Join us in exploring the fascinating connections between the Jubilee year and Pentecost. This discussion offers valuable insights into age-old traditions and their spiritual implications. Through examining scriptural passages and historical contexts, we navigate the themes of harvest, renewal, and the powerful metaphor of sowing and reaping as presented in biblical teachings. This episode prompts a deeper reflection on the role of believers as active participants in this divine cycle of growth and fulfillment.
SPEAKER 01 :
We rarely give very much thought to these days between Pentecost and Passover, that’s between Passover and Pentecost, that this is, I guess, just another week in a lot of ways. But there are now six weeks to Pentecost. One week is already over and has passed. And it’s easy enough to forget, because we always call it Pentecost, that the oldest name, I believe, of this festival is the Feast of Weeks, or perhaps the Feast of Firstfruits. I’m not entirely sure which of those titles was attached to it first. It is, though, primarily the Feast of Weeks. In ancient times, this period of time that we’re now in now, not today, of course, but the period of seven weeks, was a time of very hard work. This was a time when the Israelite didn’t have the chance to wander off down to the Jordan River and go fishing because these were days of getting in the early barley harvest, the beginning of the wheat harvest took place during this period of time, And everything had to be done. I don’t know how, but I had gotten in my mind down years past that the harvest, there were two harvests. There was an early spring harvest of grain and a late big harvest of grain. But the truth of the matter is that the autumn harvest was a fruit harvest. It was a totally different produce at that time. And that the grain was almost entirely finished by the time you get to the Feast of Weeks, or the Feast of Firstfruits, as it’s often called. So, the… The period of time now, they would work six days and they would rest the seventh. Work six days and rest the seventh through this period of time. And then when they got down to the end of this period of time, to the 49th day, this was a Sabbath and they would rest. And then the 50th day was a special Sabbath, a high day. It’s called the Feast of Weeks or First Fruits or Pentecost. And it was a celebration of the harvest just then finished, of the harvest that was then over. And when you think about it in those terms, it becomes more interesting, I think, to read Acts 2 and realize that all the church were all together with one accord on the day of Pentecost, that this is the day when God poured out his spirit in a way, and in a sense, the metaphor becomes a little shaky in a way at this point, but it’s there nevertheless, that that is the place where he really began that harvest. was on the day of Pentecost, and it very much symbolizes that day. This is a day when Peter said, looks forward to a time when God will pour out his spirit upon all flesh, when your sons and daughters will dream dreams, your old men will dream dreams, your sons and daughters will see visions, a very important time. Now, if you’ll turn back with me to Leviticus 23, to the scripture which establishes and lays out for us this whole pattern, we’ll pick up on a few rather interesting things. In Leviticus 23, In beginning in verse 9, the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, Speak to the children of Israel and say unto them, When you become into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then you shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest. He will wave the sheaf before the Lord to be accepted for you. On the morrow after the Sabbath shall the priest wave it. Now, we have interpolated that over the years, interpreted to mean the morrow after the Sabbath during the days of unleavened bread. And that is correct, certainly for the church, although there is no specific statement of that in the Old Testament. It just says, on the morrow after the Sabbath. For those in Old Testament times, it was necessary that they go out and look at the grain as it began to develop, because they had to choose a week, which they actually, believe it or not, adjusted the calendar so that that week fell within the days of unleavened bread. But they had to choose a time when that barley was going to be ripe, And, of course, they watched the weather and they watched the development of the crops in the field. And if they were not going to be ready in time, the priests, the Levites, had the authority to add a 13th month to the calendar arbitrarily in any given year. And they socked that 13th month in there and shoved it all later so that there would be no question, but that they would be able to take this first sheaf of grain into the temple on the morrow after the Sabbath. And it was important that it be on the morrow after a weekly Sabbath. Now, there is some confusion there. that began to exist, and there were parties among the Jews who believed that it was the morrow after the annual Sabbath that it was waved. So they would wait until the morrow after the 15th, and so I would presume for them it would have been, for those who believed that way, the year Jesus was crucified, that it would have been a Friday would have been the day that they were actually waving the wave sheave rather than on the following Sunday. And I’ll explain in a minute why we understand it to have been on a Sunday, or should have been on a Sunday, rather than on a Friday in that particular year. But the Jews do it on the morrow after the weekly