Preparing for the Bridegroom

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Transcript:

I have this recurring dream, or you might even call it a recurring nightmare, and every time I have it, it starts here at church. I show up here at church, and it’s still Trinity. It’s the same church, but we have a different building.

You know how that happens in your dreams sometimes? You see something different, and you know it’s the same, but it looks different. Anyway, we’re in a much bigger building, and church is about to start, and there are hundreds of people out in the crowd.

You might say, well, why is that a nightmare? It’s a nightmare because I realize I’m backstage, and I realize I’m in my pajamas still. And I also haven’t prepared a message of any sort.

Somehow I forgot that I was going to be preaching Sunday. And to make it even worse, to make it even worse, I am desperate to find a restroom. And we don’t have any.

We have this big fancy new building and there are no restrooms. And so it’s just a very stressful experience. And I find myself unprepared in every way. As a matter of fact, just thinking about telling this story, I put on extra clothes this morning, as you can see, Just to make sure I’m prepared.

Oh, it’s so stressful. I mean, I still occasionally have dreams about showing up in my senior English class in high school without having done my homework. That’s not even as stressful as this is.

Just this dream of showing up unprepared. It’s awful. And I know that those kinds of dreams are common to a lot of people.

Okay, some of you have probably had those dreams. Maybe you don’t show up to church in your jammies, but you show up at work unprepared for something. You’re back in school showing up unprepared for something. I know a lot of people have that dream where they show up for something and they have no clothes on at all, so I’m glad at least I have my pajamas on when I show up at church.

But it speaks to something deep within us that we don’t like to feel unprepared, at least about certain things. I mean, there’s some things we’ll fly by the seat of our pants, but there are things in our lives that we don’t want to be unprepared for because they matter to us. Maybe it’s your job.

Maybe it’s school. Maybe it’s something you’ve got to do that you’re afraid you’re going to be embarrassed if you’re not prepared for. But there are things in our world, there are things in our lives that we don’t want to show up unprepared for.

And it’s a source of a lot of anxiety for us, the thought that we’re going to be unprepared for it. causes us a lot of stress. But the crazy thing is, these things, as important as they might seem in the moment, are little in contrast to eternity.

And we stress about these things that we need to prepare for on a regular basis that a year from now we will have forgotten all about, and yet all too often we’ll neglect to prepare for the things that matter most, the things that matter most, the things that are going to last the longest. When it comes to the things that matter the most and are going to matter for the longest time, we’re willing to put off our preparation and we’re willing to risk being unprepared. Maybe it’s just because we don’t see it right in front of our faces. We don’t see the deadline barreling toward us.

But for whatever reason, we’re willing to stress over these things that matter for just a little bit and then they’re gone and we leave ourselves unprepared for the things that matter most and matter the longest. And Jesus, when it comes to one of these things, Jesus warned us not to put off dealing with him. He warned us not to put off dealing with him on matters of eternity, lest we find ourselves unprepared when it gets there. This morning, I want us to look at a story from Matthew chapter 25.

Matthew chapter 25. It’s a story that Jesus told about being unprepared when he shows up. Matthew chapter 25.

I think this is a fascinating story, and I shared in the email that got sent out to the congregation on Thursday that this is a story that’s puzzled me for a lot of years until I did some more digging in it on purpose, and I’ll explain why it was so puzzling to me in just a little bit. But it’s a fascinating story. Matthew It says, The foolish ones said to the wise ones, Give us some of your oil because our lamps are going out.

And the wise ones answered, No, there won’t be enough for us and for you. Go instead to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves. And when they had gone to buy some, the groom arrived.

And those who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet, and the door was shut. Later, the rest of the virgins also came and said, Master, Master, open up for us. He replied, Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.

Therefore, be alert because you don’t know either the day or the hour. So Jesus told this story to illustrate something important to his disciples. Now, we need to understand the background of the story to really know what he’s talking about here.

He tells this story of the ten virgins, just to summarize, ten virgins. Five of them were wise, five of them were foolish. To understand what he’s talking about in this story, we look at the broader context of what he’s doing in chapter 24 and chapter 25 of the book of Matthew, he’s talking about the coming judgment.

