THE GREATEST CELEBRATION!

[0:00] We come now just to reflect on those scriptures that were read by Ian there and also there. A passage I read from Isaiah chapter 5 at the start of the service. Before we do that, let's just have a prayer.

[0:13] Gracious and loving Father, we come at this time in our service to reflect upon your word. I pray that we're prepared and advanced for it. That it's anointed by you.

[0:24] You know us. You know us individually. You know our circumstances. You know what we're thinking. What we don't understand. What we're struggling with. Lord, I pray that through your spirit, you speak into our hearts.

[0:36] Open our minds so that we see something of you. Grow closer to you. Grow deeper in that relationship you've called us to have. And that security and peace that we can enjoy as well.

[0:48] In Jesus' name. Amen. Well today, as I mentioned earlier, is the first Sunday of 2025. First Sunday of our new year.

[0:59] Maybe you're one of these people. I don't know. Someone who makes a New Year's resolution. You make a promise to yourself. To change in some way or achieve something that you didn't achieve before.

[1:11] You achieve something in 2025. Like I'm going to lose some weight. I'm going to get fitter. I'm going to go on my bike. I'm going to walk in. And I know I said that last year as well.

[1:23] I'll probably say it next year after Christmas and New Year. Because of all the good food. All the eating that we do. Or, I'm going to cut down on the amount of rubbish television I watch.

[1:35] And start reading more books. Or go for more walks. And so on and so forth. And we tend to do that at New Year, don't we? We tend to kind of make an assessment of our lives.

[1:47] We reflect back maybe over this past 12 months. And then we decide what changes I want to make. What changes are necessary. What changes I think would improve my situation.

[2:01] With the coming of a New Year, let's make a new start. And after all the hype of Christmas and the activities of New Year, January can feel a bit flat, can't it?

[2:17] So what is a calendar year? Well, purely in scientific terms, of course, it's just the orbit of the Earth. Around the sun in that 365 days cycle.

[2:30] And the Earth is traveling at a distance of 583.4 million miles. The Earth travels in a year. And at this very moment in time, we're actually traveling through space at a speed of 66,000 miles per hour.

[2:47] Wow. Those facts are going to change your life, don't they? I don't think so. But of course, there's no sensation of movement on the Earth, is it? Because the Earth is a satellite that's orbiting the sun.

[2:58] It's like being on an airliner on the cruise. You don't get any sensation of speed, of course, until it lands and the brake's going. Then you realize how fast you'd be going. You get some idea then.

[3:09] As I say, I don't think these bits of information are going to change your lives today, don't they? But what New Year does remind us of is that time is passing.

[3:23] As a consequence, we are obviously a year older. Hopefully, we're in. Time is not a constant, is it? It's slipping by.

[3:36] Opportunities have been missed. Opportunities to make good decisions. Opportunities to make the right choice, good choices. In a way, we are running out of time.

[3:51] Running out of time to make the right decisions. And that's just our reality, isn't it? As we get older. Now, I don't know how you celebrated New Year.

[4:04] You did style with a party, maybe had some fireworks. I know some members of my family headed off down to Edinburgh. They had tickets to go to the party on Princess Street.

[4:16] They were halfway down the A9 when they got the news that the whole thing had been cancelled. So they were very disappointed about that. Or maybe, just chose to go to the early on New Year.

[4:27] It wasn't a big deal. However, the future does not rest, doesn't it? It doesn't rest in how we celebrate a New Year. Of course, it doesn't. But one celebration that we are invited to attend, one celebration that is critical in terms of our attendance and our eternal well-being, is a celebration that's referred to right throughout Scripture.

[4:55] The great feast in Isaiah. The banquet that Ian read about in Luke. Finally becoming the wedding feast in Revelation. Now, that is one party.

[5:07] That is one celebration you really don't want to miss out on. In Isaiah chapter 25 at verse 6, it says, On this mountain, the Lord of course will make for all peoples a feast of rich food.

[5:22] A feast of well-aged wine. Of rich food full of marrow. Of aged wine well refined. You know, recently we've been binge-watching, not drinking, binge-watching, Downton Abbey on Amazon Prime.

[5:38] Many of the scenes in that drama take place around a great big, large, grand dining table with candelabras and their servants and portland and so on. Rich food, fine wine being served and so on.

[5:51] But here in this passage, the host isn't Lord Grantham as it is in Downton Abbey, but the Lord of hosts, the Lord Almighty. And the meal that's been prepared, the fact that's taken place, isn't for the aristocracy or the social elite.

[6:08] It says that for all peoples, all peoples, not just Jews, not just Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, whatever.

[6:20] It says for all peoples, verse 6. And we'll examine that more about who the all are, in short one. Think about Isaiah's context.

