40 Days Prior to the High Holy Days

If you look around at this particular point in time right now, you will very imperceptibly see that things are changing. The days are a little shorter. The sun is at a different angle in the sky than where it was just two months ago, to summer solstice. It's moving back to the south. The flowers are beginning to show the first signs of dying. The perennials in my perennial gardens around my home are starting to die off. The snow on the mountain that we have, I always like to see that come up every year in the spring, it's now rust on the mountain. The flowers that my wife put out in late May are still very nice, but I can begin to see that their strength is beginning to turn. My garden is beyond its prime. The tomatoes are still coming on, but the squash is just looking pretty pathetic right now. I don't know what yours looks like. Some of yours may be even better than that. You'll also see that the light is a little different. That's because we're moving into September of all things, day after tomorrow.

We're midway between, I guess you could say, summer and fall, but things are beginning to change in the world around us. It's important that we note that. We get into our air-conditioned, comfortable, big-screen television lifestyles with all of our electronics and our gadgetry.

We can eat watermelon in December. We can have strawberries in January because they come from South America. Because of that, we don't notice things changing. We don't notice the seasons, and we don't necessarily pay attention to the cycle that is built into the changing of the seasons. We just don't note those things. It's just a part of our modern global world in which we live. But it's important to note them because they don't change. They're very real. The cycles, that is. The seasons that come and go. I see dead leaves on my patio and in my backyard now. I don't know where they're coming from. I keep looking around. I know the big ones are yet to come, but I'm starting to see that. You know that summer is beginning to wind down.

The holy days are just a few days and a few weeks off from us.

A few years ago, I picked up a book that caught my attention. It was a book called Preparing Your Heart for the High Holy Days. It's written by a couple of Jewish...one of them is a rabbi, I believe. It was written from a Jewish perspective, Preparing Your Heart for the High Holy Days. The title caught my attention. I can't remember exactly where I saw this. It's put out by the Jewish Publication Society. Since we keep the holy days, and they are high days, I thought, that might be interesting. Looking through it, I didn't gain all that much insight into the holy days, as you might think you would from a Jewish publication, except from the perspective that this particular book was written, which was not so much focusing on the holy days as it was focusing on a period of time leading up to the holy days. This was a guided book to take you through the period leading up to the Feast of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as they refer to them. They don't really pay that much attention to the Feast of Tabernacles, and they have no knowledge about the last great day as we do. They focus on Rosh Hashanah, Trumpets and Atonement, or Yom Kippur, as it's called in the Jewish tradition. But what they focused on was as much the days leading up to it. And what I learned from this book, as much as anything else, was the idea of a Jewish tradition of a 40-day period leading up to the Day of Atonement, that they call the Days of Awe, or the Days of Wonder. Actually, it's the 10-day period between Trumpets and Atonement, is what they call the Days of Awe. But the period leading up to all of it is a 40-day period ending at the Day of Atonement that it takes in a little bit more than a month on the Jewish calendar that actually begins today. As I was looking at it the other day and thinking about it, and I did counting on the calendar to the Day of Atonement, beginning with today, there's a 40-day period that will end by the time we come to the end of the 40 days, will be on the eve of the Day of Atonement in 40 days. Some of you are thinking, 40 days still happen half the fast, as you look at it from one perspective. That's true. We have a 40-day period. But what I learned from this book and from doing a little bit of research on the subject is that within the Jewish tradition, they have the tradition of taking this 40-day period leading up to the Day of Atonement and using it as a time of self-examination, of reflection, in preparation for what is in their tradition the most significant day on their holy calendar, which is Yom Kippur. As my son was saying in his sermon, among many Christians, they find themselves in church, maybe on Christmas or Easter, and that's about it. For a Jew, they may find themselves in their synagogue only on one day of the year, and that is on Yom Kippur. They take that one very, very seriously. So they'll find themselves on the synagogue on that day and somehow keeping perhaps a bit of a fast day, but they take that very, very seriously within their tradition. They begin this period of time. They begin that lead-up with a 40-day period of examination. Now, they're not fasting during that time, but it is an interesting period of time. When I first ran across this a couple of three years ago when I picked this book up, I found it to be intriguing and very thought-provoking that they would take a 40-day period.

