The great festival of Pentecost is upon us. At Pentecost the
Holy Spirit rushed upon the fledgling Christian Church so that they were
compelled to preach. What they had to preach is what you heard from the book of
Acts. The end of the ages has come upon us. Sons and daughters prophesy. Young
men will see visions. Old men will dream dreams. There will be signs in the
heavens and signs on the earth, blood and fire and a rising cloud of smoke.
The prophet Joel had said these things hundreds of years
before Pentecost came. The apostle Peter told the crowd that this is what was
taking place before their eyes with the tongues of flame, and the ability to
speak so that others who spoke different languages could understand them. The
great and glorious day of the Lord has come. This was the end of the world.
Now since this took place about 2,000 years ago, I don’t
think that folks can help but wonder whether Peter and the apostles were
mistaken. Time keeps ticking away. The sun rises and the sun sets. Things
continue to go on like they have from the beginning of the world. Where is this
end that Christians speak of?
The end times are larger than what we might imagine. The end
times are not just those last few hours or days of this old world. The end
times began with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The Scriptures speak
of him as the first fruit of them who sleep. The resurrection of Jesus is the
beginning of the harvest. More resurrections from the dead are coming. The time
is not yet quite right for that bumper crop to be gathered in. There are still
a certain number of people whom God has known and chosen for salvation from
before the world was made. These people still must be called by the Gospel,
enlightened by the Holy Spirit’s gifts, sanctified and kept together with Jesus
in the one true faith.
When those last few who are to be saved are brought to
faith, then the end will come. Christ will come on the clouds. The dead will be
raised. Every individual will be judged by his or her Maker. Those who have lived
evilly will go to hell. Those who have believed in Jesus are forgiven, and they
are given Jesus’s righteousness as a gift. Therefore, since they are holy and
fit, they shall live together with Almighty God in their resurrected and
purified bodies.
What I have just told you is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You
don’t hear it too much these days because people are ashamed of Jesus and his
words. This is true even within the Christian Church. This is true even within
our own church body. Instead some other, more socially acceptable,
quote-unquote “Gospel” is invented. Our flesh has a devil of a time believing
that there is any such thing as an end times—much less that we are already
living in it.
Therefore this Gospel meets resistance—to say the least! The
apostle Paul was laughed at in Athens when he spoke to them about the coming
resurrection from the dead. You heard how the apostle Peter, at Pentecost,
addressed those people who saw something of what was taking place at Pentecost
and scoffed, saying that they were all drunk. The raised eyebrows of
unbelievers is nothing new.
But what we cannot do is alter or tailor or edit the words
that we as Christians have been given. Cutting out whatever is offensive can
seem rather harmless. In fact, it can seem like it would be helpful. If we tone
it down a bit on those things that make us seem like we’re crazy, then we’ll be
able to rope more people in. Our church will grow. But what has actually
happened is that a new religion has thereby been invented.
There’s nothing so common as people inventing religions for
themselves. Everybody has a religion. Everybody has beliefs about what will or
will not happen to them when they die. The invention of new religions happened
already in the Garden of Eden when the serpent invited Eve to believe in
something that she found more reasonable and palatable than what God had
actually said. So it goes now and so it will be until the lying devil is locked
away forever in hell at the end of time.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ has come to put an end to all
other religions. That is to say, the Gospel has come as the truth to do away
with the lie. This is what has always enraged people who want to hold on to
lies. People want to be left alone with whatever it is that they might believe.
They want to be validated in whatever hopes they harbor about the life of the
world to come. In our times a common hope is that there is no such thing has
heaven or hell. As supposed products of evolution we simply melt back into the
soil and are gone forever. But this too is a lie. This too is a false hope. For
we are not the product of random chance. All people are creatures who are
fearfully and wonderfully made. As creatures we are responsible to our Creator
for the life that we have lived.
The sophisticated world likes to believe that they have
grown up and done away with religion. But are they so sophisticated? This
belief, that we simply go away when we die—isn’t this the very thing that the
serpent said to Eve? Adam and Eve originally knew God’s truth. They knew that
God would punish them if they lived evilly. But what did the serpent say? “You
won’t surely die.” “You already know what you want to do. Just do it.
You’ll be fine. God won’t care. He probably doesn’t even exist!”
And the funny thing
is that when Adam and Eve ate, they didn’t die right away. They probably
thought that the serpent was right in some sense. But they also knew something
wasn’t quite right. They discovered their nakedness and didn’t like it. They
covered it over. Darkness descended upon them. But it wasn’t until they heard
God coming through the garden that they knew for certain that they had been
tricked.
So it is for so many people today. People are told over and
over again that there is no such thing as God. Or, if they are allowed to
believe that there is a God, then surely God must be some power that has
nothing to do with a person’s daily life. Surely God couldn’t care about one’s
daily life—the things that one has done and left undone. Realize that the
people who espouse these beliefs and teach them are the ones who are in our
nation’s highest positions of power and our greatest institutions of learning.