He’s talking about God’s judgment of mankind, which is coming. Yes, God has delayed it out of his mercy to give us an opportunity to repent, but make no mistake, the judgment of God is coming. One day there will be a time when we’ll all be raised, and God will judge the living and the dead through Jesus Christ. And so Jesus is preaching to his disciples and others who are listening about this concept of the judgment, and he comes to what we know as the beginning of chapter 25, and he begins to tell this story.

So this was an illustration that Jesus used to help them understand the truth about the judgment. And as an illustration, he uses this story of a first-century Jewish wedding celebration. and this looks very we need to understand that because it looks so much different from anything we do in our ceremony in in our culture in our ceremonies uh I know at at mine and charla’s wedding instead of her being walked down the aisle she came there’s a side entrance to the auditorium and she stood there and waited and after I had walked in with the wedding party I actually went down and got her because we liked the the stories that jesus told about the bridegroom coming to get bride.

So I walked down and got her, and then we walked up the aisle together. And people said, that’s so original. It’s really not original. We stole it from Jesus. You know, it was thousands of years old.

But we don’t see stuff like that anymore. That’s not what we do. So it’s a little hard to, we have to put ourselves into their first century mindset to understand what he’s talking about here.

These ten virgins were what we would call bridesmaids. That’s probably the best correlation to something we have. They’re people who were assisting in the ceremony.

And often these ceremonies, this part of the ceremony would take place at night. The ceremony would take place at night, and they would have to wait for the groom. The groom would lead a procession.

And by the way, for years I heard pastors preaching about the bridegroom. I had no idea what that is. If you don’t, the bridegroom is the same thing as the I don’t know why they call it the bride and the bridegroom.

I guess I don’t know why we don’t call the bride the groom bride then. I don’t know. But the bridegroom is just the groom.

So the groom would lead this procession through the community, and they would go to get the bride. And the procession would continue on after he had led this kind of parade through the darkened streets of their village to get his bride. The parade would continue on to the place where they would get married and where they would have the wedding feast. And everyone in the procession, everyone who was taking part of this, everybody who was part of the wedding party, would have to carry their own lamp of some sort, either a torch or an oil lamp.

They’d have to carry something to light their way because it was dark. They didn’t have street lights. And some of the things I read this week about this practice said if you showed up without a torch or a lamp of some sort, they considered you were just a wedding crasher.

If you were part of this, you would have come prepared. So you weren’t actually part of this. You’re just trying to sneak in for the food or to gawk at things.

But you weren’t part of the group if you didn’t come prepared with a torch. Now, what complicates things for them is they didn’t always know exactly what time the groom would come. First of all, they didn’t have clocks and watches the way we do now.

They had some timekeeping devices, but usually I think those were reserved for the wealthy. So you couldn’t say, oh, I’ll be there exactly at 8. 30.

Nobody knows exactly when 8. 30 is. On top of that, we all know that, or hopefully we know, that our society is kind of weird in our adherence, our strict adherence to a schedule.

We expect things to begin and end at a certain time. We start church at 10. 30, and we end church at 11.

30, And that’s just the way it’s been since Moses brought those rules down in stone tablets from Mount Sinai, right? That’s not the way the rest of the world works. That’s not the way the, well, as a matter of fact, that’s not, well, that’s not the way the rest of the world works.

And so they had to wait. They didn’t know exactly when the groom was coming. So they had to wait for him.

They had to be prepared. And in their waiting, they were expected to take this seriously. Being part of somebody’s wedding was a big deal. I mean, it still is.

It’s an honor to be invited to be part of somebody’s wedding. And so they were expected to take that honor seriously. They were expected to be there when the groom arrived, ready to go in this procession.

And they were expected to be prepared for the wait. Because it’s like, what else do you have to do that’s more important than waiting on the groom? This should be your priority at this point, and you’re going to have to wait, and that’s just part of it.