As I said, today, it happens to mark the beginning of this 40-day period. They call it Alul Tishri because of the two months. Alul, this is actually the first day on the Hebrew calendar of the month, Alul, E-L-U-L. Tishri, the first day of Tishri, is the day of trumpets. When you look in Leviticus 23 and you find that as the first day of the seventh month, the seventh month on the Hebrew calendar is the month Tishri. And so, they call this period Alul Tishri, which is kind of a bridge. And it is, in their tradition, a bridge between the seasons. And it is interesting to look at it from that point of view. And what I am going to do today is make a suggestion to you and I. That you and I begin today as a period of preparation, as a period of examination, and reflection in our own way leading up to the Holy Days. Now, I am not, by doing this, suggesting that we create a new tradition or that we create a new theology within the church. That is not at all. And I am not trying to add to the Holy Days, only in the sense that I add to our meaning and our experience of what God really does want us to come to understand through the meaning of a Holy Days. And I am not trying to create a Holy Day or a Holy Period in any way, shape, or form. But I do find it interesting that they picked this particular season to do this. We examine ourselves every year in the spring as we lead up to the Passover season. And we don't necessarily define any period of time doing that, even in the spring, nor would we at this point. But I find it interesting at least to examine and to look at this from not just a Jewish tradition perspective, but from the perspective of the Bible. Because the selection of a 40-day period is not an unusual feature from the Bible. We're all familiar with various episodes and stories and time periods within the Bible that come down to either a 40-day period or a 40-year period. Stop and think about it. Stop and think about it. You will find this throughout the Scriptures. How many days did Jesus fast before he met Satan? You already know. 40 days. How many days did Jesus appear with his disciples that we are told in the book of Acts prior to his ascension? There's a specific time period mentioned in Acts 1 and verse 3 that he appeared with his disciples, teaching them the things about the kingdom of God. It was 40 days. How many days was Moses on the Mount with God? 40 days. Actually, on two different 40-day occasions. How many years did the children of Israel wonder through the wilderness? 40 years. Yeah, I said days, like 40 years. How many days was the flood upon the earth? 40. Throughout the Scriptures, as we'll see in a minute, you find this period of 40 mentioned many different ways. It's interesting just to study that and to look at that in that particular way. We're leading up 40 days to the Feast of Atonement. Now, when I look at a book like this, I will tell you right off the bat, and you've studied Jewish tradition, you don't find anything about Jesus Christ in it because they don't accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Certainly, they do not understand Him as the Son of God. Sometimes people in our church, we look at the Jews and we think that they're pretty close to us because we keep the Sabbath and keep the holy days. They don't eat pork. We don't eat pork. We think we're kind of alike. But when you really get down and really understand it, those are only surface similarities and we're not alike at all. Yes, they are a remnant of the tribe of Judah, but that's about where it begins and ends.

For many reasons, as the book of Romans brings out, they don't have a full knowledge and understanding. You'll read a book like this and other Jewish traditions, and there's not an understanding of full depth of understanding in regard to the meaning of the holy days. But with what God has given to us in our understanding and with what we focus on in our own life, I think there's a point for us to understand and to reflect on and to think about. Because especially when it comes to what we are told in these many examples of an episode of 40 days or of 40 years, when you look at what the Bible shows us in regard to those, there are many interesting lessons. And I think that there are some interesting lessons to point us to the ultimate fulfillment of these holy days, and especially when you come to the day of atonement and understand its full message. Because when we come to the day of atonement, we are smack in front of Jesus Christ. And this is something that for years I have observed in the church. When we come to the day of atonement, because it is a fast day, most of us miss the meaning of the day. We love trumpets, we love the Feast of Tabernacles. We love all the holy days. They have their unique features and teaching, all of which point us to Jesus Christ in many different aspects of His work in ministry and certainly the fall holy days, Christ coming on the day of trumpets, the Feast of Tabernacles picturing the millennial reign of Christ on the earth. We are Christ-centered when it comes to understanding that. But sometimes I've observed because we are afflicting ourselves physically on the day of atonement and perhaps using or that becomes a day that is a little bit lost at times as we are rushing toward the Feast of Tabernacles. Sometimes we may even be on the road traveling to the Feast of Tabernacles. I've observed that we may not focus clearly squarely on the message God has for us on that day as we properly should. So to find that the Jewish tradition at least has this tradition of a 40-day period leading up to the day of atonement, I found it interesting and wondered what can we learn from that? How can we adapt that? Because when we come to the day of atonement, in many ways I felt in the last several years that that day holds not necessarily not more meaning than any other holy day, but it is something we need to focus on. We really need to understand because on that day we have an opportunity to meet Jesus Christ as we've never seen Him before. And for your life and my life and your relationship with God, the Father, through Christ, that is an important thing to keep in mind. That is extremely valuable to consider. And it's not something to just be passed over because of the headache of the day, the empty stomach, or some of the other distractions that might be there. The message is important for us to focus on when it comes to our relationship with Christ. So let's take a few minutes. Let's look at what we can learn from this. Let me take you through just a brief study of some of the examples in the Scriptures regarding 40 and a period of 40. Let's look at it. Let's then be prepared to draw some lessons from that. If you will turn back to Exodus 16. We'll look at one of the quite obvious ones, that of the Israelite wanderings through the desert before God brought them into the Promised Land. In Exodus 16 is the story where God began to give them this daily ration of food called manna.