Sabbath, and so consequently, Pentecost always falls for them on a calendar date, 6th of Sivan, every year, consistently, like clockwork. For us, it may vary considerably as far as calendar date, for it always falls on the same day of the week, always on a Sunday, Pentecost. And of course, this has been a an interesting question it keeps rising again and again in the church down through generations it seems and we’ve gone around and around about it and of course the church kept Pentecost on Monday for a lot of years it was really not until we ceased doing that and began keeping Pentecost on a Sunday that a sudden connection came in my mind others may have noticed it before that because they had studied a little more carefully than I perhaps but I had not noticed the connection before The connection is found in the 25th chapter of Leviticus, where the Jubilee year is discussed. Now, here God presents through Moses to the people his basic calendrical cycle, as it were, not only a cycle of the heavens for the annual holy days, but a cycle for the land. And so he told them that there are six years in which you will actually work your land, and then the seventh year you will let the land lie idle, and then you may work it six more years, and then you let the land lie idle. You work it six more years, and you let the land lie idle. You do this through a seven-time, seven-year cycle. And so you, having gone through this complete cycle, you come to the 50th, interesting expression, but it is used, the 50th year. And in that year, when you come to the Day of Atonement, you blow the trumpet, and you declare the Jubilee. And slaves are freed, and land reverts back to their original owners. Everything is all cleared up, and everybody gets a brand-new start in the year of the Jubilee. It’s a beautiful concept. Now, of course, a Jubilee lays out this interesting set of cycles with sabbatical years, and at the end of it you have a sabbatical year followed by the Jubilee year. What I also, for some reason, because some people kept saying for so many years that Pentecost meant count 50, and I never really looked it up, it actually means 50th, and you might just as easily have said that the Jubilee year is the Pentecost year. or 50th year, because that’s precisely what it was. And so the connection overlays. Now, it makes absolutely no sense in a way. The whole thing tends to get very shaky if you begin counting these weeks that we’re now in from the morrow after the annual Sabbath, because what happens is you actually go out and have the wave sheaf, and you work one day, and then you rest the Sabbath. Then you work six days, rest the seventh, six days, rest the seventh. Whereas if you do it the way we do it, and you were in ancient Israel, you would have a weekly Sabbath, you would go out the next day and offer the wave sheaf, then you would work the remainder of that day and work six days, rest the seventh. Six days, rest the seventh. In other words, it falls into the weekly cycle, and the weekly cycle is precisely the point of the Feast of Weeks, as one makes his way through seven Sabbaths. Now coming back here to Leviticus 23 again, you shall offer that day When you offer the wave sheaf a lamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering to the Lord, the meal offering thereof shall be two-tenth deals of fine flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire to the Lord for a sweet savor. The drink offering shall be wine, a fourth part of an hen. You shall neither eat bread nor parched corn nor green ears until the selfsame day that you have brought an offering to your God. In other words, you are not allowed to harvest any part of your crop and prepare it for yourself to eat until you have actually gone through the ceremony of offering the wave sheaf. So all the new crop, you could eat your old stuff, but all the new crop had to be held until after that wave sheaf was offered. So then you could begin to consume it. And you shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day you brought the sheaf of the wave offering, seven Sabbaths shall be complete. Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall you number fifty days, and you shall offer a new meat offering to the Lord. Now, to be sure, there may be some minor obscuration in the King James Version, depending upon how you want to play around with the words. But as it’s been pointed out to me about people who read Hebrew, if you read Hebrew, there isn’t any way you’re ever going to mistake what this means. There’s just no way of missing it. Especially, and I can recall myself, back when we were keeping Monday Pentecost, being a little bit disturbed, when it says, even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall you number fifty days. Because the way the wording ran, it seemed to me that it ought to be on, the Pentecost should be the morrow after the Sabbath. But we had to work our way around that and decide, well, that meant tomorrow after the seventh week, and the week wasn’t over until Sunday, and therefore it was Monday when you actually kept Pentecost. The arguments on it go on and on and on, and they become very, very tiresome. But suffice it to say, I think that, you know, several years ago, informed opinion in the church came to clearly see that it should be, of course, on a Sunday, and that decision was made. If any of you want to dig into that, we don’t have really any that much in the way of literature, but we do have several tapes where we’ve gone into the subject at times. We’d be happy to try to dig them out for any of you who are of a mind