Grantsdale Community Church
2026-08-23-Oil You Can't Borrow
  • Introduction
    Last week I made a promise. I told you this morning's sermon would get personal fast, and I meant it, so let's not waste much time getting there.
    Last week we left ten young women standing in the dark with lamps in their hands, five of them bright, five of them sputtering.
    The foolish ones turn to the wise ones and ask the most reasonable question in the world: can we borrow some oil? And the wise ones, who up to this point have been perfectly pleasant wedding guests, say no.
    I told you that answer makes almost everybody uncomfortable. I’ve had people in other churches when I preached on this say, “that's the least Christian thing I've ever heard in a sermon about a wedding." Fair enough.
    I've been at weddings where the groomsmen forgot the rings, lost a boutonniere, and once, memorably, a best man who forgot which pocket held the vows he'd promised to hold onto for the groom.
    Generosity is usually the rule at a wedding. Sharing is what you do. So why won't the wise virgins share the one thing that would fix everything?
    The answer hinges on a single word Jesus never actually defines in the parable: oil. He tells us who has it and who doesn't. He tells us what happens when it runs out.
    But, He never once tells us, in so many words, what it is. And that, I've come to believe, is entirely on purpose. Jesus wants us to go looking for the answer. Not just in the rest of what He said, but in what the rest of Scripture says, and that's exactly the walk I want to take with you this morning.

    What the Oil Is Not

    Let's clear away a couple of wrong answers before we get to the right one, because both of them are tempting. We’re going to start by looking at Matt 25:8-9 again.
    Matthew 25:8–9 CSB
    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.’
    Here’s where the question hits. “What is the oil exactly?”
    The oil is not salvation itself, at least not in the sense of a one-time transaction we either have or don't. If that were the case, the parable would be teaching that salvation can run dry through negligence, which contradicts nearly everything else Jesus says about a Father who keeps His sheep securely in His hand.
    Whatever the oil is, it's something the wise virgins had to keep acquiring, flask after flask, long before the cry went out at midnight.
    The oil is also not raw enthusiasm, because all ten virgins had that in equal measure. All ten showed up. All ten had working lamps. All ten fell asleep waiting, wise and foolish alike, and Jesus doesn't dock anyone points for napping.
    The difference wasn't who wanted to meet the groom. It was who had spent months, maybe years, quietly making sure they'd be ready when He came.
    The word "quietly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I want you to sit with it, because it sums up the whole sermon.

    The Word That Fuels the Flame

    If you want a single verse that starts to crack this open, Psalm 119 hands it to us on a platter.
    Psalm 119:105 CSB
    105 Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.
    Notice the psalmist doesn't say God's word is just a lamp. He says it's a lamp with light inside, the thing that makes the lamp worth carrying in the first place.
    A lamp with no fuel, no light, is just an inconvenient piece of pottery you have to carry around in the dark. The Word of God is what a wise virgin has been quietly pouring into her flask, verse by verse, for years, long before she ever needed it to burn.
    Here's where it really gets uncomfortably personal. You see, the oil is, at least in part, a life saturated in God's Word. That means borrowing oil at midnight is like asking to borrow somebody else's Bible reading from the last ten years.
    We can't do it. We can hand someone our Bible. But, we can’t hand them the hours we’ve spent, or didn't spend, sitting with it. Taking God’s Word in and storing it in our hearts.

