Christ’s return is imminent, though the exact time is unknown. As Christians, we must remain vigilant and spiritually prepared. This involves utilising the ‘means of grace’ – practices like Bible reading, prayer, church attendance, and sharing the Gospel – to stay filled with the Holy Spirit. Just as the wise virgins in Jesus’ parable had enough oil for their lamps, we too must be ‘oiled up’ spiritually. Our goal should be to walk properly ‘as in the daytime’, representing Christ well right up to when He returns.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] This morning I want to pick up on a theme I know I’ve already begun a few times which is a theme to do with the fact that we need to have an awakening, the fact that God is in the business of awakening people. When we use that word we’re talking about that activity of the Holy Spirit, Jesus spoke about it when he said that when he goes to heaven, he’s in the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit will convict the world of sin. And people never really come to grips with or understand the facts that’s the Bible tells that we’re all sinners, but we sort of interpret that in very easy ways in ourselves,

[00:00:51] that we have a few faults here and there. but we don’t understand the dynamic of rebellion against God that has come upon the human race and we need an Awakening with the Holy Spirit shows us the depth of what the problem is. That’s not only something that happens necessarily for someone to become a Christian in the first place but also in our own Christian lives. There are moments when we can get very comfortable very accommodating of our ways which may be sinful or we can become those who are slack about the spiritual things.

[00:01:31] The other Sunday I put in the bulletin about the means of grace, the ways that God has given us to be recipients of His grace. They include reading the Bible, they include prayer, they include getting into fellowship with other Christians, they include Church attendance, what you’re doing now, it includes these means of grace are things that let God’s power, His grace come through to us, and those means of grace bring us closer. but it is a fact of Christians that we often get lazy about the means of grace. But when there’s a revival time, when there is a time of God’s Spirit particularly moving to speak to people, they become aware of their half-heartedness. They become aware of the need to come in closer. And so for us as Christians also,

[00:02:34] there’s a sense in which an awakening is a good thing. an awakening where the Spirit brings us back to where we should be. Now the passage I want to put up for a start, or one that we’ve already had, I think Romans and Chapter 13, is a very interesting one. And the point that I want to elaborate on in the message today is its connection with the Second Coming. Besides this, you know the time that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep in the light of the facts that we do not have a continuous ongoing forever period of happenings in the world of Spiritually speaking. But there’s a certain amount of time for this era of grace,

[00:03:29] this era of the church, and it’s going to final, not that the church will stop, but it will finalize by Jesus Christ’s returning to the Earth. The second advent is going to draw to a close the opportunity of this period in which we, by His grace can do so well. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” That’s true for every Christian because time is marching on. When it talks about salvation, it is the understanding of salvation that’s not just getting in the door of God once and for all.

[00:04:08] A very necessary thing to happen but salvation is not only you’re getting in the door, but it’s also your sanctification that follows where the Holy Spirit helps you to grow in grace, where the Holy Spirit helps you to have change of behavior. And is always a thing for me about my dad who used to tell me when he was young, he was a Scotsman in his genetic background and he was a eddy man, he had a very sudden temper. And I remember him telling me how playing a game of basketball with some missionaries, he got angry at them and kicked one of the lady missionaries into shins.

[00:04:53] Now I could never imagine my father doing that but that was when he was young. And the person that he presented to our family was one that sets a very higher standard to copy but was one where somehow change of personhood came on him. Many of his original students in the different places where he ministered in colleges used to meet me and they’d say about my dad. In fact I even had one ex-student tell me I had a long way to go. About being gracious, is what he was talking about. And that change that has happened in my father is because salvation continues in the change in your life as a Christian

[00:05:41] as you get more and more like Christ. But there’s a third step and the third step, and I repeat this many times because I want us to really understand it and get a grip on it, and the third step is salvation, is when we go to glory and we will have our sanctification perfected. We will have the judgement and there’ll be a judgement for the things that weren’t perfect previously and the decisions that we made and the mistakes that we committed. The times when we let Christ down,

[00:06:16] all of that is going to face a judgement for Christians but it’s not the judgement as to whether you go to heaven or hell that’s sometimes as referred to as The Great White Throne Judgement book of Revelation talks about it but that’s for people to be saved or lost and we Christians are completely safe with respect to that judgment but where the… where we have our judgement the wording in the Greek is Bema, it’s the Bema seats that Jesus will sit on that’s the time when he judges us, it all happened sometime before the final from before the final judgement. And but the moment of our getting into heaven is when our salvation is completed.