to want to go into the subject. But anyhow, the whole thing is laid out, and the important thing of it is, I think, the laying out of the seven weeks of a harvest. And the point is that these are weeks of harvest that we are now going through. It would have been if we were still connected to the land. To us, they are weeks just like any other of our lives. To an Israelite, they were weeks very much unlike the rest of the year. They were weeks of harvest, a great deal of joy if the weather had been good because you could see all this wealth being gathered into your barns. They were weeks of happiness, of looking forward to the time when you get that over with and you could celebrate and begin to really enjoy the summer. It was a good time. It was a hard-working time and a very different time for them in many ways. Now I want you to turn back with me to the 20th chapter of John because it is really only here that as Christians we can nail down exactly what all this means to us, where it all is going. The 20th chapter of John. It’s a simple little statement that is made here and one almost wonders why it is here, but it reveals to us a great deal. We find ourselves here on a Sunday morning. The stone has been rolled away. The women have found that Jesus is not there. And we find Mary standing outside the sepulcher weeping. And as she wept, she stooped down, verse 11, looked into the sepulcher, and she saw two angels in white sitting, the one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they said, Woman, why are you weeping? And she said, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him. She had no idea, not even a hint that he was raised from the dead. She said, I don’t know where they have laid him. And when she had thus said, she turned back and saw Jesus standing, and she did not know that it was Jesus. He said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for? And she supposed him to be the gardener and said, Sir, if you have borne him away, tell me where you’ve laid him, and I’ll take him away. And Jesus said, Mary. And she turned to him and said, Rabboni, which is to say, Master. And Jesus said to her, because her first impulse doubtless was to grab him, said, Don’t touch me. For I am not yet ascended to my Father. Go to my brethren and say to them, I ascend to my Father and to your Father and to my God and to your God. Now, that’s all very interesting. What becomes more interesting is, a little bit later, we find him after eight days. The disciples, verse 26, were within. Thomas was with them. And Jesus came, the doors being shut, and he stood in the middle of them and said, Peace be unto you. And he said to Thomas, Reach here your finger and behold my hands. Reach here your hand and thrust it into my side, and be not faithless, but believing. And so Thomas was allowed at that point of time to touch him. So sometime between the time that he saw Mary, and really even the same day a little bit later, I believe, whether other accounts of the Gospels will tell us, he ascended to the Father and then returned to his disciples. Now the important thing I think for us to realize when we look at this is that that this is the moral after the Sabbath, during the days of unleavened bread. It is right at the time whenever the first ripe grain was coming ripe in the fields, right at the time when a party of the Jews believed that the wave sheaf was to be offered. And of course, under these circumstances, Pentecost falls on a Sunday, not on the 6th of Sivan, as I believe the Sadducees party was the one that held to this particular idea of the way the that Pentecost was to be counted. So we are at a time when the wave sheaf would be offered on Sunday morning. Jesus is presented to the Father. Now, bearing in mind that this feast is called the Feast of Firstfruits, turn back over to 1 Corinthians with me. Just want to give you a little bit of a rundown on why we believe some of the things that we believe relative to Pentecost and to these days of harvest in between. I’m sorry, 1 Corinthians 15. and verse 20. He says, But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruit, and I think that word is singular in the Greek, the first fruit of them that slept. Proceeding to talk about how in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive, but every man in his own order. Christ the first fruit, afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. So Jesus is, in a sense, the first of the firstfruits. He is the first of those to be raised from the dead. He is the first to be harvested, as it were, from the earth. Now also, if you’ll turn back with me to James, James chapter 1. I’m not too fumble-fisted to find it. James chapter 1, verse 17. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures, of his creation. Then if you turn over to Revelation 14.4, you find the 144,000 identified as a part of the first fruits to God and to the Lamb. Okay, what am I establishing with all of this? Simply this, that the analogy of harvest is one that Jesus himself uses repeatedly during his ministry, having to do with the work of saving people from this world, of saving souls, if you will, of reaching out here and saving lives, of going up and down the streets, and of reaching out to people, of helping discouraged and depressed people to find a way of life that has meaning to it, of changing lives, of bringing people to repentance and baptism. All these things Jesus refers to as harvesting. of gathering, of bringing people in as opposed to merely bringing things in. And all of us are called, and all of us really who are converted