    Character You Can't Cram For

    I want to widen the lens now, because Scripture describes this same slow accumulation using a completely different picture: not a lamp, but building up from a foundation.
    2 Peter 1:5–7 CSB
    5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, 6 knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, 7 godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
    Read that list again and notice the verbs are all additions, one on top of the other, like a mason laying brick upon brick. Peter doesn't say "acquire all of this by Friday."
    He describes a lifetime of building up, of transformation. Each virtue built upon the one before it. And notice each one requires "making every effort."
    Nobody sleepwalks into godliness. It comes the same way calluses come to a guitarist's fingers: slowly, through repeated, unglamorous, and sometimes very painful contact with the strings.
    I tried to learn guitar once, back before any of you knew me. I practiced with tremendous enthusiasm and zero calluses, and on day ten, my fingertips staged a full mutiny. I wanted the sound without the soreness, and it turns out that's not how learning to play guitar works, and it's not how sanctification works either.
    The writer of Hebrews describes the same problem in a congregation that wanted spiritual maturity without spiritual repetition.
    Hebrews 5:13–14 CSB
    13 Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness, because he is an infant. 14 But solid food is for the mature—for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.
    "Trained to distinguish” the translation of a Greek word from which we get the word “gymnasium.” Mature discernment, the ability to tell good from evil at a glance, requires a gym membership, not a light switch.
    It reminds me of how, every January, gym parking lots fill up with people who bought a membership, hoping the card in their wallet would do the heavy lifting for them. By February the lot's back to normal. The problem was never access.
    It’s always been the repetition of doing the work. Each days work building upon the last. That's what the wise virgins had that the foolish ones didn't. Not a better starting position. But determined, repetitive work.
    Experienced people who run marathons, almost every single time, somewhere around the twenty-mile mark, have a runner near them who’s body decides to bonk. A marathon term that describes:
    “A sudden state of extreme fatigue and energy depletion that happens when your body runs completely out of stored carbohydrates, or glycogen, in your muscles and liver. In a marathon, this usually hits around mile 20.”
    We can’t borrow somebody else's training on mile twenty. We can’t ask the runner next to us to hand over some of the miles they logged back in February, when it was nine degrees outside, and we were still asleep.
    The race exposes, in about four hours, what months of early mornings either built or didn't build. Midnight in this parable works exactly the same way. It doesn't create the difference between the wise and the foolish virgins. It simply reveals a difference that had been there, invisible, all along.

    Faith Tested Into Something Sturdier

    James takes this one step further and tells us where a lot of that training actually happens, and it's not somewhere any of us would sign up for voluntarily.
    James 1:2–4 CSB
    2 Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.
    Consider it GREAT joy. Whenever you experience trials. If you're anything like me, that verse reads less like an invitation and more like a dare. Nobody wakes up hoping today is the day their faith gets tested.
    But James says the testing is the furnace that turns faith from a raw material into something load-bearing, and there is no shortcut that bypasses the furnace. We can’t outsource our own trials to somebody else and receive the endurance secondhand. That’s exactly why the wise virgins couldn’t pour their flask into somebody else's lamp without both lamps going dark.
    This is where Paul, of all people, gives us the flip side, because I don't want anyone leaving here thinking sanctification is a solo, weightlifting program between you and your own gritted teeth.
    Philippians 2:12–13 CSB
    12 Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. 13 For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.
    Work out your own salvation, and God is working in you. Both true, both in the same breath. The effort is genuinely ours; the wise virgins are the ones who bought the oil, filled their own flasks, trimmed their own wicks.
    But the power behind that effort was never manufactured in-house. Every honest ounce of oil in that flask traces back to a God who was, the whole time, working in them, to want it in the first place. It is God who gives us the desire to want our sanctification and the will to do the work needed for our sanctification.

    Train Like You Mean It

    Paul says almost the same thing to Timothy in language even more direct.
    1 Timothy 4:7–8 CSB
    7 But have nothing to do with pointless and silly myths. Rather, train yourself in godliness. 8 For the training of the body has limited benefit, but godliness is beneficial in every way, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.
    "Train yourself." Not "wait for a feeling." Not "hope it happens." Train. And Paul, who clearly liked comparing the Christian life to athletics, isn't shy about the fact that physical training is real training, with real, if limited, benefit.
    He's not knocking our treadmill. He's saying godliness works the same way muscle does: through resistance, repetition, and time, none of which can be borrowed from someone else's workout.
    This is precisely why the wise virgins couldn't share. It was never about scarcity of oil in some cosmic warehouse. God isn't rationing grace like it's the last case of water before a hurricane.
    It was that the oil each virgin carried was, quite literally, an image of hours she alone had put in. We can’t hand somebody our training. Sure, e can hand them a protein bar, but that's not the same as the months of showing up everyday, day after day.
    Proverbs paints the same growth as a sunrise, not a light switch.
    Proverbs 4:18 CSB
    18 The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, shining brighter and brighter until midday.
    Dawn doesn't arrive all at once. Anybody who has ever waited on a Montana mountain for the sun to clear the ridge, knows the process takes its own sweet time. Minute by minute, gray to gold to blinding. That’s the shape of a life with oil in the flask. Slow. Cumulative. Utterly unimpressive most days. And then, one ordinary Tuesday, completely blinding.

