Alistair Begg recalls a news story he heard while living in England about a Liverpool couple who had their car stolen from in front of their home one night. Several days later they woke in the morning to find their car, cleaned, full of gas and sitting back in front of the house. There was a note on the front seat, containing an apology for whatever inconvenience they may have experienced, and two theatre tickets.
So the couple used the tickets. And while they were at the play, the guy burglarized their house.
Begg used the story for the same purpose I repeat it; to make the simple point that if the couple had been just a little suspicious about the unusual circumstances and perhaps thought it through more, they may have skipped the play and been ready for the intruder.
There is no shortage in the Scriptures of warnings to be watchful, alert, ready. These are always directed at God’s people. The people of the world have nothing to be watchful for. The warnings to them are of quite a different type, and the tone offers nothing of a desirable nature at all if they refuse to take heed.
But here in Luke 12 Jesus is speaking to His disciples and He has some very enlightening but also sobering matters to address with them.
ATTENTIONS DIVERTED
Putting our text verses in the context of the moment, we look back and observe that Jesus has just told the parable of the wealthy landowner who thought he had it made because his barns were full. The man thinks he has all he needs for years to come, so he is now free to kick back and enjoy it all in ease. Little does he know that by morning he’s going to be dead.
Jesus has been telling this parable in the presence of a very large crowd of people. Verse one of chapter 12 says thousands. It says they were stepping on each other. But notice His comments are nevertheless directed to His disciples. Luke tells us that in verse one and again in verse 22.
He finishes the parable then once again says directly to His disciples, “For this reason I say to you…” For what reason? So they won’t end up like the fool with the full barns.
He laid up treasure for himself on earth but was not rich toward God.
Now we are not to derive from this that there is something wrong with having wealth or worldly goods. Lloyd Ogilvie pointed out that we in the church have historically been critical of successful people, condemning prosperity all year, and yet “…go to the prosperous at stewardship time to collect the results of their industry”. “AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GOD” – Regal Books 1979
Ogilvie’s point was that having wealth in itself is not bad. In fact, when a person is wealthy in this world, their duty to God is to first acknowledge that what they have comes from Him, and secondly to use it with Godly wisdom and charity.
The main point Jesus is making to them is that the man’s attentions were so riveted on his material goods and the here and now that he gave no thought for God and wasn’t ready for eternity.
So in verse 22 when He tells them (and us) “…do not be anxious for your life, as to what you shall eat; nor for your body, as to what you shall put on”
He wasn’t telling them it’s wrong to plan for yourself or to pursue your basic needs in an honest manner.
He also wasn’t saying this just to give them comfort and assurance that their needs would be met.
If you put this parable and these admonitions from Jesus all in context with the rest of the chapter you will see that although we do derive these other messages from this dialogue of His, the pressing and urgent message we need to get through our heads is, remember your priorities!
If our focus is so intent on acquisition and accumulation of worldly goods and comforts as though we cannot depend upon God, they will be such a distraction to us that we will forget God and not be ready for eternity.
Then He goes on to give them some examples from their world around them that should serve to be daily reminders of God’s goodness and provision. The birds. The lilies. The very grass. He takes care of all these things, and aren’t we worth infinitely more to Him than those things that whither and go back to the earth?
Of course. Thus, the admonition to keep our attentions fixed on the things that are eternal and stored up for us in the Kingdom of Heaven, because our hearts, that is, our desires and our delights and our attentions will be fixed on wherever our treasure is. Either on a passing world or an eternal home.
Paul made the same point in a slightly different context to the Colossians.
“Set your mind on the things above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.” Col 3:2-4
THE REVEALING OF CHRIST
The revealing of Christ is the very point Jesus was getting to with his warnings in Luke 12. Being ready for His coming is really the key focus of this entire discourse.
Look again at our text verses.
“Be dressed in readiness, and keep your lamps alight.”
I enjoyed watching the Dick Van Dyke show when it was on in the 60’s. The main two characters were Rob and Laura Petrie, played by Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore.
In one episode it was very close to time for Laura to deliver their baby. There was a scene where they were going to bed for the night, and when the scene opened, Rob was already in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin. Laura got in bed and pulled the blankets over herself, said good night and turned off the light.
There was a moment where the TV screen was dark, then you heard Laura say, “Rob?” as though she wanted to ask him something.
Suddenly, the light goes back on, he sits up and as he does he grabs his hat off the headboard where he had placed it, and as he jumps out of bed you see that he is fully dressed, sports coat and tie and everything, and he grabs a suitcase and is almost out the bedroom door before Laura can call him back and tell him it’s not time yet.
He was ready!
Well Jesus has exhorted His disciples, that includes you if you are a born again believer in Christ, not to let the things and the cares of the world distract them from what is really important.
Now He’s going even further and saying that we need to be more than aware that He’s coming; we need to be waiting with an attentiveness so acute that we cannot be taken by surprise.