in this entire age in which we live, first fruits. Jesus, the first of all those first fruits, and then of course all of us together. One of the most shocking things to me, and our most shocking, I don’t know if that’s the word for it, but really eye-opening things that I have seen, frankly, in the last several years, is the awareness that that the harvest that was to come during this period of time was not necessarily to be some tiny minuscule thing that is of no significance whatsoever. And that the time of this, between Passover and Pentecost, representing in a sense the generations of man that would come between Christ’s sacrifice and ascension and his second coming, really represents an enormous number of people. compared maybe to the population of the world, not very large, but in total, a considerable sum of people who need to be reached in the world and who may be reached in the world. Turn back with me, if you will, to John, the fourth chapter, because at this point, I think we need to understand Jesus’ attitude toward this harvest. In John, the fourth chapter, Jesus has been talking to the woman at the well and his disciples came to him finally and said to him in verse 31, Master, eat. And he said to them, I have meat to eat that you don’t know anything about. Therefore, the disciples said to one another, well, has somebody brought him something to eat? He said, my meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you say there are yet four months and then comes the harvest? And really, that’s about what we would probably be saying ourselves right about now. About four months from now is harvest time. That’s autumn. That’s when all the harvest festivals are, aren’t there? You make your way around the churches, they’ll all have, a lot of them will have some sort of harvest festival. It’s about four months really or so now before that festival comes. Don’t you say there are yet four months and then comes the harvest? Look, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields. They are white already under harvest. And he that reaps receives wages and gathers fruit unto life eternal, that both he that sows and he that reaps may be one. And herein is that saying true. One sows and another reap. I sent you to reap, for upon you bestowed no labor. Other men labored, and you are entered into their labors. Now, talking about this same thing, the other gospel writer says to his disciples, Pray ye, the Lord of the harvest, that he may send forth laborers into his harvest. To me, that’s interesting because right at the moment he makes this statement, he is surrounded by 12 men whom he is going to name apostles and whom he is going to commission to go out and to carry on a work. These are men to whom he will say, greater works than these that I do shall you do because I go to my father and because I commission you and because I send you out to do this work. And he said to those 12, look, the fields are white to harvest. Pray the Lord of the harvest that he will send forth workers into his harvest. I want to tell you essentially what that means to me. That those twelve… be they apostles or what have you, were nowhere near enough to accomplish very much as far as God’s work is concerned. That there is a harvest that must be made, that the fields are white any time you look out there in the harvest, and there is a direct relationship between that harvest and the number and the effectiveness of the laborers who are actually involved in that harvest. Now, I’ve said a lot of words there. Let me see if I can back up and help you to understand what I’m trying to say. Whenever God looks down upon the world, how many people are there here whom he is willing to call? Well, I have no idea. I feel there’s a very grave danger, though, in our sitting up here and saying, well, you know, God’s only going to call a very few people out here. And he’s going to call those people regardless of what I do. that God is going to do his work, he’ll raise up stones, or he’ll do this. Now, all that may be true as far as it goes. I’m just not sure it’s real healthy for you and I as people whom he has called, and with all the gifts that he has given to us, if God should have to go out there and raise up stones to try to call people. I have to think about this a little bit, and I say to myself, wait a minute. Here’s a man named Saul, Saul of Tarsus. who finally God changed his name to Paul, or they at least began to call him Paul. Maybe they liked the meaning of Paul better than the word destroyer, which is what Saul meant, and he certainly was no longer a destroyer. When you understand that here’s a man who goes into a city and he preaches the gospel, stands up before a group of people, preaches the gospel, And before you know it, whatever’s happened, perhaps it’s Saul’s personality, who knows what the reason for it is, they’ve laid hands on that man. And they’ve drug him outside the city gates and sent all of a sudden a rock carry him off his head. And he’s on the ground, the first thing he knows, covered up with a heap of rocks as people stone him. They walk off and leave him for dead. And he sort of drags himself out from under the rocks that are there and says, who needs this? You know, and his acquaintances help him back into town. and they find the best way they can find it back down to the shore of the Mediterranean, and they take shipping and go back to someplace where he can make tents. No, that isn’t what happened. He got up, and he went down the road to the next city, and he walked into the city and he began to do it again. Now, this sort