[00:07:02] And when it says here, For salvation is nearer to us now, Than when we first believed. And you might have come to Christ You know 10 years ago, You might have been three years ago Doesn’t matter in my case, Actually, it was about 60 so many years ago. So this statement is true for everyone. We are nearer to that moment of judgment for us as Christians than when we first believed.

[00:07:41] And the passage is calling on us to wake up, don’t be a dreamy Daniel. Don’t be a person who’s coasting along. Be a person who recognizes that there does come a moment when time is short. Sometimes the shortness of time has to do with the time that we’re gonna die. And sometimes the shortness of time can be because the actual dates are turning over and the one that will be the one that Jesus returns, it’s certainly closer and it will come. Now, I want us to turn to another passage. We may come back to this one later, but this, to another passage in Matthew, where Jesus himself is speaking along the same lines, and it is in Matthew chapter twenty-five,

[00:08:30] and it’s on the screen there for you. And it’s talking, first of all, about the Kingdom of Heaven. You are aware that the Kingdom of Heaven is the Kingdom that is sourced from Heaven, a Kingdom that is powered from heaven. the kingdom that is run by the Prince of Heaven, the Son of Heaven, who came to earth and the reason why he came to earth was to display God, to bring God out into more open view for us, to see it was a revelation or thing that God the second person to the Trinity we call him is God, the Father God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit, the second person to and expressed his deity-ness through a human setting. He was the God-man, both fully God and fully human,

[00:09:23] which, by the way, he took back to heaven, he still is. And this, Jesus, is the revelation of what God is like. The Father sent him. The Father empowered him. He had to take on, Jesus did by taking on humanity, a walk beneath heaven, or under Heaven’s guidance. In obedience to the Father previously as the second person of the Trinity, the three – Father, Son and Spirit are co-equal. They all have the same godly attributes. But when he took on humanity, he put limitations on him. on him. It put a condescension. The book of Philippians tells us that Jesus came

[00:10:10] down and he took on humanity and all that it was. His purpose was that he might succeed on behalf of us in keeping the law. He was born under the law and he kept it. He’s the only one since Adam and Eve who was sinless. Adam and Eve was sinless until he sinned as I mean they were, but Jesus came and took on humanity and didn’t sin, he got tempted in ways that were appropriate for who he was in all points as we are meaning that his temptations covered the gamut of humanity face of course it was different temptations for him, because of who he was and he had far worse temptations, but one of them was to continue to follow the Father which led to his finally going to the cross, where on the cross

[00:11:08] he bore our sins, which was the ultimate goal of his coming to earth, that he might pay for our failures. And this Jesus, this Jesus, He gave parables about the fact that he’s going to go back to heaven and that he’d return the second Advent. But that you can’t know exactly what the time will be. Now I often meet people who have got all sorts of emphases, some people emphasize the Second Coming, they used to be here in Salisbury and Acacia Ridge, families who gave out cassettes from a certain teacher overseas

[00:11:58] that you had all sorts speculative ideas as to how it happened, maybe some of those might be the truth, but I think the speculation went further than what you could be certain. And you get people so caught up with the Second Coming that they think that’s all there is to talk about in the Christian Gospel. But the truth of the matter is that the Bible itself outlines that the centre of the Gospel is in the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and that Jesus arose, his death and resurrection, is the center of the gospel.

[00:12:36] That’s something, from our times perspective happened 20 centuries ago. Jesus, what he did coming to earth, then returning to heaven, is the center of the gospel. And this gospel is one which blesses us and helps us, and the more we understand it the more deeper we’re taken. And when a person first becomes a Christian, they usually only have grasped the smattering of what that means. They usually have grasped that somehow or other, they need to make peace with God, someone’s led them in a prayer, and if they were gospelized properly, I told them that Jesus suffered on the cross for their sins. So they came to Jesus not just as, because He was the Son of God, but because He was our sacrifice,

[00:13:30] and taking their sins meant they could be forgiven. So generally when people come to Christ they are aware of the whole forgiveness need. But there’s an awful lot more to this Gospel of Jesus, though its centre is in the things that happened when He was down here on earth. And here the storyline says, it uses the analogy, if you like, or the picture of a wedding. And the wedding has the bridegroom coming at the end to have the great ceremony, and they used to have it all wrapped up in one enormous seven day event sometimes, when they’d have a wedding, where

[00:14:13] the people would come to a place where the bride and the groom, they are going to get married, but it sometimes took her across seven days. joined in the fellowship, but it was a honor to be allowed to come into that celebration, to be welcomed as a guest. And there were some people who would be particularly chosen, just as what we have at weddings, some bridesmaids and different people who do things to participate in the wedding. So, back then one of the participations that was required of friends of the bride and the groom, was that they They line the road from the major city where the people lived to where the meal and the happening was going to happen.

