By Jonathan Keller
With flaming tongues of fire the Holy Spirit began to be poured out on all mankind on Pentecost. As Joel prophesied, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, even in our current day. What sorts of people are being brought into God’s kingdom, though?
Certainly God knows that His people would gather in churches and need to keep the lights on. Surely He would bring in the kinds of people who could back His enterprise financially to keep it going generation after generation. Jesus warned us against looking for only these kinds of people, though, with His parable of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:12-23).
In this parable, a person gave a great banquet and at first invited many, but when the time came for the banquet, the guests had excuses left and right. A couple were in business ventures, and another had to attend to his new wife. Seeing that these guests rudely refused, the man started to invite the lower members of society – the poor, disabled, and even those on the outskirts!
God is currently going out among these lower members of society even to this day to invite them, through the proclamation of the Gospel, to the great wedding feast of the Lamb. And strangely enough, these sorts of people are the very people whom God calls His dwelling place, made up like living stones into a temple for Him to dwell forever among them. Praise God that He can turn even the ragged to princes through the great redemption that is in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection!