Things to Come: The Return of Christ


Anticipation of Christ's return was a fever pitch when I was in high school!  The book The Late Great Planet Earth was published, and became an immediate bestseller.  Every evangelist who preached a revival at our church did at least one sermon on it.  One evangelist looked at me and the rest of my youth group sitting at the front and said, "I believe not one of these teenagers will have a gray hair on their head before Christ returns!"

Today, my hair is pretty much all gray, so that didn't quite work out!

I inhaled all the anticipation and helped spread it!  But I didn't know that every generation of Christ followers expected Christ to return in their generation, and that the view of the end times I held was only one of several possible approaches.

This led me to study the scriptures to find what the Bible actually says about Christ's return and to separate it from all the well-intentioned, but fanciful and false interpretations.

Passages like Luke 17:22-35 say that Jesus' return will be obvious, but sudden and unexpected.  They also say that there will be a separation between those who have followed Christ and those who haven't.  But it doesn't say those left behind won't know where Christ's people have gone!

Other passages say no one knows the time when Christ will return (Mark 13:32), and that he will return the way he left, in power and glory (Acts 1:11).

Since no one knows when Christ will return, the best thing to do is to be always ready.  How do we do that?  In Acts 1, Jesus is about to ascend to heaven.  His followers ask him if he was about to end the world and establish his kingdom on earth.  Jesus said in vs. 6-7 that it wasn't for them to know times or seasons set by the Father's authority (though we keep trying!).  Instead, he said in v. 8 that they were to be his witnesses in the world.  

The way to be ready isn't to try to figure out the time of his return.  The way to be ready is to be a witness to God's love and salvation in Christ to everyone every day!

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