[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, we rejoice that our Lord Jesus is returning in glory soon for us.
And this for us, for the Christian, is not a frightful thing or something to worry about.
It’s in fact something joyful and something that we’re looking forward to.
Jesus frights when he’s teaching and he says, when you see these things happening, lift
up your heads.
Don’t run for the hills.
Lift up your head in love because your redemption draws near.
That’s what’s coming on the last day.
That’s who’s coming on the last day.
God’s Redeemer, the one who loves you.
And it won’t be long now.
The time in this life, the time of sorrow,
the time of tears and weeping, will soon come to an end.
Suffering for that day.
We pray, Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.
We look for that day, and we look for that return,
and we’re ready for that.
But we’re also, and this is the lesson of the text,
We’re also ready to wait for that return.
We want to have a two-fold readiness.
This is the lesson that Jesus is giving to us in the parable, and we’re headed towards
it.
I want to get to the parable through the epistle.
I want to do a little bit of work on 1 Thessalonians to get there, but we want to get to the point
where Jesus says, look, the wisdom of the five wise Thessalonians is this.
They were ready for the wedding, and they were also ready to wait for the wedding.
They had a two-fold ready verge, a now and not yet.
If Jesus comes back today, God be praised.
If he comes back tomorrow, God be praised.
If he comes back in a thousand years, God be praised.
And we want to have that kind of readiness.
God be praised.
Now, the thing that I, one of the things that assaults that readiness is a Christian obsession
with the end times.
And I want to think about that because my own past, many of you know that I for a long
time was in the evangelical church, was particularly interested in the dispensational theology,
the idea that the history of world events was unfolding as God had promised in the prophetic
books.
When I was 19, I dropped out of college and was backpacking around Israel to see biblical
prophecy unfolding before my 19. I was ready for this thing. I remember, I remember one
time I was driving in Albuquerque and listening to Christian radio and the radio station went
silent and I thought, I’ve missed the rapture. I mean looking at this at some point I was
convinced that the king of Spain was the one world ruler who was going to be the Antichrist.
So just this kind of thing.
And one, the winter in particular,
I remember I was convinced by my uncle,
he had this article or text or something
that said that, I think it was 1998,
that Jesus will return, given me the, in 1998.
And I remember I was staying with my grandparents,
my family was, Christmas, and they had one of those
sort of Swedish calendars on the wall, you know,
where it said the month and thus for that day and the year and
and so I was sliding down the days I would wake up in
December 24, December 25, December 26 and I was looking there
there’s only you know five more days left in the history the world
25, 4, 3, 2, 1 day left this is
December 31st and I was I was convinced absolutely convinced that this was the last
world that Jesus would come back it was I think 10 o’clock when we went to bed and I was like
well there’s just two more hours
And then I woke up the next morning and I thought, that was hard.
That moment, I want to try to grab that moment, but I want you to know that when I woke up
that morning and realized that the Lord had not returned, I thought, well maybe it’s still
December 31st somewhere in the world, like Jesus isn’t coming back on Central Standard
Time or something like that.
But that maybe Jesus, did you see, so there’s something that happens, there’s a lot of wrong
things in reading the Bible on one hand and the newspaper on the other. There’s a lot
of wrong things about that approach. The main wrong thing is you end up unchecking things
that God has checked. You end up undoing promises that God has kept. You say, well, no, this
Bible promise hasn’t been kept by Jesus, or this Bible promise the Lord hasn’t yet met.
It’s already a dangerous thing to uncheck the things that the Lord has checked. And He’s
checked off, this is the point, he’s checked off everything. And it’s a day
there’s only one thing left, come in glory, raise the dead, divide the sheep and the
goats, there’s the new heaven and the new earth. The last day is the only thing
left on the Lord’s checklist. There are no more prophecies to bring about to be
fulfilled, but if we if we start looking at the world as if as if God hasn’t kept
all of his pieces, and if he is keeping them in history, then something dangerous
happens not only in the way we look at the world, but in the way we look at
promises. But here’s the result. Once you are convinced that there is a promise that God has
made, and that promise is not kept, this causes a deep spiritual conflict. I know that many of you
have experienced this many times in your own lives. I’ve been able to walk through a few of these with
a number of you. I can count these times in my own life as well, where I thought that God had
given me a promise, and that promise wasn’t kept, and I had to be either angry with God
if God even existed.
And something happens spiritually when we get so worked up into seeing the events of
the world as fulfillment of biblical prophecies, and then the work doesn’t come back.
It becomes very dangerous.
so what do we do to make sure that we spend a little bit of time in 1st
Thessalonians 4 here what do we think of the text because this is one of the main
texts you think just that’s used to argue the doctrine of the rapture the idea
that seven years before the great returns the Lord will come back and
remove his Christians secretly from the world and then go back to dealing with
the Christ Israel remember those left-behind books and TV shows that’s
what that was all about that rapture and this text is people as a defense of that
And I want us to see that that’s not the thing that Paul is teaching in the text.
Paul had been to the Thessalonians, he was on his second missionary journey, he’d gone
to Philippi, over to Thessalonica, and he had preached to them, and then he had to leave
pretty soon, although he was there long enough to tell them that Jesus was dying and then
turning in glory to judge the living and the dead, to raise the dead.
But then a question just was raised, well what about the living?
What happens to the living when Jesus returns?
He’s going to rise again now.
We confess that he’ll raise the dead, but what if Jesus were to come back today?
