SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/16/2017 11:12 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Scope of the Ministry”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
1:25b
Message of the
verses: “that I might fully carry
out the preaching of the Word of God.”
We stated in our last SD that we would look at five
reason that Jesus’ ministry was successful, remembering that He limited His
ministry to God’s will as stated in John 5:30 “I do not seek My own will, but
the will of Him who sent Me.” Jesus also
limited His ministry to the region of Israel along with limited regions around
Israel.
Now the first thing is that something we mentioned, and
that is that He limited His ministry to God’s will. In our study of the 17th chapter
of John which we are currently looking at in the morning SD we see that Jesus
states in the first verse “the hour has come,” and this was a key in His
ministry as the hour had come for Jesus to go to the cross to fulfill the will
of the Father, to bring glory to Himself, and to the Father.
Second, Jesus limited His ministry to God’s timing. We have also been learning about this in our
study of John’s gospel as we saw in our first point where we mentioned the
timing of Jesus’ going to the cross which was in the perfect timing of God.
Third, we see that Jesus limited His ministry to the
objective of God. Jesus knew that God
had not sent Him to reach the entire world all by Himself. We have also learned a lesson from John’s
gospel about this reason and that is that Jesus told His disciples that it
would be better for them if He went away, and the reason is that once Jesus
died, was buried, and then resurrected from the dead, and after that ascended
back into heaven the Father would send the Holy Spirit to the disciples, and we
learned that when Jesus told them this was going to happen that He said that
the Father would send another comforter which speaks of One like Him, who was
the Holy Spirit. So now you have every
believer in the New Testament age having the Comforter in them doing the work
of Jesus. Jesus, in the form He came to
earth could not do this, but now since He went back to heaven sending His Holy
Spirit it can be done. We as believers have to remember
that we too have a sphere of ministry to work in.
“Fourth, Jesus limited His ministry to God’s kingdom”
writes John MacArthur. “He refused to be
drawn into the political controversies of His day. When His opponents tried to embroil Him in
one such controversy He replied, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s’ (Matt. 22:21). He kept the political realm and the spiritual
realm separate. That is a lesson many in
the contemporary church seem to have missed.”
Fifth, we learn that Jesus limited Himself to God’s
people. As we look at the gospel record
we see that Jesus only worked with a few men as He chose out of a larger group
twelve men to work with and we can also see that He spent much more time with
Peter, James, and John that the rest of those twelve men.
John MacArthur concludes by stating “Those who desire
truly effective ministries must learn the importance of limits. If they concentrate on the depth of their
ministries, God will take care of the breadth.”
2/16/2017 11:32 PM
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