[00:14:56] And these girls were given a special role being such ones who would knock out the track with their lamps. And Jesus in his story about this begins to talk about the wise and the foolish. Now the first task we have to do to understand how to apply this to us is to work out whether or not it’s talking about people who get in the door with God altogether and get saved or whether it’s talking about Christians as to whether they get to enjoy the full celebration of salvation that they should find. I would venture to say that there’d be people who’d teach either way and probably both are true applications of the Parable. Well the Kingdom of Heaven, which is on Earth,

[00:15:48] will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom, by meeting the bridegroom they weren’t going to intercept him as much as they would lie on the road and as he came along, I’m sure he acknowledged them. So that was the meeting. It was a special opportunity to get in on the ground floor of being a part of the Kingdom of God as it’s represented in this parable. Well anyway, there’s 5 wires and 5 foolish

[00:16:22] and the difference between the wisdom and the foolishness of those girls is whether or not they prepared to be able to be on duty and not get slack that they prepared to do a good job and whether or not they took extra resources, extra oil, for the lamps. The reason why the need of the girls have extra oil in there is because of the fact that you never know when the bridegroom’s gonna come. Now, Jesus told this story is really about him and his return to the earth at the time of the Second Coming.

[00:16:58] Right here we have the evidence that you’re not meant to know the exact time. And you can’t be certain that your theories as to how it’s going to unravel are exactly right. There’s some things in the Bible which you can know for certain because they make clear. But there’s other aspects particularly of the Second coming of Christ where you can’t be totally sure that you’ve necessarily got it tagged everything correct.

[00:17:27] And in the case of these bridegroom girls the bridesmaid girls, they do not know when the actual groom is gonna come. That was a custom of the day. But their foolish ones are the people who neglect to think about how much oil they’re going to need. Now you may be aware that in the Scriptures, oil is very often used as a symbol of the Holy Spirit And to have these girls who don’t look to having sufficient oil to be able to keep them on their toes, waiting for when the bridegroom comes, is a picture in Jesus’ parable of our need to know that we can keep in with the Holy Spirit.

[00:18:19] You know the verse that I like quoting from Galatians, which is to walk after the Spirit, but J.I. Packer has suggested another wording, which is, keep in step with the Spirit. And the only way that you can guarantee that you’ll go on being a person who has the means of Grace, the Holy Spirit brings, is that you keep in step with the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us that we should learn how to be filled with the Spirit. And when you’re filled with the Spirit, things happen, you’re not the cause of it, they’re sometimes amazing things, sometimes character things. And if a person often displays being filled with the Spirit, the Scriptures would call someone, you know part of their character, choose men to work in the first deacons would men chosen, because they were known to be filled with the Spirit.

[00:19:17] It’s not as though that you can make yourself always display the spirit by just sort of somehow doing something, you can’t, it’s something that comes from God. But if He often has found you available, if He often has found you in getting yourself involved with what these know, means of grace are. Remember I listed them, going to church, reading the Bible, being in prayer, being a person who’s found the joy of Christian fellowship, being immersed in that fellowship. And there probably are others. It’s not necessarily a discrete list. The one other that I find is taking opportunities to share the Gospel. There’s nothing that puts a bigger hum in me that I get an opportunity, sometimes out of the blue, to speak to someone about Christ. I take every opportunity. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a shop or doing

[00:20:22] something else. I learned that from that bloke that took his cross around the world whose His name is escaping me at the moment, Arthur Blessett. He came through Australia. He’s been a fellow who had a café in America at a place where the local businesses, which were very ungodly, didn’t like the presence of his Christian café,” and they moved the local council to have him shut down. When the authorities came along to tell him that he had to close up. He went to it, handcuffed himself to this cross like we have a cross. He had one like this one here. And they came in they said you’ve got to leave.

[00:21:10] And he was handcuffed to the cross. So they took the cross down and handcuffed still to him and got him to walk out the door with it. But he thought that was a bit of a signal that was a sign from the Lord of what he should do next. And he took that cross with him and carried it around the world. I’m sure maybe he took the handcuffs off, I don’t know, but he carried his cross, and he got on transports, which could take it but I don’t know how big it was, it was a big one, so.

