradition and not the truth of God’s Word.  4 "For God said, ’HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER,’ and, ’HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH.’ 5  "But you say, ’Whoever says to his father or mother, "Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God," 6  he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. 7  "You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: 8  ’THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. 9 ’BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN’" (Matthew 15:4-7).  MacArthur adds “On the surface it seemed that the traditions made the law harder, but in reality they made it much easier, because observance was entirely external.  Keeping the traditions demanded a great deal of effort, but it demanded no heart obedience and no faith in God.” 

 

            In Isaiah 29:13 we learn that God’s law had always required inward as well as outward obedience:  “Then the Lord said, "Because this people draw near with their words And honor Me with their lip service, But they remove their hearts far from Me, And their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote.”  Let us look at this verse in the NKJV “Therefore the Lord said: "Inasmuch as these people draw near with their mouths And honor Me with their lips, But have removed their hearts far from Me, And their fear toward Me is taught by the commandment of men.”  As we look back at when the Jews were exiled from their land and then brought back later on and also during the interestamental period is when many of these traditions appeared, and the law was not followed.

 

            It was during this time that the rabbis would look through the Scripture to find various commands and regulations, and to those they would add supplemental requirements.  For instance to the command not to work on the Sabbath they added the idea that carrying a burden was a form of work.  Imagine how Jesus must have felt when He saw the traditions of the Law that He had given to the Jews on Mt. Sinai, as it must have not only made Him angry, but also must have broken His heart. Next the Jews would try and figure out what consisted of a burden that they were not to carry, and on and on it went to where you just may as well stay in bed all day on the Sabbath, which is certainly not what God wanted to happen on the Sabbath.  John MacArthur writes of this “burden” “They decided that a burden is food equal to the weight of a fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put on a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member of the body, water enough to write two letters of the alphabet, reed enough to make a pen, and so on.  To carry anything more than those prescribed amounts on the Sabbath was to break the law.”

 

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  One of the key verses on the reason for the law was written by Paul in Romans 5:20, so think about this verse “The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”  God is saying that you cannot keep my law perfectly so give up and put your trust in My So who kept it perfectly for you.

 

My Steps of Faith for Today:  I realize that all that is going on in our country is being allowed by God and is headed up by Satan, and will in the end give glory to the Lord, so there is no need for me to be angry over it, but to pray that God will, in His own time stop it, and will use this to bring many souls to the Savior!

 

7/6/2020 9:46 AM

 

           

PT-4 "Intro to Matthew 5:17)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/5/2020 8:44 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                               Focus:  PT-4  “Intro to Matthew 5:17”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Matthew 5:17

 

            Message of the verse:  “17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”

 

            We continue with the last part of John MacArthur’s comments from his commentary on the introduction to Matthew 5:17.  “We cannot live the righteous life or be God’s faithful witnesses by lowering His standards and claiming to follow a higher law of love and permissiveness.  Whatever is contrary to God’s law is beneath His law, not above it.  No matter what the motive behind them, standards that are unbiblically permissive have no part either in God’s love or His law, because His love and His law are inspirable.  The key, and the only key, to a righteous life is keeping the Word of the living God.

 

            “Jesus’ warning, ‘do not think,’ indicates that most, if not all, of His hearers had a wrong conception about His teaching.  Most traditionalistic Jews considered the rabbinic instructions to be the proper interpretations of the law of Moses, and they concluded that, because Jesus did not scrupulously follow those traditions, He obviously was doing away with the law or relegating it to minor importance.  Because Jesus swept away the traditions of washings, special tithes, extreme Sabbath observance, and such things, the people thought He was thereby overthrowing God’s law.  From the outset, therefore, Jesus wanted to disabuse His hearers of any misconceptions about His view of Scripture.

 

            “Throughout the gospel of Matthew, more than in the other gospels, Jesus repeatedly uses Scripture to contradict and indict the superficial and hypocritical scribes and Pharisees.  Though not always specifically identified as such, it is primarily their beliefs and practices that Jesus exposes in Matthew 5:21-6:18.

 

            “Kataluo’ (abolish) means to utterly overthrow or destroy, and is the same word used of the destruction of the Temple (Matt. 24:2; 26:61; etc.) and of the death of the physical body (2 Cor. 5:1).  The basic idea is to tear down and smash to the ground, to obliterate completely.  In several places, as here, the word is used figuratively to indicate bringing to naught, rendering useless, or nullifying (see Acts 5:38-39; Rom. 14:20).  Doing that to God’s law is the antithesis of the work and teaching of Jesus.

 

            “In the remainder of verse 17 Jesus focuses on the preeminence of Scripture as God’s perfect, eternal, and wholly authoritative Word.  By implication He suggests three reasons for that preeminence:  it is authored by God, it is affirmed by the prophets, and it s accomplished by Christ.”

