SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/15/2018 1:26 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-4
“Salvation is from Sin”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Eph. 2:1-3
Message of the verses: “1 And you were
dead in your trespasses and sins, 2 in
which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to
the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the
sons of disobedience. 3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of
our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by
nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”
We
have been looking at the subject of what I have named as “Total
Depravity.” We will continue to look at
this subject as we begin our Spiritual Diary for today.
I
want to begin with a quote from our Lord found in Luke 6:33 “"If you do
good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” Next Luke 11:13 “"If you then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly
Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?’” A person who is not a believer can do humanly
good things. However as our Lord points
out in these two passages the person is still a sinner, he is still evil by
nature, the nature he was born with. He
is still operating on a motive less than that of glorifying God. Remember what the first thing that all
believers are to do, and that is to glorify God. When we do things in our lives to bring glory
to ourselves we are not doing what we should be doing, for in everything we do
we should have the motive of glorifying God.
I am not saying that is easy to do, as we all, even though we are
believers still have the old flesh to get in our way. There is a story at the beginning of the last
chapter of the book of Acts when Paul was on a boat that was shipwrecked on the
Island of Malta, and we read what Luke reported happened to them once they got
to the island: “the natives showed us
extraordinary kindness.” First of all
when the word “natives” is used my online Greek/English states that this word
means that anyone who did not speak the Greek language would be called a
native. At any rate these people were
very kind to all of the ones who shipwrecked on their island. They were not believers in Jesus Christ, and
yet to the best of their human nature they did good to the shipwrecked
people. Even after doing good to those
who came from the boat, the people still remained superstitious pagans as seen
in verse six: “But they were expecting
that he was about to swell up or suddenly fall down dead. But after they had
waited a long time and had seen nothing unusual happen to him, they changed
their minds and began to say that he was a god.” MacArthur writes “A sinner’s doing good is
good, but it cannot change his nature or his basic sphere of existence, and it
cannot reconcile him to God.”
When
you ask the question to any unbeliever about why God would accept him in heaven
you most likely will get an answer that has to do with the good things that
they do and perhaps even that their good works have out-weighed their bad
works. That is not the point at
all. The correct answer is that Jesus
Christ took my place on the cross and I have accepted His forgiveness and now
God looks at me as being perfect because I am now “in Christ.” That is how God views believers, as He sees
them as He sees His Son, Holy and perfect.
Let
us look at John 16:8-9 “8 ‘And He,[the Holy Spirit] when He comes, will convict the world
concerning sin and righteousness and judgment; 9 concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me;’” MacArthur adds “That is the sin of
separation, the sin that both causes and reflects man’s alienation from
God. It is the sin of not accepting God
as God and Christ as Savior, the sin of rejection.” This is not a particular act or even
statements of rejection, however it is the sphere of rejection in which the
unsaved person exists that separates him from God. He does this because he is spiritually “dead
in trespasses and sins,” as seen in verse 1 of Ephesians two. I want to quote another verse from John’s
gospel, and this time the one who is talking is John the Baptist who says that
there are only two kinds of people on this earth: “"He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey
the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.’”
I
will now close this SD with a short quote from John MacArthur as he talks more
about verse one of chapter two: “in the
state of spiritual death, the only walking, or living, a person can do is
‘according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of
the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.’ Kosmos
(‘world’) does not here represent simply the physical creation but the world
order, the world’s system of values and way of doing things—the world’s
‘course.’ And as Paul makes clear, the
‘course of this world’ follows the leadership and design of Satan, ‘the prince
of the power of the air.’”
In
our next SD will continue looking at this thought of the “world system.”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “The valley of the shadow of
death.”
Today’s Bible question: “Who sent disciples to Jesus to ask who He
was?”
Answer in our next SD.
12/15/2018 2:05 PM
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