So they were expected to be prepared not only for him to show up, but they were also expected to be prepared to wait for him to show up. This was all they had to do that day, so they would be ready when it began. And then when the groom would show up, they would go off with their lit lamps, and they would follow the procession off to where the wedding would take place.

Now, in this particular story that Jesus told, it’s in the context of that kind of event that gives you some understanding of what they were supposed to do. Part of the reason I always misunderstood this story is I was trying to figure out why this man was marrying 10 women and all at the same time. And this just seems like a recipe for disaster.

Later on, I figured out that wasn’t this week, but later on, I figured out, oh, wait, they’re the bridesmaids. Okay. So reading that, I’ve read the story since I was a child and I’ve always struggled to understand it for a variety of reasons.

Those women were the bridesmaids. So this particular group, they went out, verse one tells us, they went out to where they were supposed to meet the groom and they’d all gone and gotten ready together. And then they went out to wherever they were supposed to meet him.

I don’t know if they were supposed to meet him at a particular corner of the streets, or if they were supposed to meet him at somebody’s house. It doesn’t really tell us. They just went out to where they were supposed to meet him.

What we see in verses 2 and 3, 2, 3, and 4, is that some of the bridesmaids took it seriously and came prepared, and some of them didn’t. Some of them didn’t take it seriously. Because Jesus tells us there were five foolish and five wise.

The foolish ones took their lamps without extra oil, but the wise ones took oil in their flasks with their lamps. So the ones who were wise filled their lamps with oil and also carried extra oil with them. They were prepared to wait for the bridegroom.

They took this seriously. The foolish ones seemed to have just taken what was in their lamps, and the oil didn’t last all that long. I’ve read different estimates on it this week, and some people said if they took a torch, you know, they might have to add more oil to it every 15 minutes or so.

They might have to re-dip the rags, re-oil the rags to make it continue to burn. So you had to come prepared, unless you just expected, oh, the bridegroom’s going to be here on our timetable. We’re not going to wait that long, and so we’re just taking the oil that’s with us.

They didn’t bring extra. So they didn’t take it seriously, and they didn’t come prepared, five of them. And we see in verse 5 that the groom was delayed for a little bit.

That happens, not only because of that culture where there wasn’t a strict adherence to the clock, but also just because things go wrong in a wedding. Anytime you’re putting together a big event, something’s going to go wrong, right? Nobody else ever has stuff go wrong.

That’s just me. All right. Just making sure y’all are awake.

Something’s always going to go wrong. There’s always going to be some last minute thing. Even something as informal as our Wednesday night services, I’m usually at 530.

Oh, great. The printer didn’t finish spitting out all the prayer lists. You know, something’s going to go wrong and you’re going to have to deal with it.

So at this wedding, the groom was delayed for some reason, we know, and he was delayed evidently for a little bit. It’s the middle of the night. They got sleepy, okay, and they all began to rest. The wise bridesmaids, though, this was reasonable for them to take some time to rest. It’s the middle of the night or getting close to the middle of the night.

They took some time to rest. The bridesmaids, The wise ones were well prepared, and so they rested. Now, I want to be clear. I don’t believe this is a picture of idleness.

I’ve heard some preachers preach about how, you know, you can’t rest while you’re waiting for Jesus to come. Well, there’s some truth in that. We don’t want to become idle while we’re waiting for Jesus to come back.

But that’s not what this is about, all right? Because if it was, he wouldn’t have had the wise bridesmaids fall asleep too. Now, he’s just telling the story the way it would really happen, all right?

You’re waiting up in the middle of the night. You don’t know when he’s getting here. The sandman starts calling your name.

You’re probably going to doze off. All right. Even the wise ones dozed off.

Now, the foolish bridesmaids should have realized at this point that he’s being delayed. We don’t have enough oil. We don’t have enough oil to last us as long as we’re going to need it, because this isn’t going to go as quickly as we thought.

They should have used this time to go out and get some oil during his delay. They should have gone out and gotten more. Really, they should have done it sooner.

They should have come prepared with it to begin with. But this was their last chance. We’ve got some time here while we’re waiting for the groom.