of thing happened with Paul not once, but many, many times, where he was strapped up and beaten. sometimes by Jews to 40 stripes save one, sometimes by Romans without any particular limit, so maybe somebody got tired of hitting him and got somebody else to hit him for a while. They beat him with rods and with clubs. He endured terrible perils of danger because, you know, traveling in those days was not like traveling today. It wasn’t a matter of, you know, having well-traveled roads with the state policemen every few miles up and down the road to maybe keep all the bad guys and robbers intimidated from shooting up the place. It was dangerous to travel in those days. They were in perils of his own countrymen. He was in perils of the Gentiles. He was in perils of nature. He spent a night and a day bobbing around in the Mediterranean holding on to a piece of driftwood. Why did he do all that if his work made no difference? It’s difficult sometimes for us to fully understand this, but the quantity… And the quality, that is the number and the effectiveness of the laborers that are actually out doing God’s work, makes a difference in the number of people who are going to be coming up in the first resurrection. It has to. Nothing else makes any sense when you understand what was going on in here. Nothing else makes any sense when you hear Jesus say, pray the Lord of the harvest, that he will send laborers into his harvest. That the number… And the effectiveness makes a difference. We are so prone, of course, to let the other person do it, to leave the responsibility on somebody else’s shoulder when harvest time actually comes. I want you to turn back with me, if you would, to perhaps the most fundamental teaching that exists of Christianity, the most basic, the most bedrock, the most believed, the Sermon on the Mount. And Jesus says in Matthew 5 and verse 13, You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? What is the value in salt? Well, you’ve got to taste it, right? How much good does it do the world for you to be in the world if the world does not know that you are a Christian? You know, what’s the value? In other words, if you can’t be tasted, if you can’t be sensed, if by some means one cannot become aware of you, of who you are, of what you stand for, what you won’t stand for, what you believe in, what you would live for, and what you would die for. Now, for you and I, that is really not much of a trick. For these people, now that was another matter. For these people, it was another matter. Entirely. When you understand that whenever to profess to be a Christian, to actually begin to try to live by the teachings of Christ, was worth your life. Where it was worth a situation where you could actually be clapped in chains and shipped off to the lead mines of Sardinia. Where what they did when they took you there, and you got to this place, they put chains on you, and they didn’t put locks. There were no locks on these chains. The chains were permanently soldered. They then cut. part of the back of your heel so that you could not run. They cut a couple of other muscles. They permanently branded you with a number on your forehead so you could always be recognized as a slave from the lead mines where they had taken you. This was where a lot of Christians wound up, and they worked all but four hours a day in shifts. They’d get five minutes to sit down and rest, and they were back up working again. And the chains were welded on where they never, for the remainder of their life, which would not be very long, could ever stand up. And then they were beaten soundly before they ever got to the mines, and this way quite a few of them died in the process and never got there. This is what it, you know, being a Christian in those days involved a certain amount of risk, that it just really doesn’t quite come home to us here and now. You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt can’t be tasted, well, nobody cares anything about using it for salt. It’s good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel but on a candlestick. And it gives light to all the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Now when I read this, all this comes together to me to say that we, I mean, you and I, every single one of us, minister, layperson, man, woman, every single one of us is to impact the world around us. In other words, is to have an effect on the world around us, is to be discerned, to be recognized, to be felt, to be adjusted to, to have to make allowances for by the world around us. To me, this statement, if the salt has lost its savor… it is good for nothing to be cast out and trodden under the foot of men, says to me that unless a Christian is recognizable, he is good for nothing. Now, I got to thinking about this and the relationship with the harvest that maybe we should be entering into right now. And I thought, the world is not going to be saved by a strong hand from someplace. The world is going to be saved by a returning, conquering Jesus Christ. Of what value is a Christian who goes forth preaching that, oh, I’ve got good news. The world is not going to come to an end. We are going to be saved from our madness by a strong hand from someplace. Of what value is that? Might make somebody sleep a little better at night. But it’s not going to create any harvest. Nobody is going to, let’s say, be severed from the roots of this earth and transferred into the godly kingdom. Because they’ve been told that, yeah, God’s going to save you with a strong hand from someplace or somebody is. We do not merely, by the way, attend a