[6:33] His context was, of course, Judaism. These scriptures were read in the temple, later in the synagogues, they were read to Jews. So the all people, well, that would be a real challenge, wouldn't it, to Jews?

[6:47] It might even seem shocking to them, that all people, oh, this is great banquet. And then the location, this mountain, could easily be interpreted as Mount Moriah, the coast of Jerusalem, Mount Moriah, the temple mount in Jerusalem.

[7:03] But as we'll discover, this is not a physical location we can identify. And those fortunate enough to attend, it says they will no longer experience death.

[7:16] Every tear will be wiped from their eyes, in verse 8. This is a vision. It's a vision of a future banquet that clearly takes place beyond our earthly, physical, today reality.

[7:32] No more death. No more tears. It says, well, that doesn't sound like this present age, does it? In regard to the all peoples who attend this feast, in our next Bible text, from Luke's Gospel, chapter 14, Jesus, in response to a question, gives us a clearer understanding of who these all peoples might be.

[7:53] In Luke 14, verse 1, Jesus invited back to the home of a Pharisee. The Pharisees were always wanting to check Jesus' sake. It was a real chalice and a real pulse of them.

[8:06] They wanted to observe him. And of course, they had an agenda. But little did they appreciate that Jesus is always, always in sovereign control.

[8:18] Jesus kindly accepts their invitation to hospitality. But almost straight away, Jesus turns their hidden agenda around.

[8:30] Because he's really observing them. And then he begins to challenge their legalism over healing a disabled man on the Sabbath. And then that's followed by their hypocrisy over social status.

[8:44] And although that wasn't read, that was in verses 1 to 11 of chapter 14. In other words, these Pharisees get far more than they bargained for by inviting Jesus to that meal.

[8:55] He very quickly reveals their shallowness, their saving face values, their honor culture. Because the Pharisees appear to be far more concerned with following the rules, keeping up appearances, than with any genuine concern for those who are in real need, those who are in real poverty.

[9:15] One person sitting around that meal table recognized that the world is not, as it should be, that there are injustices in the world, that there is poverty and suffering.

[9:26] And so they make this statement, maybe to calm down the atmosphere, maybe to ease the tension arising from Jesus' direct approach. They make a statement that the person who sits down with God at his great banquet at the end of time will be blessed, says in verse 15.

[9:43] Well, of course that makes sense, doesn't it? After all, teaching about the great banquet is something that the Pharisees, I'm sure, would have been familiar with, especially that text that we just looked at from, that we read from Isaiah, chapter 25.

[9:59] The scrolls of Isaiah is actually a key text in Judaism. So Pharisees would well know that passage from Isaiah, chapter 25, which describes this great banquet taking place on the mountain of God.

[10:11] And to join him with a celebration, yes, of course, it's a great honor, great blessing. But again, Jesus responds with a challenge to his hosts.

[10:22] He says, not everyone who is invited will sit down to enjoy a great banquet. Crikey. What is Jesus suggesting?

[10:34] Because the Pharisees would see themselves very much as those who sat at the table. In fact, they'd always see themselves as those who sat at the head of the table. Should have thought, what an affront Jesus' words would be.

[10:48] The Pharisees are their very authority, aren't they? They saw themselves as their authority on God's word. Which, of course, then was just the Old Testament. Of course, for us today, we have the benefit of hindsight.

[11:02] We view Scripture from the privileged viewpoint of the New Testament. Because we are, of course, host to the cross, host to the resurrection. So we know, we can see these things.

[11:15] We now know what they didn't know. That Jesus was the much-awaited, much-expected, anticipated Messiah. The Messiah whom the Jews refused to recognize.

[11:27] The Messiah who was rejected by his own people. And in that sense, the Jews were the first to be invited to the banquets in verse 17 of that passage in Luke.

[11:41] But their response was to excuse themselves. In the parable, Jesus describes them as being too busy. Too busy with purchasing land or livestock or someone just newly married.

[11:57] And as a result of their failure to take up this invitation, Jesus' description, the mass of the banquet gets angry, doesn't he? And he sends his servant off to invite the poor, the crippled, to compel people to come to the banquet, to go to the highways and the valleys and make them come to my great banquet.

[12:16] The beneficiaries of Israel's refusal to accept that invitation results in the invitation being thrown wide open to Israel's neighbors and to those further afield, to their gentile neighbors, to the poor, to the poor in spirit.

[12:37] Today, to people like us, people like you and me. Israel's rejection of Jesus results in the grace of God being extended to all nations, every tribe and every language.

[12:51] which is exactly the description we read in the apocalypse of Revelation, Revelation chapter 7, verse 9. In fact, Israel's failure to recognize who Jesus truly was results in the invitation to the celebration being extended right up to this present age, right into the future.