 

            This concludes what John MacArthur had to say in the introduction of Matthew 5:17.

 

7/5/2020 9:06 AM

 

 

PT-3 "Intro to Matthew 5:17"

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/4/2020 9:34 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                                Focus:  PT-3 “Intro to Matthew 5:17”

 

My Worship Time                                                                              Focus:  Matthew 5:17

 

            Message of the verse:  “17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”

 

            We continue with the quotation of John MacArthur’s introduction to Matthew 5:17:  “Jesus’ meekness, humility, gentleness, and love marked Him out in great contrast to the proud, selfish, and arrogant scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests.  His call to repentance and His proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom make people listen, even if they did not understand or agree.  They wondered if He was just another prophet, a special prophet, or a false prophet.  They wondered if He was a political or military revolutionary who might be the Messiah they anxiously awaited, who would break the yoke of Rome.  He did not talk or act like anyone else they had ever heard or seen.  He did not identify Himself with any of the scribal schools, or with any of the sects or movements of the time.  Nor did He identify Himself with Herod or with Rome.  Instead, Jesus openly and lovingly identified Himself with the outcast, the sick, the sinful, and the needy of every sort He proclaimed grace and dispensed mercy.  Whereas all the other rabbis and religious leaders talked only about the religious externals, He taught about the heart.  They focused on ceremonies, rituals, and outward acts of every kind, whereas He focused on the heart.  They set themselves above other men and demanded their service, while He set Himself below other men and became their Servant.

 

            “Of primary concern to every faithful Jew seeking to evaluate Jesus was, ‘What does He think of the law; what does He think of Moses and the prophets?’  The leaders often confronted Jesus on matters of the law.  Many Jews believed that the Messiah would radically revise or completely overturn the Mosaic Law and establish His own new standards.  The interpreted Jeremiah 31:31 as teaching that God’s new promised covenant would annul the old covenant and start over on a completely new moral basis.  Sickened of the demanding, hypocritical legalism of the Pharisees, many people hoped the Messiah would bring in a new day of freedom from the burdensome, mechanical, and meaningless demands of the traditional system.

 

            “Even the scribes and Pharisees realized God’s revealed standards of righteousness were impossible to keep—which is one reason they invented traditions that were easier to keep than the law.  The traditions were more involved, complicated, and detailed than God’s law, but for the most art, they stayed within the bounds of human accomplishment, within what man could do in his own power and resources.  Because of that, the traditions invariably and inevitably lowered the standards of God’s scriptural teaching.  The whole system of self-righteousness is built on reducing God’s standards and elevating one’s own imagined goodness.

 

            “It soon became obvious that Jesus fit none of the common molds of the religious leaders.  He obviously had a high regard for the law, but at the same time He taught things completely contrary to the traditions.  His teachings did not lower scriptural standards but upheld them in every way.  He not only put God’s standard at the height where it belonged but lived at the humanly impossible level.

 

            “The Law and the Prophets represent what we now call the Old Testament, the only written Scripture at the time Jesus preached (see Matt. 7:12; 11:13; 22:40; Luke 16:16; John 1:45; Acts 13:15; 28:23).  It is therefore about the Old Testament that Jesus speaks in Matthew 5:17-20.  Everything He taught directly in His own ministry, as well as everything He taught through the apostles, is based on the Old Testament.  It is therefore impossible to understand or accept the New Testament apart from the Old.

 

            “As has been pointed out sever times, each teaching in the Sermon on the Mount flows out of the teachings that have preceded it.  Each beatitude logically follows the ones before it, and every subsequent teaching is related to previous teachings.  What Jesus teaches in 5:17-20 also follows directly from what He has just said.  Verses 3-12 depict the character of believers, who are kingdom citizens and children of God.  Verses 13-16 teach the function of believers as God’s spiritual salt and light in the corrupt and darkened world.  Verses 17-20 teach the foundation for the inner qualities of the Beatitudes and for functioning as God’s salt and light.  That foundation is God’s Word, the only standard of righteousness and of truth.”

 

            Lord willing we will finish the quotation from John MacArthur on his intro to Matthew 5:17 in our next SD.

 

7/4/2020 10:03 AM

 

PT-2 "Intro to Matthew 5:17

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/3/2020 9:21 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                                Focus:  PT-2 “Intro to Matthew 5:17”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Matthew 5:17

 

            Message of the verse:  “17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”

 

            We continue to quote from John MacArthur’s commentary.  “If there is no religious absolute there can be no basis for real law.  People will not respect or long obey laws that are only judicial guesses.  An evil, godless society, floating about on a sea of relativism, realizes that it was no foundation, no anchor, no unmoving point of reference.  Law becomes a matter of reference and order a matter of power.  A democracy where power is ultimately vested in the people is particularly vulnerable to chaos.

