Grantsdale Community Church
2026-08-16-Parable of 10 Virgins
  • Introduction
    Last week we left Jacob limping into the sunrise at a river called Jabbok, and I told you we were leaving the long night behind for a wedding. Ten young women, lamps in hand, waiting on a bridegroom who was taking longer than anyone expected. Well, here we are. Welcome to the wedding.
    I need to confess something before we open our Bibles this morning. In my experience with weddings, the person on the schedule you can least count on is never the caterer, and it's never the DJ, who for reasons unknown, always insists on playing exactly one song nobody requested.
    It's not even the flower girl, who three minutes before showtime, has decided this is the day she becomes a conscientious objector.
    It's the groom's cousin who was supposed to bring the rings.
    Somebody is always running late at a wedding. Usually it isn't the bride. Brides, in my experience, arrive on a schedule known only to themselves and to God.
    But somebody in that bridal party is standing in a parking lot right now, wondering if they left the unity candle in the trunk of a car three states away.
    Jesus knew exactly what He was doing when He picked a wedding to make His point about waiting. Everyone in His audience had either been in one or endured one. And everyone understood the particular kind of tired that comes from standing around in your best clothes, wondering when the important person is finally going to show up.
    Some of you may remember this parable. We touched on it back in April, in our very first series, as a supporting text for what it means to “watch.”
    Today we're not touching on it. We're moving in. If you have your Bibles and want to follow along we’re going to be in Matthew 25:1-13.

    Ten Lamps, One Bridegroom, No Guarantees

    This is the parable's own Sunday, the one it's been waiting for, and I want to tell you up front: this isn’t a comfortable story. Jesus isn’t trying to make us feel nice about waiting. He’s trying to wake us up about how we wait.
    Matthew 25:1–4 CSB
    1 “At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the groom. 2 Five of them were foolish and five were wise. 3 When the foolish took their lamps, they didn’t take oil with them; 4 but the wise ones took oil in their flasks with their lamps.
    A little background, because a first-century Jewish wedding didn’t run on the same clock as ours. The groom would come to collect his bride and her party for the wedding feast, and the timing of his arrival belonged to his father, not to him.
    It could be evening. It could be midnight. It could be a year from next Tuesday. Nobody knew, and that uncertainty was the whole point.
    The ten bridesmaids in this story had one job: light the way to the feast when the groom finally showed up. Five of them packed extra oil for their lamps. Five of them didn’t. That's it.
    That's the entire difference between the wise and the foolish in this parable, not intelligence, not sincerity, not enthusiasm. All ten of them showed up. All ten of them had lamps.
    All ten of them, presumably, RSVP'd “yes” with genuine excitement. The only difference is that five of them packed a spare flask of oil, and five of them figured they'd be fine.
    We laugh at that, a little, because we've all been the person who brings a portable phone charger to a wedding and forgets the actual gift. But Jesus isn't telling a story about party planning.
    He's telling a story about the difference between people who prepare for a future they can’t schedule, and people who assume the present moment will always give them enough runway to catch up later. Solomon said it plainer than I ever could:
    Proverbs 6:6–8 CSB
    6 Go to the ant, you slacker! Observe its ways and become wise. 7 Without leader, administrator, or ruler, 8 it prepares its provisions in summer; it gathers its food during harvest.
    The foolish virgins aren’t lazy people. They didn't skip the wedding to sleep in. They showed up with lamps, which took effort, and stood in the dark, which took patience. What they lacked wasn't devotion in the moment.
    It was preparation before the moment came, and that is a much more uncomfortable category, because it means the failure happened long before anyone noticed it.

