SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/22/2019 10:18 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Sacrificial Love”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Eph. 5:25b
Message of the
verse: “and gave Himself up for
her.”
As
we look at these six words, which are powerful words, we can go back into
eternity past as I have been writing about from time to time, talking about how
in eternity past that it was all planned out for Jesus Christ to come to earth
and pay the price for His bride.
Philippians 2:6-8 speaks of Christ humbling Himself in order to become
the God/Man so that He could pay the price for our sins. In the letter to the Romans Paul builds his
case showing that every person born of the seed of man is a sinner, and then
goes on to talk about how Christ came to save sinners. “7 For one will
hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would
dare even to die. 8 But
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom.
5:7-8). The point in all of this is that
it was gracious love that was the reason that Christ did this for all those who
will accept what He did for them on the cross.
If
we look at the world’s kind of love we can see that it is always
object-oriented as a person is loved because of physical attractiveness,
personality, wit, prestige, or some other such positive characteristic. We could thus say that the world loves those
whom it deems worthy of love. I think
that it is fair to say that this kind of worldly love is necessarily fickle,
for as soon as a person loses a positive characteristic—or that characteristic
is no longer appealing to the person who thought that they love that person
then the marriage will fall apart. As soon
as a partner loses his or her appeal, love is gone, because the basis for the
love is gone.
This
above section is what we have called “Worldly Love,” and that is not at all
like God’s love as God’s love is much different. God loves because it is in His nature to love
that which He has created and also because the objects of His love are in great
need to be loved and not because they are attractive or deserve His love. When Adam and Eve sinned then God could have
just destroyed them and started over again, but He didn’t. The reason is because of His love for them
that He did not destroy them. Imagine if
that decision would be in the hands of a worldly person what would have
happened. In God’s marvelous
graciousness, He loves because He cannot do otherwise. That is really good to know.
We
will end this SD with a quote from John MacArthur who writes: “God can command His own kind of love from
those who belong to Him because He has given them the capacity to love as He
loves (cf. Rom. 5:5; 1 Thess. 4:9) and because His commanded love must,
therefore be a matter of choice (cf. James 2:8; 1 John 3:7, 16-18, 23; 4:7,
11). It is an act of the will as well as
of the heart. And it seems to be a principle that whatever we
choose to love and practice loving soon becomes attractive to us. But a Christian’s loving with Christ’s kind
of love is not based on the attractiveness of the one loved but on God’s
command to love. Loving as Christ loves
does not depend in the least on what others are in themselves, but entirely on
what we are in Christ.
“A
husband is not commanded to love his wife because of what she is or is
not. He is commanded to love her because
it is God’s will for him to love her. It
is certainly intended for a husband to admire and be attracted by his wife’s
beauty, winsomeness, kindness, gentleness, or any other positive quality or
virtue. But through such things brings
great blessing and enjoyment, they are not the bond of marriage. If every appealing characteristic and every
virtue of his wife disappears, a husband is still under just as great an
obligation to love her. If anything, he
is under greater obligation, because her need for the healing and restorative
power of his selfless love is greater.
That is the kind of love Christ has for His church and is therefore the
kind of love every Christian husband is to have for his wife.”
Lord
willing we will look at the parable of the Good Samaritan as we begin our next
SD, showing the kind of love he had for a perfect stranger.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: That is a tall order, but with the Lord all
things are possible.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Being humble by the filling of the Holy
Spirit has a lot to do with loving my wife like Christ loves the church.
Today’s quotation from “Love in
Actions”: “Believers are to follow the
way of love, to do everything in love, to serve one another in love, to live a
life of love to speak the truth in love, to put on love, to pursue love, to
spur one another on to love, and to love not only in words but in actions and
truth.”
8/22/2019 10:57 AM
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