[00:21:43] But he came, went around the world and he came here to Brisbane. And the feature of this man was that every person he met, he would tell of Christ and had lots of stories to tell the different people, lovedors of bikies that he’d talked to and he came to Brisbane and this fellow, who was a senior pastor of the church where I was a youth pastor. Decided to take him in to meet the authorities of the Baptist Union, in their headquarters. Now you couldn’t take the cross up on the left, but when he got on the left, just one of those ones where a man sits in the stool and he’s been in the war and lost his legs legs and so he’s got a job of pressing buttons and those people learn how to

[00:22:28] have conversation with the people that come. And he got in the in the in the lift with my senior pastor and um the man says you’re going up or down? And he says we’re all going up one day unless we’re going to be 0, I forget how we worded it, but he witnessed to that man sitting on the spool. It turned out that everywhere he went, one of my friends who was involved in, we used Arthur’s Blessed to speak on King George Square. We had people come to Christ and counsel on the steps of King George Square on the town hall. in town hall. But one of my friends in the ministry did that. He went with Arthur Blissett around the rest of Australia. So he could tell us how everywhere he went he didn’t miss

[00:23:27] an opportunity, took it as the highest priority. If you were just a Christian who wanted to coming in his photograph, not photograph, but his signature, what do you call that? Yeah, that one. Anyway, he would adore you, because he didn’t want to spend his time talking to a Christian about little things. But if he found a non-Christian, he’d just concentrate on them until he could see that he’d leave them having understood that Jesus Christ died for them and rose again. And I got greatly influenced by his example, and because also it takes an awful lot of courage to do the things he did. And I think we need to allow ourselves the beautiful privilege of being spokesperson for God. Now some people like Arthur Blessed I think have special gifts and a special calling. And in the body of Christ, some are called this way and some are called that way to do different things. But I think all of us for just being a Christian

[00:24:44] also share in the specialty of what is the Gospel. And of the normalcy being normal, of being a person who shares Christ. Sharing Christ is not just for evangelists. You’re evangelizing by sharing Christ by definition. But there is a special gift for some to do it, like Alpha Blessed. But all of us have the opportunity to so be in touch with Jesus, to so be having oil in our lamps. And I think this parable that they have to meet Him on the road, on the way in having been prepared with enough oil to have the lamps trimmed no matter how long He waits to come.

[00:25:38] That is telling us that we need to be as Christians, oiled up enough to have a good Christian life in life that’s not going to have big backsliding in the middle, that’s not going to be something where you get slack. You’re meant to be someone who attends to having enough oil to trim your lamps, and a part of the whole scene of the parable is the fact that they don’t know when the bridegroom is coming. Now when I meet people who are experts on the second coming, I have a little thought in my mind I don’t always do it, but if I get the opportunity I’m going to try and point out to them that there’s some aspects that none of us know exactly how to interpret,

[00:26:25] and that I think that God has done it deliberately in the Scriptures, just as in this parable. They didn’t know and actually there’s somewhere, let me see if I can see it. What happens? In all the versions, verse 7, rose and trimmed their lamps and the foolish ones, am I so she’ll let you you have a foolish one said to the wise given some of your oil for our lamps of going out but the wise answer saying since there will not be enough for us and you go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves and while I’m going to buy the bridegroom came and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut, this is their custom back then, the door was slammed shut and afterward the other virgins came also saying Lord Lord open to us. but he answered, look at this, truly I say to you, I do not know you I don’t know you. now

[00:27:35] It’s a bit hard to see what that’s about until you think it through but he’s saying, I came along the road, you were one that I met. You’re not now coming in. I think this is both a warning to people to really get converted properly and be proper Christians so you won’t have Jesus telling you that you’re going to face the judgment of the world maybe go to hell, because you didn’t come to know Christ. The acid question that will make you safer before the judgment of God is knowing Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him.

[00:28:23] Jesus is the one. But I think secondly, this parable has an application, an application that we who are Christians, who are on our salvation, we’re in the second stage of the, we’ve been justified coming to Jesus, we’ve been properly converted, and now we’re getting sanctified, but we’ve taken enough opportunity to run and get lots of more oil. And that’s just a beautiful picture of putting yourself in for the means of grace, so that you’re a person who’s topped up.

[00:29:05] All of us as Christians can know where it is to go a bit flat Christianly. I don’t just mean because your emotions might be down, but I mean because you haven’t attended to walking after the spirit and you get called out. And I know from my own experience that I can do things that can spoil my witness for when I’m walking after the flesh. I know that I can make mistakes with people. And it’s important that I tend to putting myself in those positions where God ministers to me. one way that really I like to do is listening to sermons or reading sermons, and Spurgeon is one and some of those old fellows I listen to, I’ve got a whole series of them that I

[00:30:02] listen to, and so I put myself under ministry, and that’s a way of grace for me, it’s like having church several times a week. One of the joys I had going to study in America is that I used to go to church as often as I could. And some churches are at different times to cater for different people. So you could go to more than one or two or three in the Sunday. But then others had them on Saturday night for the medical people who have to be at the hospital.