 

            “Is there an absolute basis for truth, for law, for morals, for real right and wrong; and if so, what is it?  Those questions are the essence of what Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:17-20.  The absolute, He says, is the law of the eternally sovereign God.  God has laid down His absolute, eternal, abiding law and made it known to men.  And as God’s own Son, Jesus declared unequivocally that He did not come to teach or practice anything contrary to the law in even the slightest way, but to uphold it entirely.

 

            “We continually hear the idea that because times have changed the Bible does not fit our day.  The truth, of course, is the opposite.  The Bible always fits, because the Bible is God’s perfect, eternal, and infallible Word.  It is the standard by which true ‘fit’ is measured.  It is the world that does not fit the Bible, and not because the world has changed but because the Bible has not changed.  Outwardly the world has changed a great deal since biblical days, but in its basic nature and orientation it has always been opposed to God and has never conformed to His Word.  The world has never fit Scripture.

 

            “The argument is also proposed that Scripture is but a collection of various men’s ideas about God and about right and wrong.  One person’s interpretation of the Bible is therefore just as good as another’s, and there is no place for dogmatism.  Men have been left free to believe or not believe, to follow or not follow, and or all of Scripture as it suits them.  Each person becomes his own judge over Scripture, and the end result for most is to disregard it altogether.

 

            God’s revealed Word, Jesus says, not only is truth, but is truth conveyed with absolute, inviolable authority.  It is in that authority that He came to teach and to minister, and it is to that authority that He commands His kingdom citizens to bow and obey.  “Let it speak,’ He says.  “Let it rebuke, correct shatter, overturn all your evil ways and let it show the absolute, inerrant, and perfect will of God—and the way to eternal life.’

 

            “For thirty years Jesus lived in privacy and obscurity.  Only Mary and intimates to the family would have remembered the miraculous events that surrounded His birth and early years.  As far as His friends and neighbors were concerned, He was but a unique Jewish carpenter.  It was when He began His ministry, when He was immersed in the Jordan by John the Baptist and stared to preach, that all eyes suddenly turned on Him.  At that point, even the leaders of Israel could not ignore Him.”

 

            Lord willing we will continue to look at this introduction in our next SD.

 

            To all of those in the United States have a very happy and meaningful July 4^th.

 

7/3/2020 9:42 AM

 

           

PT-1 "Intro to Matthew 5:17

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/2/2020 9:10 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                                        Focus:  PT-1 “Intro to Matt. 5:17

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Matthew 5:17

 

            Message of the verse:  “17 “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”

 

            In his commentary John MacArthur entitles the 22^nd chapter of his commentary “Christ and the Law—Part 1 The Preeminence of Scripture.”  Part two will come when we look at verse 18 which will be a while before we get to that verse.

 

            I suppose that one of the questions that all new believers have, and for that matter all believers have is what does the Law have to do with them?  I hope that as we study these two verses together that we will get some answers to that question.

 

            As I look over the first part of this introduction from MacArthur’s commentary I find that after reading it that what is going on in our country in the year 2020 has a lot to do with what he wrote about in 1979 and so because of this I want to take the time to quote a great deal of his commentary over the next couple of days.  I do not want to put too much in each Spiritual Diary because some of it, at least to me, is very heavy to understand.

 

            “In a recent book titled The Interaction of Law and Religion (Nashville:  Abingdon, 1974), Harold J. Berman, professor of law at Harvard University, has developed a significant thesis.  He notes that Western culture has had a massive loss of confidence in law and in religion.  One of the most important causes of this double loss of confidence is the radical separation that has been made between the two.  Berman concludes that you cannot have workable rules for behavior without religion, because only religion provides an absolute base on which morality and law can be based.  The author fears that Western society is doomed to relativism in law because of the loss of an absolute.  When men break away from the idea of an authoritative religion, and even from the concept of God, they break away from the possibility of absolute truth.  Their only remaining resource is existential relativism, a slippery, unstable, and ever-changing base on which no authoritative system of law or morals can be built.  Religionless law can never command authority.

