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I'd like to invite you to open
your Bibles once again to the last book of the Bible and the
last chapter of the last book of the Bible which is Revelation
chapter 22. Finishing up a long time preaching
series in this book and we come to the next to last message I'll
bring from this book. We always have to remember as
we come into the church, as we come before the Word of God,
as we come into the presence of God, we're always, always
dealing with matters of eternity. That we have to think about eternity. And as we look at some of the
closing words of this last book of the Bible, that is certainly
the case. So as I read and then pray, just
please prepare yourself to think during this time. about eternity. Again, I'll be reading from Revelation
chapter 22 beginning in verse 12 down to 17. Hear the Word
of God as we hear the voice of Christ speaking. Behold, I am
coming soon, bringing my recompense with me to repay each one for
what he has done I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and
the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash
their robes so that they may have the right to the tree of
life, that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are
the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers
and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. I, Jesus, have sent my angel
to testify to you about these things for the churches. I am
the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star. The spirit and the bride say
come. And let the one who hears say
come. And let each one who is thirsty
come. Let the one who desires take
the water of life. without price. Let's pray and
ask for God's blessing on our time in His Word. Father, we
thank You for the words of Your Son that are given to us here.
And we pray as we think about them this morning that it wouldn't
be my voice that Your people hear, Father, but it would be
the voice of Your Son through the Spirit and Word speaking
to them. Bless us, Father, to that end.
Help us to hear what your spirit says to the churches. We pray
it in Christ. Amen. Well, last night I just
returned from Colorado. I was out the last few days attending
particularly the installation service of a good friend, Ed
Blackwood, as he became a pastor out in Colorado Springs. And
just yesterday at this time, I was driving along after an
evening snowstorm with the white-capped Rockies there on my left as I
headed north. And as you're there among the
natural wonder that the Rocky Mountains are, their immense
size and their raw beauty, there's just something about the Rockies
that strikes you. You don't just see the Rockies,
you feel them. You feel their presence. wherever
you go. They do orient your direction. They produce conversation. It seems like it pops up all
the time as people are talking just about their lives. The mountains
quickly come into their conversation. So much of what people do, whether
it's the work they do or the activities that they do outside,
all involves the rocky mountains, even the weather out there. is
impacted by the Rocky Mountains. Wherever you go, you feel the
Rockies when you're there. Well, spiritually speaking, that
is what this passage is to convey to us today. That there is a
reality so towering, so certain, so awesome that we should feel
it every day, wherever we are and whatever we are doing. And it's this. It's the coming
judgment of Jesus Christ. It's a certainty. It's a reality. And many people try to go through
their lives denying it, putting it away, pushing it out of their
minds, even trying to mock it to pretend as if it's not going
to happen, But friend, I'm here to tell you today that that's
a fool's errand. That would be like me being out
by the Rocky Mountains and looking up at Pike's Peak and someone
telling me that it's not there. And I can see it. And I can feel
it. And you know it. All of you in
this room, the Bible tells me this, so I know this. All of
you know. All of you do. that this world's
gonna end, and that Christ is coming back, and you will be
judged. All of us will stand before that
towering mountain of judgment one day. And if we fail to prepare,
if we fail to respond in the way that God teaches us to do
here today, it is really to our own peril. The message of this
passage is that the Lord is coming and He expects everyone here
to be ready, to be prepared for His coming. So, if the Lord is
coming, what do you need to do? Well, you need to watch for the
coming Lord. You do need to prepare for the
coming Lord. And you need to come to the coming
Lord. So that's how we're going to
think about it together. First of all, watch for the coming
Lord. In every way that Jesus is described
in this passage, and in many ways throughout the whole book
of Revelation, it is with a sense that we should be aware of His
coming. That there's going to come an
end to these things, and He's going to be there when we come
to that end. Verse 13, He calls Himself the
Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and
the End. This world had a beginning. It
had a beginning. And the Scriptures teach us that
the beginning of this world came through Jesus Christ as He created
this world in which we lived. And so that's why He says He
is the Alpha and the Omega. He's the A and the Z of all history. He started history, and He will
end history. Because He's the beginning, and
He is the end. So even that is telling us that
He's coming. We're to watch for the coming
Lord because He is the omega, the end, the last. Verse 16,
He tells us that He is both the root and the descendant of David. What does He mean by that? Why
does He bring that up at this point in time? Well, He's the
root of David because He's the one that created David in the
Old Testament. He's David's Creator. He's David's
Lord. And He made David to be the king
over Israel. And God promised that through
David, He would have a son one day who would become an eternal
king. And that's what we really celebrate
at Christmastime, right? We celebrate that the Son of
David, born in the city of David Bethlehem, came into this world
as a little baby. And He lived. as a king, even
in his infancy, he was worshipped by other kings, the wise men
that came to see him, the shepherds that came to see him. He left
heaven and was born as a king. He's kind of like Aragorn in
the Lord of the Rings. He may not look much at the surface,
but he's a fierce warrior. who ends up winning the battle,
who ends up conquering the foe, and that's what Christ has done.
