SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/24/2018 7:10 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The
Courage of Conviction Knows Its Purpose”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 21:1-3
Message of the verses: “1 When we had parted from them and had set sail, we ran a straight course to Cos and the next day to Rhodes and from there to Patara; 2 and having found a ship crossing over to Phoenicia, we went aboard and set sail. 3 When we came in sight of Cyprus, leaving it on the left, we kept sailing to Syria and landed at Tyre; for there the ship was to unload its cargo.”
We are back to the “we” in this section telling us that
Luke is along with Paul and others, and we are back to a sea voyage. It has been years ago when I was attending
Founders Week at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois that I remembered
hearing one of the Pastors who was preaching there say something to the effect
that Luke could really write about a sea voyage and as we see from this section
he gives very descriptive details of this voyage that he, Paul, and other
missionaries had.
I will mention that this SD will not be very long due to
the fact that I had cataract surgery on my right eye yesterday afternoon and it
takes a while for the eye to clear up so that I can see well enough to be able
to read and type so we will get a far as we can today for this topic.
We briefly mentioned a number of OT saints who had the
courage of conviction in our last SD, and among them were Joshua and Caleb,
along with Deborah, David, and also Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abed-nego. All of these people, and
probably many more showed their courage of conviction as they were doing things
that they truly believed that the Lord wanted them to do to bring glory to His
name. It is not clear to us how long
that Paul had been thinking that the Lord wanted him to go to Jerusalem, but it
must have been a while, and I am sure that knowing Paul as we have begun to
know him through the book of Acts and some of the other letters that he wrote
that he had spent much time in prayer to the Lord in order to know that this
was what the Lord wanted him to do, and so that is why he continued to press on
to go up to Jerusalem.
As we begin chapter twenty-one we see that Luke mentions
for the last time the emotional reminder of Paul leaving the leaders of the
Ephesian church. We could see from our
last several SD’s that this was not only a very emotional time for Paul, but
also for those leaders that Paul had spent three years with, and especially
when Paul told them that they would never see his face again, and as a result
all went through an emotional time.
Verse one uses the word “parted” in the beginning of it and John
MacArthur writes “Apospao) “aparted”
which means ‘to tear away’ (cf. 20:30; Luke 22:31), shows the trauma of that
parting. So great was the Ephesian
elders’ love for him that Paul literally ad to tear himself away from his
sorrowing friends.”
I can tell a story that happened to me and also my wife
that has some similarities with this one.
My wife and I from September 7, 2004 to the 16th of March of
2005 lived in the country of Aruba. I
remember when it got time for us to leave Aruba that I was traveling into the
company where I was working and I was wondering a few weeks before as I drove
through the gate how many times would I still be driving through that
gate. You see my wife and I had grown
close to a number of people who we worshiped with while living there, people
from different walks of life and we were very fond of them, loving them as
brothers and sisters in Christ. I had
even had the privilege of preaching to them on a number of occasions, something
that I had never done before, but felt the Lord leading me to do so while
there. On the second to last week I had
that privilege telling them what brought me to Aruba, telling them about how we
had the privilege of leading many neighbor’s to the Lord through a very
difficult challenge that we were going through as the Lord was giving us blessings
in the storms of life through leading many members of a family to a saving
knowledge of Jesus Christ. At the end of
the message the entire small congregation stood and applauded after telling
them what God had done in bringing many in that family to a saving knowledge of
Christ. Needless to say I was a bit
embarrassed, and yet in my own way I knew that the applause was for the Lord,
for the grace He had given to those in that family. The next week my wife and I were asked to
come to the front of the church in order to let the church family we were
leaving and that was a very painful time for us too, knowing that we would not
see any of these brothers and sisters for a long time. We did return in April of 2007, but by them
many of the same crowd was not there.
Leaving a situation like that was very emotional for my wife and me, and
so I can understand a bit of what happened to Paul and the Ephesian leaders
when Paul left. With that we will
continue to look at this section from Acts 21 in our next SD.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: I am thankful for
having had the privilege of knowing different believers from different walks of
life.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Trust the Lord as He continues to heal my eye
from the surgery that I had yesterday, and being thankful to Him for leading me
and also my wife to the doctor who did the surgery.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “Athens” (Acts 17:22-23).
Today’s Bible
question: “Who hired Balaam to curse
Israel?”
Answer in our next SD.
7/24/2018 7:51 AM
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