What's it? This mysterious bread that rained out of the heavens for a period of 40 years. That is in chapter 16 of Exodus. We come down to verse 35, and we're told this, the children of Israel ate manna 40 years. 40 years until they came to an inhabited land, they ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan. That was quite a diet. We can think about what it would be like to have the same type of food every day for that 40 years. I think they probably picked up some other things, but that was a staple of their diet for that period of time, and it sustained them. It taught them many different lessons in terms of reliance on God. Daily bread, if you will, when Jesus came to talk about that in his own message in the Gospels, man shall not live by bread alone. So I did teach them a daily reliance upon God for the sustenance of their life, but this chapter here, or this reference, refers to that 40-year period. If you go forward to the book of Deuteronomy, you will see in the Deuteronomy there are many references to this period. Let's begin in chapter 2 of Deuteronomy. Chapter 2 and verse 7. Remember that Deuteronomy is the account of at the end of that 40-year period. Moses' last message to Israel just before they went into the Promised Land, and it recaps the law, recaps their story where they had been, many aspects of the teaching of the law. In verse 7 of Deuteronomy chapter 2, Moses says, For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hand. He knows your trudging through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you, you have lacked nothing. Now, we know when we go to the book of Corinthians and Paul's writings that Paul draws heavily upon this experience of the Exodus and the wonderings of the Israelites in many lessons that he teaches us about our spiritual relationship within the church, to God through Jesus Christ. He talks about the rock that was there and that that rock was Christ. He talks about the fact that they're going through the Red Sea was a type of baptism, prefigured baptism. And so, all the episodes, all of the things, in fact, what is the scripture in Corinthians, Paul said, all of these things were written for our example, those of us upon whom the ends of the age have come. So, there are spiritual lessons for every one of us to learn from all the complete story of the children of Israel coming out of Egypt and through this forty-year period of wandering prior to going into the Promised Land. Promised Land is a type of the kingdom of God. The forty years going through the wilderness is a type of, you and I, trudging through, if you will, the wilderness of our life, the wilderness of this existence that we have. And just as they kind of sometimes went around in circles, you and I go around in circles of life. Sometimes we make the same mistake over again. Maybe we make it a third time in our life.

And we find ourselves perhaps still learning lessons and passing by the same scenes of life that we might have gone by a few years earlier. So, you see the story, the picture, and how it goes. So when you look at what it says here in verse 7, Moses tells him, God has blessed you in all the work of your hand. Now keep that in mind. He knows you're trudging through this great wilderness these forty years. He's been with you. God was with them through that period of time. He didn't leave them. He guided them by a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. He gave them bread every day. He was with them. He didn't leave them. God doesn't leave us. God takes us through life, lets us make our own choices, but He never leaves us. It's a very important lesson to learn there in chapter 8 of Deuteronomy and in verse 2.