People despised Him, mocked Him, put Him on a cross, but it was
by that death on the cross that our death and our sin was dealt
with. And the Scriptures tell us that
the grave could not hold Him because, you see, He's an eternal
King and He was raised from the dead And as I said earlier, He's
ascended. He's seated as King next to His
Father right now. And He's coming back. And you
need to watch for this coming King. Verse 16 also tells us
that He is the bright morning star. He is like the sun that
after a night of darkness rises to bring warmth and light to
the earth. And as dark as this world may
appear at times, as evil as it may seem at times, friends, know
there's coming a day when all that's going to be taken away.
Because Jesus, the morning star, is coming back in all His splendor
and in all His glory. And He will deal with that evil.
And it will be no more in His eternal Kingdom. Watch. Watch
for this coming Lord. And then verse 12. Behold, he
says, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me to repay
each one for what he has done. He says he's coming soon. Perhaps
this is what causes people to doubt. For after all, these words
in the book of Revelation were written 2,000 years ago. And some might say, well, 2,000
years. He hasn't showed up yet. The
Apostle Peter says many just think, well, he's not going to
show up. He's not going to come back because he says he's coming
back soon. Well, to treat scripture this way is to misunderstand
something about the nature of scripture, particularly the nature
of prophecy. The nature of prophecy. You see,
the book of Revelation in its first pages tells us it's a book
of prophecy. And one of the things about prophets,
as one person has said, the prophets compressed great events into
a brief space of time, brought momentous movements close together
in a temporal sense and took them at a glance. In other words,
the prophets were rooted in history. John, who wrote this, was rooted
in his history. He's speaking about things at
his time, but he also has an eye to the horizon. And it's
much like your experience if you're driving up toward the
Rocky Mountain. From a long way away, it could just look like
there's one mountain ahead of you. But as you get closer and
closer to the mountains, you begin to see, no wait, there's
other mountains behind them. That's the way it is with prophecy.
So often rooted in one event, but looking ahead to something
future. We see that in the verses that
are printed inside your bulletin regarding the birth of Jesus.
In Matthew chapter 1, Matthew quotes from Isaiah when Jesus
was born saying that a virgin shall bear a child and should
call his name Emmanuel. If you read the prophet Isaiah,
in his day there was a child born to represent what was going
on at that time. But of course, the greater event
that that was all pointing toward was the coming of Christ. And
this book of Revelation is filled with judgment. that the seven
churches of Asia to whom this book was written were seeing
in their time pictures of the judgments upon their enemies
that will be the case and truth at the final coming. Friends,
Jesus is coming soon. It may be too soon for some people. They won't be ready. They won't
be prepared. That's why we need to watch out
for the coming Lord. The scriptures say it'll be like
a thief in the night. You don't expect it. And there
he is. And if he's coming and you're
watching for it, then you need to be prepared for it. And that's
what we need to think about as well. Prepare for the coming
Lord. Speaking of mountains, I grew
up in the Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina. They're
not quite the Rockies. but it was a beautiful place to grow
up. I grew up at the end of a gravel road, and my childhood years
were spent wandering the neighborhood with my friends, catching crawfish
in the creek, and having fun exploring in the hills and woods
near my house. I'm a hillbilly at heart. But
there's one thing I knew. As the afternoon wore on, And
suppertime approached, I knew I needed to keep my ear out for
my father's whistle. For at some time, he could whistle
really loud, I can't. But at some point in time, there
would come a whistle. I can't whistle loud. But that would pierce. Wherever
I was, I would hear that whistle. And I knew that I needed to get
home pretty quick. Because if I ignored the whistle,
or delayed in responding to the whistle, I knew my dad would
come find me. And if my dad had to come find
me, I knew what awaited me when I got back home. I learned that at the right time,
I needed to listen to the call of my Father, and if I did not,
there would be consequences. Friends, there are consequences
for not being prepared for the coming day of the Lord. The picture
here in this text is that the kingdom of God is like this beautiful
city in which we are to dwell as his people. But if we're not
in the kingdom of God and we're outside, then God has some not
so flattering things to say about us. And he names the kinds of
people and behaviors that are outside the kingdom of God. You'll
notice this in verse 15. Outside, and let me just highlight
briefly what he's saying about these people, outside are the
dogs. And the scriptures, when someone's
called a dog, it's because they have disgusting behavior, which
dogs are prone to do. And in particular, the types
of disgusting behavior are those who believe that their salvation
is based upon what they do, and then practice what often accompanies
that, which is they might have some outward righteous acts that
they do to try to impress people, but inwardly, they are leading
degrading, immoral lives. They pervert the goodness and
truth of God, whether it's the sex that He's given us to enjoy
within the bounds of marriage, which I'll say something about