The dead will be raised, but what happens to us?
You can imagine that Thessalonians were wondering about that and thought, well, maybe they’ll
miss the resurrection altogether, or maybe the Lord will kill us and then raise us from
the dead.
Maybe that is what will happen.
They didn’t mention all that.
And so, Paul writes to comfort them.
You want to pick it up in Romans 16 at the very bottom of the page of the bulletin?
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with a voice of a sick
archangel, with the sound of the trumpet of God, nothing secret here, and the dead in
Christ will rise first, the voice of an archangel.
We who are alive, who are left, we will be caught up together with them in the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air, then, and so we will always be with the Lord.
so encourage one another with these words. In other words, Paul is telling us
that even if we’re alive, when the Lord returns in glory, we will not miss the
resurrection. He will change us, transform our lowly bodies to be like unto His
glory, so that we can behold Him face-to-face and partake of the new
life that’s coming in the resurrection. That’s what gloriousness is. And just
like all of the other times in the Scriptures where the Lord talks about
the second coming, the promise not to go to all of the crazy world events that are happening,
but to fix our eyes on Jesus.
He is coming for us, and that’s the good news.
Now to go back to that moment of the one who’s January 1st, 1999, when I had to move the calendar
to the day that I thought would never exist.
The danger when I’m reading world history with the Bible and all these unchecked promises
is that while on the one hand we might be very excited for the Lord to return in glory
now, which is good and we should be, on the other hand we should be ready for Jesus to
come today, hopefully before the end of the sermon.
I mean really, we have this expectation to come before the end of the sermon that He’s
on the way to rescue us.
We have this eagerness to see Him in glory and to see the Lord Jesus gathered up together with Him and all the saints.
It’s good, but the danger is when you read the history of the world events as fulfillment of prophecy is that we’re not ready to wait.
We’re not ready to hold on.
We’re not ready if He doesn’t come back.
And that is the problem with the five foolish virgins.
If the bridegroom turns out to come at sunset, it would have been fine.
Their lamps would have been burning, the room would have been ready, the flowers were all
in the hair, they had their nice robes, they were all, all ten virgins were ready at that
moment.
Their hair, five foolish ones were not ready to wait.
And this is one of the things that we have to grab a hold of.
But the gift that we’ve inherited as Lutherans, and I want to maybe highlight it for us this
morning, is that we are very interested in right now, in the
particular moment that we’re living in, and the particular people very around us
in this particular time, but we are also interested in what happened before, and
what will happen. We’re not just interested in the salvation of this
generation, but the next, and the next, and the next. One of the marks of American
Christianity is that this obsession with what is right now next and there’s
no thought of what’s coming in the future because there is even no
future. I mean Jesus is back if not this week then next and so there’s nothing to
think of and that is the foolishness that Jesus is calling out in the prayer
coming back. There were after all ten virgins, ten lamps, ten wearables, ten
little things full of oil. This is what the lamp would look like. You know
you got oil in there but it only burns for a couple of hours and then it’s
done they all had a little bit of oil ready they all a little over that but
they but the but the five foolish they were not ready for they were not ready
to wait they were not ready were ready is their children in the faith and their
grandchildren and their great-great-great grandchildren they were
not ready for the long ready to rate Christian life of suffering and and of
praying and of waiting and of looking to the Lord and of all of the studying the
Scriptures and abiding in Him, they were, the five foolish were like the seeds that
were thrown in the rock.
In the parable, the sower threw some of the seeds and some went on the path and some went
in the good soil, but some went in the rocks and it grew up very quickly.
It looked like the weeds and spiritual of all.
If you were to just walk by a couple of weeks after the seed was thrown, you’d say, oh,
the Moses has thrown all the seeds in the rocks, look at how tall it’s grown.
But then the long summer came and the sun came and it was beating it down and it all withered because it didn’t have those roots, it wasn’t ready for endurance.
I mourn, Carrie and I mourn because so many of our friends from those old Evangelical days who were so excited about the Lord and His Word and His return in glory are now not even Christians.
They’ve wandered from the faith or lost it all together, like the five foolish virgins
not ready to wait.
So the Lord Jesus is giving us this since they were an old task today.
This two-fold readiness.
It seems like it’s very different, right?
to the excitement of his immediate return so the preparedness to wait a
long time for the day and glory to end all we’re ready to wait only when we
have oil appear a key difference between the wise and the foolish virgins is that
the wise have a flask of oil.”
So we have to say, what does that mean?
What does it mean to be ready?
This oil is faith worked in the Christian heart by the Word and the Spirit.
When you have the Word of God pressing into your heart His law, His command, His expectations,
And when you have the Holy Spirit pressing into your heart the promise of forgiveness,
the promise of the righteousness of Christ, the hope of the life to come,
then you are, in fact, ready.
When you know that Jesus, returning in glory, is returning not to judge you,
but Jesus commune and to deliver you to bring you into the eternal wedding
feast a well I am that has no end then you are ready so dear Saints we stood
the less in the wisdom that the Lord Jesus gives us in his promises and in
his warning we rejoin in the oil that he pours into our flasks in the divine
service and in the meal, the Holy Sanctuary, the altar that we are by the Holy Spirit
made ready for Jesus to come back and ready to wait. May God continue to
grant to us that wisdom in the name of Jesus, amen. The peace of God which
surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ
our Lord.
Amen.
Amen.
