Prepare for Me a Bride
1 Amens
“Prepare For Me a Bride!”
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-Did you come here tonight to meet God, or did you come to hear a sermon about Him? -
I was at this particular prayer meeting Friday night after youth and I was praying as I usually do pacing back and forth bringing Him praise and adoration and suddenly His voice surprised me.
I was struck with what He spoke to me and completely smitten with His message.
It was like a strike of lightening that shot its way into my heart and cried: “What about my bride???”
Ephesians 5:25-33
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, 26that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. 28So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. 33Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Immediately an image entered my mind of Jesus standing at an altar with the Father God standing where a marriage celebrant would stand and the saviour of the world staring down the aisle waiting eagerly for His bride to come.
I remember my wedding day and I still maintain that I felt the anointing of God as powerful as I ever have that moment she (Katarina) stepped out into the aisle and began her descent toward her waiting groom. It was a pure wedding with a pure bride wearing white as she should a virgin ready to enter sacred, holy, matrimony. I was struck with sense of fear and awe of God’s Holy command that a man and woman shall leave their parents and become one flesh.
I pictured Jesus standing there where I was standing, smiling ear to ear and as the music crescendos she enters in like an angel beaming with majestic light. And He stands waiting till the end of days when He takes her for himself and the two become one and live together forever in eternity. The time has come and the music seems to be in perfect time and everyone there rises. The pews and galleries are full of the great hosts of heaven and the great cloud of witnesses who have already won their prize and finished their course not yet having received the promise.
A light emerges from the threshold of the archway where she is to appear. And suddenly she emerges…
Holding a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, pregnant because she has been sleeping with the world. Filthy dirty, wrinkled and blemished. She begins to make her way down the aisle hardly noticing her Saviour and Redeemer, swearing and cussing as though she was in the presence of swine.
Can you imagine how I felt at a Friday night prayer meeting seeking His face, He tells me to prepare Him a bride that will be worthy of Him, and than He shows me what she looks like now.
2 Corinthians 11:2
I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I have betrothed you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.
· She is obese because her god is her belly. Her life is filled with the lusts of gluttony and obsession.
· Bruised because she can’t stop fighting and attacking herself. She hated vital parts of her own body even until the point of trying to kill them.
· Vomiting because she is riddled with sickness and STDs contracted from the world. She has had her fill of covetousness and infidelity. She aborted numerous lives due to her carelessness. ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ she would mutter as she had her fill of the most vile forms of debauchery.
· She hauls a sack of money behind her that she had earned and she wasn’t leaving the world without it. She had conducted an abundance of unnecessary offerings, making certain she had fleeced the people to their last dime. She promised to feed the poor and save the lost with it but she did neither and only grew more money hungry as she built her own empire.
· She is wearing a number of revolting crowns that carry all the achievements she had previously attained in the filthy, broken world below.
· One of the most appalling things about this bride is she is hardly even going to recognise her husband. Her prior intimacy with her future Husband is inconsequential. She has struggled to offer Him anytime at all. He has always been willing and waiting for her to free her schedule but she refused, choosing the lusts of the flesh over the Lover of her soul. Courting everything and everyone but Christ Himself.
Gal 4:17
“They zealously court you, but for no good; yes they want to exclude you that you may be zealous for them.”
And He is supposed to be cool with it!!!
On my wedding day, my wife came down the aisle as a pure virgin, dressed in white, hair done so beautiful and make up done perfectly. She walked with elegance and grace and kept her eyes on me. It was a day I’ll remember forever but the King of glory has to be lenient to a shameful, unfamiliar, naked, overweight, arrogant, drinking harlot because grace is sufficient enough.
Well I say GARBAGE!
She cusses like a heathen, not caring who she blasphemes. I have heard so many ministers swear I'm absolutely gob smacked, both in and out of the pulpit. I remember when I was in year 12 and I was invited to attend a camp with Ps Steve and sitting at the pastors table because Ps Steve was speaking and I was his protégé. I had the opportunity to sit at the table with the guest speakers and youth pastors from all over the region. People I had admired as being so close to God they knew His after shave. Well I was speechless when I started to hear them mouth words I had only heard heathen say and I was flattened by the startling reality of their standard of holiness.
I have heard state and national executives pour forth utter profanity from the pulpits, using the excuse that they are just quoting someone.
Does He deserve that???
DOES HE?
Revelation 19:7
“Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready.”
This passage clearly tells us that the bride of Christ, His betrothed wife will make herself ready!