church convention every autumn. We attend the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn. And it’s a festival with a very specific meaning. It conveys a considerable amount of knowledge to people about who we are, what we stand for, our detachment from this world, the fact that our roots are not here, the fact that we look for a kingdom. These things, I think, are a part of being salt. You and your family disappear every autumn. Somebody says, well, we went to a church convention. Oh, well, everybody goes to church conventions, so nobody asks any further questions. You know, we abstain from pork, not merely because we are allergic to it, And not merely because it doesn’t agree with us, but because God commanded us not to. Now, that in itself is a little bit unusual when someone encounters someone and says, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t care for that. And if they say, well, why not? Well, you know, we follow the law of God, which says that we’re not to eat pork. Oh, well, you may or you may not. I would say in most cases you have absolutely nothing to fear from any further questioning, if that’s worrying you. Very few people will inquire any further than that. But you know, sometimes it is the simplest little things, the simplest little things, that will allow a person to get a glimpse into what might be there for them. It’s sort of like just leaving the door open a crack. You know, you don’t have to throw it wide open and get behind them and try to shove them through it. But a lot of times, many of us are afraid to even leave the door open a crack. You know, The more I think about it, the more I realize, you know, we have a faith which is rich and beautiful and pregnant with meaning, with beautiful traditions that have some depth to them. It’s a gorgeous religion, if you want to call it that. It’s a beautiful religion. It’s a rich and meaningful religion that you and I have. When you think about it, that everywhere we turn, everything we do is rich with symbolism, fraught with new ideas, with new concepts, gives us tremendous insight into God’s plan, to his workings, to what he’s up to, what he’s not up to, what he wants to do, what he won’t do. My, it’s a beautiful thing. You know, it is so easy, though, in spite of that, to make people feel that our religion is esoteric, hidden, exclusive, odd, awkward, or embarrassing. It is really easy to convey that feeling to another person. especially if you feel that way yourself. I guess in a way I’m talking about a certain pride in our faith. It’s an awkward combination of terms, but to realize that what we have is a beautiful thing, not an awkward or an ugly thing. You know, I have an exceptional painting that I especially enjoy. It’s a a painting of three little girls who are kind of embarrassed because one of them with a stick has reached up and knocked a hand off a suit of armor, and the hand is lying down on the floor, and they’re all looking kind of startled and backed off from it. It’s really quite a lovely work, and it’s probably, I’d say it’s around 100 years old. Now, would it make sense to you if I had this without a frame? If I went down there to Safeway and picked myself up some orange crates and went home and hammered my nails in the saw, and I kind of fashioned myself a crude frame to put around this really exceptional painting. Then I stood back and I looked at it and I thought, well, that’s kind of embarrassing. It doesn’t really look very good. So I take this gorgeous thing down into my garage and I put it in my workshop where no one but me will ever see it. Does that make much sense to you? Now, maybe it’s not the best analogy in the world, but sometimes I think we do that with our faith. I think we put a crusty old, you know, rusty old frame around the thing, and then we get a little bit embarrassed maybe with the frame. And so we tend to want to put the whole thing in a closet or keep it all to ourselves or, well, we’ll go, you know, I’ll let my friends come down to my workshop, but, you know, because they’re going to make allowances for all of my mistakes and all of my not having had the time to get it cleaned up or everything put away, and they’ll appreciate the painting and they won’t pay much attention to it. They may joke with me a little bit about my handiwork on the frame, but I understand. They’re my friend. I can… put up with that a little bit. I really believe sometimes that we make precisely that kind of a mistake with our faith. We put a bad, you know, piece of work around it or kind of an awkward looking thing around it and then we hide it from people. You know, there are quite literally right now some weeks of harvest ahead of us. And I would say that between the Passover and Pentecost of this year, it’s not unlikely that we will add something like 3,500 new people to our mailing list in just this seven-week period of time. It could happen. We’re maybe running a little bit behind that on the average, but we still got Nashville coming on the line. So say 3,000 people on the mailing list. Now, it will be a little while before that many of those people start turning up in church, I suppose. But as we make ourselves known in the community here in Tyler and as our churches do elsewhere and as more and more people find out about us, It’s possible that an awful lot of people could begin visiting with us who have never visited with us before. Are we ready for that? Are we quite really ready for church growth? Now most of us have been for the past five years chomping at the bit wanting some growth. We want to see some new people. We