SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/4/2019 9:05 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The
necessary Foundation”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians
5:21
Message of the
verse: “and
be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”
We continue to look at the
transition between what we have been looking at about being filled with the Holy
Spirit and then the things that will happen to us when we are filled with the
Spirit as we will see in verses 5:22-6:9.
In John MacArthur’s commentary he
spends a lot of time talking about marriage in the beginning of this chapter
that we are looking at, and talks about things like how easily it is for
believers to get a divorce and the fact that the church in most cases does not
look at this as being a big problem because it happens so often. Things are much different in the church in
our country at this time as compared to 50 years ago, and things are not very
good as far as following things that the Bible has to say about marriage and
even having children. It is not uncommon
for believers to live together with one another before getting married, and
this kind of thing happening in the church 50 years ago hardly ever
happened. Bottom line is that the church
in our country is becoming worldlier and as we look around at things that are
happening in our country and around the world we see the fall out of not
following what the Bible has to say.
John MacArthur writes “God will forgive,
cleanse, and restore the repentant believer, but He does not change His
standards of righteousness and purity and does not promise to remove the often
tragic consequences of disobedience. If
the church seeks to accommodate those divine standards to the foolishness and
sinfulness of its own members, it not only offends and grieves God but
undercuts its testimony to the world. If
marriage cannot be right in the church it can hardly be right in the world, any
more than it was in Paul’s day.”
He writes latter “Families are the building block
of human society, and a society that does not protect the family undermines its
very existence. When the family goes,
everything else of value soon goes with it.
When the cohesiveness, meaningfulness, and discipline of the family are
lost, anarchy will flourish. And when
anarchy flourishes, law, justice, and safety cannot. The family nourishes and binds society
together, whereas the anarchy that results from its absence only depletes,
disrupts, and destroys.
“The
unredeemed can benefit greatly from following God’s basic principles for the
family, but the full power and potential of those principles can be understood
and practiced by those who belong to Him by faith in His Son. Paul speaks to the Ephesians as fellow
Christians, and apart from the divine life and resources that only Christians
possess, but principles for marriage and the family that he gives in this
letter are out of context and thus limited benefit. The basic principle of being subject to one
another finds its power and effectiveness only in ‘the fear of the Christ.’ The
family can only be what God has designed it to be when the members of the
family are what God has designed them to be—‘conformed to the image of His Son’
(Rom. 8:29). Just as an individual can
find fulfillment only in a right relationship with God, so the family can find
complete fulfillment only as believing parents and children follow His design
for the family in the control and power of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 5:18b).”
Bible verse
that goes along with D. L. Moody’s quotation is from Matthew 26:19 “With men
this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
8/4/2019 9:31
PM
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