    Available, But Not Automatic

    Now, before this starts to sound like a sermon about spiritual bootstraps, let me put the brakes on, because the wise virgins didn't manufacture their own oil out of thin air. They bought it. Somebody was selling it. And Isaiah tells us exactly who's behind the counter.
    Isaiah 55:1 CSB
    1 “Come, everyone who is thirsty, come to the water; and you without silver, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without silver and without cost!
    The dealer selling oil at midnight in Jesus' parable is a shadow of the God who's been giving it away for free the whole time. The wise virgins didn't earn their preparedness by being smarter or more spiritually gifted than their friends.
    They simply kept showing up to receive what God was freely offering, day after ordinary day, long before they needed it. That's the whole secret, and it isn't much of a secret.
    Church attendance. An open Bible. Honest prayer. Obedience in the small, unnoticed moments nobody throws a parade for. None of it is dramatic.
    All of it available. All of it free. And none of it transferable after the fact, which is precisely why Ephesians tells us not to wait until the tank is empty to go looking for a refill.
    Ephesians 5:15–16 CSB
    15 Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk—not as unwise people but as wise—16 making the most of the time, because the days are evil.
    Ephesians 5:17–18 CSB
    17 So don’t be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. 18 And don’t get drunk with wine, which leads to reckless living, but be filled by the Spirit:
    "Be filled" there is present tense in the Greek, which is a fancy way of saying it's not a one-time top-off. Paul’s describing an oil flask we must refill constantly, not a tank we fill once at the factory and forget about it.
    Being filled with the Spirit is a daily habit dressed up as a doctrine, and if we skip it for a decade, no amount of spiritual CPR at midnight will substitute for the years we didn't spend filling the tank.
    Conclusion: Buy the Oil Today
    So here's where all of this lands, as plainly as I know how to say it. The oil is a life, built day by unremarkable day, on the Word of God, through tested faith, disciplined obedience, and the quiet, ongoing work of the Spirit inside us.
    Nobody hands that to us at midnight. Nobody can. But everybody, sitting here this morning, in a chair that may or may not be as comfortable as advertised, has access to the same salesman at the counter Isaiah pointed to, the same Spirit Paul described, the same Word the psalmist called a lamp with light inside.
    The door hasn't closed on us yet.
    If you're realizing your flask has been running low for a while, I want you to hear this the way I meant it last week: not as a threat, but as an invitation. Go buy oil. Open the Word today, not as an emergency flare but as the ordinary bread of an ordinary Tuesday.
    Let today's trial do its quiet, uncomfortable work instead of running from it. Train, the way Paul told Timothy to train, one unglamorous rep at a time. None of it can be borrowed. All of it can be bought, and the One selling it has never once turned away a poor buyer who came empty-handed.
    Next week we follow this same watchfulness into a different servant standing at a different door, the one the master finds still working when he comes home. We're calling it "The Faithful Servant," and it turns out staying ready and staying busy were never two different assignments.
    Until then, keep filling the flask. The lamp is only as good as the light producing oil that we’ve poured into it.

      • Matthew 25:8–9ESV

      • Psalm 119:105ESV

      • 2 Peter 1:5–7ESV

      • Hebrews 5:13–14ESV

      • James 1:2–4ESV

      • Philippians 2:12–13ESV

      • 1 Timothy 4:7–8ESV

      • Proverbs 4:18ESV

      • Isaiah 55:1ESV

      • Ephesians 5:15–16ESV

      • Ephesians 5:17–18ESV

Grantsdale Community Church
bklapwyk@grantsdaleccmt.org
4063666883
https://grantsdaleccmt.org/
2 members