It doesn’t say that God in all His infinite wisdom and power is going to give her a substantial scrubbing down when she sees her Husband coming on a cloud of fire to claim His wife.
It doesn’t say through grace God can no longer see her iniquities and lawlessness. He is oblivious to her short fallings and therefore He will accept her as she is.
This is the heresy called cheap grace. Where so called Christian claim that God doesn’t have any issue with sin and vile living because He loves us so much He can overlook a few mistakes here and there.
No, No, No, No! A thousand times No.
Paul dealt with this when he asked the Roman Christians. He says in Romans 6:1-4 “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”
However dead to sin is such a foreign concept that many just assume that it’s something magic that occurs somewhere between here and heaven.
But the passage in Revelation tells us so clearly that the Bride made herself ready!!! That’s right made ‘herself’ ready. Didn’t wait till someone preached a good sermon or pray the right prayer over her. She didn’t wait till Jesus came and took all her struggles away. She didn’t wait till someone had the right word for her or gave her the opportunity she was waiting for. Many Christian people today live their holiest when they are asked to step up into some ministry incredibly significant. If you were asked to preach at youth or church I’m sure you would have no worries sleeping with your girlfriend this week. But if it came to preparing your heart and life for the great wedding with your Christ you cannot.
Potentially the most stirring scripture in the entire doctrine labelled the ‘end times’ doctrine, is this simple line penned from the soft heart of John the beloved: Revelation 22:17
“…and the Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come’!”
We don’t say come!!! We never say come. We might utter the words “Come soon, but not yet, I have business to attend to. Or I just have to get married. Or I want to achieve my goals first. Or I want to be successful in my career, than come.
But the reason we have no desire for His coming is because we are not ready to receive Him.
This leaves us in a dire situation. Hear this parable from the Lord Himself.
Luke 14:16-23
Then He said to him, “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.
I understand, you’re too busy! You have business to attend to, and work that needs to be done. People you don’t want to disappoint and meetings with people of import you don’t wan to miss.
Oh but what about His bride!!!
When I 1st got saved the devil had to use every bit of guile and craftiness he had to keep me from church and it has never stopped. Family members would ban me from going to church so Sunday afternoons I would bury myself on my face in the carpet of my room and pour out my heart in begging Him to make the path straight that I might go to His house and praise and please Him. On so many occasions I broke through and my parents would just out of the blue say “you can go to church tonight.” And that was a miracle. I was almost sacked from my job on more than one occasion because I refused to soften my stance regarding attending His house.
Now days you have to beg young people to come to church.
They say:
- “It’s boring!”
- “I have more important things I have to do!”
- “I'm not allowed!”
But the cry of the psalmist is lost when he said:
“Lord, I have loved the habitation of Your house, And the place where Your glory dwells.” Psalm 26:8
Psalm 27:4 “One thing I have desired of the Lord, That will I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple.”
Psalm 84:1-2 “How lovely is Your tabernacle, O Lord of Hosts! My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young— Even Your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in Your house; they will still be praising You.”
Psalm 84:10-11
“For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord will give grace and glory; no good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts,
Blessed is the man who trusts in You!”
Oh but His bride. What about the bride of Christ? Does anyone weep for her? She is lost, broken, shameful, naked and blind and yet no one seems to care.
Our pulpits have become places of soothing oil as we cry out peace, peace but there is no peace. We want people to attend church so we try every human method we can think of.
We entice them with entertainment, entreat them with persuasive words enslave them with religion yet the scripture says to compel them…Give them no other choice but to come not by mans wisdom but by a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.
Our pews are even worse. People occupy them week by week and take up a seat at the Lord’s table and eat of the bread and drink of the wine and change not.
Have nothing to do with people who can sit and listen to the very words of life and never change. Disassociate with them altogether. For God is a consuming fire.
YOU my dear friend are the bride of Christ. The bride of Christ is His church. I am convinced than some part of my diagnosis tonight is in you. This is a message God has delivered to me to carry to His church as a whole. Not just this youth ministry or this church or this movement but the entire body of Christ needs to realise He will not wait forever. His bride must make herself ready and than we can say with true conviction “Come Lord Jesus, come”
Comments:
Craig C. Ireland
The statements made in this message are relative to the Australian movement of churches only. The preacher assumes no knowledge of the state of the multitude of movements around the world. The listener will have to use discretion as to whether these statements apply to them.
Please remember to send us a quick email to let us know your listening. Feel free to offer us your thoughts and how God may have touched your life through this message.
craig@impactcc.com.au
Thank You in advance
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