FBC Daily Devotional – November 27, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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Maybe it's morning, you may be watching this at noontime, or even in the evening, whatever time of day it is.

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I hope you're having a good Friday as we wrap up this work week.

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Did you have to go to work today? I'm sure you were off for holiday yesterday, but how about today?

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Well, however you spent the day today, I trust it's been a good one, and even maybe basking a little in the afterglow of a good

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Thanksgiving holiday. Maybe enjoying some of those Thanksgiving leftovers.

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Did you have some turkey with your eggs this morning or something? I don't know. Well, anyway, hope you're having a good day.

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Well, I wanna focus on a passage in John chapter 19 for a few minutes.

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It's actually the passage that deals with the burial of Jesus. And what's really interesting about this passage is that the two individuals who are involved in burying

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Jesus are not ones that you would expect. One of them is

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Joseph of Arimathea, and we don't know hardly anything about him.

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He just shows up here. We're just told that he was a disciple, a secret disciple of Jesus, because he was afraid of the

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Jews and what they might do to him. But he came and he's the one that asked for permission to bury Jesus.

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And then he had with him Nicodemus. You remember Nicodemus? Back in John chapter three, the guy who came to Jesus, he was scared, came by night and asked

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Jesus some questions. That's the interview that Jesus had with him, where Jesus talked about the fact that you must be born from above in order to enter into the kingdom of God.

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Well, after that encounter with Jesus, we don't hear anything much else about Nicodemus.

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There was a time before the Sanhedrin, he did sort of stick up for Jesus in a way, but not in a very public way that identified him as a follower of Jesus.

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But here we are at the tomb, at the crucifixion and the taking of Jesus' body from the cross and putting him in the tomb.

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And we read that Nicodemus, who had earlier come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about 75 pounds in weight.

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So they, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, took the body of Jesus, bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the

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Jews. And in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden and in the garden, a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid.

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And so there they buried the Lord. Now, I found an interesting comment on this section from J .C.

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Ryle, who was a bishop in England in the last half of the 1800s.

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And he's commenting on this passage and he makes some interesting observations.

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Have you made the mistake of perhaps thinking that your personal experience with Christ is the norm and should be the experience that everyone has?

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I'm not just talking about the time of your conversion and the manner of your conversion, although that can certainly be a mistake to make, that everybody has to be converted in the same way that you are and that you were, same sort of experience.

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But even after the fact, it's important to realize that the

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Christian life and its growth is not a cookie cutter thing.

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And so J .C. Ryle, in commenting on this passage, he says this, and let me just share it with you.

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He says, there are some servants of Christ whose latter end is better than their beginning. The case of Nicodemus teaches this lesson very plainly.

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The only man who dared to help Joseph in his holy work of burying our Lord was the one who at first came by night and was nothing better than an ignorant inquirer after the truth.

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After a later period in our Lord's ministry, we find the same Nicodemus coming forward with somewhat more boldness and raising in the council the

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Pharisees the question, does our law judge any man before it hears him and knows what he does?

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Finally, we see him in this passage before us, ministering to our Lord's dead body and not ashamed to take an active part in giving to the despised

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Nazarene an honorable burial. How great the contrast between the man who timidly crept into the

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Lord's lodging to ask a question and a man who brought a 75 pounds worth of myrrh and aloes to anoint his dead body.

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Yet it was the same Nicodemus. We shall do well to store up these things in our minds and to remember the case of Nicodemus in forming our estimate of other people's religion or other people's

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Christian life. We must not condemn others as graceless and godless because they do not see the whole truth at once and only reach decided

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Christianity by slow degrees. The Holy Spirit always leads believers to the same foundation truths and into the same highway to heaven.

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In these, there is invariable uniformity. But the Holy Spirit does not always lead believers through the same experience or at the same rate of speed.

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In this, there is much diversity in his operations. He that says conversion is a needless thing and that an unconverted man may be saved is undoubtedly under a strange delusion.

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But he that says that no one is converted except he become a full -blown and established

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Christian in a single day is no less under a delusion. Oh, that is so true.

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If you're, you should be a part of a local church and as such, you will readily discover that everybody in that local church is growing and they're all growing in different ways and different speeds, rates, if you will, and have come through different experiences in the course of their

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Christian life. And so at any given time, there's a wide variety of individuals in where they are in their

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Christian walk. Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone should be where you are.

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Someone might be making the same mistake about you, assuming that you ought to be where they are.

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Now, let's leave all that to the Lord. He could use a Nicodemus and a

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Joseph of Arimathea, most unlikely of disciples, most infantile, if you will, in their

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Christian walk, but he used them and gave them the honor of giving him an honorable burial.

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So wherever you are in your walk with Christ, if you are his, I trust that you are growing, but God bless you as you continue keeping on in that walk with Christ and in that Christian growth.

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If you are not in Christ, trust him today. Even as Jesus said to Nicodemus, you must be born from above.

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Oh, turn to him, come to Christ, be born from above today.

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Well, I hope you have a good rest of your Friday and that the weekend will go well and look forward to the

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Lord's day. We are planning carefully for in -person service

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Sunday morning at 10 .30. If you're not comfortable with that, understandable in these days of COVID crisis, then join us at 10 .30

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on live stream on Facebook or YouTube or the church homepage. I hope you can join us as we worship the

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Lord together Sunday morning at 10 .30. So hope to see you then.