The Great Feast

Have you ever been blessed by being one of the privileged

• Where you have been able to do something most others can’t?

• Backstage

Read Luke 14 The Parable of the Great Feast

• Being Blessed is how this story starts out

• A man makes a comment that what a blessing it’s going to be

• To be able to attend a Banquet in the Kingdom of God (ELAB on that event)

But Jesus informs him that not everyone looks at it this way

• And this is how the story plays out

In Jesus’ day when you invited someone to dinner,

• You told them the day but not the exact hour of the meal.

• A host had to know how many people were coming

• So he could butcher the right amount of animals and prepare enough food.

And when all the cooking and prep work was done

• The host would send his servants out to fetch the guests

• Tell em to get a move on the party’s getting ready to start

But in this story Jesus tells us that even though these people knew that there was a party on this day

• They made other plans

• Instead of being excited about going to the party

• They had made other plans that they felt were more important

In other words, each of the guests in this parable

• Had already agreed to attend the banquet.

• And the host expected them to be there.

• And the excuses they gave were weak and didn’t make any sense

The first man had bought some property and said he needed to go check it out

• In the East when you bought property it was a long complicated process

• This man would have had plenty of opportunities to check the property out before he bought it

• Because anyone who buys something without checking it out is always taking a chance

• Furthermore since most banquets are held at night

• The man would have been dealing with the problem of limited light to check out the property- He wouldn’t have been able to see

The 2nd man said that he had just bought 10 oxen and wanted to try them out

• Again 2 key facts go along with the 1st man’s excuse

• 1st it was late in the day and the sun would have been going down

• Not giving him ample time to really check em out

• And 2nd who would go buy 10 oxen without making sure that they could pull

• Kind of like buying a truck with a blown up engine

• It just doesn’t make any sense.

And this brings us to the 3rd man

• We claims he can’t come because now he has a wife

• Some might ask why wouldn’t he just bring his wife?

• Well in those days if you got invited to a banquet it was for men only,

• You didn’t bring the wife, the girl friend, a date,

• Because only Jewish men were invited to banquets,

• The host didn’t expect the wife to come anyway

But there’s more to this

• The process of getting married in those days was quite an event-ELAB

• So when the man received his invitation and RSVP’d-

• When he said he would be there

• He would have known that he would have had a wife

Bottom line, anyway we want to look at it, these were all just excuses

• And the host had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that everything was taken care of

• And now since all of his friends had blown him off

• He didn’t want all this food to go to waste

So he opens up the guest list

• And it doesn’t matter at this point who comes

• The only thing that is important is that we fill up the house

• Because what good is a party if there isn’t anyone to party with?

So he sends his servants out into the streets in town

• With the instruction to get everyone you can

• He says get the crippled, the blind, the lame

• Think about this guest list (ELAB on each one of these conditions, The servants had to help)

And the servants GO, they do this- They do what the master tells them to do

• And the people come

• But they still have room for more

So now the host says

• You’ve already invited everyone in town

• So now go invite everyone that’s outside town

• Search the country roads

• Look behind the bushes, Look everywhere,

• Invite everyone you find and tell them to come (ELAB on the kind of people that would be sleeping behind bushes)