“Be dressed in readiness, and keep your lamps alit.”
In the Greek the term there for being dressed in readiness is a reference to girding the loins. If you’ve been in a study of the Exodus you’ll remember what that means.
The way they wore their robes in ancient times made travel or physical labor extremely tedious, unless they reached between their legs, grabbed the back hem of their robe, brought it up to the front and tucked it into their belt.
This freed their legs for movement so they could bend and work or travel in haste.
So Jesus wasn’t saying to stay dressed in the way Rob Petrie stayed ready to take Laura to the hospital. He was saying to us that our state of readiness should be such that when He returns we are prepared to receive Him as a Master returning home and needing his servants ready to serve.
Jesus has this master returning from a wedding feast. Although He doesn’t specify that the master is himself the bridegroom, it is safe to assume that is the intent, since in other discourses Jesus equates Himself and His relationship with His followers with the status of a bridegroom to a bride. Luke 5 is an example:
Luke 5:34, 35 “And Jesus said to them, “You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you?
“But the days will come; and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.”
So setting the scene a little bit, Jewish weddings were held at night. Now the custom at nightfall was to bring in all the pets and in some cases a few head of livestock, and lock the door. Then everyone would bed down for the night and no one would go in or out until morning.
But here we have the master returning, and if he is indeed the bridegroom then he has with him his new bride, and he’s not going to look kindly on having to knock and bang and toss pebbles in the upstairs windows in order to get someone to let him in his own house.
So his servants are expected to be awake. Alert. Expecting him to come home. The revelation, we might say, of the bridegroom.
Another factor that might enter into the analogy here is that quite often wedding celebrations lasted for a week or more. They just went on until the food and wine gave out, and people would trickle away to their own homes and lives.
So the servants in this story would not have known the day or hour of his coming. The state of watchfulness by necessity was continuous.
The thing they knew for certain was, the master was coming home. If they gave up after a few days and said to themselves, “Well, he must have been waylaid by robbers. Or he must have decided to take his bride and start a new life elsewhere. Or since it’s been so long, surely he won’t expect that we’d still be watching out the window and waiting at the door”, those servants would be taken by surprise and would most certainly displease their master, and suffer for their lack of vigilance.
Christians, as I mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of Biblical admonitions to the believer to be watchful and alert and waiting for the Lord.
This kind of watchfulness and patient readiness is a common theme through the whole Bible. We see it in David’s psalms, and in the words of the prophets.
Here are just a couple:
Psalm 39:7 (NASB95)
7 “And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in You.
Micah 7:7 (NASB95)
7 But as for me, I will watch expectantly for the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God will hear me.
The old adage, ‘patience is a virtue’, is given its full and richest meaning in this context.
But we also see something in scripture in reference to waiting on the Lord, or waiting for the Lord that should give us all pause to reflect and examine ourselves.
That theme is that there will apparently be many who are not waiting for Him, not expecting Him, and by ‘many’ I do not mean the unbelieving world. I mean those in the church.
Here in our text verses Jesus likens the unexpectedness of His coming to that of a thief who catches his victims off guard. Remember the couple from Liverpool.
Even darker in its implications, is chapter 18 of this gospel, although in a slightly different context, Jesus is speaking of His Father’s readiness to bring justice to His children and ends saying in verse 8, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”
And although His reference there is to believers having faith that God will vindicate them and not desert them, I refer to this question of Jesus’ in the context of our verses of study because failure to expect His return is faithlessness, and lack of watchfulness and readiness to serve Him is a manifestation of that faithlessness. If we’re not ready, then we must not really believe He’s coming, no matter what our mouth says.
Warren Wiersbe in his Bible Exposition Commentary says this;
The saintly Presbyterian pastor Robert Murray McCheyne sometimes asked people, “Do you believe that Jesus is coming today?” If they replied in the negative, he would say, “Then you had better be ready, for He is coming at an hour when you think not!”
Don’t you just hate it when preachers ask you questions like that?
You kind of wonder if they’re setting you up for the next question.
“Do you believe Jesus is coming today?”
“…um…yeah…”
Listen! You better believe Jesus is coming back today! You should believe every day when you wake up that before you go to bed again Jesus is coming back. And when you lie down to sleep you’d better believe that Jesus is coming back tomorrow.
Because friend, Jesus is coming back and I don’t care what the pre-wrath people tell you or the people who think something has to happen first, like the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem or whatever event they might cite, Jesus said His coming will be as unexpected as the entrance of a thief in the night.
And when that happens, when that trumpet blast is heard and He catches His bride up to meet Him in the air, it will inevitably be at a moment when believers are not waiting, not watching, not ready.
If it were not so, He would not have seen the need to give these warnings and these exhortations to readiness.
Christian, be ready. Not just aware, but with your hearts and minds girded in readiness to move out at His beckoning.