[00:30:35] And so there were different churches around. And I used to enjoy just being over there to go to all these different services. It was a fantastic thing because if, particularly if you chose well and you chose where someone opened the Word of God and to put yourself under the Word of God is something that those 12, were they 12, are those bridesmaids girls, or the bridesmaids there, the ones that are the wise ones got plenty of oil. And my sermon this morning was to land on you the question, how much oil are you giving your sanctification? How much do you attend to what I call the means of grace, Theological College was a part of the theology that we talked about. What is a means of grace? It’s not a means of you getting yourself pumped up. It’s a means of being open to God getting through to you with His grace and His power and helping your

[00:31:53] sanctification to make another step forward and helping you to be oiled up. And I think and I think what this parable that Jesus gave is telling us Christians not just warning the people who put off getting to become a Christian in the first place but also to tell us Christians to be wise. Don’t let him come back. At a time you do not know, and he’s deliberately, Jesus has let it be known that there’s some delay. I don’t know whether a delay is because he’s changing his mind or he had He’s not told us in the first place or whether it’s just that we don’t know, we’re left

[00:32:36] but we don’t know the time of the second return and that’s how he wants it and that’s how we need … that’s why we need to be people who attend to the means of grace in order that we will have the Holy Spirit. That’s what it is to be wise. And when he comes he will then find us ready. Let’s go back to our first passage, please, and see what is said. The hour has come for you to wake from sleep. And I think that message is relevant today, even though this word was written back in the early century.

[00:33:22] But it’s always true that any moment you talk about, you are closer to when He’s coming than when you first believed. But it’s also going to be true for one generation of people for whom Christ will come and catch many of them without their oil. And we don’t know when is He’s coming, and so we might get ourselves all oiled up, you know, who have the spirit working in your life. And then He still might come three centuries away from today. We just don’t know. But there will be a time, one generation will find the truth of these words is particularly applicable to them. The night is far gone. The day is at hand. So let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

[00:34:21] It’s time to stop fiddling around where you’re ill prepared to face the temptations. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, in the sunshine, the light of God’s word. Not in orgies and drunkenness. Not in sexual immorality and sensuality. Not in quarreling and jealousy, but on the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, He was put on when you get converted, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ is when you allow His characteristics like my Dad, somewhere in his growing up times or his maturing times he learned how not to kick the missionaries in the shins.

[00:35:04] I’m going to giggle with him when I get to glory and talk to him. I don’t know that he knew he’s telling me that would get quoted all around Australia, which I have done. Let us walk properly as in the daytime. Be a person who walks filled with the Spirit. Michelle and I were greatly blessed by there being a brethren family in Sheffield, Tasmania, because we had a four-month crusade there and we lived in Browns Farms, which was in Browns Road, and there are lots of brown cows. You know the funny thing is they named a cow after Michelle. Is that right?

[00:35:54] I think is she here? I’m not sure, yes she is. In that little town was this family. They run a clothes shop, but they were full of grace, and particularly the women when they went there. There was just an opportunity of blessing in that town, and the whole family were Christians who, out of whom you could see the Lord. And that was a real challenge. I’m so glad for the people I’ve run across who’ve put in front of me an example of what I need to become more like.

[00:36:39] This was a godly couple, and we need us to so put ourselves under the means of grace that we become like that. Actually some of you are, and you don’t know it. Because I run across people to who tell me about my church people and some of the things that they have done in Christ. And that’s a wonderful thing, but we need to attend to that is what we do regularly so that when Jesus comes, he will find us like that. I want when at last the Lord comes or when I pass away, it’ll happen when I am in the midst of loving to tell the gospel. Every now and then I do come across a pastor who has had a rough time and got soured by

[00:37:34] the experience or I come across a Christian who quit on the Lord because it was all too hard. How different than when you come across one who’s just beaming with Christ. Like the Aboriginal man, Ronnie Williams, who I went to Amsterdam to a conference with him. I’ve probably told you this before, but it’s something that really struck me. He didn’t wait to get to the conference and evangelism in Amsterdam to get thinking evangelism. He heard it up the hosties in the plane. They had them telling him, telling them his testimony. I hope when Jesus comes, he will find me like that. We all have our different roles to play, but one that is funded by, driven by the Holy Spirit

[00:38:48] is what this passage is calling us to see that when he does come, he’ll find us walking properly as in the daytime and representing him. And what a wonderful thing that will be. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for this passage and how it matches that other one in Peter about the fact that the time is short and that we need to be awakened. That we need to wake up and take opportunity and take the privileged opportunity that is ours by the means of grace to find a deeper walk in the spirit that we may be like so when Jesus comes again. Amen.