SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/21/2018 9:49 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Aspect of Believers”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians
1:3
Message of the
verse: “Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual
blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,”
I will quote from MacArthur’s commentary as he gives us
an outline of what we will be looking at in these opening verses of the book of
Ephesians. “In these opening verses of
Ephesians Paul gives us a glimpse of eternity past. He lets us eavesdrop as He planned to save
us—not only long before we were born but long before the earth was born.” In yesterday’s SD we looked at the first
sub-section under the main section of “The Aspects of Blessing,” and in today’s
SD, since it is Sunday we will only look at two more short sub-sections, the
first being “The Blesser—God,” and then the second “The Blessed Ones—Believers.”
God is not only to be blessed as we saw in our last SD,
but He is also the Blesser. It is
consistent with His perfection and also His praiseworthiness that the One who
is to be supremely blessed for His goodness is Himself the one who is the
Supreme Blesser who bestows goodness. We see this as the verse continues on
“who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.” Let us look at James 1:17 which reads “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from
above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation
or shifting shadow.” When I was studying
the book of James a few years back I quoted what Dr. Warren Wiersbe wrote about
this verse from James. The following quote comes from
8-28-2003’s Spiritual Diary “If I understand what Dr. Wiersbe says about this
verse it could start out something like this: Every gift that God gives us is perfect, and the way that
He gives it to us is perfect, and He keeps on giving us gifts all of the time,
even when we do not realize that He is giving them to us, and God is not like
the moving of the planets and stars, for He never changes because He cannot
change for worse because He is holy, and He cannot change for better because He
is perfect.
We will now move on to look at “The Blessed Ones—Believers.” When we look at the word “us” in Eph. 1:3 it
speaks of believers, as Paul was writing to believers. In God’s wonderful grace, and marvelous
providence, and also in His sovereign plan God has chosen to bless us. When you stop and think about this it is
almost too good to receive, and also too good to believe, and yet it is
true. I have said that one has to
understand the characteristics of God which are seen in His attributes in order
to understand why God does what He does.
Galatians 3:9 tells us “So then those who are
of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer.”
We will conclude this SD with a
quote from John MacArthur: “When we
bless God we speak good of Him. When God
blesses us, He communicates good to us.
We bless Him with words; He blesses us with deeds. All we can do is to speak well of Him because
in ourselves we have nothing good to give, and in Himself He lacks no
goodness. But when He blesses us the
situation is reversed. He cannot bless
us for our goodness, because we have none.
Rather, He blesses us with
goodness. Our heavenly Father
lavishes us with every goodness, every good gift, every blessing. That is His nature, and that is our need.”
Answer to
yesterday’s Bible question: “David” (2
Samuel 18:5).
Today’s Bible
question: “Saul wanted to bring the
believers he found in Damascus to which city?”
Answer in our
next SD.
10/21/2018
10:18 PM
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