    The Sleep That Isn't the Sin

    As we just discovered in our last series, not all sleep is sin. We see that here in our parable as well.
    Matthew 25:5 CSB
    5 When the groom was delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep.
    I want you to notice something we tend to rush past: all ten of them fall asleep. Not five. All ten. If falling asleep were the sin in this story, Jesus condemns the wise virgins right along with the foolish ones, and the parable falls apart. It doesn't.
    He isn't saying the foolish virgins' sin was drowsiness. He's saying their sinfulness happened much earlier. They came to the waiting already unprepared, and no amount of enthusiastic napping was going to fix that.
    This is, frankly, good news for anyone who has ever dozed off during a long wait, in a hospital hallway, in a DMV line that appears to operate on geological time, or, let's be honest, in a pew on a Sunday when the sermon runs long.
    Watchfulness, as Jesus defines it here, isn’t the absence of rest. It is the presence of readiness. You can sleep. You just can't sleep unprepared.
    That distinction matters because it answers a question every honest person eventually asks: if we don't know when Christ is returning, why has He waited this long?
    Two thousand years is a strange delay for a wedding. Peter answers that exact question, and I think it belongs right here, because it gives us the big-picture reason behind the groom's delay in the first place:
    2 Peter 3:8–9 CSB
    8 Dear friends, don’t overlook this one fact: With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. 9 The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.
    The bridegroom in Jesus' parable isn't late because he's disorganized. He's not stuck in traffic. In the bigger story this parable is pointing toward, how the delay is mercy wearing the disguise of inconvenience.
    Every extra day is a day someone else gets to wake up and get their oil. That truth doesn't make the waiting shorter. But it changes what the waiting means.

    The Cry at Midnight

    Even then too many are still going to be unprepared.
    Matthew 25:6–9 CSB
    6 “In the middle of the night there was a shout: ‘Here’s the groom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 “Then all the virgins got up and trimmed their lamps. 8 The foolish ones said to the wise ones, ‘Give us some of your oil, because our lamps are going out.’ 9 “The wise ones answered, ‘No, there won’t be enough for us and for you. Go instead to those who sell oil, and buy some for yourselves.’
    Midnight. Not a gentle wake-up with coffee and soft music, but a shout in the dark, the kind that gets everyone's heart rate up before their eyes are even fully open.
    When I was in boot camp our very first morning wake-up call came at 4:00 in the morning and it came with this giant man running back and forth on top of the long table in the middle of the barracks banging on a 30 gallon metal trash can with a wooden tool handle.
    Every time I read this part of the story I think back to that startling, heart pounding wake-up call and imagine that, in a similar way, that must have been their experience.
    All ten women wake up. All ten trim their lamps. And in that single motion, the difference that had been invisible for hours, days, or weeks becomes impossible to hide. Five lamps flare up bright. Five lamps sputter.
    And then comes the line that makes almost everyone in the room a little uncomfortable. The foolish virgins ask to borrow oil, and the wise virgins say no.
    Before we decide the wise virgins are being stingy, and believe me, my first instinct wants to go there, but notice what they actually say.
    “There won't be enough for us and for you.” This isn't selfishness. It's math. If they split the oil, all ten lamps go dark before the procession even reaches the feast. Some things simply cannot be transferred at the last minute, no matter how generous the person holding them wants to be.
    Paul says almost the same thing about the way we each carry our own walk with God:
    Galatians 6:4–5 CSB
    4 Let each person examine his own work, and then he can take pride in himself alone, and not compare himself with someone else. 5 For each person will have to carry his own load.
    There's an Old Testament echo of this too, from an unlikely corner of Ezekiel, where God tells the prophet that even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were standing in a doomed city, “they would deliver only themselves by their righteousness” (Ezek 14:14, 20, CSB).
    Not their neighbors. Not their children. Just themselves. That’s not a popular truth in a culture that likes to believe closeness to a godly person automatically rubs off on us. Sometimes it does rub off, praise God for that.

    The Door That Closes

    But nobody else's oil can light your lamp at midnight. We'll spend an entire sermon on that exact question next week, so for now, just sit with the discomfort. Jesus wants us to.
    Matthew 25:10–12 CSB
    10 “When they had gone to buy some, the groom arrived, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet, and the door was shut. 11 Later the rest of the virgins also came and said, ‘Master, master, open up for us!’ 12 “He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you!’
    This is the part of the parable nobody wants to preach and everybody needs to hear. The foolish virgins do exactly what the wise virgins told them to do. They go buy oil. They're not defiant. They're not indifferent.
    They're trying, in the moment, to fix a problem that needed fixing hours or years earlier. And while they're out shopping, the door closes.
    In a first-century wedding, once the groom, the bride, and the wedding party were inside, the door was shut for a reason, not cruelty, but the plain fact that a wedding, unlike a Walmart, actually has a start time.
    You don't get to wander in during the vows because you had a good excuse for being late. And when the five locked-out virgins knock and beg, the groom's answer is, I think, the coldest sentence in all of Scripture: “I don't know you.”
    That phrase should stop us cold, because Jesus uses almost the exact same words earlier in Matthew, and there He's not talking about bridesmaids. He's talking about people who did ministry in His name:
    Matthew 7:22–23 CSB
    22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, drive out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name?’ 23 Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers!’
    That's a sobering pattern to hold next to each other: activity without relationship, presence without preparation, a lamp without oil. Both texts describe people who look, from the outside, exactly like everyone else standing in the wedding party.
    The tragedy isn't that they didn't try. It's that they mistook proximity to the wedding for a place inside it.

