SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/8/2017 10:39 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1“The Source of the Ministry”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
1:23c, 25a
Message of the verses: “the gospel….of which I, Paul, was made a minister…Of this church I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit.”
We have to go back for a moment to see how Paul closed
out verse 23 “the gospel” which described the content of the Colossian’s faith,
which is the saving truth which Paul was made a minister of. Now in verse 25 Paul repeats the thought as
he once more stated that he was made a minister of the gospel. We looked at that word “minister” in our last
SD showing that it is a really simple word from the Greek language but this was
given to Paul by the Lord as we also looked from his testimony in Acts
26:16. Simple words can bring very
important items as they don’t have to be words that are hard to understand to
be effective and “minister” fits into this category.
Paul did not plan to be a minister of the gospel; in fact
Paul’s plans were to be one of the top Pharisees in the Jewish religion, a
religion that did not end up the way that God began it as seen in the Old
Testament. Paul was probably about the
same age as Jesus Christ was and as Jesus stated that once He was raised from
the dead that His enemies could not attack Him anymore and so they would attack
those who believed in Him and Paul was one of those enemies when he was called
Saul, and that was what Paul was planning on doing, killing those who named the
name of Jesus for at that time he hated Jesus.
That all changed when God blinded Him and the Lord spoke to Him asking
him why he was persecuting Me [Jesus].
You see to persecute the followers of Jesus was to persecute Him, and
that is not a good thing as Paul found out.
The song “once I was blind, but now I see” fits into what happened to
Paul as He was blinded by Jesus, but then had his eyes opened so that he could
see the truth of the gospel, the gospel that Jesus made him a minister of. Now as we look at this very brief history of
Paul we can figure out that Paul did not volunteer to become a minister of
Jesus Christ, but was
appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ to do this and once saved Paul put
his heart and soul into ministering for the Lord.
Paul knew that what he was doing before Christ saved him
was wrong, that his salvation like all people who are saved is a miracle from
the Lord Jesus Christ through the effectual calling of the Holy Spirit and he
let people know this. When we are saved
we have a testimony and when we share that testimony with others sometimes the
Lord will use that testimony in the lives of others to convict them of their
sin and save them, so just like Paul did we should be ready to share what the
Lord has done for us.
God gave Paul the ministry to the Gentiles and Paul was
joyous in sharing with the Gentiles about how Christ had changed his life, even
joyous when he was being persecuted, which happened on many occasions.
We will continue looking at this subject in our next SD,
but in the meantime I pray that all who are believers who read this SD will
think about and praise the Lord for the miracle of their salvation and take
some time to get your testimony in order and pray that the Lord will use this
in your life to tell others about Jesus Christ.
Several years ago I had the opportunity to write my testimony down for a
class I was taking and I will share this with those who read this SD at this
time.
My Testimony
Please allow me to tell you how my relationship with
God began. When I was a young boy I went
to a church that taught us that before we reached our 12th birthday
if we died we would go straight to heaven.
At the age of ten I went fishing with some of my friends, who were
mostly older than I was, and so in order to impress them I began to swear,
swear a lot. It was the beginning of a
habit that I would never be able to stop on my own.
Another thing that happened to me when I was young was
that my mother taught us how she heard that the world was going to end. She told us that winter was going to turn
into summer and then summer would turn into winter and then the world would
burn up. To a young boy this was very
frightening to me.
We fast forward to the summer of 1966 when on the fifth
of July I was inducted into the Army.
This frightened me because there was a war going on and I surely did not
want to die in a war at the age of 19. I
made a deal with God that if He would get me out of the Army that I would stop
swearing, for I knew this was wrong.
There was a medical problem that I had before I went into the army, but
they sent me anyway. I had never had
this problem before, so after being in the Army for three days I was told that
I would be going back home. I had to
keep my deal with the Lord so for three weeks I stopped my swearing, but then
it was back to “normal.” After going
back to my job they checked me for the medical condition and it was gone, never
to return again.
In late 1972 I went to visit a friend in Florida. It was a last minute decision, so I had to
stop over in Atlanta. While in the
Atlanta airport a young couple began to speak to me about what the Bible really
had to say about the end of the world.
This was very interesting to me, and it relieved my fears a bit, but did
not stop the habit of swearing.
In January of 1974 I went back to visit my friend in
Florida, and I must confess that my motives were not good in going there. My friend gave me a series of cassette tapes
by a man named Hal Lindsey that were about what the Bible said about how the
world was going to end. I listened to
one each day and it was if they were speaking right to me. At the end of each message Lindsey told his
audience how they could have a relationship with the Lord. I followed what he said and the first thing
that I noticed was that I had no desire to swear, but I did have a desire to
read the Bible. The thing that I tried
to do on my own was taken away from me never to return again. My fears about how the world was going to end
were also gone, because I understood how it was going to happen.
In 1979 our son was born with a hole in his heart along
with a bad heart valve. In May of 1980 at
the age of 18 months the surgeons actually cut his heart into and inserted a
patch in it and put another patch near the valve. It was the longest day of my life to that
point, but because of my relationship with the Lord there was calmness. My son and his wife now have three
children. My question to you is if you
died today would you be 100% sure of going to heaven?
“I was listening to a sermon by John MacArthur this afternoon from Acts chapter one, and in that message he quoted a poem that his grand-father had pasted in his Bible. The poem has some similar things in it that we have seen from MacArthur’s note on Isaiah 43:21. “"When I stand at the judgment seat of Christ and He shows me His plan for me; The plan of my life, as it might have been, and I see how I blocked Him here and checked Him there and would not yield my will. Will there be grief in my Savior's eyes, grief though He loves me still? He would have me rich, but I stand there poor, stripped of all but His grace while memory runs like a haunted thing down a path I can't retrace. Then my desolate heart will well nigh break with tears I cannot shed. I'll cover my face with my empty hands, I'll bow my uncrowned head"...then this prayer..."Oh, Lord of the years that are left to me, I give them to Thy hand. Take me, break me, and mold me to the pattern that Thou hast planned.’”
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