If you’re just back from holiday, welcome back.
There’s a great deal of curiosity in the media about the last words people say, have you noticed? People attach great significance to the last utterances of famous men and women; Princess Diana, Michael Jackson or whoever. What did they say before they died? What great, profound pearls of wisdom did they bequeath as they left this world? Ever since a general in the American civil war called John Sedgwick looked over the valley at the enemy and said, “Hah! They couldn’t hit an elephant from this dist-” we call it famous last words. H.G. Wells, as his nurse, entered his room said “Go away, I’m all right” and then died. And Douglas Fairbanks Senior said “I’ve never felt better” moments before breathing his last.
If we think that the last words of the great and the good are worth listening to, how much more should we pay particular attention to the closing verses of God’s unique and inspired Word? What last gems of truth will God give us before closing the pages of his eternally inspired word? Well? When you get to the end of the book of Revelation, you’ll have just negotiated the final judgment and you’ll have finished with all those weird beasts and strange numbers – and when you get to the very last verses of the Bible you find that they are words of grace simple enough for a child to understand and get the message. And what you find are four things; an invitation, a warning, a reminder and a prayer.
An Invitation (v17)
Let’s start with the invitation (v17). We all like to get an invite to a wedding or a party don’t we? We feel special and privileged. It’s nice to be thought of and we look forward to the fun.
But no one is more special and privileged than the one who receives this invitation from God: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let those who hear say, ‘Come!’ Let those who are thirsty come; and let all who wish take the free gift of the water of life.” Happy are you! These are the words that God addresses to you this morning, calling for a response.
Right at the beginning of the Bible, we find God searching for a response to him, “Where are you Adam?” (Genesis 3.9) In the middle of the Bible God calls again saying, “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.” And here, right at the end he’s still looking. It’s as if God said to John, the apostle: “Before you seal the book, write down one last appeal just in case there’s still anyone left who still might just want to turn back to the living God and to be showered with grace and favour forever.
In fact, it’s not one invitation here, it’s actually five. Five reasons why men and women should turn to God.
The Spirit says, “Come!” Why should anyone pay any attention to the things of God? Because the Holy Spirit beckons us. The Holy Spirit imparts spiritual life. The Holy Spirit frees prisoners from the addiction to sin. The Holy Spirit breathes power into the Christian life. God the Holy Spirit is calling, calling, calling this morning. “Come!” Heaven’s door is wide open and there’s a place at the feast for you. But will everyone here accept his invitation?
Why should anyone here respond to God? Because the bride (which is Revelation language for the God’s people) is urging us also.
The groom and his bride; what an image of Christ and his church. Marriage these days gets a bit of a bad press. Actor and film director Clint Eastwood once said, “They say marriages are made in heaven. Yeah, so is thunder and lightning!” But the Bible never portrays Christ as an uncommunicative or henpecked husband. Nor is the church ever a nagging or unfulfilled wife.
This is no tired old relationship, going through the motions, with all the passion gone. Throughout Scripture, the love between Christ and his people is portrayed in terms of the excitement of the wedding and the zest of youth. It’s new. It’s fresh. It’s wonderful forever! So when it say “the bride says ‘come’” it is the picture of God’s people, satisfied in Christ, calling out, “Come in, this is great, you’re not too late, there’s plenty more room and there’s more to share.”
The third invitation comes from someone else again. “And let those who hear say, ‘Come!’” Who is this? Bible scholars can’t make up their minds and, to be honest, I don’t really know. But I think it’s probably talking about anyone else who happens to be listening. This is the Bible’s “Uncle Tom Cobley and all” if you like. If anyone else just standing around happens to overhear something about this fantastic invitation, well, you can come in too.
But the great invitation of v17 hasn’t finished yet. The prospect of unlimited abundance merits a wholehearted invitation. “Let those who are thirsty come...”
“Is anyone thirsty?” Asked Jesus. How do you know if you’re thirsty or not? If you’ve just run a couple of miles on a hot day you know that uncomfortable tightness in your throat that just cries out for a cold drink. How do you know if you’re spiritually thirsty? It’s the same. Spiritually, you want more. Just coming to church isn’t enough for you. You yearn for a deeper, more real, more less routine experience of God.
Malcolm Muggeridge was thirsty. Listen to what he said: “I may, I suppose, regard myself or pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets - that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue - that’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversion - that’s pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time - that’s fulfilment. Yet I say to you - and I beg you to believe me - multiply these triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing - less than nothing, a positive impediment - measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are.”
Fame, success, pleasure, fulfilment - or the spring of the water of life.
“Let all who wish take the free gift of the water of life.” One last thing; there’s no cost. What could be simpler; an invitation to come for free.
When I lived in London, I used to go around the neighbourhood and offer people the church magazine, which was free. It was a simple way of keeping people living in the parish in touch with their local church and a nice way to show the neighbourhood that we were interested in them. It was really interesting to study people’s response to this. Most people said, “Oh, well, o.k., thank you. Goodbye.” Some said, “Christians? No thanks.” But a surprising number said, “Oh, here’s some money.” “Oh you don’t have to pay for it,” we said. “It’s free.” But we found that some people just don’t want to get anything for nothing and they wouldn’t take the parish magazine without making a contribution. (So we took the money and put it in the poor fund).