want new people in church and coming to church. And I have to ask some questions about that, too. And I ask it of you here, and I ask it of everyone on the tape program out there who’s got a little home meeting, a church meeting in their home, or who rents some hall someplace and get together. Are we really ready for this? I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a visitor. Never attended our church before. Never darkened our doors. Never been with us before. Comes in for the very first time and sits here and enjoys our services. Now, it may be easy for you, it may not be. And if you have trouble visualizing this, frankly, I would suggest someday, some Sunday morning, you get yourself out of bed and get ready and go down to your local Presbyterian church or Methodist church or some down the street somewhere and go visit and just see what people are used to in church. Now, I’m not saying that what they have is what we ought to have. I’m not saying that we should do everything the way that those people do things. What I’m saying is, so that you then next Sabbath can come back to church. And when you walk in the front door, you can imagine that you are attending here for the very first time and that you’ve attended church lots of places elsewhere before. And I want you to ask, how do you think a visitor would look upon this church? What sort of a frame, in other words, are we putting around God’s picture? A lot of things, I think, go to make up the impression that people receive of the church. I think, for example, our care of one another. It may not be immediately evident or easy for a person to pick up on, but if the attitude is there of people who really care about one another and are concerned about one another, it manages to reflect out to people, and it’s amazing how quickly people can pick up on that. Now, one dead giveaway as to our care for one another is our awareness that someone who is here is not one of us. In other words, if we really don’t pay much attention to one another, if we really are not aware of the fact that one of us hasn’t been here for a while or is here again or that somebody’s missing or so forth, if you really aren’t aware of one another, some new person might come into church and you say, I think I’ve seen that person before. And I don’t know whether I should go up and introduce myself like they were a new person or whether I should say, hi, it’s good to see you again or what have you. What do you do in a situation like that? The only safe thing is to walk up and say, have we met? And if you have met, they’ll, you know, and they remember it. They’ll tell you. They don’t remember. They won’t tell you either. You know, there’s no problem. But have we met? My name is. And you’ve solved the whole problem because you’ve confessed that you don’t remember them. At least you cared enough to introduce yourself. And it’s a start. I think that one of the things that will give people a great deal of indication of this frame of our picture is the warmth that we express and the welcome that we express toward people who are visitors. You know, the fact that we’re glad to have them here, that we know that they are visitors, and that we welcome visitors into our midst. This is a great deal of it. Now, are you ready for this one? There’s more. Other things that go to make up this frame is the behavior and the respect our children show toward adults. Oh, yeah. It’s part of it. The way children conduct themselves, the way they act toward adults, all these things go toward making up a picture of how we live our Christianity and how we teach our children. Another little key, what sort of respect do we show for one another? Now, that may seem, well, what do you mean respect for one another? Well, you think about it for a while. There are just a lot of ways that we can show respect or disrespect for one another. I’ve always appreciated the fact that whenever I’m up speaking that people show a great deal of respect for me as a speaker. But, you know, it can be kind of distracting if a person, you know, two or three people start getting up and walking out. It’s kind of a dead giveaway. You’re speaking too long lots of times when you start seeing people getting up and walking out. And, of course, not speaking too long, that’s my responsibility. Mr. Armstrong, we have to think about that. But on the other hand, there is that respect for your minister, and that same sort of respect for one another that does need to be expressed in church. I think another part of this frame is our care for our personal appearance and for the appearance and the environment for church. You know, I was pleased not long ago somebody had gone to the trouble to get us some flowers to put down front during church. I don’t know who did it to this day, but I am grateful that somebody decided they wanted to do that kind of thing. Not that we have to have it every week, but I think it reflects an attitude of mind of we have come here to worship God. We are here to honor him and to also show our love for one another and our respect for one another. And the environment in which we do this can be tremendously important. Oh, it didn’t have to be expensive. And it can oftentimes, I have had some very warm times with my brethren in some pretty run-down places from time to time because the attitude toward that run-down place and what they made of what they had reflected a right attitude. I think people will also draw impressions of our reverence for God and our attitude toward him when they come to attend with us. They may not be looking for it with