Again, Moses is repeating and going over it. Deuteronomy is a wonderful book just to study on its own just as a, for what it is, which is a second giving of the law, a second giving of the word of God to a new generation. In Deuteronomy 8, in verse 2, he says, You shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness to humble you and to test you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So again, God here is, they're told, God led you. You may have thought you were charting your own path, but God led you through this period of time. And He did it to humble you, to test you, to see what was in your heart, to really see what was in your commitment. And He found out. Keep in mind that the reason the Israelites went through this forty-year period, remember, was because the generation that came out of Egypt refused to believe and trust in God, and they would not go in to take the land under God's terms. And at one point, God was ready to just wipe off all of the descendants of Abraham, and Moses intervened and said, if you do that, God, you're not going to be true to your word. The promises you made to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and Moses intervened, and He caused God to, in a sense, stay His hand from wiping out that generation. But God said, all right, they're going to go through the wilderness until this generation dies off. And that's why a forty-year period is an interesting period, even from a generational perspective. Because, however, you know, we talk about the generations, you know, the greatest generation, generation X, generation Y, generation, we're already up to generation Z today, as they look at the generations that are in our midst. I'm waiting for generation ZZ, and then ZZZ, and then quadruple Z, however we're going to go on that. But a generation is typically figured around forty years. A forty-year period is what constitutes the length of time of a generation. And within a generational time span, let's say forty years, you know, you can go through an awful lot of experiences. Look back just forty years from today, those of you that can't. 1968.

1968 was an interesting period. The summer of 1968 was a time of upheaval in America. A lot of riots. Summer of love, they called it. Hippies, pot, haydash berry, all of that business. We were mired in the Vietnam War. Today we had the Iraq War, but we had the Vietnam War back then. We had a different president. The conventions, the Democratic Convention in 1968 was in Chicago, and they were rioting in the streets. I remember watching it on television. Couldn't believe my eyes. What was taking place. The mayor of Chicago was shouting into a microphone. It was a real party they had. Made what happened in Denver this week look pretty tame by comparison.

And as people look back over that period of time, if you remember it, Robert Kennedy was killed that year. Martin Luther King was assassinated that year. And we look back over that forty-year period, and America's been through a lot. The world has been through a lot. You and I have been through a lot. We've married. We've raised children. We are now grandparents. And the second and the third generation has begun to come on from that.

But we look back and you can look at what you have learned, what you've experienced in that period of time. And you begin to get a sense of what you can learn over a forty-year period, or even a forty-day period.

And you begin to think that when you look at it from that point of view, you can understand why that period of time, whether it's days or years, figure in the Scriptures as a significant period of time for testing, or a time of trial, or a time of examination, and a time of preparation. It's not just a negative period of time. We look at forty years of wandering into the wilderness as sometimes from a negative perspective. And we'll look at these Scriptures and understand, folks, it's not just a negative story.

God led them. God gave them every day what they needed. God was learning from them. They were learning. It wasn't the most advantageous experience. Those of you that have been to that part of the world know that that's not a pleasant place to wander around in. And when you have to pick up your tent every few weeks or every few months and take another thirty miles and then set up camp all over again, and by doing so, you're looking at setting up a sanitation system, a water system, a distribution system for that number of people.

This was not just going out to the state park on the weekend. And they did that through all of that period of time. And God was learning what they were all about. And they were learning what God was all about. And it served its purpose. So that by the time we come down to this period in Deuteronomy, that generation that grew up during that time, they're coming to understand through Moses' last episodes with them why they had to go through that, why their parents did, and what they were to have learned through all of that.

In chapter 9, beginning in verse 9, he talks about Moses reminds them that when I went up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water.

The Lord delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all the words which the Lord had spoken to you in the mountain from the midst of the fire and day of the assembly. And it came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights that the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant.

And then he, you know the story, he smashed those and had to go back up before another forty-day period. I'm thinking Moses, by the time he was halfway through that second period of forty days of fasting, was wishing he hadn't broken the first set of tablets. Why did I do that? He's thinking. So he had to go through that twice, but God took them through here to explain all that took place.

Verse 18, he mentions it again another forty days where I neither ate bread nor drank water. Down to verse 25, I prostrated myself before the Lord forty days and forty nights. I kept prostrating myself because the Lord had said he would destroy you.

So Moses went through a period of his own personal agony and sacrifice intervening for the children of Israel, intervening for these people that he had laid down his life for and that he'd committed himself to. In chapter 10, in verse 10, Moses kind of sums this up and he says, as at the first time I stayed in the mountain forty days and forty nights, and the Lord also heard me at that time, and the Lord chose not to destroy you. So you see that when Moses got to the end of his episodes of forty days of prayer, forty days of fasting, I'm not saying in any way suggesting that we should try to even go through forty days or four days of that.

That's not my point at all. But when he got to the end of it, he said, God heard me at that time. So you see that the connection to, again, a forty-day period or a forty-year period in terms of either Moses or Israel as a community being led of God, being heard by God, coming to know God, as you see through these episodes. Go forward to Deuteronomy chapter 29. Deuteronomy 29 and look at verse 5.

