SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/13/2018 10:52 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “The Circumstances of Paul’s
Conversion”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 22:6-16
Message of the verses: “6 “But it happened that as I was on my way, approaching Damascus
about noontime, a very bright light suddenly flashed from heaven all around me,
7 and I fell to the ground and heard a
voice saying to me, ’Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’ 8 “And I
answered, ’Who are You, Lord?’ And He said to me, ’I am Jesus the Nazarene,
whom you are persecuting.’ 9 “And those who were with me saw the light, to be
sure, but did not understand the voice of the One who was speaking to me. 10
“And I said, ’What shall I do, Lord?’ And the Lord said to me, ’Get up and go
on into Damascus, and there you will be told of all that has been appointed for
you to do.’ 11 “But since I could not see because of the brightness of that
light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me and came into Damascus.
12 "A certain Ananias, a man who
was devout by the standard of the Law, and well spoken of by all the
Jews who lived there, 13 came to me, and
standing near said to me, ’Brother Saul, receive your sight!’ And at that very
time I looked up at him. 14 “And he said, ’The God of our fathers has appointed
you to know His will and to see the Righteous One and to hear an utterance from
His mouth. 15 ’For you will be a witness for Him to all men of what you have
seen and heard. 16 ’Now why do you delay? Get up and be baptized, and wash away
your sins, calling on His name.’”
I promised
a quote from John MacArthur to begin this third SD on Acts 22:6-16: “Ananias’s declaration ‘the God of our
fathers has appointed you’ stresses the biblical truth that God is sovereign in
salvation. ‘No one can come to me,’
declared Jesus, ‘unless the Father who sent Me draws him’ (John 6:44; cf. Mark
13:20; Eph. 1:4; Col. 3:12; 2 Thess. 2:12; 2 Tim. 2:10; Titus 1:1; 1 Peter
1:1-2). The Lord also sovereignly chooses those who serve Him
(Luke 6:13; John 13:18; 15:16, 19; Acts 1:2).
He chose Paul ‘to know His will, to see the Righteous One (a Messianic
title, Isa. 53:11; Acts 3:14; 7:52), ‘to hear an utterance from His mouth’ (leading
to Paul’s salvation), and to ‘be a witness for him to all men of what’ he had
‘seen and heard.’ The dramatic conversion of Saul
of Tarsus is a compelling testimony to the sovereign purposes of God.” (I have to say a hardy Amen to that!)
Now the
other side of the coin so to speak is that the sovereign purpose of God in
choosing these individuals does not relieve them of their responsibility to
respond in a proper way. We read “And
now why do you delay? Arise, and be
baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His name.” MacArthur writes “Some have mistakenly sought
support for baptismal regeneration (the false teaching that baptism is required
for salvation) in this verse. Although
baptism is an act of obedience required of all Christians, it does not save. Paul understood that clearly. To the Romans he wrote:
[This is] the word of faith
which we are preaching, 9 that if you
confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that
God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; 10 for with the heart a person believes, resulting in
righteousness, and with
the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
“Paul preached that salvation came from belief in the heart
(cf. Acts 16:31; Rom. 3:28) and public confession of that faith (cf. Matt.
10:32; Rom 10:13). Obviously, he did not
understand Ananias’s words to mean that baptism saves.”
When we
looked at and studied Acts 10:44-48 we also saw that it revealed that the
relationship of baptism to salvation, as it was only after Cornelius and his
friends had received the Holy Spirit that they were then baptized.
John
MacArthur continues on this very important subject: “Ananias’s words in verse 16, when properly
understood, are in full agreement with the New Testament teaching that
salvation is by faith alone. The phrase ‘wash
away your sins’ must be connected with ‘calling on His name’, since connecting
it with ‘be baptized’ leaves the participle epikalesamenos
(‘calling’) without an antecedent. Paul’s sins were washed away not
by baptism but by calling on the name of the Lord (cf. Rom. 10:13). A literal translation of the verse says, ‘Arise,
get yourself baptized and your sins washed away, having called on His name.’ Both imperatives reflect the reality that
Paul had already called on the Lord’s name, which is the act that saves. Baptism and the washing away of sins follow.
Paul was
telling his audience that it was only his obedience to what God had told him to
do was the reason that he did what he did, and thus this turns the tables on
his adversaries. We will see later on,
that this will come into play when Paul goes on trial.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: Baptism is a necessity in obeying the
first of two commands that a believer has to do, the second being the Lord’s
Supper. However it is necessary to
understand that we cannot ever add anything to achieve salvation. If we could do something other than accepting
what the Lord has done for us as He took our place on the cross for salvation
then what would be the reason that He came to earth in the first place. “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves,
it is the gift of
God; 9 not as a
result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would
walk in them.” Notice the sequence of
when we are to work, as is it after salvation that we do our works for the Lord
that he chose for us to do in eternity past, not in order to be saved.
My
Steps of Faith For today: To do the works that God planned for me to do from
eternity past.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Gibeon” (Joshua 9:3-15).
Today’s Bible question:
“Who told Mary she would be the mother of the Messiah?”
Answer in our next SD.
8/13/2018 11:25 AM
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