    The Wedding Behind the Wedding

    Here's where I want to pull the camera back, because this parable doesn't hang in the air by itself. Jesus reaches for wedding imagery because the whole Bible has been building toward one particular wedding since Genesis.
    Paul tells husbands to love their wives the way Christ loved the church, and then lets slip the bigger picture he's actually describing:
    Ephesians 5:25–27 CSB
    25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. 27 He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.
    Christ is the groom of this story. The church, which, last I checked, includes everyone sitting in this room, is the bride. And John, near the very end of Revelation, pulls back the curtain on exactly where this parable has been pointing all along:
    Revelation 19:6–7 CSB
    6 Then I heard something like the voice of a vast multitude, like the sound of cascading waters, and like the rumbling of loud thunder, saying, Hallelujah, because our Lord God, the Almighty, reigns! 7 Let us be glad, rejoice, and give him glory, because the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has prepared herself.
    Revelation 19:8–9 CSB
    8 She was given fine linen to wear, bright and pure. For the fine linen represents the righteous acts of the saints. 9 Then he said to me, “Write: Blessed are those invited to the marriage feast of the Lamb!” He also said to me, “These words of God are true.”
    Ten virgins, one groom, a shout in the middle of the night, and a door that closes. It's not a stand-alone morality tale about punctuality. It's a preview, in miniature, of the last chapter of the whole Book.
    Every Scripture we've touched this morning, from an ant in Proverbs to a shut door in Revelation, is describing the same wedding from a different angle. That's the big picture this little parable has been quietly holding the whole time.
    Conclusion: Keep Watch
    Jesus closes the parable exactly where He opened it, which tells us He wants this sentence to be the one we carry out the door with us this morning:
    Matthew 25:13 CSB
    13 “Therefore be alert, because you don’t know either the day or the hour.
    Notice what He doesn't say. He doesn't say, “therefore panic.” He doesn't say, “therefore try to guess the date.” He says, be alert. Stay ready.
    Keep oil in the flask, not because you're anxious about the groom, but because you love Him enough to be ready whenever he shows up, whether that's tonight or forty years from tonight.
    If w’ere sitting here this morning and already know our flask is running low. That our relationship with Christ has been running on the fumes of a decision we made years ago, rather than a walk we’re actually taking today.
    Hear this as an invitation, not a threat. The door in the parable closes at midnight. It hasn’t closed on us this morning. There’s still time to buy oil, and better yet, there’s a Groom who gives it freely to anyone who asks.
    We've spent five months now learning what it costs to stay awake. This morning, ten virgins with lamps taught us that waking up isn't the finish line. Being ready when we wake up is.
    Next week we ask the harder question this parable leaves hanging in the air: what exactly is the oil, and why couldn't the wise virgins simply hand it over? We're calling it “Oil You Can't Borrow,” and I promise you, it gets personal fast.
    Until then: keep our lamps lit. Keep our flasks full. And keep watching, because the door is still open.

      • Matthew 25:1–4ESV

      • Proverbs 6:6–8ESV

      • Matthew 25:5ESV

      • 2 Peter 3:8–9ESV

      • Matthew 25:6–9ESV

      • Galatians 6:4–5ESV

      • Matthew 25:10–12ESV

      • Matthew 7:22–23ESV

      • Ephesians 5:25–27ESV

      • Revelation 19:6–7ESV

      • Revelation 19:8–9ESV

      • Matthew 25:13ESV

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