very once in a while I receive a phone call from a friend who wonders when I’m going to get serious and warn people that Jesus’ return is “sooner than we think.” His burden is that God’s people aren’t sufficiently prepared for the Lord’s return.
Every time I hear that I wonder how I’m supposed to improve on Jesus’ final message: “Yes, I am coming soon” (Rev. 22:20). Isn’t that warning enough?
I mean, every so often someone comes along with an insight from Scripture or a prophetic scenario that suggests final events are really falling into place. And natural disasters almost always lead to speculation about the nearness of the Second Coming. Then for a few weeks or months people get all excited and . . . life goes on.
When are we going to get past this crisis mentality? When are we going to get past the idea that some world event is going to tip us off when it’s time to get seriously spiritual? When are we going to learn to live every day in a constant state of readiness?
For some, being ready for the Lord’s return means a dramatic adjustment to one’s lifestyle: heading for the country and living a life of blessed solitude and spiritual reflection, adopting some severe or restrictive diet, being more involved in giving Bible studies or some other kind of evangelistic outreach. Rarely does it mean walking a path of deliberate, consistent discipleship.
Yet throughout the Gospels, Jesus’ emphasis was not about getting ready, but being ready (see Matt. 24:44; 25:10; Luke 12:35, 38, 40, 47). There’s a huge difference.
It’s the difference between students staying awake all night cramming for a final exam, and deliberately, methodically doing one’s reading, completing assignments, participating in classroom discussions, writing papers, and taking the final exam to demonstrate how much they’ve picked up over the semester.
When we live balanced Christian lives, in which devotion, obedience, and service are daily elements of our walk with Christ, we don’t have to get all discombobulated if the pope says mass at Yankee Stadium, if the price of gas at the pump hits $5 a gallon, or if earthquakes, floods, or tornados bring wholesale death and destruction to entire regions of the country.
If we have a message to share with our communities, it’s not that Jesus is coming this year (or next, or in 2011, etc.); it’s a message that a relationship with Jesus is all we need to take us from this life to the next. When we’re in Christ, we don’t have to worry about getting ready; we are ready. We can then concentrate on being all the things Jesus was when He served the people He came to save.
Too many Adventists sing, “Is my name written there?” instead of, “Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it!” Too many of us live the message of a bumper sticker from a couple of decades ago, “Jesus is coming, and boy is He mad,”* rather than the words of John Newton’s great hymn, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
Why would anyone wait until life on this planet gets any more messed up before they take seriously their relationship with Christ? Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16) has a powerful message in this connection:
You remember the story: the vineyard owner hires workers by promising to pay them “whatever is right” (verse 4). They work for him the entire day, 12 hours. Then he hires others who work nine hours, six hours, three hours, one hour.
At the end of the day the vineyard owner starts with the one-hour workers and pays them a denarius each. Everyone then assumes that one hour’s work equals one denarius, which leaves the 12-hour workers rubbing their hands in anticipation. But when they, too, receive only a denarius, “they began to grumble against the landowner” (verse 11). They were miffed because they thought they deserved more for working longer.
But they overlooked the fact that they had a reward greater than that of the other workers: they had the opportunity of being with their master for the entire day, 12 hours. The
others had the same reward, but not the same experience.
That’s why I can’t understand the mentality that says, Soon it will be time to take seriously my walk with Christ.
That day is today.
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*Or words to that effect.
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Stephen Chavez is managing editor of the Adventist Review.