a checklist to check off, but little impressions get formed along the way. A lot of that is the orderliness of Sabbath services or the lack of orderliness in a Sabbath service. Now, there’s a lot of things that go to make that up. A lot of it is your seating arrangements. A lot of it is how we work with our children. A lot of it is a mother’s willingness whenever her child begins to cry to quietly get up and take the child out rather than try to hush the child there and disrupt the services for five minutes. You know, it’s a simple thing, but it’s very important as far as people’s ability to enjoy, to concentrate, to be aware of what’s happening in church, to be able to listen to ministers’ message without having to fight in their mind through a lot of noise or distraction or people getting up and wandering around and leaving and coming back. And so it goes. All this is very important. It’s rather interesting to me, too, to realize the Apostle Paul, when he wrote the Corinthians on two different points in his first epistle to them, he had to correct them for disorderly church services. The first one he corrected them for was the way they actually conducted the Lord’s Supper. He was very concerned about the fact that people were eating too much and actually getting drunk, getting flat-out drunk, at the Passover service because of the amount of wine that they were drinking when they were there. He had the right to say, now, brethren, that’s just not right. Now, I don’t have to go very much further on that one to make us realize that whenever, and I’m not giving this because of our chilly supper tonight, believe me, but what I’m saying is that whenever you have a church service, oh, let me transfer this to another situation. I had a lady call me who attended a church, which I’ll remain nameless in another location, And she was profoundly offended. She said, I’ve been attending this church for quite some little time. And every time we have a church social, several people get drunk. They have had way too much to drink. They engage in offensive behavior. And while the minister doesn’t get out drunk, he obviously has been drinking quite a bit himself. He does nothing to try to correct it. And she was just absolutely offended by it. Now, of all places where one should not drink too much, You know, a church social, when you’re there with little ones and your children are all here and with visitors that might be attending the church and so forth. The Apostle Paul had to correct them for that. Then in the 14th chapter, he corrects them still further about the basic way. He said, you know, when you people come together, everybody’s got something to say. Somebody’s got a psalm. Somebody’s got a doctrine. Somebody’s got a message of this and a message of that. He says, we’ve got to stop all this. He said, let the prophets speak. Now, a prophet, you know, is a preacher. Not just any old body. But a prophet, you know, in New Testament language, is a preacher. He said, let the prophets speak. At the most, two or three. And let the others judge. And then he talks about how everybody is supposed to keep this thing under control. And he said an interesting thing. He went on to say, for the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. And that’s a very simple statement. It means just this. that if all of a sudden Mr. Watkins sitting down here should feel that he had a message from the Lord, and he jumped to his feet right here and began to speak right in the middle of what I am saying, and he claimed his excuse, I’m sorry, I just was out of control, the Lord came upon me, I would have to say, Mr. Watkins, you are wrong. And he would know it, of course, he’d never do that, but he would know better because if it is of God, it is under the control of the person who has it. He has the full control to stay in his seat, say nothing, hold it back, maybe even jot down a note, and then when his turn comes to make it known. And Paul proceeds to give us that beautiful phrase, let all things be done decently and in order. Now, I don’t really know how we ought to, you know, what particular things maybe we ought to do. What I am looking for, what I am talking about today, is an attitude of mind to prepare ourselves to be receptive to new people, encouraging to new people, to not turn new people off or to turn them away. But in every aspect, as we come to church, to be thinking in terms of worship, of reverence, of love, of kindness, of respect, self-respect, respect for one another, respect for God, respect for the ministry. It just goes all the way. an attitude of respect will find reflect in every aspect of God’s people. I could make that list longer and longer, but as I said, what I’m talking about is an attitude of mine and the ability to see ourselves as others see us. We now have got one week of the weeks of harvest behind us. I hope that during the next six weeks remaining before Pentecost that we’ll all put some effort to see if we can do a few meaningful things about the harvest. There may be things having to do with personal evangelism. There may be things having to do with church services. There may be things having to do with our own approach and our attitude toward visitors. There may be, well, who knows what it may be. But sometime, with six weeks to go, with all of your resolutions that you made during the Days of Unleavened Bread still intact and still working on, let’s add one more thing. Let’s try this next six weeks before Pentecost to do something, maybe to increase the number of laborers for the harvest, or at least their effectiveness.