[13:15] But in order to sit and enjoy this great banquet, this great celebration, we do need to respond. We need to respond to the invitation. From this text here in Luke, Jesus tells this parable about a man who lays in a great banquet, a great feast.

[13:32] He goes through a lot of trouble preparing the food, getting in the best caterers. He sends out invitations to his guests. I don't know. Maybe you've experienced that scenario. Maybe you've done something like that.

[13:43] Maybe you've prepared the meal or prepared a church event or you've been involved in singing out the wedding invitations. You expectantly made your plans.

[13:56] Back in Christmas of 1996, seems like a long time to go there to me, I was working as a pilot at Leeds Brevet Airport. And I represented, maybe rather naively now as I look back, a Christian Pilots Association.

[14:13] And just as I was running up to Christmas, I sent this box full of Christmas cards and Christmas tracts. I thought, why don't I use these things? I'm going to make sure that I use them. So full of my enthusiasm, I decided to organize a carol service in the airport.

[14:27] I knew somebody who was on the management of the airport and asked him if it was possible to get somewhere for the space for this. And he kindly arranged for an empty airport departure lounge to be made available for my carol service.

[14:42] I knew through my local church in Leeds, as it was then, an evangelist called Roger Carswell. And he was keen to do something at the airport. So he volunteered to give a Christmas talk.

[14:55] And another very good, kind friend offered to play the keyboard. She brought the keyboard along. So it was all organized. I went around the different departments of the airport, air traffic control, the met offers, different handling agents, the airport restaurant, the flying club.

[15:10] I put up posters, I sent out invitations. And the reception was quite positive. Sometimes I was met with embarrassed smiles. But everyone happily accepted invitations and some indicated they would come.

[15:25] On the night of the carol service, it started snowing. Very Christmassy, you can say. Anyway, we arrived in the departure lounge. The airport kindly provided coffee, tea and biscuits.

[15:39] and we set everything up. And we waited. And we waited. And we waited. And no one came.

[15:51] There was eight of us. Five of which were members of my own family. Well, you can imagine how I felt. Disappointed. Discouraged. Even a little embarrassed.

[16:04] I was apologizing to Roger. But Roger said, don't worry. He can't insist that we actually go ahead with our carol service or sing some carols and he says, I'm going to give my talk.

[16:15] Thinking, well, there's only five of us here. But unbeknownst to us, the snow had delayed the leads to Belfast flight.

[16:26] So the airport had to stay through all these extra passengers somewhere, didn't they? So he sent them through into our departure lounge. into our little carol service.

[16:38] We'd only just started when all these people started to appear with their bags. Okay, they weren't there for too long. But it was longer for them to stand and witness and hear. The carol's been sung and they heard elements of the Christmas story about Jesus, the baby who was born in the stable and so on.

[16:57] It was a witness to them as they made that journey on that very snowy winter's night. I'm pretty sure they were bewildered as they came into that departure lounge of their luggage.

[17:08] They looked at us and we just carried on with our carol service. Reflecting back, it's quite funny. It's also quite wonderful in a way of testimony to how God does work.

[17:25] Initially for us, there was a great sense of disappointment that the people who'd been invited didn't come. I'd had some positive responses from people in the airport.

[17:36] Some seemed quite interested in coming. But in the end, they didn't turn up. They made their excuses. And Jesus tells the story of those who were invited to the banquet.

[17:49] They also make their excuses, don't they? One person buying land and one buying livestock, someone newly married. On the face of it, these all seem like reasonable excuses, reasonable reasons not to attend.

[18:06] But they can also be the very worldly reasons that people use to excuse themselves from important Christian events. We can always find reasons, can't we, to justify why we can't come to church on that particular morning, or we don't come to faith, why we delay choosing Jesus as our Savior.

[18:27] some say, I'm not worthy of becoming a Christian, I'm a bad person. Well, welcome, this is exactly the place you should be because you're the person that Jesus actually came for.

[18:41] Some say, I'm not ready. When I'm older, when I'm a bit nearer the grave, that seems risky to me, but the trouble with that is, if we keep shutting our hearts for allowing God's love in, eventually, our hearts become cold and hard, and they lose the sense or the feel of any need, any spiritual need, any sense of the need for God's love.

[19:08] Our hearts lose their sensitivity to our spiritual needs. And what we're doing is we're saying to God, you wait on us. Well, good luck with that one.

[19:22] This parable speaks as much to us, as it did to the Pharisees. Just like being here in church this morning doesn't make you a Christian any more than sitting on a nest makes you a bird.

