Thank you, sir. All right, so let's open our Bibles to Revelation chapter 22, Revelation chapter 22. We're going to look here at the closing words, not only of the apocalypse, but of the entire canon here, Revelation 22. Let's look at verses 17 through the end of the chapter here. Now the word of the Lord, the spirit and the bride say, come Let the one who hearsay come. Let the one who is thirsty come. Let the one who desires take the water of life without price. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. He who testifies to these things says, surely I am coming soon. Amen. Come Lord Jesus, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen. We are finishing up at Gospel Fellowship PCA, a long series in the book of Revelation, some 70 or so sermons. It's the first time I've preached through Revelation in my life. And a lot of people in our church told us the same. That's the first time they've heard an entire exposition of the whole book of Revelation. I encourage you to do that, by the way, at some point in your ministry. I waited until I was nearly 50 years old to do that. I just didn't feel competent in order to exposit the apocalypse earlier on in my and my career, but I felt like it was the right time. My associate pastor, David, is a wonderful associate to work with, and so together we've been working through this very difficult book. I think too much edification of ourselves in the church. I've personally learned an incredible amount from the book of Revelation with all of its vivid imagery, all of its dynamic, visionary descriptions. There are, of course, beasts, and there are dragons, and there's light, and there's darkness, and there's the conflict between good and evil, and there's the sovereignty of God. and there's the provision and the sustaining of the church. Again, it's been incredibly edifying for us. And so I'll probably be a little bit emotional if I'm honest. When this Sunday comes up, I'm going to do the last verse of the last chapter, chapter 22, verse 21, the last portion of the book of Revelation. But I want to mention today the structure of this closing of the epilogue of Revelation here in chapter 22. As John closes not only the apocalypse, but the whole of the canon, he does three things, but we're only going to focus on one of them here this morning. He does three things. First, in verse 17, he gives a fairly emphatic invitation to come to Jesus. After all of these dynamic experiences that John has seen of the heavens and the earth and all of these marvelous and wonderful creatures and such things, Yet John does not avoid or skip inviting those who have heard the book read, or those who have read the book with their own eyes, inviting them to come to Christ. So he does that in verse 17. In verses 18 and 19, he issues a serious and grave warning. either regarding adding to the sufficiency of Holy Scripture or in any way taking away from it. And those things will merit for the one who does it, plagues, the plagues that are described as he says in this book. And then third, John also gives a promise, which is the very personal promise of the Lord Jesus Christ that he is coming soon again to redeem his covenant people. So what I would like to do this morning in our brief time together is to simply look at the invitation that he gives in verse 17. So I'm going to spend the preponderance and in fact, the entirety of our time just looking at verse 17. And here I want to point out several things about this particular invitation. So with your Bible open and my Bible open, let's look at verse 17 a little bit more carefully here this morning and notice this. In 17 it says, the spirit and the bride say, come. and let the one who hears say come, and let the one who is thirsty come, and let the one who desires take the water of life without price." So we have a three-fold repetition of this invitation to come to Christ, to come to the gospel, to come freely, or as it were in another way, to take from the water of life free without price. And this is probably going to be the most serious and important invitation that you are ever going to consider in your entire life. Now listen, you will undoubtedly receive all kinds of invitations throughout the whole of your life. If you add up all of the invitations that you're going to receive, they will number in the dozens, perhaps in the hundreds. You will be invited to weddings. You will be obliged to and expected to attend funerals. You will be invited to birthday parties or the birthday parties of your friends' children. You will be invited to people's homes. You will be invited to people's coffees. You will be invited many times. And here's the deal, and I'm going to level with you and be honest. The more you love people, the more, intuitively, people want to be around you. Like, that's not rocket science, right? If you are patient, if you are kind, if you are gracious, if you are gregarious, if you are magnanimous in spirit, those are the kind of people that other people want to be around. And so if you're exhibiting in your life the fruits of the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, etc. One of the things that you're going to observe is that you're going to be invited to things all the time. And some of those things, quite honestly, let's be honest here, you don't really want to go to or have time to go to. Other things, you will be obliged and expected to attend by virtue of who you are and