Do you believe Jesus is coming back today? It’s easy to say, “Jesus is coming soon”, isn’t it? Soon is so vague. Soon could be next month or ten years from now, so we say ‘soon’ and go about our daily distractions. But do you believe Jesus is coming today? If there is a tendency for your subconscious mind to quickly answer ‘no’ to that question, Ask yourself why. Why not? Why can’t this be the day?
You don’t know the day or the hour. No one knows the day or the hour.
So why not today?
THE SERVING MASTER
There is a line in this text that just astounds me. If we are in agreement that the returning Master, the revealed bridegroom in this account is Jesus, and that we in His church are the servants, then how amazing is it that He says,
“…truly I say to you, that he will gird himself to serve, and have them recline at the table, and will come up and wait on them”. (vs 37)
Something that doesn’t really amaze me but it does make me chuckle, is how many learned Bible commentators dance the wide step around verses like this.
I have a computer program that gives me access to about 5 or six different commentaries, and I have one commentary on Luke on my shelves, and out of them all about the most I could get was a one line comment on verse 37 that said, “To those who are faithful the Lord will bring many blessings”.
That was his entire commentary on a very significant statement by Jesus!
Now I’m sure there are those out there who have tackled it. Seven commentaries is a very slim selection of what is ultimately available. But since I couldn’t find one, and my research staff is remarkably non-existent, I’m just going to tackle it myself and with the Holy Spirit’s guidance perhaps give us something to rejoice about today.
I’ll begin with a question.
Why should it surprise us, why should it embarrass us or shock us, really, to think that in eternity one of the ways Christ will relate to us will be as Servant?
In His incarnation did He begin being something He hadn’t been? And when He rose, glorified, to sit at the Father’s right hand did He begin then to be something He had never been?
Now our minds want to argue, ‘But He came as the Suffering Servant, but He will return as King of Kings and Lord of Lords and we will bow before Him and confess Him as Lord. And we will worship and serve Him forever”
Yes, that is how I understand scripture as well. But in all his royal authority doesn’t a good king serve his people? Even here in America with Presidents and Governors and Mayors instead of kings, don’t we call them public servants; even the ones who have authority over us?
Listen and think about this.
Perfect love and holiness makes for perfect relationships and perfect understanding.
We know so very little of servanthood now. And the history of sinful man has so perverted the idea of real servanthood, with oppression and forced slavery and mistreatment of the helpless that it is virtually impossible for us to imagine what perfected servanthood will be in the place where righteousness reigns.
But Jesus is giving us a picture here of a benevolent Master who, full of love and appreciation for his poor servants who have been faithful and patient to stay alert, and keep watching, and be ready for action when He returns and calls to them, will be moved to say, ‘Sit down. Take a rest. You’ve worked hard and played the part of a good steward and a watchful guardian. Let me bring you your reward”
Revelation 19:9 Then he said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’ ” And he said to me, “These are true words of God.”
Now I don’t presume to have a better grip on the symbolism of Revelation than anyone else. Men smarter than I may have very good arguments that there isn’t going to be an actual sit down dinner when we all get raptured.
But if there is, and there is this big feast to welcome us all home, why would we be surprised to see Jesus handing out the food and pouring the drinks?
You see, what makes it difficult, I think, is that we try to reason these things out through the sullied filter of our fallen pride and our twisted images of what humility is.
Humility isn’t thinking you’re worth nothing. Humility is knowing exactly what your worth and your talents and abilities are; what your place and rank are, and not being impressed either for good or for bad by them.
Jesus was able to say “I am meek and lowly of heart” because it was perfectly true.
Some of you will remember something I read to you from Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” in our evening bible study about what a truly humble man would be like. He said, “He will not be thinking about humility; he will not be thinking about himself at all.” Mere Christianity” - Lewis, Collier Books, 1943
It is my belief that in eternity when we are all there as the finished products of what God is in the process of making us, all of our attentions and affections, all of our desires and goals, all of our ambitions and efforts will be first to serve our Lord, and then to serve one another, with no thought of ourselves and no need to.
I’ll close with this.
If we truly believe that Jesus is coming back, and are prepared to say “Jesus is coming back today” and say that everyday until He comes, and really be ready and watching in faith because we really believe that, then that faith and that knowledge must manifest in our relationships to one another.
Because when Jesus suddenly calls His church to meet Him in the air, none of us wants to be found beating a fellow servant with our words, demanding repayment from an indebted brother with no show of mercy, walking past a fellow servant who is hurt and rejected and in need of help and ignoring him because the cares of the world call to us or we just don’t want to get our hands soiled.
The Biblical imperative for every servant of Christ is that we remain watchful and alert, dutiful and conscientious, serving the brethren, reaching the lost, proclaiming Christ until He comes.
“…for the Son of Man is coming at an hour that you do not expect” (vs 40)
ARE YOU READY?
