SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/23/2019 8:59 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The
Believer’s Limited Privileges”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians 5:16
Message of the verses: “16 making the most of your time, because the days are evil.”
In our last SD we looked towards the end of it how
Judas was the man who is probably the one who wasted his life the most of any
person ever born. Now we want to look at
what Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1:17 “If you address as
Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear
during the time of your stay on earth;” In
his farewell remarks to the Ephesian elders at Miletus, Paul said, “I do not
consider my life of any account as dear to myself, in order that I may finish
my course, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus (Acts
20:24). MacArthur writes “Paul’s course
was prescribed by God, and within that course he would minister to the utmost
until his last breath. He was determined
to run with endurance the race that was set before him (see Heb. 12:1). At the end of his life he therefore could
say, ‘I fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the
faith’ (2 Tim. 4:7).” Now as I look at
these two verses it is my belief that as believers we all have certain things
that God has planned for us to do in eternity past (Eph. 2:10), and that means
that not all of us have the same work to do for the Lord, other than we all
have the job of what is explained in the Great Commission. If you think that Paul calls the church “The
Body of Christ” and when you think of a body having different parts to do
different things in the body, then as believers we all have different jobs to
do for the cause of Christ, but as our verse tells us we are to make the most
of our time, because the days are evil, and no one living in the world today
can argue that our world is not evil, for evil seems to be growing everywhere
around the world.
Let us look at what Paul wrote to
the Corinthians in first Corinthians 7:29 “But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened, so
that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none.” I want to focus in on “the time has been
shortened” and not the rest of the verse as it had to do with the time period that
Paul was living in and what was going on in his life as well as in the
Corinthian’s lives. James also had
something to say about people who were rather arrogant about their time: “13 Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to
such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a
profit." 14 Yet you
do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that
appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:13-14).
Today
is Sunday and my SD’s are a bit shorter than in the other six days of the week,
and so I want to finish with a story from MacArthur’s commentary.
“Kefa Sempangi (whose story
is told in the book A Distant Grief.
Regal Books) was a national pastor in Africa and barely escaped with his family
from brutal oppression and terror in his home country of Uganda. They made their way to Philadelphia, where a
group of Christians began caring for them.
One day his wife said, ‘Tomorrow I am going to go and buy some clothes
for the children,’ and immediately she and her husband broke into tears. Because of the constant threat of death under
which they had so long lived, that was the first time in many years they had
dared even speak the word tomorrow.
Their terrifying experiences
forced them to realize what is true of every person: there is no assurance of
tomorrow. The only time we can be sure of
having is what we have at the moment. To
the self-satisfied farmer who had grandiose plans to build bigger and better
barns to store his crops, the Lord said, ‘You fool! This very night your soul
is required of you’ (Luke 12:20). He had
already lived his last tomorrow.”
Today’s
quote comes from St. John Chrysostom who wrote “The Holy Scriptures were not
given to us that we should enclose them in books, but that we should engrave
them upon our hearts.”
6/23/2019 10:09 PM
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