Because here we see that another interesting feature of this period.

Deuteronomy 29 verse 5, God says, I have led you forty years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not worn out on you and your sandals have not worn out on your feet. Their clothes were miraculously preserved. God led them. Nothing wore out. God always provides what is needed, not always what's wanted. They couldn't run down to Macy's and get a new set of clothes every three or four months. They had to make do with what they had. I take from this that they probably recycled a great deal and they learned the value of things that last and quality construction. They also learned reliance on God because God said, I preserved you, even to the point of what was on your back and on your feet. I gave it to you and I provided for you. So through this whole period of time, you see what they learned. They had the opportunity to learn reliance on God. That's the positive side and that's a big positive. It took this generation forty years for God to purge out a group of people who didn't believe, who couldn't see. Go forward to Joshua chapter 5. Joshua takes over from Moses and then he starts to give an accounting and an instruction as to who they were and what was going on and their mission. You have to look at these writings and how these whatever they were sermons or town hall meetings that Moses and then now Joshua had with the elders or with the people at the various times. These were messages, however they were originally given, and we haven't recorded it as sermons and these long-form treatises. Understand that these were messages that were essentially telling the Israelites their mission and why they were where they were, who they were, what was going on in their life. It was a constant repetition of a mission statement. Where you are, who you are, why we're going through all this, why it's going about this way, and what we are to learn. This is what we are all about. The company writes a mission statement, puts it on the wall. This is what this company is all about. This is what we do. This is the benefit we provide for our customers, for our community, for our employees. This is our mission statement. Those of you that have those and have to rely on those, that mission defines the purpose for a company. We have a mission for the United Church of God, a mission and a purpose statement in what we do. It defines us and the benefit we provide for the people and through the message that we provide. This was an ongoing mission statement as to what they were to learn. In Joshua 5 and in verse 6, Joshua repeats it. He says, For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, till all the people who were men of war who came out of Egypt were consumed. Because they did not obey the voice of the Lord, to whom the Lord swore that He would show them the land which the Lord had sworn to their fathers, they would give us, the land flowing with milk and honey. They didn't believe. And it took again forty years or the time of a generation, four decades, and a lot of sunrises and sunsets, a lot of cycles of the seasons, for this unbelief to be dealt with among the people. Sometimes I wonder, even as I look back at forty years in the Church and a forty year period within the Church, in our own modern history, and ask what have we learned? What have we gone through? Those of you that have been into the Church forty years or more, been around it, which several of us here can reflect back over that much time and longer within the Church, we've seen a lot of things happen. A lot of water is passed under the bridge, as we say. I announced about Mr. Bald. Over forty years ago, he was a pastor here, a different time and life for many.

I wonder sometimes when I look at the experience and where we are, where are we in terms of what God is doing with us? How much of the unbelief has been purged from us as a people individually? I draw my own conclusions. You draw yours. I don't need to go off into that particular road here today, but I'm just using it to illustrate the connection to forty, to a period of time, of examination, of reflection, of preparation, and what God teaches us through all of these. Ask God to give you a greater clarity in what He is doing in your life as you lead up to the Holy Days. Ask Him to give you the ability to see where He is leading you and why you are dealing with what you're dealing with. It's not just at this point in time of this year, the end of the summer of 2008, that we always focus on in three months. We'll have another set of issues in six months. There will be another set of issues in our lives and sickness, illness, challenges that you will face, I will face. We'll all be asked to pray about collectively. That's just part of life. That's just part of who we are. And because we may be a bit older, church as a whole, there's more of it. So it's not just this particular time, but it is this time of the year. And when it comes to us, we have to deal with it. Ask God for a greater clarity to deal with it, to see what He is doing in your life as you find yourself in your life dealing with your trial, your situation right now. But it's most important to see where God is leading us. That's what we learn from these episodes of the Israelites and what we learn here.

You know, I could go through so many other periods of 40 in the scriptures. One other application that you'll find later on in the story of Israel is with the kings. There were three kings of Israel. Actually, two of Israel united Israel and one of the nation of Judah, who reigned 40 years. Three kings who reigned 40 years. You know who they were?

The first one was David. David reigned 40 years. His son Solomon reigned 40 years. And then there was one other king of Judah, King Joash. He reigned 40 years as well. And you can look at those, and those were three high points. Joash was a righteous king, and of course, David and Solomon represent the epitome of the high time of Israel's existence under the united monarchy of David and Solomon at its peak.