in just a moment, or they pervert the salvation, the purity of
the Gospel that He's given to us, those people are called dogs
in the Scripture, a pretense to godliness, but not exercising
its power at all. Sorcerers, those who practice
other religions, those who indulge in witchcraft and the occult,
It's interesting, the word here in the original language is the
word that we get pharmaceutical from, because often with these
practices comes the use of drugs and mind-altering behaviors that
are associated with it. If you read the book of Acts,
you will see that regularly Paul and the apostles were encountering
people that were under these demonic type of influences. And
we may think, well, this doesn't go on in our age. Oh yeah, it
does. Just this week, the state capital of Iowa the satanic temple
puts an altar to Satan in the in the capital building of Iowa
and people are falling to the bewitching lies of the evil one
by having a fascination with the occult and demonic practices
he talks about the sexually immoral I don't know if you've read the
Bible lately, but God's pretty strict about our sexuality. Within the bounds of marriage,
there's fullness of joy, but outside of that, you're venturing
into forbidden territory. Studies show Christian young
people are engaging in premarital sex at the same rate as the world,
because they're not being trained. I hope that's not the case here. People, and even Christians,
are watching things they should never lay their eyeballs upon.
Wouldn't it sicken you, the thought of inviting your neighbor into
your house and watching them be intimate? We would never do
that. But we'll turn on Netflix or
go to a computer and website and watch it. I think, Neri, about it. The
Bible says fornicators are outside the walls of the kingdom of God. Murderers, those who have no
regard for human life. I was talking in the class earlier
about how there are so many places, so many churches that are actually
pro-choice. They actually tell their people
that it's OK for them to go out and put to death their unborn
children. Here today, we're celebrating the life, the birth, the joy,
the blessing of a child. And in other churches, they are
actually teaching their people to go out and have an abortion
and then bring their blood-stained hands back in the next week into
supposedly the house of God. And God detests that and anything
associated with it. Idolaters. People who in their
own imagination set up God and worship God the way they please
rather than seeking the God of the Scriptures and worshiping
Him as He has asked them to do. And then liars. God hits liars with a double
barrel, so to speak, here. He says those who love and practice
falsehood. We're living in a time where
lying is a practiced art. Our politicians are regularly
just lying to us. And we can see their lies, because
a week ago it was printed this in the paper, and this week it's
this. And yet they deny it and twist it and turn it each way
they want. But it's not just out there in
the world. It's in the church. There's too many pastors lying,
living false lives before their people. a prominent Reformed
pastor in this state. A man who's quite famous in many
circles. He's serving one of the largest
churches in Philadelphia. Nine years ago, he was caught
in a public park in immoral behavior with a woman in his church. And
for nine years, he's been defaming others denying the truth and
the reality and finally, finally it's caught up to him and he
finally has been made to step down after nine years standing
in the pulpit as a liar. And I fear for his soul. I fear
for his soul. How can you stand in the presence
of God and his people and be a liar? And God says outside
the walls are found those types of people. Well, you can't even trust pastors. How do you know where to look
for the truth? The true bride of Christ? Well,
it's actually not that difficult. How do you tell the difference
between a bride and a prostitute? It's what they're wearing and
how they're behaving. And Jesus says that His bride,
His people who are ready for Him, He describes them in verse
14, are blessed are those who wash their robes. Rather than
wearing the filthy garments of this world in the manner that
I've just described, He says that those are blessed who have
washed their robes. And of course, the question is,
what have they washed their robes with? And the answer is, the
holy blood of Jesus. And if someone has truly been
washed by the holy blood of Jesus, spilt on Calvary's cross, and
that person believes that that blood will save and forgive and
cleanse them, and they believe that, it will show up in how
they live their lives before Him. You see, Jesus has brought
salvation in its totality to His people. He just doesn't save
His people from the penalty of their sins. When we talk about
forgiveness, we talk about not having to stand before God in
judgment and pay for our sins ourselves. To do what it's saying
here, we're going to face the recompense of our sins We don't
have to fear that anymore if we're wearing the blood of Jesus
upon us. But if we're wearing that blood,
it changes you. You're not the same person that
you once were. And the fullness of Christ's
salvation makes you to be a holy person, desiring holy things. Notice what these people are
doing whose robes have been washed They have the right to the tree
of life. They enter the city by the gate. They come into the church. They
join the fellowship of the church. And then they live with other
faithful people in the holiness of Jesus Christ. That's how you
know whether someone's a true Christian or a false Christian. The fruit eventually shows itself. What they're wearing eventually
is seen. Is it holiness they're wearing?
