What Are We Waiting For?

There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world right now.  We’re sending more troops to Afghanistan.  There’s the threat of war with North Korea.  There are protests in Charlottesville and other places.  There was just a hurricane in Texas and now there may be one headed for Florida.  So, for some, this raises a question:  are we in the end times?

Well, I’ll tell you--I don’t know.  Jesus described the signs of the coming of the end times:  “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.  But before all this, they will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name.”  (Luke 21:10-12).  You could make the argument that this description fits where we are now.  On the other hand, there have been many times over the last two thousand years when you could make the argument that what was going on fit Jesus’ description, and the end times haven’t happened yet.  So again, I don’t know.

If we are in the end times, of course, we’ll know for sure soon enough.  But here’s what I think is a more relevant question.  If you were firmly convinced that we are in the end times, what would you do?  Would you live your life differently if you believed that the end times are here now, and if so, how?

Would you spend more time in prayer?  Would you spend more time in church?  Would you read the Bible more?  Would you make more of an effort to love your neighbor, the way Jesus told us to?  Would you make more of an effort to go and make disciples of Jesus Christ, the way Jesus told us to?  Think about it.  In what would you live your life differently if you believed we are in the end times?

And here’s an even more relevant question:  Why are you not doing that now?  For that matter, why am I not doing that now?  Because, if you believe in the end times at all, you know that the end times could happen at any time.  Jesus did not give the disciples an exact time--in fact, he told the disciples that only God in heaven knows the exact time--but he told them to always be ready.  “Always be on the watch” is how Jesus put it (Luke 21:36).  And even if you don’t believe in the end times, each of us is going to have our own personal end time at some point.  That’s true even if you’re young--you hear about young people dying every day.  So why are we not getting ready now?  What are we waiting for?

I’m not suggesting that we live each day as if it was our last.  That’s not practical.  What I am suggesting, though, is that most of us--most definitely including me--need to take our faith a lot more seriously.  We need to stop making faith in God just another one of the many things that compete for our time and our attention.  Faith in God, faith in Jesus Christ, doing the things Jesus told us to do, needs to be the pre-eminent thing in our lives.  

Deuteronomy 6:6-9 says of God’s commandments “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”  I’m not telling you that you have to take that literally, although it certainly would not be wrong if we did.  We do need to take that idea to heart, though.  We need to do whatever we have to do to make sure we’re living with an awareness of God and of doing God’s will all the time, not just when we think we have the time.

The time to start doing that is now.  Because we never know when our time might run out.