SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/14/2019 7:57 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “Intro
to Eph. 4:17-24”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians 4:17-24
Message of the verses: “17 So this I say,
and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles
also walk, in the futility of their mind, 18 being darkened in their
understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is
in them, because of the hardness of their heart; 19 and they, having become
callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every
kind of impurity with greediness. 20 But
you did not learn Christ in this way, 21 if indeed you have heard Him and have
been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, 22 that, in reference to your
former manner of life, you
lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the
lusts of deceit, 23 and that you be
renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and put on the new self, which in the likeness
of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”
I
hope that you can understand from the highlighted portions found in these
verses that John MacArthur entitled this 13th chapter of his
commentary “Off with the Old, On with the New.”
In
order to understand this introduction, at least half of it, and because it is
Sunday evening, but mostly because we need to understand this introduction to
the fullest, I am going to quote three rather short paragraphs from John
MacArthur’s commentary, and then we will see in our next SD what we want to do
about finishing this introduction.
“When
a person believes and confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and is thereby born again,
a transformation takes place in the basic nature. The change is even more basic and radical
than the change that will take place at death.
When a believer dies, he has already been fitted for heaven, already
been made a citizen of the kingdom, already become a child of God. He simply begins to perfectly experience the
divine nature he has had since his spiritual birth, because for the first time he is free from the unredeemed
flesh. The future receiving of
his glorified body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:42-45) will not make him better, since he is
already perfected; but it will give him the full capacity for all that eternal
resurrection life involves.
“Salvation
is not a matter of improvement or perfection of what has previously
existed. It is total
transformation. The New Testament speaks
of believers having a new mind, a new will, a new heart, a new inheritance, a
new relationship, new power, new knowledge, new wisdom, new perception, new
understanding, new righteousness, new love, new desire, new citizenship, and
many other new things—all of which are summed up in newness of life (Rom.
6:4).
“At
the new birth a person becomes ‘a new creature; the old things passed away;
behold, new things have come’ (2 Cor. 5:17).
It is not simply that he receives something new but that he becomes
someone new. ‘I have been
crucified with Christ,’ Paul said, ‘and it is no longer I who live, but Christ
lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the
Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me’ (Gal. 2:20). The new nature is not added to the old nature
but replaces it. The transformed person is a completely new ‘I.’ In contrast to the former love of evil (cf.
John 3:19-21; Rom. 1:21-25; 28-32), that new self—the deepest, truest part of
the Christian—now loves the law of God, longs to fulfill its righteous demands,
hates sin, and longs for deliverance from the unredeemed flesh, which is the
house of the eternal new creation until glorification (see Rom. 7:14-25;
8:22-24).
“Why, then, do we continue to
sin after we become Christians?
As Paul explains in Romans 7, ‘No longer am I the one doing it, but sin
which indwells me. For I know that
nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the wishing is present in
me, but the doing of the good is not’ (vv. 17-18; cf. 20). Sin is still resident in the flesh, so that
we are inhibited and restrained from being able to give full and perfect
expression to the new nature. Possessing
the fullness of the divine nature without the corruption of our unredeemed flesh
is a promise we will realize only in the future (cf. Rom. 8:23; Phil. 3:20-21;
2 Pet. 1:3-4).”
Quotation for today and this one is from
Brother Lawrence: “We ought not to be
weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness
of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”
4/14/2019 8:30 PM
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