OUR WEDDING GARMENT

'BUT when the king came into to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding garment. "Friend", he asked, "how did you get in here without a wedding garment?" The man was speechless. Then the king told the attendant, "Tie him up hand and foot, and throw him outside into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are invited, but few are chosen."'

Such is the telling end to the parable which Jesus tells of the Wedding Banquet, which is found in Matthew 22:1-14. I expect that most of us at some time, before it was explained to us, have felt how unfair to expect a man invited at short notice off the street, and poor as well, to have clothes fit for a wedding. How could he afford them? How could he have obtained them? But when we have it explained to us that the custom of the time was that the host at the wedding provided the wedding garment for all guests to wear, we see it was a mark of rudeness and rejection of the kind provision of the king.

This end of the parable is so telling, because of its spiritual meaning and application. It is the bedrock of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Like the guests at the wedding banquet, God invites all people everywhere to the wedding supper of salvation. None are exempt from the invitation because they are too bad. Forgiveness and eternal life is offered freely to all. But an essential part of the gracious invitation is that the wedding garment of Christ's righteousness is the essential part of the package. Christ's righteousness is the garment that the Lord of heaven provides which makes us fit to sit down with the King of kings and have fellowship with him.

Christ's righteousness is like the invisible cloak of fictional stories, though Christ's righteousness is no fiction. Just as putting on the invisible cloak made the wearer invisible to all, so when we have the garment of Christ's righteousness on, all our sins are made invisible to God. They are blotted out and remembered no more.

When Christ died it was before we were born, yet he died for us. Our name was in the list of names of those for whom he died, and all our sins and failures were known to him and he bore them all in his body on the cross. Before he died, Jesus also kept the whole law of God perfectly and he was doing it in our place. By his life and death he fulfilled all the righteous demands of God, and he did it, not for himself, but for us and in our place.

Thus Jesus has provided a righteousness which meets all God's holy demands; and in the Gospel invitation to salvation and to heaven and to dining with the Lord, this righteousness of Jesus is the wedding garment, which God has graciously provided so that we may be fit for his presence and the marriage supper in heaven.

When we hear the Gospel invitation to be forgiven and receive eternal life, we have nothing to make us fit to come into God's presence, hence the wedding garment of Christ's righteousness. We must receive it and put it on. When we do, as we enter the presence of the King of kings, we are gloriously altered. All our rags are covered. The king sees the beauty of Christ's righteousness in us, and he sees no sin in us whatsoever.

For all eternity this garment of Christ's righteousness will be our only title to heaven, and will be that which makes us fit for glory.

What does it mean spiritually to be like this wedding guest without a wedding garment? It is to feel that in some way we have righteousness ourselves which make us fit for the heavenly banquet. But our good works are like the beggarly tattered garments of the guest taken off the street. To reject Christ's righteousness is to slight God who has provided the garment at such cost - the cost of the life of his only Son. To refuse the garment of Christ's righteousness is to reject God's diagnosis that we are utterly unworthy for his presence in any righteous works of our own, however good or meritorious we may feel they are.

To come to God answering the Gospel invitation to heaven and eternal life rejecting the wedding garment of Christ's righteousness is an unforgivable offence to God. We sin against the Holy Spirit, and there is no future for us but hell.

It is such a tragedy that so many good church people will find themselves at the last like this man without the wedding garment, simply because in all their religion they hung on to the belief that in some way they were contributing to their salvation by their good deeds and religious activity. There is only one way to come and answer God's invitation to heaven, and it is in the words of Toplady in his well known hymn -

Nothing in my hands I bring,

Simply to Thy cross I cling.

Naked look to Thee for dress,

Helpless look to the Thee for grace,

Foul, I to the fountain fly,

Wash me, Saviour, or I die.