Matthew 11:12
And from the days of John the Baptist
until now the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence,
and the violent take it by force.
Devotional
And the violent take it by force.
We, who have been brought up and brought up in the truth, know all too well that believing and being saved is a one-sided work of the Lord and that man himself can do nothing about it.
Perhaps we know this way too well, and does it often make us take a wait-and-see attitude toward the things of God’s Kingdom, feeding the thought, “I can’t help it anyway.”
And now we read here: And the violent take it (the kingdom) by force.
- Does that mean that the first is not true, and that we ourselves must conquer the kingdom of heaven as in a stampede?
- Is it then so, that man is justified before God, by the works of the law?
No, that is definitely not true!
But it does not mean that we should just sit and wait with our hands on our laps.
Someone once said,
▪︎ We must pray as if everything depends on the Lord
▪︎ and we have to work as if everything depends on us.
- We will have to know the struggle in prayer,
- We will have to continue the fight against sin,
- We’ll have to fight the battle against worldly thoughts,
- We’ll have to fight the devil,
- and we will have to face the struggle against one’s own evil heart as a reality.
We then learn to confess that before we went to seek the Lord, He had already found us.
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