what your position is. But understand this. This is the general rule of how invitations work. We tend to invite people to come into our lives who we legitimately like. That's not a surprise, right? If you are finding yourself that you are not the kind of person that people are inviting into their lives, into their home, to meetings and other such things, you might want to just have a casual spot check of your own personality and wonder that maybe there's something abrasive about you that people don't want to be around you. Now, that's not the main point of the sermon today, but it's true. People invite the people that they love and care about and legitimately want to spend time in their presence. But here, in this invitation, we have an invitation that, quite to contradistinction, works the other way. In fact, this is an invitation that is given to people who are very much unlikable in their essence. This is an invitation that is given to people who are not necessarily gregarious and outgoing and lovable and affable and desirable to be around. But this gospel invitation is unique and that the more unlikable you are, the more necessary it is for you to come to heed the invitation. In fact, here's a very unique invitation given in the Apocalypse for the most unlikable people to come, sinners like us. No good, dirty, rotten sinners like you and me, and yet here we are finding ourselves subject to and invited to come to an invitation that far exceeds our worth and our merit. Yes? And so let's just notice a few things about this particular invitation and the way that John gives it here at the close of the apocalypse. First, and I'll mention three things or so. It is sincere. Notice that the spirit and the bride say, come. What are we talking about here? What's our theological categories? Well, the Spirit is, of course, the Holy Spirit. This is the only one who can actually offer what, in my class in evangelism here, we just defined as the effectual call. Westminster Confession, Chapter 10. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can actually do the work of the effectual call, the enlightening of the mind, the changing of the heart, much as we might want to. We cannot, we do not have the ability to, we cannot reason people into Christianity by our winsomeness or our rock-solid logic. It is only the Holy Spirit who has the power to effectually call the elect unto himself. That is a call that, by the way, you cannot issue to anybody else. The Spirit of God does that work, and praise be to God, He does it perfectly, and when He does it, guess what? Irresistibly. But notice also the sincerity of this call. Not only is it the Spirit that says, come, but and the bride says, come. Who is the bride in the book of Revelation? Who is that? It's the church, yes. For several chapters now, John has been building this imagery of heaven as being something like the wedding supper of the Lamb. And now here is the bride herself issuing the invitation quite in concert with and parallel to the call of the Holy Spirit. Now again, only the Holy Spirit can effectually call the elect, but that doesn't mean that the bride is to be silent. The bride is likewise to be inviting people to come. And why does she do that? Why does the bride invite others to come? Well, I have a daughter that's getting married in June. I know the answer is because she wants to spend time with the people that are precious and important to her. So let me ask you, are souls precious and important to you? Are you so joyful in the Lord that your life, that your words, that the way that you carry yourself is another way of issuing what only the Holy Spirit can do and effectually calling the elect to himself? Are you in concert with the Holy Spirit in your evangelistic methodology and as much as you are likewise inviting people to come to Jesus? I hope so. you would miss the whole point of Revelation. If you figured out all of the signs and all of the beasts, and if you understood all of the mysteries of the timings, and yet you didn't understand that the book of the Apocalypse is essentially a call to people to come to Jesus to repent and find what he calls here the water that is without price. So first of all, notice the sincerity of the invitation of the bride. Secondly here, notice the emphatic nature of that invitation, to use another word here, the zealous invitation. This is an invitation that goes out with zeal. Now, how do I know that? Well, because he says it three times. Do you see the word... Look at your Bible. Do you see the word come three times? Why do people repeat themselves so often? Is it that they have nothing else to say? Maybe. Maybe there's an urgency, though. Maybe there's such a sense of gravity of the moment that you have nothing else to say other than to plead with people to come. I think there's something of that here. This call is issued three times. Come once. Come twice. Come three times. Take from the water of life. Now, good Bible students know that this is one of John's many, many, many allusions to the Old Testament here. In fact, some of you might even know this offhand. To what passage is John referring here? Does anyone know this? Yeah, it's Isaiah chapter 55. This is one of his many, many allusions to the Old Testament. And let's just pick up the language from Isaiah. Isaiah says, chapter 55, verse 1, come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. He who has no money, come, buy, eat, come, buy