But they're looked upon at the 40-year period there as times of proof of God's favor upon the nation. They were given a long reign in order to learn. Not even Hezekiah had that long. I think what Hezekiah had at 35, 36 years that he reigned in Judah. But there were periods of time that took the people through these episodes in their life. A generation. And they learned. They were led by God. They were fed by God.

This is a fascinating period and episode to think about in regard to exactly what God is doing. When I bring this down to our example, and just taking this one day today as it marked the first day of 40 toward the Feast of Atonement, the Day of Atonement, and I see this as a time to set aside or to look at, I look at it by looking at the end and begin with the end in mind.

As I said earlier, the end is Jesus Christ. The end is a deeper relationship with Christ and with what God is doing with our lives. When we come to the Day of Atonement, we will look at, and in that particular day through the message, we will look at maybe the story in Leviticus 16 of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.

Maybe we'll go into the story in Hebrews that flushes that story out from the point of view of Jesus Christ as our High Priest and how He fulfilled all of that. Because that's the ultimate fulfillment of it. And again, we will come face to face with Jesus Christ. And so we have an opportunity to look at this in our own life and to reflect upon the joy, the beauty, the grace, and the freedom that we have to look at our lives and our lives with the meaning and the purpose that God intends.

That's an opportunity. And I think it comes at a particular point in our life where we have that opportunity to focus and to look at God in a way that draws us close to Him and to helping us to understand exactly what we are to be accomplishing in our lives. In the past, I have looked at this particular time of year as a time of the changing of seasons and the changing of time.

And seen that as the summer months wear down, the fruits of our life begin to be, the fruits at least of the gardens and of the seasons begin to die off. Because when we start off in this time of year, we start off with gardens and fruit trees beginning to blossom and to come out with the best. We plant our gardens in the spring of the year and we have excitement and anticipation. And we come to a point where we have the joy of looking for that fruit to begin to be born in our life.

And there's an example there for us to look at our own personal lives. Because when we start off with our calling as God calls us, we start off with what is called a first love. And we see God dealing with us.

We see changes begin to take place in our life and we begin to make strides. And we see that God is dealing with us. And when that happens, there's a great deal of joy and anticipation. We're excited about the calling that God has given to us. But life happens. Trials come upon us and things begin to wear away. That first love begins to wax and to change. The trials of life begin to take some of those things away from us. And we fall prey to the possibility of falling away or letting down.

And that's part of the things we have to deal with and the challenges that we have to contend with. When we look at what God is dealing with with us and how He is working with us in our lives, we have to understand and be concerned most of all with God's observations about us at this particular point in our life. He is concerned that we bear fruit. If you will, turn over to Luke 13.

Luke 13.

And let's look at verse 6.

This is the parable of a fig tree. He spoke this parable. A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard and he came seeking fruit on it and he found none. And he said to the keeper of his vineyard, look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down. Why does it use up this ground? No fruit after a period of three years. But he answered and said to it, sir, let it alone this year also until I dig around it and fertilize it. And if it bears fruit well, but if not after that, you can cut it down. Christ was concerned not so much about the fruit on the tree, but getting a lesson across to his followers and to you and I that he desires fruit. He desires change. He desires that we be growing and developing in our own lives. That's what he's most concerned with. He's very patient, but his patience sometimes has an end. Now, when that end might be, you and I don't always know. We're really shown a lesson in patience and grace here because God is actually very, very patient with us and he's very, very gracious with us. And it's not so much a time of being cut off as it is recognizing that there ultimately is a time of judgment. And that's even a message that applies to this time of year because when we come to the Feast of Trumpets, that is a day of judgment. And that is a time when judgment, in a sense, will be sealed because it pictures a time of the resurrection, the first resurrection. And for the first fruits, that time of judgment coming to a complete end. And so we recognize that the time of our life at some point is going to come to that of a period in a time when our judgment will be sealed by the works and by our relationship with God. And so when Christ used this parable here, He was really showing that He's concerned that His followers bear fruit. He will give time. And He will give time even beyond what might be normally considered within a span of life or even according to certain agricultural and horticultural standards. But ultimately, that time is going to come to an end. In chapter 14 of Luke, we find another episode here as Christ talks about the time of a supper in Luke chapter 14 and in verse 15.