They are held to be the great teachers of our society. But they are not
sophisticated at all. All they are doing is holding to the lie that Adam and
Eve first held to, before God came and preached the Gospel to them.
And just as Adam and Eve knew that something wasn’t quite
right, so I think this is true for people today too. We’re supposed to believe
that we are so advanced and sophisticated and have discovered everything that
there is to know. We’ve built our tower of Babel into the heavens. We’ve done
such outstanding things with our technology that our inventions would have
seemed magical to people who lived in other times. But with all of this being
said, I don’t know if there has ever been such a sad people as our people. Our
people are so sad that they don’t even want to have children. They think that
life is too sad to bring children into it. Just like Adam and Eve, people know
that there is something wrong.
And they are right about that. The thing that is wrong with
us couldn’t be more fundamental. We creatures have estranged ourselves by our
sins from our Creator. We judge ourselves and we don’t like what we see. We try
to cover our nakedness. We go and hide in the bushes rather than face our
Creator, because we’d rather not be further exposed, further judged. Then we
tell ourselves that everything’s just hunky dory. What kind of a life is this?
But people put up with it and they try to make the best of it, because they don’t think that there is any
alternative.
Pentecost: this is what declares to us the alternative. The
end of the ages has come upon us. The fullness of God’s revelation is before
us, and what does God reveal in that revelation? He reveals that although you
deserve nothing but God’s punishment both in this life as well as in the next,
he has sent his only begotten Son to suffer and to be punished in your place.
By the atoning sacrifice that Jesus has made on the cross you have been
reconciled with your Creator.
It does not matter what sins you have committed in the past.
You should not fear the sins that you will unfortunately commit in the future.
Jesus is more powerful than your sins. He has dealt with them. Between you and God peace has been made. Not
a fake peace—not a peace where God just pretends that he doesn’t see whatever
you have done. The Father is fully satisfied with the Son and the atonement he
has made. Therefore, God is fully satisfied with you who have been baptized
into him and who believe in him.
Pentecost changed the lives of the apostles and all those
who became Christians through their preaching. These folks were no longer
believing that they could make their own way. They quit believing in all towers
of babel whether they be ancient or modern. They were living a new life in
fellowship with their Creator. They no longer looked forward to being rich with
earthly treasures. They were already rich with the precious blood of Jesus.
They were no longer looking to make a name for themselves. They were looking to
glorify the name of Jesus, which saves all who call upon it. Their perspectives
were widened so that they no longer looked at what happened in this world as
being the only things that mattered. There is a life of the world to come. Now
we are in the wilderness. Beyond the Jordan there is a promised land, flowing
with milk and honey.
Accordingly these folks spoke to their friends. They spoke
to their family. They spoke to their neighbors. And so it has happened that the
saving Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ has been passed down to us to this very
day and this very hour. It is not possible for us mere mortals to trace the
lineage of the Gospel that we have heard all the way back to Pentecost, but God
knows how it has happened. Peter and the apostles and all the rest of the
Christians preached the Gospel. Those who believed, also preached. Thus it
went, so on and so forth, until the Gospel was preached to you. But it probably
wasn’t just one person. Your parents probably preached to you. They had you
baptized. Pastors in the past have preached to you. Your family members have
preached to you. I am preaching to you.
God willing, you have also preached to others. All
Christians are called upon to preach the Gospel wherever and whenever the
opportunity to do so arises. You have not been asked to do this for a
congregation, like you have asked me to preach for you, but you are certainly
called upon to speak the saving Gospel to those you know. I’ll tell you what:
Very often people will listen more carefully to what you have to say to them
than they will to me. That’s because people assume that I have to say what I say because I’m a preacher. It’s my job. But if
you take the risk, if you put your relationship with that person on the line—that
person takes note of that.
And so I wish you a blessed Pentecost today. Today I’d like
you to realize what goodness God has worked in you by the power of the Holy
Spirit—that you should know the truth that overcomes the devil’s lies. You know
the truth that your salvation is assured in the Lord Jesus Christ. In Jesus you
have peace. You have a hope that no one can take away from you, for through the
blood of Jesus you have been reconciled to your Creator.
On this Pentecost I’d also like you to see your role in
moving the ball forward when it comes to the saving Gospel. God has freely
given to you through the preaching of many Christians—some called to preachers,
but many more who were not. You have been given to. Now you give. Tell others
the truth. Help them to be a disciple. Encourage them to go to church. Let them
know that they can learn how to be a Christian—your pastor will teach them the
catechism. Teaching the catechism is probably the most important job that a
pastor has.
And I am not saying this so that we grow in numbers and
become a mondo big congregation. Who cares about the size of our congregation?
This congregation will not last forever. No congregation will last forever. But
the Gospel that is preached through all the members of this congregation—that
will go on.
We are living in the end times. The fullness of God’s
revelation has been given to us. We know the truth that overcomes the devil’s
lies so that people are saved through faith in Jesus. Preaching this to those
you know and love is the nicest thing you could ever do for a person—regardless
of how it might be received by them. The peace of Jesus be with you in this. In
the world you will have trouble, but you have peace in Jesus.
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