Now would be a good time. Go out and get the oil that you should have gotten to begin with. If you’re taking it seriously, go prepare now.

You know there’s going to be a delay. Go prepare so that you don’t come up short when he returns. But they didn’t.

The five foolish bridesmaids did not. They lived up to their name, and they did not use their time wisely. They went to sleep too, and they squandered their last chance.

Now we see in verses 6 and 7 that finally the groom showed up. He approached, it says, in the middle of the night. He came at a time when they least expected him to come.

And they woke up. They heard the cry that he was coming. And they woke up and they got themselves ready.

They were already ready, but you know you have to get up and straighten everything out and make sure your hair’s fine and all that. And they trimmed their lamps where you’ll cut the extra part of the wick off of a candle so it’ll continue to burn right. They did all that.

They made sure he’s coming. They know he’s coming. He’s just around the corner.

And so they’re ready to go. Half of them anyway. Because it was then that the foolish bridesmaids finally realized their problem.

They finally realized their problem. Their lamps were about to burn out. I don’t know why it took them until then to realize, but their lamps were about to burn out.

And all of this is because they had failed to take the groom seriously enough to bring the oil that they needed. They had failed to take him seriously enough to prepare for his coming, to prepare to wait for him. And so now they found themselves unready with these dying lamps.

What do we do? We should have done something sooner. We’ve had multiple opportunities.

But now what do we do? What they did was verses 8 and 9 tell us they begged for some oil. They begged for some oil from the wise bridesmaids.

But the wise bridesmaids, again, lived up to their name, and they wisely refused to give any oil. Now, that wasn’t because they were being mean and saying, ha ha, slackers, we’re going to enjoy watching you left out in the cold. No, they realized, wait a minute, this is going to take a lot of oil.

And if we give you half of ours, if we give enough to light your lamps with, we’re not going to have enough to keep our lamps lit, and nobody is going to be adequately prepared to go with the groom. So they refused. The wise bridesmaids told the foolish ones, go quickly and try to buy some.

Maybe there’s time. Go see if you can buy some. We know he’s just around the corner.

You’re going to have to hurry. But maybe you can buy some. but we see in verse 10 it was too late it was too late while they were gone they they hurried off into the night to try to buy oil to keep their lamps going but while they were gone the groom arrived with his procession and the wise bridesmaids fell in line with the procession the way they were supposed to and by the time the foolish bridesmaids returned they found that the wise bridesmaids weren’t where they left them.

That meeting place was empty. They went along the procession route, and they found that the whole wedding party was already inside the hall, enjoying the wedding feast, and the doors were locked. They’d showed up late.

So the doors were locked tight. They did what a lot of us would do. When there’s a feast, they knocked, and they pounded, and they pled at the door in verse 11, but the groom wouldn’t open the doors.

As a matter of fact, he told them in verse 12, truly I tell you, I don’t know you. I don’t know you. He said, I don’t know you, you’re strangers.

And that meant they couldn’t be part of the celebration. They were basically wedding crashers at that point. You know, if you cared about this that much, you would have been prepared.

If you cared about me that much, you would have been prepared. You’ve had all this time to prepare and you didn’t because you really didn’t care. And so they were locked out from the celebration.

So we need to understand what this story means. Again, I told you, I’ve struggled with this for a long time, and I think the reason why I struggled with this for so long with this story is because I tried to over-interpret every single detail. You know, I’ve heard people do this with some of Jesus’ parables, okay?

They would tell this story, and they would say, well, these five bridesmaids represent this, and these five bridesmaids represent this, and the groom represents this, and the lamp represents this, and the oil represents this, and the sleeping represents this, and the hall that they’re in represents this, and the locked door represents this, and the lock on the door represents this. I mean, you can quickly get off in the weeds, right? I’ve heard people talk about the parable of the lost coin.

Well, the woman represents this, the coin represents this, okay, I’m with you so far. Well, the broom represents this, the dirt she swept out of the house represents this, the floor she swept, and we’re taking it to an extreme that I don’t think Jesus ever intended. The best way to understand the parables of Jesus, I’ve learned this in the last little bit, the best way to understand the parables of Jesus is to look at the context, find the main point, and focus in on that.