 

            “In that book Professor Berman notes that ‘Thomas Franck of New York University [has observed that law] in contrast to religion ‘has become undisguisedly a pragmatic human process.  It is made by men and it lays no claim to divine origin or eternal validity.’’ (pg. 27).  Berman says that this observation

 

‘leads Professor Franck to the view that a judge, in reaching a decision, is not propounding a truth but is rather experimenting in the solution of a problem, and if his decision is reversed by a higher court or if it is subsequently overruled, that does not mean it was wrong but only that it was, or because in the course of time, unsatisfactory.  Having broken away from religion, Franck states, law is now characterized by ‘existential relativism.’  Indeed it is now generally recognized ‘that no judicial decision is every ‘final,’ that the law both follows the event (is not eternal or certain) and is made by man (is not divine or True).’ (pp. 27-28)

 

            Professor Berman goes on to ask, ‘If law is merely and experiment, and if judicial decisions are only hunches, why should individuals or groups of people observe those legal rules or commands that do not conform to their own interests?’ (pg. 28).

 

            “He is right.  Rules without absolutes are rules without authority, except the authority of force and coercion.  When God is abandoned, truth is abandoned; and when truth is abandoned, the basis for morals and law is abandoned.  A consistent, coherent legal system cannot be built on philosophical humanism, on the principle that right and wrong fluctuate according to man’s ideas and feelings.

 

            “In an article in Esquire magazine titled ‘The Reasonable Right,’ Peter Steinfels asks, ‘How can moral principles be grounded and social institutions ultimately legitimized in the absence of a religiously based culture?’ (13 February 1979).  The obvious answer is that they cannot be.”

 

            Lord willing we will continue to look at this introduction from John MacArthur’s commentary in our next SD.

 

            I will close with something that I read online that made sense to me as I believe it is true when someone stated “Christianity can survive without America, but America cannot survive without Christianity.”

 

7/2/2020 9:48 AM

"The Purpose: To Glorify God" (Matt. 5:16)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/1/2020 10:14 AM

 

My Worship Time                                                            Focus:  “The Purpose:  To Glorify God”

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Matthew 5:16

 

            Message of the verse:  “16 “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.’”

 

            Well we finally come to the end of these amazing verses from Matthew chapter five.  It seems that we have been in the fifth chapter of Matthew for a long time, and we have been in this chapter since March 12, 2020, and Lord willing we will be in it for some time to come, but it surely has been a wonderful chapter to study.  Today we will look at the 16^th verse and find out that the purpose of what Jesus has been saying in verses 13-16, and also I believe from the beginning of the Beatitudes is to glorify God.  We will begin this last section with a quote from John MacArthur as he explains the word “good” to us.

 

            “The word (kalos) for ‘good’ that Jesus uses here does not so much emphasize quality—though that obviously is important—as it does attractiveness, beautiful appearance.  Letting our ‘light shine before men’ allows them to see our ‘good works,’ the beauty the Lord has worked in us.  To see good works by us is to see Christ in us.  That is why Jesus says, ‘let your light shine.’  It is not something we create or make up, but something we allow the Lord to do through us.  It is God’s light; our choice is whether to hide it or let it shine.”

 

            It is the purpose of letting our light shine to bring glory to the Lord and not to ourselves, as we don’t want to bring attention to ourselves, but to the Lord whom we as believers owe everything.  We have written in a few earlier SD’s about what the West Minister Catechism is and that is that “The chief end of man is to glorify God.”  Jesus says in this verse that we are to glorify our Father, and Father emphasizes God’s tenderness and intimacy, and speaking then of His being in heaven this emphasizes His majesty and holiness, as He is pictured dwelling in the splendor of His eternal holy home.  What our good works are to do is to magnify God’s grace and power.  MacArthur adds “The way we live should lead those around us to ‘glorify’ (doxazo, from which we get doxology) the heavenly ‘Father.” 

 

            If we as believers do things that bring attention to ourselves, then we are not the light that they see is not the light that they should see, which of course comes from the Father through us if we are walking with Him in a proper way.

 

            I find the following short story remarkable as MacArthur talks about “Robert Murray McCheyne, a godly Scottish minister of the last century (1800’s), that his face carried such a hallowed expression that people were known to fall on their knees and accept Jesus Christ as Savior when they looked at him.  Others were so attracted by the self-giving beauty and holiness of his life that they found his Master irresistible.”

 

            There is another man MacArthur brings up, a man that I have never heard of.  He is the French pietist Francois Fenelon and he states that “his communion with God was such that his face shined with divine radiance.  A religious skeptic who was compelled to spend the night in an inn with Fenelon hurried away the next morning saying, ‘If I spend another night with that man Il’’ be a Christian in spite of myself.’”

 

            These two stories are the example of the kind of salt and light God wants His kingdom people to be.

 

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  The examples given in the two stories that I quoted from MacArthur’s commentary seem to be something out of the times when the Apostles walked on the earth or perhaps some of the OT saints lived.  To learn to be salt and light like these men should be my goal.

 

My Steps of Faith for Today:  I desire to bring glory to the Lord and one of the ways I can do that is to fight the good fight.

 

7/1/2020 10:51 AM