The final hour.
Which is harder to wait for? The last hour of Monday’s work day or the final hour of Friday?
Waiting is hard to do. It causes anxiety. For me the best remedy for waiting anxiety is to stay busy. To distract myself with activity.
We are waiting for Jesus to return and according to 1 John, we are in the last hour. This last hour hasn’t just seemed to take forever, it has actually been 2000 years (ish).
In hours? If I did the math right it’s been 17,520,000 hours (ish) since John wrote this.
“Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us. But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
1 John 2:18-23
We have two primary jobs to do while we wait: 1. hang onto our faith. Do not walk away. and 2. Share our faith.
David, who wrote the psalms, had some experience with waiting for the Lord.
“I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.”
Every winter my soul starts to despair because of the short days. It seems like it’s always dark. Dark when I get up, dark when I leave for work and dark when I get home. But if I just wait a little longer, late February, the days get longer again, and there is a glimmer of light on the horizon at both ends of my workday.
Could the world be at that same spot now? Is it late February on God’s timetable? Are we seeing the glimmer of light on the horizon of time? Not because the world is improving but because the world is getting worse. We know from reading through the book that it will. It will continue to get worse.
Even if Jesus’ return is not imminent i have a job to do. I should be sharing my story about Jesus with the people I meet and see every day. Who will I share with today?
(originally posted 2/26/2018)
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