SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/3/2017 10:19 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Performance of the New Man”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
3:12-13
Message of the verses: “12 So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; 13 bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you.”
We mentioned when we were looking at verse 3:5a that Paul
instructed believers what they should take off, and now in verse 12 we see that
Paul instructs the believers what they should put on. Now in verses 3:9a-11 Paul tells the believers
what God has done for them, and then in 3:12-17 he describes what God expects
of the believer in response. Now when
God saves a person He changes things from the inside out, and although there
are struggles with living a life the way we have been changed when God saves us
during the sanctification process God will begin to change us from the inside
out. I remember listing to a sermon
shortly after I first became a believer entitled “Becoming What You Are,” and
the sermon was about what we are in Christ once we have been saved and then
living that way.
We have mentioned many times in these Spiritual Diaries
that God is the One who has chosen believers in eternity past and as MacArthur
states “No one becomes a Christian solely by their own choice. Rather, believers
are ‘those who have been chosen of God.’”
Now I have mentioned a sermon that is one of my all time favorite
sermons entitled “Twin Truth” and it is a sermon by John MacArthur who tells us
that the Bible talks about the Sovereignty of God and also the Responsibility
of Man as mentioned in this sermon.
These truths run parallel and do not ever run together, but alongside
like the two tracks of a railroad track.
No man can totally understand this, but this sermon I mentioned helps us
better understand the facts that we don’t understand how these truths
work. Some things you have to take by
faith. I don’t believe that anyone who
is born of woman, with the exception of our Lord Jesus Christ can make a choice
of becoming a believer without the effectual call of the Holy Spirit. The reason is that we are all born
spiritually dead. It would be like an
undertaker asking a dead person what kind of clothes they wanted him to put on
to bury him in. He would get no
response. Think of Lazarus lying dead in
a tomb for four days and you going up to him and telling him to come out of the
tomb. Likewise, nothing would happen,
however when the Lord Jesus said “Lazarus come forth” Lazarus came walking out
of the tomb alive. This pictures the
effectual call of the Holy Spirit when He calls someone to salvation.
We will pick up looking at the phrase “holy and beloved”
in our next SD.
5/3/2017 10:43 PM
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