How More Souls Can Be Saved Than in the Whole History of the Church

• And then we move on into the New Testament and I’m going to read a passage that I read in the previous session. Matthew 13:39, just one very simple statement. ‘The harvest is the end of the age.’ Brothers and sisters, it’s important to remember this age is not going to last forever. What’s your response? You say ‘praise the Lord’? I do.
• I wouldn’t want the present age to last forever, it’s a mess. And, it’s getting worse. The good news is, it isn’t going to last forever; it’s coming to a climax. And it’s going to climax with a harvest. The harvest is the end of the age. I used to read a British poet called T.S. Elliott. In the days when I was intellectual and not spiritual.
• I don’t know what I am today. He had a poem called ‘The Wasteland’. I don’t suppose any of you ever spent time reading it. But, one of his statements was, ‘The worlds move to their ends like old women gathering fuel in a vacant lot.’ He’s wrong. The world is not going to end in an anticlimax. It’s going to come to a climax.
• God is not the God of the anticlimax. And the harvest is going to be the climax. The harvest is the end of the age. The word end is the not the normal word for end, it’s ‘the consummation of the age’. It’s the bringing together of all the threads of the age in one grand climax. Then one other passage from the New Testament which lines up with all of this.
• James 5:7–8: Therefore, be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. Until what? The coming of the Lord, that’s right. What is the goal? What is it we’re looking forward to? The coming of the Lord, that’s right. And we have to be patient until then. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth [that’s the harvest], waiting for it patiently until he receives the early and latter rain.