“What Time Is It?”

By Martin Irish

“A certain man gave a great supper and invited many, and sent his servant at supper time to say to those who were invited,‘Come, for all things are now ready. ‘But they all with one accord began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of ground, and I must go and see it. I ask you to have me excused.’

And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to test them. I ask you to have me excused.’ Still another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ So that servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in here the poor and the maimed and the lame and the blind.’

And the servant said, ‘Master, it is done as you commanded, and still there is room.’ Then the master said to the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say to you that none of those men who were invited shall taste my supper.’” ─Luke 14:16-24 NKJV

There is a problem I have been struggling with and since the Bible says that there is no temptation that we have experienced except that which is common to man (1 Corinthians 10:13), then I think it is a safe bet to say that there are others who struggle with it too. The struggle that I am talking about has to do with the inner fight to lay down our own desires, hopes, and dreams; and to deny ourselves, pick up our cross daily, and follow Jesus.

Let’s be honest for a minute, and just admit that it is not an easy thing to die to self. The Bible says in Romans chapter twelve that we are to present ourselves as a living sacrifice to God, but someone once said that the problem with living sacrifices is that they tend to crawl off the altar. Humorous as that may be, it is also a true and sobering fact that we must continually offer up our lives and be diligent to remain in a state of submission to our sovereign Lord on a daily basis. Let me see if I can bring this closer to home and illustrate it from my own life.

In January of 2011, I met this beautiful, spirited, and loving lady whom I fell in love with and she with me. Between the time that we met and were married, I started to have the Scripture verse above run through my head, or more accurately just a portion of it. The part that kept coming to mind was, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” But what it was going through my head about differed from the words of Jesus; for I did not seem to be declining to come to the Master’s banquet, but rather I was making an excuse as to why I could not obey His command to labor in His field for harvest time.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but all the things that have happened to me since this struggle began; from getting laid off from a good job that I held for seven years, to falling into a state of feeling lost and having no goals or vision to aim for, to slipping into depression and stepping out of fellowship with both the Lord and the church for a few months─have all come to pass because of this one thing: I have turned away from my calling to share the Word of God with others and to say what the Lord is laying upon my heart to say.

My wife and I have spent a good amount of time sharing with each other our dreams and desires for where we would like to live, what kind of home we would have, size of family, careers, hobbies, and so on before we were married and even more afterward. We both want a small house in the country with some land for a small farm with a barn, animals, and a garden. Now this may be just me, but I get the impression that we may not have that much time left before the Rapture of the church.

I spend time reading and listening to the news, as well as following a few blogs on the Internet and a person would have to be pretty ignorant of Bible prophecy to not see that the return of Christ is imminent. With the wars and rumors of wars, the famines, droughts, plagues, and distress of nations, I feel more strongly than ever before─that it is time that we watch and pray, for we do not know what hour the master of the house is going to return. (Mark 13:35)

What’s more, there is a huge departure from the faith happening in many mainstream Christian churches and denominations. People are leaving and joining the emergent church movement, which is adopting demonically inspired practices like meditation, which they call “listening prayer.” And listening to heretical teachers who say that the Word of God has been corrupted and that Jesus never really told people of an eternal punishment for sinners in hell─that those things were added later by the early church leaders who sought to control people by fear. They preach a pack of lies known as universalism in which they say that hell is not forever, but is only a temporary punishment meant to cleanse those that go there, so that they can one day accept Christ’s gift of grace and be saved.

continue at Rapture Ready:

http://raptureready.com/soap/irish1.html