The other day I received a document from a friend of mine. In this document he was trying to establish that the National Sunday Law would be enacted on May 29, 1999. From there he applied certain prophecies that lead him to conclude that Jesus would come in the year 2002.

I personally do not have the gift of interpreting last day prophecies, although I am interested in hearing and reading from those who do. Personally, I am more sensitive about the change of ideologies in the church as we approach the end of time than I am to read of a move to change the Constitution or to hear of a large-scale disaster in some far-off country or that the earth may be struck by an object from outer space.

My friend has made it his study to determine a date for certain last-day events. When I think about it, I can see why we would like to know the day and the hour of the Lord's coming. However, we might discover that to know in advance could mean more disadvantages than advantages. You remember that a few months ago some astronomers thought that earth was on a collision course with a meteor and that it would impact the earth around 2025. The announcement was in the news around the world for a few days until someone came to the conclusion that there had been a miscalculation and that the meteor would not collide with the earth after all.

Along the same line of thinking, in many places they are trying to accurately predict significant earthquakes. If it were indeed possible to predict an earthquake, the big question would be how and when to get the word out, and what panic could result if they did predict one and then it didn't happen. The result could be a disaster in itself. Hundreds could die in the panic and it could take years to recover from the economic damage.

What about the coming of Jesus? How does the victorious Christian relate to the possibility, yea, to the inevitability of the coming of the Lord the second time? This is extremely important.

I was telling a fellow minister about the document that my friend prepared and how it predicts the dates for the final events. I remarked that we have tried and failed at this so many times that now we are almost afraid to talk in any real meaningful way about the coming of Jesus at all. While the world was getting excited about the possibility of the end of all things around the turn of the century, we may have felt that we had been through this so many times that we would rather not become involved.

But let me ask you a question. What if we knew that Jesus was going to come on a certain day of a certain year? What would we do about it? Maybe before we ask ourselves that question, we ought to ask ourselves another one, and maybe there is no answer to this one, and that is, if the scriptures told specifically the year in which Christ would be sacrificed, then why wouldn't they tell the exact time of His second coming?

I think you are aware that the prophecies were understood in such a way that, when Jesus came the first time, the people were generally expecting the Messiah to come around that time. What they weren't expecting was the way He came. That is what confused them. The majority was expecting a king or general or some other kind of power figure to come and deliver them from domination by the Romans, and Jesus didn't fit the model.

Back to the question. If the scriptures foretold when Christ was to come the first time, why wouldn't they reveal the year of the Second Coming? I don't think I can answer for sure why Christ wouldn't tell the day or the hour; we can only speculate. However, I think there are a lot of good reasons why He wouldn't. Jesus said that there would be a whole host of signs that would precede His coming, and that when the signs were fulfilled we could know that His coming was near.

What if it was clearly stated in the Bible that Jesus was going to come in four more years? What would you do about it? Let us use a bit of sanctified imagination and think of what the dynamic might be. It would mean that from this year we would know that we have about four more years in this world. Let's make some observations. I am going to list some possibilities. I won't worry about any kind of priority.

In the first place, although there would hypothetically be four more years, there would be no guarantee that the population of today would all be around when the four years were over. I say that, because life being what it is, some would die of old age between now and then, others would die of disease or by accidental causes. That means then that if we knew with certainty that Jesus were going to come on a particular day four years from now, a significant number of people would not actually have the whole four years to get ready.

So suppose that a person who didn't know that they would be killed in a traffic accident in two years would think that they had four years to get ready. This could mean that they might put off getting ready, and then they would lose out because they didn't know about their accidental death.

If you knew that you still had four more years to get ready for the coming of Jesus, would that give urgency to the present? I think if we know very much about human nature, the answer would be No. Experience teaches us that we tend to put off something as long as we can. So if we thought for sure that Jesus wasn't going to come for four more years, the probability would be that we could actually be less serious about our lives than we are now.

This brings up another question. What does it mean to be ready for the coming of Jesus anyway? Along with this question comes another one, and that is, do we get ourselves ready for His coming? Or maybe we should ask ourselves first--what does it mean to be ready for the coming of Jesus? Is being ready to die tonight the same as being ready to be translated without seeing death? Is the assurance that we have salvation today the same as the having assurance that we will be ready to be translated alive without seeing death?

Let's put the Second Coming of Jesus on hold for just a minute and ask ourselves another question that is nearer than four years from now, and that is, if you knew that you had only 24 hours more of life to live and then your heart was going to shut off, what would you do between now and then?

That is an interesting question, isn't it? How would we spend our last day on earth? Would we spend the time reading the Bible? Would we call all the members of our family and make some things right with them? Would we be praying all the time? Would we spend the time visiting the sick and trying to help the needy and those less fortunate?

Or maybe we would just do whatever we usually do. I don't know exactly how we should answer that question. What does it mean to be at peace with God? Would we miss the soap operas that last afternoon? Would we spend the evening watching TV? This brings up an interesting thought, and that is, would it be valid to say that whatever we are supposed to be doing the last day of our life, we ought to be doing every day, because none us knows if today will be the last day of our life.

There is another component that we need to take into account, whether it be about getting ready for our last day in this life or for the day of the second coming, and that is, can you get ready for the coming of Jesus when you are under stress?

By that I mean, can we really be ready for the coming of Jesus when we are motivated by fear? When I get my taxes together to mail them in on April 14, it is not exactly something that I do as a thank offering. Did you notice that I said that I do it on April 14? That is true. I usually fill in the forms several weeks before the deadline, but I don't send them in until the last minute. I do that because I usually don't get a refund. Ministers are classified as self-employed, and April 15 means that we have to, if nothing else, send along money for the first quarter's estimate of taxes. April 15 each year, then, is not something that we look forward to, although we do have to get ready for it.