If you take this kind of shotgun approach, where you focus in on every detail of the story, it distracts from the main point. It’s possible that Jesus told a story with a main point, and some of the elements in the story were just elements to move the story along. That’s why I told you, and I’ve heard preachers say, that this is about their sleeping and their idleness.

I think we’re over-analyzing, over-interpreting the story if the wise bridesmaids were sleeping too. If it were a foolish thing to do, the wise bridesmaids wouldn’t have done it. It’s just something to move the story along.

All right, we can easily do this. This story is not about the symbolism of the oil or the symbolism of the lamps. I’ve heard people make good points on both of those, but it’s not really about the symbolism of those things or the symbolism of the sleeping or the symbolism of any of the other little details.

Jesus was painting a big picture here, all right? He was making a point that some of the people who wanted to be in the wedding party cared so little for the groom that they were unprepared for his coming and they could not enter into the wedding feast. That’s the point of the story. And like I said, in years past, I’ve gotten hung up on the lamp and the oil.

What does it mean that he said five and five? Is this a percentages thing? and he’s telling us, no, it’s about some people that weren’t prepared and didn’t get to go into the wedding feast. He’s preaching about judgment and stops in the middle to tell a story saying some people will be unprepared and will not get into the kingdom.

That’s the point of his story. And what we see is there were some people who wanted into the feast but didn’t care enough about the groom to prepare themselves. That’s a big problem.

care more about the feast, care more about the celebration, to care more about getting into the party than to care about the groom that the party’s being thrown for. Now we see in verse 1 that the story illustrates an aspect of the kingdom of heaven. He says the kingdom of heaven is like this.

At that time, the kingdom of heaven will be like this. When he says at that time, remember, he’s talking about, he has been preaching about judgment. So he says at the time of God’s judgment, the kingdom of heaven, Kingdom of heaven is going to be like this story.

There’s going to be a time of judgment, and there are going to be some who won’t enter the wedding feast because they’re not prepared to meet the groom. As a matter of fact, any of those who are not prepared to meet the groom will not get to be in the wedding feast. And the point of all of this, that’s the point of the story, but the point of application for us, what we need to know today as people who are learning this story 2,000 years later, what Jesus was saying that applies to us today is that we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless we have prepared ourselves for the king. This morning, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless you are prepared for the king when he comes.

Now, there’ll be a day when Jesus comes again to earth and comes to all of us. There’ll also be a day, if we don’t live to see that one, there’ll be a day when he comes for each of us. And we have to be prepared for his coming.

If we’re not prepared for the king when he shows up, we don’t get to enter the kingdom. We don’t want to be like those five bridesmaids, those five virgins who cared more about the wedding celebration, the wedding feast, than they did about the one who was getting married. We don’t want to be like those five bridesmaids who cared so little about the groom that they showed up unprepared, that they never took it seriously, that they never took him seriously enough to take the time to prepare.

What they did was they thought, oh, there’s plenty of time. It doesn’t matter if we’re prepared or not, there’s plenty of time we can deal with it later. We can deal with it later.

We can deal with it later. Even at the last moment when they knew he was on his way, they thought there’s still time to deal with it. And they put it off and they put it off and they put it off until it was too late.

Well, if that’s how the kingdom of heaven is, we don’t want to put off preparing for the king. We don’t want to wait until we know he’s on his way today. We don’t want to wait until trumpets sound and people are shouting, here he comes.

We don’t want to wait until that happens. Thinking there’s always more time. I can put it off.

I can put it off because what we’ll do is we’ll put it off until it’s too late. And then there’ll come a day where we think, well, we’re finally prepared. But we pound on the door and we knock and we beg to be let in.

And he says, I never knew you. We never had that relationship. I offered to bring you into the celebration.

I offered to bring you into the kingdom, just like the groom offered to let them be in the in the wedding procession and be in the wedding feast. I offered to bring you into those things. I offered to bring you with me, but you never cared enough about me to prepare yourself. The last thing we want to do is be left knocking and pounding on the door and pleading and only to hear the Lord say, you can’t come in, I never knew you.