Now, as I think I said a few weeks ago, men and women sometimes have problems with grace, precisely because it’s God’s glorious offer of peace and life and joy and freedom - at no cost. Even if you win the lottery you have to shell out a few quid for a scratch card – but grace is entirely free. But there seems to be something in human nature that says, “I don’t want handouts, I want to make a little contribution. “Take it, says God.” And swallow your pride. It’s free, because I’ve already paid.”
Grace means two things. Firstly, it means your bad deeds need not keep you out of heaven. Nothing you or I have ever done is so wicked and monstrous that God has thrown in the towel and said, “Right, that’s it, you’re history - I am washing my hands of you.” God never says that to anyone while there is still breath in their body. Your bad deeds need not keep you out of heaven.
But secondly, grace also means that your good deeds cannot help you get into heaven either. You’ve got to accept God’s free water. You can’t take your own water supply with you instead. In other words, all your good deeds added together over a whole lifetime are not good enough.
Philip Yancey put it this way; “Grace is knowing that nothing you can do could make God love you any more and nothing you can do could make God love you any less.”
2) A Warning (v18-19)
So that’s the invitation. Take it - or leave it, you have to do one or the other. After the invitation, the warning. And you don’t need to be clever to get the message it. “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If any one of you adds anything to them, God will add to you the plagues described in this scroll. And if any one of you takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from you your share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.” It means, don’t mess around with God’s word. You can’t improve it by adding anything and you’ll only spoil it by cutting anything out. It’s a bit like the advert for bread I used to watch on TV as a kid. “Nothing added, nothing taken away.”
I once preached in a Japanese church in Paris. I can’t remember now if I preached in French or English – it wasn’t Japanese anyway. But I noticed that the translation was getting longer and longer as the sermon went on. I’d say something like, “Jesus is alive.” And the translation followed: “Ying tong, sushi, Toyota, ying tong, Yamaha, yang song, fuji, karate, tong mong, tokyo ying tong, yang yong, karaoke.” The translator seemed to be adding his own ideas to my sermon. You’re probably thinking “I could add a few of my own to this one come to think of it.”
But when it comes to God’s word, you can’t improve it by adding to it. Jesus plus is actually Jesus minus – because all you need is Jesus. I used to have a Bible with notes at the bottom. You know what? I ended up reading the notes more than the Bible and, having put the book down, couldn’t remember which was God’s word and which were man’s wisdom.
Other people take away from God’s word. They look at it and say, “Oh, we don’t like all this fighting in the Old Testament. And these prophecies are a bit doom and gloom aren’t they? And you can’t believe in miracles today so they’ll have to go too. And no one can understand half of what Paul says so let’s just get rid of that bit. Oh, and this morality is all out of date. And by the time they’ve finished you’re left with the cover, the index and the maps!
The Bible commentator Michael Wilcock’s thoughts on these verses are helpful. He says this; “If we believe that what God has said in his word is not sufficient for salvation, but that we need to make certain additions of our own if we are to be saved; or if we believe that some of the demands of God’s book are superfluous, and we can get by without observing them; then we are saying we know better than God.”
It’s important we have this warning here. Because grace doesn’t mean, do what you like, God is so nice he won’t mind. God is a good and loving Father who gives it to us straight, who tells us where the boundaries are, not an absent Father who lets us do anything we want.
3) A Reminder (v20)
Thirdly, and I’ll go a bit quicker now, as the canon of Scripture ends, as the whole of God’s revelation of himself comes to a close, one final look at Jesus, and a reminder that he is coming again soon. And the surprise is that it is the Lord himself who reminds us.
The very first words spoken to his disciples after Jesus ascended into heaven were, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand there looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go.” Now, the very last words Jesus addresses us from Scripture are on the same theme. “I am coming back.”
The earliest Christians used to say “Maranatha”, which is the Aramaic equivalent to what is written at the end of v20. Amen, come Lord Jesus. Every time we share Holy Communion together, as we will this morning, we proclaim his death - until he... comes. Every time we say the Nicene creed we declare our belief that, “he will… come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”
Where is heaven? I don’t know. Billy Graham said, “It doesn’t matter where it is. It is where Jesus is.” C.S. Lewis said this: “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” I think that’s a good summary of what the Bible says about eternity, and it’s good enough for me.
But the surprising truth is this; it isn’t so much that we are going up there to be with him forever, as him coming down here to be with us forever. So what will eternity with God in the new heavens and the new earth be like? Is it a real place? The Bible certainly presents it to us as such. Jesus said: “I am going to prepare a place for you.” Paul wrote that we will have resurrection bodies. The New Testament speaks of streets, rivers, trees, eating and drinking, music... a real physical world.
A Prayer (v21)
And finally a prayer for blessing, appropriately because this prophecy was to be read out in the 7 churches of chapters 2 and 3.
Those churches were about to face terrible, heavy persecution which is what Revelation is all about; it was to show the church what must soon take place. It is by the grace of God that we can triumph over the challenging times of the future. Some of you, I know, are facing a very uncertain future healthwise, jobwise, familywise and so on. “Surely goodness and loving kindness will follow me all the days of my life.” Surely God’s grace will be sufficient to the end.
May God renew your confidence today that the grace that saved you shall also sustain you and take you to a glorious eternity.
John opens the Revelation (1:4) with grace and now he closes it (22:21) with grace. God’s amazing favour on us, his sheer mercy that we just don’t deserve, his unfathomable decision to adopt us as heirs, his steadfast commitment to bless us to the end, for the rest of our days, that’s grace.
Now, may the grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 30th August 2009
