SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/9/2018 12:03 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Spiritual Mission”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 13:2b-5
Message of the verses: “the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." 3 Then, when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. 4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia and from there they sailed to Cyprus. 5 When they reached Salamis, they began to proclaim the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews; and they also had John as their helper.”
When we looked at verse one we saw a list of names who
were involved in the church at Antioch, and now we see two of them whom the
Spirit of God chooses to send out on what we call the first missionary
journey. God the Spirit chose these men
because they were actively involved in ministry, and not just sitting around
doing nothing. MacArthur writes “God
chose experienced, proven men for the vitally important mission to the
Gentiles. I just want to add that there
was a fairly long time in the history of the church when this kind of missions
work did not happen. As I prepared for
my Sunday school lesson a few weeks back on the church at Philadelphia one of
the commentators mentioned that the prophetic time for that church was from
1750-1925 and it was during that time period that two things happened that had
not happened much in the years before, and the first one was sending out mission
teams to different parts of the world.
The second thing is that the second coming of Christ was being preached
about, unlike in the times before this period.
I am not saying that these two things never happened before this period,
but that it became more prominent during this period of time.
In our last SD we talked about all ministry is to be done
to the Lord and it is demonstrated in this section of verses we are looking at
today. “Set apart for Me” is what “the
Holy Spirit said.”
MacArthur writes “Another principle that flows out of
this text is that God sovereignly calls men to the ministry. The church did not choose Saul and
Barnabas. Indeed, they would probably
have been the last two chosen since they were the best the church had, nor did
Saul and Barnabas volunteer. Instead,
the Spirit sovereignly called them to full-time missionary service.”
We can only give an educated guess as to how the Spirit
of God spoke to the church to do what He wanted the church to do, and that
would be He spoke through one of the prophets, and we also spoke about prophets
in our recent SD’s from this chapter in Acts.
Once this message was given to the church they immediately obeyed it, as
there was no grumbling about what the Spirit wanted them to do.
I will close this SD with a personal note. I suppose that it was about 13 years ago when
I was going to another church that I was asked to become the head of the
Missionary team. I have mentioned that
there were troubles in this church, troubles that lasted for a number of years
before we felt it was good for us to leave.
At any rate we voted on a pastor two times to see if it was the Lord’s
will to have him serve there and both times he was not chosen and so because of
that incident I made it a practice that when we had missionaries that we as a
church were supporting come and visit us that I would meet with them and ask
them to give their personal testimony as to when the Lord had called them to
missionary service. My thoughts were
that perhaps the man we voted on had not been called by God and so I wanted to
hear that these missionaries were called by God. If a person is called by God to go to the
missions field they will know when that calling came.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: I once again have
to go back to a verse that is a favorite of mine Ephesians 2:10 “10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in
them.”
My Steps of Faith for Today & Memory verse: 10 Teach me
to do Your will, For You are my God; Let Your good Spirit lead me on level
ground (Psalm 143:10).”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “Lot’s” (Luke 17:32).
Today’s Bible
question: “Who said ‘Remember me when
You come into Your kingdom?”
Answer in our next SD.
2/9/2018 12:32 PM
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