or the world and its ugliness that they're wearing. A local
church is to be a picture of heaven on earth. A place where
people come and eat the tree of life by taking of Christ,
by taking of his sacraments, by taking of the Lord's Supper
and having life and fellowship with the Lord. We need to prepare
for His coming. And friends, to prepare for His
coming, I call you to come. Come to the coming Lord. You know, the book of Revelation
starts off speaking to seven different churches. There are
now in the area of Turkey, but back then it was called the Churches
of Asia. And Jesus speaks to each one of these seven churches
a unique message, but at the end of them, they all end the
same. He who has ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is
saying to the churches. And here in verse 17, we hear
a final word from the Spirit. It says, The Spirit and the bride,
the church, say, Come. The Spirit says, Come. It's calling everyone who hears
this message to come and to take the water of life without price. In other words, it's inviting
you that you don't have to do anything to impress God because
you can't do anything to impress God. You have to come to Christ. And you have to put your faith
in Jesus. And you have to know that either
He's going to come one day and I'm going to have to stand on
my own righteousness and stand before Him and face His judgments,
and you will not be able to stand, friend. You will not be able
to stand that day. Or you let the recompense be
what God did to His own Son by putting your sins upon Christ. so that you could have the water
of life without cost. That you can drink freely from
this river of life. That you can eat freely from
the tree of life. Earlier in this book, as John
sees this vision of a harlot, which is picturing the false
people of God, And he sees this harlot about to face the judgments.
He calls out to the harlot, the false people of God, come out
of her. Anyone who will still listen,
come out of her. You've got to come out of your sins, he says. You've got to run away from your
unfaithfulness to God. And then you need to run to where
God says for you to go. You need to come. You need to
come to Jesus. He Himself said that. Come to
Me. All of you who are weary and
heavy laden, tired of the things of this world, tired of dealing
with your immorality, with your idolatry, with all the things
that you're carrying, all the baggage that you're carrying,
you're weary, you're heavy laden, He says come. Let me take that
off of you. You who are ashamed of your clothing. You who are dressed in filthy
rags. You who feel unworthy to even
be here maybe this morning. Jesus says don't think like that.
Come. Come to Me. And I'll make you
clean. I'll make you white. I'll make
you holy with My righteousness. He says here, if you're thirsty,
come. If you're hungry, come. Friends, I'm here to testify
to you this morning the truth of what Jesus says when he said
in John chapter 7, he who believes in me as the scriptures say,
from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water. Friends, that's a true promise.
This world will never satisfy you. You were not made to be
satisfied with the things of this world, with the created
things around you, your idols. They'll never satisfy you. But
Christ will. And Christ does. Because His
Spirit is poured out into the hearts of those who believe.
And they find rest. feast and satisfaction in Jesus. So, friend, he says to you, come. Come. Please come. Let us pray. Father in Heaven, how thankful
we are for the words of your beloved Son. And, Father, they
are so very serious and sobering, because we know that He does
stand as the one that you have appointed to be the judge of
all the earth, the coming Lord. And Father, I plead with you
that you would pour your Spirit out upon each person here, that
no one would leave here today, Father. I'm sure they're standing
on that great day, that they would believe in you, that they
would come to your bride, the church, and have fellowship with
you and enjoy all the blessings and benefits that you have for
your people. Father, help them to come. Thank you, Father. And God, may
we not only come ourselves as we see this dying world around
us. So, Father, help us to go forth
and offer to them as well this water of life. We pray it in
Christ our Lord.
Come To The Coming Lord
| Sermon ID | 1210231659596601 |
| Duration | 32:46 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Revelation 22:12-17 |
| Language | English |
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