He said, When one of those who sat at the table with him heard these things, he said to him, Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God. And 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. And so He is picturing the time of the marriage supper, a time of the period of judgment that is really being pictured here. In verse 18, He says, They all with one accord began to make excuses after they were invited to the supper. 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 a servant, Go out to the city and bring in here the poor and the maimed and the lame and the blind. The servant said, Master, it is done as you commanded and still there is room. The master said to a servant, Go out into the highways and to the hedges and compel them to come that my house may be filled. For I say to you that none of those men who were invited shall taste my supper.

There is a time when a supper is going to be made ready and those who are distracted or who are indifferent are going to not be able to attend. You look here and you see that the cares of life, what people are involved with, are reasons and excuses for not being productive, for not coming and sitting at the table where the Lord is in this particular parable that is talking about Christ and his kingdom. There's going to come a time when the work is finished or it is near the finished. There are several parables that tell the story in this particular way, which shows us that it's important how we finish. In other words, when we come to that end, when we come to the time of our judgment, it is important how we finish, not so much how we start out. As I said, you know, we can start out like we do in the spring of the year of planting, looking at the flowers coming up, excited about it, and then the heat and the time of the summer begins to take its toll. And the episodes of life, the challenges of our life, the trials of our life, can begin to sap our attention, our energies, and ultimately even the fruit of our life if we're not careful, if we're not keeping our eyes firmly focused. So many challenges are like that.

No matter how long we have been at it, God still expects us to bear fruit. God still wants us to keep the end in mind. That's what's most vital, that's what's most important at a time like this. We stand at a particular point 40 days away from the Day of Atonement, 30 days away from the Feast of Trumpets, a little bit longer toward the days of the Feast of Tabernacles, all of which constitute the high holy days of God, the festivals of God. Let me issue an encouragement to each one of us to use this period of time, to reflect and to thank, to find the scriptures, to find the episodes, some of which I've talked about here, others of which are still waiting to be discovered within the scriptures, for you to go through and to look at and to examine your life by and to ask in your prayers and in your study with God, how is God leading you? How is He providing for you each day? And what has He provided? If you would just even write some of those down to yourself in a scrap of paper or in a book or in a three by five card you put within your Bible and you go back to it and it becomes a and forms some ways by which you internalize and remember some of the things that you reflect on and you think about. Because, brethren, this is the idea for this, while I might find it within a tradition among faithful individuals of the Jewish faith and the Jewish traditions, for you and I, we can learn some of the bigger lessons, deeper spiritual lessons, by looking at how God has worked with His people, how God has worked with us, and what He is doing with us. We can come to know God as we prepare our hearts and our minds for the holy days because in the end we're going to come face to face with God Himself. We're going to be examining just how close we are to Him because in the end it is that relationship that's going to get us through the trudging trials of our own existence and of our own life as we work through our life today. Turn a few all over to Acts chapter 1. I referred to this, but I wanted to read it in conclusion.

In Acts chapter 1, beginning in verse 1, as Luke recounts to his benefactor, a man by the name of Theophilus, all of the things that Jesus had begun to do, and as he lays out this history, he said, This account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which he was taken up after he, through the Holy Spirit, had given commandments to the apostles whom he had chosen, to whom he also presented himself alive after his suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. So, just in that period, Luke seems to peel off a period of forty days from the time of Christ's ascension backwards, in which he met with his disciples, after they'd all come back together after the scattering that occurred after his death. Remember, Thomas came in a little bit later, and the others. Peter had gone fishing for a while. But it seems that there was a forty-day period where he appeared to them on a regular basis, and he spoke with them, did many things. At the end of the book of John, he says that the things that were done, since you're in the book of John on my Bible, is right up on the top of my page in verse 25 of John 21, said, there were many things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose, that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. I wonder if some of those things were done in a concentrated form during this particular period leading up to his ascension, that forty-day period. And many of these things that were being done in Jesus' life with these disciples prepared them for the work that was yet ahead of them, because it says he spoke of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. Let's use this period of time. Let's begin to prepare for God's holy days. Rather, let's prepare our hearts to meet God on all of the holy days as they come before us in the days and the weeks ahead. Let's examine ourselves. Let's look at what God has done with us. Let's reflect and let's prepare. Let's reflect on the joy and the beauty and the grace and the freedom and the meaning and the purpose of our lives. Let's prepare our hearts to meet God on his holy days.