So how do we prepare? How do we prepare? We need to know this because I hear people from time to time say, when I talk to them about Jesus Christ, well, I’ll put it off later.

I need to get my life cleaned up a little bit, or I’m not done having fun, or any number of reasons. Why they say, I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.

Let me tell you, I heard this almost every Sunday of my childhood growing up, and I don’t tell you it as a scare tactic. I tell you this because I believe it’s what God’s Word teaches. You ready for this?

God promised eternal life to all those who would put their trust in Jesus Christ, but He never promised any of us that we would see tomorrow. I don’t tell you that to scare you, but we know that to be true. Julie, you were just talking Wednesday about looking at the obituaries in the local paper and how so many of the people were younger than you.

I bet a lot of them, not just them, but I bet a lot of people in that obituary section think, I’ve got more time. It’s not my time yet. Folks, none of us know.

None of us know when the King is coming, and none of us know when the King is coming for us. We better not be unprepared. So how do we prepare?

We prepare by dealing with Him and what He’s done for us and the offer that He presents us. Here’s the offer that the King, that King Jesus has made to us. He has offered to forgive our sins and He’s offered to give us eternal life with Him in the kingdom.

Now the reason He has to offer that, the reason why it matters so much that He’s offered that, is because we can’t get there on our own. We’ve all sinned. We’ve all disobeyed God.

We all do it on a daily basis. even the people that think oh I’m so good I’m so righteous no you’re not not by God’s standards even the people that we look at and we think it’s hard to imagine them even sinning I mean they’re practically up here according to God’s word they’re sinners as well God’s standard is absolute sinless perfection and not one of us lives up to that we’ve all sinned against him we’ve all rebelled against him we’ve all disobeyed him and that separates us from him and leaves us outside the doors to the kingdom. And there’s no amount of good that you or I could ever do that would undo the wrong that we’ve done.

But I’ve done a lot of good things. Don’t I get extra credit? I love giving the example of Ralph back there as a judge.

If I were to stand before Ralph and he said, what do you have to say for yourself for killing that lady? Well, your honor, look at all the other people I didn’t kill. Don’t I get credit for that?

That’s not how it works. That would be crazy, right? So when we stand before God, why would we expect to say, God, I know I violated your law, but look at all the ones I didn’t violate.

We don’t get extra credit for doing what we’re supposed to do. You see, it doesn’t undo doing what we’re supposed to in all these other areas. It doesn’t undo the wrong that we’ve done.

So we can never erase our sin. We can never pay that debt. We can never be good enough to get back to 100% sinless perfection.

That sin has to be punished. It has to with, and you and I could spend eternity separated from God outside the kingdom. Or there again, there’s the offer that the king has made.

See, Jesus came to earth and he took responsibility for our sins. He never committed a sin of his own because he’s God in human flesh. He’s God the Son.

But he took responsibility for our sins and he was nailed to the cross for our sins where he shed his blood and gave his life to pay for those sins in full. He died to pay for those sins in full and take all the punishment. And now, not by being good, not by giving money, not by going to church, not by doing religious things, but simply by trusting in Jesus, by receiving by faith this offer that He places before us, our sins can be forgiven and we can have eternal life with Him in heaven.

This morning, all you’ve got to do is realize that you’ve sinned against God. Believe there’s no way for you to fix it. There’s nothing you can do to keep yourself out of hell.

Instead, believe that Jesus Christ did everything that was necessary and put your full trust in Him, asking God to forgive you because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross. That’s how we deal with Him. That’s how we prepare ourselves, by taking hold of the offer of forgiveness that He’s put before us.

And folks, we want to be like the wise bridesmaids, the five wise ones, and prepare now while there’s an opportunity. We don’t put it off. If you’re putting it off still, if you know you need to trust Christ and you’re putting it off still, let me encourage you, don’t put it off.

Don’t put it off any longer, not one day longer, because we don’t know when the King will come or when H