Don’t let the media discourage you or make you think the church is irrelevant or out of date. We have a message everyone needs to hear. We want others to know the hope that we have. Pray for God to bring many more into his wedding feast. There is room for many more.
Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a wedding banquet a king is hosting for his son in Matthew 22. Through history, God had been preparing the way for his people to come to this big party. This was primarily the Jewish people through the covenants and prophets and patterns of the Old Testament. The tragedy of Matthew 22 is that a great majority of the Jewish people did not recognise Jesus as the son of the king, and they would not therefore be part of the wedding banquet that God had planned.
The great news of Matthew 22 is that the invitation is open to all who will come. Anyone, from any background, whether good or bad, is welcome to come to the wedding feast. Anyone who comes to Jesus is most welcome.
Now, if you watch the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the church is an old, dying institution that has no relevance to modern Australia. We have seen that in the commentary around the Andrew Thorburn incident in Melbourne last week. It seems that everyone is lining up to condemn views that historically all Bible-believing Christians would hold to.