wine and milk without money, without price. And he asks rhetorically, why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? You see, here there's an urgency to this call, and it's no wonder that John so frequently quotes the prophets in the book of Isaiah. By the way, if you didn't know that, you haven't done your homework on the book of the Apocalypse, because John is repeatedly using, I mean, almost every single chapter, using images and symbolism, often quoting directly from the Old Testament. John, I'll tell you this, having got through the book now, John loves the exilic prophets. Daniel, foremost among the people that he quotes. Jeremiah, Isaiah. Why does John have affinity with the prophets of the Old Testament? I'll tell you why. John loves especially the suffering prophets of the Old Testament because he, likewise, just like Isaiah, just like Jeremiah, just like Daniel, has suffered for the sake of the invitation. Okay? Jeremiah, thrown into a pit. Isaiah, persecuted. John, where's he writing from? Patmos, where he's exiled. All the other apostles, martyred. John has a common experience with these prophets in that he has suffered to issue the gospel invitation. And yet, here's what Isaiah and John have in common. They've both seen the glories of the heavenly places and yet have been called to testify to it. Isaiah saw the throne room, Isaiah 6, right? John has seen the heavenly things that he's describing in chapters 21 and 22. They both have this in common. They're both willing to, and in fact, do suffer greatly for the sake of the gospel. And why are they willing to suffer so much? Because they've seen that which is undeniable to them, okay? So yes, he's going to emphatically repeat himself, pleading, urging people to come to Jesus and to be saved. This is not only sincere, but it is an emphatic invitation. And not only that, but we'll add to that one more qualifier. It is a free invitation. Look at the stress on the freedom of the gospel itself here. Take from the water that was without price. Now, let me tell you something else about invitations. This is how they work. A lot of times, when somebody invites you to something, there is a hidden cost. They invite you over to their house, and they say, bring a salad, or bring a side. We have a friend that gives us very specific instructions on exactly what to bring. Sometimes you'll go to a dinner downtown. Maybe somebody will invite you, and you go to this dinner in some great hotel downtown, and you come to find out that it's actually a pitch for somebody to sell you insurance. You ever been to a dinner like that? They told you it was free. Now the guy wants to sell you insurance. Or you go to a banquet, present company excluded, we have one like this. Or you invite people to a banquet and the dinner's free, and it really is free, but then we hand around the little envelope at the end and we're looking for some kind of help or an offering. This is a truly free invitation here to the gospel. This is a truly free. Now, if you try to bring something, you actually can't. Because if you try to exchange this bread and this wine and this water for your own small, measly, religious goods and services, your offer, though kindly intended, will be rejected. This is not an invitation that comes with any sort of cost to it whatsoever. If you try to trade or to barter or to buy, you cannot do it. In fact, if you do so, you don't understand the invitation itself. You haven't yet understood the gospel. So why does the spirit and the bride say come? Why not just the spirit, if he is the only one who can do it effectually, and we actually can't do it? Why is that? Well, the freshman says, well, because of monergism. Good. You've learned a theology word. That's great. And that's right. That is right and true. We're Calvinists. We're Reformed here. When you go on to your sophomore year, you will add to that that God is the first cause, and he uses secondary causes as well. That's also in the Westminster Confession of Faith. But when you're a junior, you will learn as well as your monergism and your second causes. that there is a real true joy in actually inviting people seriously and freely to the gospel of Jesus. You will do it. You will learn because it is a joy to you as the inviter. And when you finally graduate, you will understand that all of that circles back again to the monergistic grace of God who does all of these things. Yes, you're commanded to evangelize. No question about that. But God uses the weak and the frail among us. He uses the invitation of the bride in as much as he effectually calls by the Holy Spirit, because God, strange as it may seem, and unlikely and counterintuitive. God delights to use the secondary means of our weak and fallible invitation to draw sinners to himself. Can you reach into the chest of the unbeliever and change their heart? No, you cannot. Only God can do that. But strangely enough, God loves to issue the free invitation of the gospel through his spirit and the bride, as together they both say, come. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we do love you and we delight in the freeness of the gospel. We thank you, Heavenly Father, that you've provided all things for us in your Trinitarian glory, the glory of the Father, the glory of the Son, the glory of the Holy Spirit. Lord God, we love you. Make us inviters. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Thank you.