200531 Pentecost Drive in Service 200531 Pentecost Order of Service The great festival of Pentecost is upon us. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit rushed upon the fledgling Christian Church so that they were compelled to preach. What they had to preach is what you heard from the book of Acts. The end of the ages has come upon us. Sons and daughters prophesy. Young men will see visions. Old men will dream dreams. There will be signs in the heavens and signs on the earth, blood and fire and a rising cloud of smoke. The prophet Joel had said these things hundreds of years before Pentecost came. The apostle Peter told the crowd that this is what was taking place before their eyes with the tongues of flame, and the ability to speak so that others who spoke different languages could understand them. The great and glorious day of the Lord has come. This was the end of the world. Now since this took place about 2,000 years ago, I don’t think that folks can help but wonder whether Peter and the apostles were mistaken. Time keeps ticking away. The sun rises and the sun sets. Things continue to go on like they have from the beginning of the world. Where is this end that Christians speak of? The end times are larger than what we might imagine. The end times are not just those last few hours or days of this old world. The end times began with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The Scriptures speak of him as the first fruit of them who sleep. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the harvest. More resurrections from the dead are coming. The time is not yet quite right for that bumper crop to be gathered in. There are still a certain number of people whom God has known and chosen for salvation from before the world was made. These people still must be called by the Gospel, enlightened by the Holy Spirit’s gifts, sanctified and kept together with Jesus in the one true faith. When those last few who are to be saved are brought to faith, then the end will come. Christ will come on the clouds. The dead will be raised. Every individual will be judged by his or her Maker. Those who have lived evilly will go to hell. Those who have believed in Jesus are forgiven, and they are given Jesus’s righteousness as a gift. Therefore, since they are holy and fit, they shall live together with Almighty God in their resurrected and purified bodies. What I have just told you is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You don’t hear it too much these days because people are ashamed of Jesus and his words. This is true even within the Christian Church. This is true even within our own church body. Instead some other, more socially acceptable, quote-unquote “Gospel” is invented. Our flesh has a devil of a time believing that there is any such thing as an end times—much less that we are already living in it. Therefore this Gospel meets resistance—to say the least! The apostle Paul was laughed at in Athens when he spoke to them about the coming resurrection from the dead. You heard how the apostle Peter, at Pentecost, addressed those people who saw something of what was taking place at Pentecost and scoffed, saying that they were all drunk. The raised eyebrows of unbelievers is nothing new. But what we cannot do is alter or tailor or edit the words that we as Christians have been given. Cutting out whatever is offensive can seem rather harmless. In fact, it can seem like it would be helpful. If we tone it down a bit on those things that make us seem like we’re crazy, then we’ll be able to rope more people in. Our church will grow. But what has actually happened is that a new religion has thereby been invented. There’s nothing so common as people inventing religions for themselves. Everybody has a religion. Everybody has beliefs about what will or will not happen to them when they die. The invention of new religions happened already in the Garden of Eden when the serpent invited Eve to believe in something that she found more reasonable and palatable than what God had ac