[19:34] You're in the right place. You can hear the invitation, but you still need to respond. Because it's only by God's grace, isn't it, that we receive the invitation in the first place.

[19:46] As Luke describes it, we are the ones from the streets and the alleyways, the ones from the roads and the country lanes. In this very material age, and maybe because of the athletes we enjoy, we might be tempted to hesitate, to pontificate, to worry about what we might lose out on.

[20:09] Just think for a moment. Think about all those who live in very different circumstances to ours. Those who live in places where the spiritual hunger is so high, are so palpable.

[20:23] Places like today, Iran, or North Korea, or parts of China, or parts of India, places where there's such a spiritual hunger, millions desperate to be present at this great banquet.

[20:40] Finally, we turn to our last reference about the celebration, what we call the wedding supper of the Lamb, Revelation chapter 19. Revelation, of course, is the last book in our canon scripture in the Bible.

[20:55] It's written in a rather unique way, and maybe it seems hard to understand at first. Literally, it's describing God's dealings with salvation in human history from the beginning to the end to final judgment, and then the new creation, the new heaven, and the new earth.

[21:11] But it's written from the timeless perspective of eternity. In chapter 19, we come across this description of this wedding feast, this incredible banquet.

[21:23] In John's Gospel, in chapter 1, twice, Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God, who was slain to take away the sin of the world. And that passage we looked at during the children's address, God loved this world so much, didn't he, that Jesus gave his life, the Lamb that was slain.

[21:43] Why? Because of God's love for us. Jesus loves his people. Jesus loves his church. And not just the church in the first century or the 21st century, but the church that right throughout time and history of these past 2,100 years nearly.

[22:06] And that love for his church is now conscionated in the wedding feast, this wedding supper described in Revelation 19. Those who accept this invitation, those who follow him, no matter what personal costs, are here in chapter 19.

[22:20] And they finally sit down to this wonderful banquet. How many do you think will be present? The good question is, will you be there?

[22:34] Well, I can tell you that there are so many present that when they cry out hallelujah, their voices resemble that of thunder, like the sound of water cascading over something like the Niagara Falls, that thunderous roar of combined voices of the bride, the bride being the church.

[22:54] What an occasion this must be. Back in another life, I used to go follow the United Football Club in those days, I was standing on the terraces, and the numbers that you see of the matches were probably the tens of thousands.

[23:08] And when they scored the goal, the roar that went up was tremendous. But it was nothing in comparison to the roar that see it in Revelation 19. What we need to understand from Revelation is that a great deal of John's vision, which is what these are, they're images.

[23:25] It's a vision that Jesus has given to John. These images paint a picture of something that's beyond our grasp, beyond our imagination, this side of eternity.

[23:36] The image of this wedding feast represents the all-peoples that we read about in Isaiah. It represents all those who accepted the invitation to the great banquet, who are the redeemed, the church, throughout history.

[23:54] Revelation 7, verse 9, tells us they're all wearing the same clothes, robes that represent their commitment and faith in following Jesus. But whilst this image is beyond the physical reality of our present age, let's be absolutely clear, what is portrayed here is true.

[24:15] These words are true, it says in verse 9 of Revelation 19. The rich feast of Isaiah for all peoples is the same great banquet referred to in the parable told by Jesus and Luke that becomes the wedding feast of the bride and the lamb of God in Revelation 19.

[24:33] The key question is, do you want to be present at that banquet? Well, like the fickleness of human beings who sometimes don't invite us to weddings or don't invite us to that party that was celebrating whatever it was and so and so forth, be assured, you are invited.

[24:55] Everyone is invited to this wedding banquet or celebration. the problem is many people cast their invitations away, they throw them away.

[25:07] They throw their invitations away when they refuse to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior, as Lord, when they reject the truth and salvation, when they intentionally subscribe to the selfish and hedonistic values of this world, when they scoffle the beauty of holiness and righteousness.

[25:25] Christmas and New Year are a time of great celebration, aren't they? A time of family, a time of eating nice food, lots of whom, judging by the metrolleys that I saw in Tesco's or the ones in Morrison's that you probably saw over here, I would say it's almost a time of banquets, isn't it?

[25:42] Christmas and New Year. However, such celebrations are as nothing in comparison with this final great celebration or banquet.

[25:55] The wedding feast and the lamb. Where does it take place? Well, as Isaac says, on that holy mountain, in the very presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the new creation, in the new heaven and earth that the Bible clearly teaches about.

[26:10] My encouragement to everyone, no matter how you celebrate the Christmas of New Year, don't miss out on this final great celebration. Whatever resolutions you choose to make or not make in this New Year, make sure that you've secured your invitation for the wedding feast, the wedding supper.

[26:31] Amen. And it made it전.