SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/12/2017 10:51 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1”The Reason”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
3:3
Message of the verse: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
We will begin to look at our next to last “R” word in
this SD, which is “The Reason.” We have
to ask the question as to why it should be normal for believers to be living in
the heavenlies. The answer is in this
verse that is believers have died spiritually and now their lives are hidden
with Christ in God. Spiritually
believers have died to this world system and this happened through their faith
union with Jesus Christ in His death and then His resurrection. Look at Galatians 6:14 “But may it never be
that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been
crucified to me, and I to the world.”
The Greek word translated “you have died” is apothnesko, actually the past tense of this apothnesko and this
indicates that a death took place at salvation. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new
creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come, (2 Cor.
5:7).”
MacArthur asks “In what sense has the believer died? In the sense that the penalty for sin has
been paid. The wages of sin is death, so
we must die. By union with Jesus Christ,
we die the required death in Him, thus the penalty is paid and sin can never
claim us again. We have thus died to sin
in the sense of paying its penalty. Its
presence and power still affect us—but it cannot condemn us.” I think that this is one of the best
explanations that I have ever read to explain that I have died to sin, and yet
sins presence and power still affect me, and it is good to know that sin cannot condemn me.
We as believers have not only died to sin, but the
excellent part is that our lives (believers) are “hidden with Christ in God,”
and that is the best place to be. I have
read this verse many times and have a hard time understanding the phrase “with
Christ in God.” John MacArthur gives a
series of explanations on what it means to be with Christ in God. We will look at a couple of them in this SD
and then finish looking at the rest in our next SD.
“First believers share a common life with the Father and
the Son,” writes MacArthur and a verse to show us this truth is 1 Corinthians
6:17 which reads “But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with
Him.” Peter writes in 2 Peter 1:4 “For
by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become
partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in
the world by lust.”
Second is that believers lives are concealed from the
world, and this can be understandable because unbelievers it seems they think
sometimes we speak a foreign language as they cannot understand us. I remember shortly after I became a believer
I was trying to explain to a friend of mine what happened to me. Once I first became a believer it seemed to
me that I had a million questions that I wanted answered. So I told my friend what happened to me and
asked him if he had any questions to which he said he did not, and that was
because he did not experience the things I experienced. The things that I told my friend were as Paul
writes in 1 Cor. 2:14 “But a natural man does not accept the things of the
Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them,
because they are spiritually appraised.”
Now we realize that our true manifestation has not yet come to us as
long as we are in these bodies living on this earth, but it will come: “For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the
revealing of the sons of God (Rom. 8:19).”
John tells us “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not
appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like
Him, because we will see Him just as He is (1 John 3:2).” Now I don’t want you to forget that one of
the reasons that Paul is writing this letter is to refute the false teachers in
Colossae. They could not understand the
things of God because they did not know God.
4/12/2017 11:26 PM
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