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Stateline Ardmore Seventh-day Adventist Church

Norman McNulty

Without a Wedding Garment

Before I offer a prayer to start the message, I just want to give a personal testimony of thanks to God.

50 years ago today, my parents were married.

And I'm grateful for the parents that I was blessed with.

They raised me to love the Lord and to have a high regard for the Bible and the spirit of prophecy.

And I was blessed to be born into a Seventh-day Adventist.

My dad passed away 19 years ago so we're waiting for the special resurrection for him but yeah when I got up today I was like well my parents got married 50 years ago today God is good I'm thankful for how he has led my life and he's leading each 1 of our lives today.

I'm gonna ask the Lord to be with us and we'll get right into our message.

Father, we thank you for bringing us to worship you today.

And I just pray, Lord, that you would send a message from the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary that would be empowered by the Holy Spirit so that the message that is given today would be what you would have me to say.

So I just pray that you would touch my lips and touch my heart and that each of us here would be able to hear the moving of the Holy Spirit as I speak today, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Today we're looking at a parable of Jesus, and the title for this sermon is Without a Wedding Garment.

And we're picking it up in Matthew 22, starting in verse 1.

And this is a parable that Jesus tells shortly before he gets into his end time prophetic messages, but this parable certainly relates to that as well.

Matthew chapter 22, starting in verse 1, and Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables and said, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king which made a marriage for his son.

So just so we understand who we're talking about here, God is describing his kingdom, which is for his people.

And in order to have a kingdom, you must have a king and the king in this parable is the father and the son is Jesus Christ and the marriage that is being made here describes the marriage supper of the lamb which will take place in heaven for all of the redeemed.

That's a wedding feast that we all want to attend as guests.

Verse 3 goes on to say, and sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding and they would not come.

Now it takes a little bit of arrogance to be invited by a king.

But this isn't just any king, this is the king of kings.

To be invited by a king to the greatest wedding that will ever take place and to not come.

And not only do they not come, they come so, or They do not come out of choice.

Now in this parable, the servants are the prophets of the Lord who bring the gospel message to the nation of Israel.

So Jesus is giving a parable to the nation of Israel, to the Jewish people just before he dies.

And he describes how his father is making a marriage for the son, which is Jesus.

And the father has done everything that he could do.

And down through time, you can look at the prophets that have been sent to Israel.

God initially raises up Moses, 1 of the great prophets.

And then you look through time and you see the prophets that were raised up to the nation of Israel, including the prophet Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and many of the minor prophets and other prophets, he were raised up to invite the nation of Israel to this wedding.

And by the time Jesus is here on this earth and he's about to die, he makes this pronouncement of the nation of Israel, they would not come.

And in verse 4, it says again, he sent forth other servants saying, tell them which are bitten or those who are invited.

Behold, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fatlings are killed and all things are ready, come unto the marriage.

Now this second invitation, we are told by Sister White in the book Christ's Object Lessons, refers to the invitation of the apostles that are then given to the Jews after Jesus dies.

So a second invitation is given, Even after Jesus dies, now once Jesus dies, that guarantees that there really will be a wedding in heaven.

And the king wants to make sure that those who put his son to death still have an opportunity to respond to the message of salvation, and he gives them another opportunity, and you can see that he has left nothing undone to make This dinner, this feast, this wedding feast, he has left nothing undone to make it the best thing possible.

And in verse 5 it says, "'But they made light of it and went their ways, 1 to his farm, another to his merchandise.'" And you know, we look at the Jewish people and we say, what is wrong with you?

I mean, if I had been a Jew, and by the time Jesus came, after I read all of the other prophetic messages, I certainly would have responded to Jesus if I had been alive.

But why then did most of the Jewish people not respond?

I mean, they sought Isaiah and half they put Jeremiah in a pit and they would have left him for dead.

Some of them would have if they could have.

I mean, when the prophets sent messages, they were not received with grace and kindness by God's people.

And when Jesus showed up, they didn't receive his message, they put him to death.

And then we see after Jesus died, they make light of the message and they went their way, 1 to his farm, another to his merchandise.

And so the cares of life became more important to them.

And you may say, those Jews are something else.

And yet I look at Seventh-day Adventists today and I wonder.

You know, we live in the South where farming is still an industry and merchandise is as well.

And it doesn't have to be farming or merchandise.

There's plenty of other industries that we as Seventh-day Adventists have involved ourselves in so that we invest more time, energy, and focus into the things of this world than to the gospel message of invitation, where the Lord is sending a prophet in this day to give us a clear message of the coming of Jesus, and yet we make light of it like the Jews did of old.

And the parable goes on to say, and the remnant took his servants and entreated them spitefully and slew them.

We think of the stoning of Stephen, that was the close of probation for the Jewish nation.

We think of how James the apostle was put to death, and Peter would have been too if an angel hadn't delivered him from prison.

Now we see the response of the king in verse 7.

But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth or enraged, angry.

God did everything he could to save the Jewish people.

And he had a right to be angry or to have wrath, or as the King James says, to say he was wrath, because he sent every prophet that he could have sent to give the message of salvation.

And finally he sends his son, Jesus, and they put him to death.

And he even sends messengers after that, and they still reject the invitation to the wedding feast.

At the end of the world, we see in Revelation 16, the wrath of God.

Now what does God do to the Jewish nation?

It says, and he sent forth his armies and destroyed those murderers and burned up their city.

And lest you don't understand what this verse means, God sent his armies, that's the Roman army with the General Titus, and in 70 AD, he destroyed those murderers, the Jewish nation.

That's what the Bible says about those people.

Now God loved the Jews, but their measure of iniquity had reached its limit.

And they are described as murderers and their city was burned up.

Now, again, we say that Jewish nation, what a people.

I mean, they were murmuring and complaining in the wilderness before they even got to the promised land.

And then they get to the promised land and they've had all these deliverances.

And instead of following God, they worship idols.

And when the prophets come, they put the prophets to death and then they go into captivity and they finally come back from Babylon and when Jesus comes, they put him to death and he sends further messengers and they stone those prophets, yeah, they had it coming to them, they deserved it.

And yet when I look 2 chapters later in Matthew chapter 24, Jesus uses the destruction of Jerusalem as an illustration of what it will be like just before he comes back.

And the way the Jewish people rejected the message, the gospel message of the prophets, is the way the world will reject the gospel message at the end of the world.

It's not just that the world will reject the gospel message, it's that many in the church will reject the gospel message as well.

Because Jesus is like, yeah, you're going to sit back, those of you Christians who read this parable later on and say, God, I thank you that I'm not like those Jews.

But he goes on in verse 8, and says, then saith he to his servants, the wedding is ready, but they which were bid nor invited were not worthy.

Go ye therefore into the highways and as many as you shall find bid or invite to the marriage.

So God says, okay, fine, if the Jewish people, my chosen people that I selected to be my very own.

If they're not going to accept this message, go everywhere else throughout the world and invite them to the marriage, to the feast.

And as Galatians 3, 29 says, if you be Christ, then are you Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise.

You know, I'm thankful that you don't have to be a Jew to be worthy of the gospel message.

Now, I know some Jews who make wonderful Seventh-day Adventist Christians, so they're still worthy of being invited if they accept Jesus, But it's not just for them.

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Without a Wedding Garment

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