Children have a gift for asking questions adults have learned to keep to themselves. On a long drive, they ask the question every parent knows is coming: “Are we there yet?”
If we are honest, many Christians ask Jesus a similar question: When are You coming? When will You make everything right? When will pain, sickness, injustice, and death finally end?
End-times conversations have a way of getting complicated quickly. Before long, we are sorting through seals, trumpets, bowls, beasts, timelines, and theories. Faithful Christians do not agree on every detail, and we should be honest enough to admit that.
But Scripture does not leave us confused about the destination.
There are few subjects that create more curiosity—and more confusion—than the return of Jesus.
People build charts. They study headlines. They watch wars, elections, earthquakes, new technology, and events in the Middle East. Before long, every breaking-news alert becomes another possible piece of the end-times puzzle.
Anyone can have a spiritual high.
It is easy to trust God when the prayer is answered, the relationship is strong, the bills are paid, and the future looks promising. It is easy to worship when you just received good news. It is easy to serve when people notice your effort and thank you for it.
Faithfulness becomes harder when the emotions fade, and life does not improve as quickly as you hoped.
There is something about waiting for an important event that changes the way we live before it arrives.
When parents are expecting their first child, they do not wait until the baby is born to begin preparing. They paint the nursery, buy a crib, install a car seat, rearrange schedules, and rethink the family budget. The baby has not arrived yet, but the certainty of what is coming has already begun to reshape their priorities.
That is the picture Paul gives us of the Christian life. Jesus has promised that He will return. We do not know the day or the hour, and we cannot control when it happens. But the certainty of His return should change the way we live right now.