Along the same lines, when a person has to get ready for an inspection of some sort, it is usually not with a great amount of expectation, unless it is, "Let's get it over with."

There is another factor that enters into the matter of being ready for the coming of Jesus, and that is that Jesus is going to come and save those who love Him. The flip side of that is that, before He comes, those who love Him will have given up loving the world and its sinful ways.

This fact brings up the biggest question of all about how to get ready for the coming of Jesus, and that is, how do you go about loving Jesus?

I know the word "love" has many meanings in this day and age. We realize, I hope, that when we talk about loving Jesus, we are not talking about loving Him like you might love apple pie or your girlfriend. We are talking about actually loving Him, Who we have not seen, to the point where we are willing to do whatever He asks us to do as it has been revealed to us in His Word.

Loving someone is not a thing a person does mechanically, unless you think that love actually has something to do with hormones. Love for Jesus is not about hormones. Neither can it be forced. I heard a preacher joking not long ago about trying to force someone to love you by threatening them. Like a wife saying to her husband, "You had better love me or I will hit you over the head with a rolling pin."

When you begin to realize that the thing that we have with God is something that doesn't have to do with Him loving us, but which has everything to do with us loving Him, then we begin to see what is involved, not only in preparing to die, but in preparing to live forever without seeing death.

We are hearing a lot these days about how much God loves us. I am glad for that. It is very difficult to love someone who doesn't love us. Love is reciprocal, you know.

Let me say here something that I think you know already, and that is that God loves sinners. He does that because, frankly speaking, if He didn't, there wouldn't be anyone here for Him to love, because the Bible teaches that we are all sinners. He doesn't love us because we are sinners, but rather because He is love. Make no mistake. He doesn't love us because we are sinners, but because He is love.

We make a mistake if we think our God is more one thing one day than He is another. It is a thrill to realize that He was forgiving before there was anyone to forgive, and that He was merciful before there was anyone to be merciful to.

It is wonderful to know that God is love and that He loves sinners. But that can be misleading. It can make you think that God loves sin. My dad is a retired minister. That was a great help when I was growing up. He knew of my desire to also be a minister, so even when I was a teenager he would let me help up front, and he even let me preach once in a while.

I remember one time he asked me to call for the offering. I had seen that done many times and had pretty well memorized the prayer I had heard people pray so often. So I bowed my head and thanked God for all of His blessings, and when I was about to finish, I said something like this, "And so, Lord, bless those who give and especially those who don't." And then I finished the prayer and said, "Amen."

After the service was over, Dad told me I shouldn't have asked a special blessing on those who didn't give. Of course, we know what we mean when we say that. We mean to pray that the Lord will bless those who may have nothing to give. But it can come across as a disincentive to give! "Lord, please bless those who give, but give a double blessing to those who don't." That doesn't sound quite right. Something is wrong. That is not what we really mean.

The reason I tell this is to say that what we are trying to say to sinners is that God loves them in spite of their sins. What we don't want to say is that God is so loving He doesn't particularly care whether we sin or not. In fact, the more you sin, the happier He is about it. This may sound ridiculous, but for a person who is, what we would call, "into sin," they could console themselves that they have nothing to lose in living the way they do, and are, in fact, a kind of "teacher's pet."

In one place, Jesus said that He came to seek and to save that which was lost. He said in another place that well people don't need a doctor, and what He was saying is that He came to make the people who are sick with sin well. Here is where some miss the point, and think that He came to harass the righteous and protect the sinful lifestyles of those who like it that way.

There is a text we must not forget that puts the matter in the correct perspective, and that is the one in Exodus 34:6-7, where it says, "And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."

The point is that, if we made a mistake in the past to think that we serve a punishing God, we could now find ourselves going to the extreme of seeing God as not holding anyone responsible for their actions and that anything goes. God held Lucifer responsible, He held Adam and Eve responsible, and so it will be with everyone who has ever lived. In order to understand what it means to be ready for the coming of Jesus, we must understand what the problem is.

We must not forget that it was a bad attitude in the heart of Lucifer that began the problem in heaven. This translated, then, into disobedience. If salvation is going to deal with the problem of sin, it will address the problem of the attitude of the sinner, and the result will be that the sinner will then go from being disobedient to being obedient.

Some Christians try to address the problem of disobedience without recognizing the attitudes that make it happen. In September of 1854, the Soho district in London, England, was nearly wiped out. An outbreak of cholera killed 578 people in just a few days.

The scientists and doctors had never heard of bacteria. The outbreak of the disease to them was a mystery. They tried everything to cure the disease. They administered whatever medicines they had. They ordered bed rest and adjusted the diets of the patients, but none of them recovered. The only thing that doctors seemed to be able to do was to make the victims of the disease as comfortable as possible and then watch them die.

John Snow was a local physician. He was desperate to stop the outbreak, and so he decided to try a different approach. He took a map and pinpointed every cholera death in the area. He marked the home of each victim and put a dot on the map. When he had finished doing this, he had a picture of the spread of the disease. The dots seemed to be in a cluster in the center of town. Whatever was causing the disease seemed to be originating from Broad Street in the heart of the Soho district.

The search began to narrow. Although the medical community at the time didn't accept it, Dr. Snow believed that diseases like cholera could be carried by drinking water. With this idea in mind, he drew a mark on the map for each water pump in the Soho District. The result was just what he expected. The dots that represented the victims were in a circle around just one water pump, which was the one located on Broad Street.

When the doctor showed the city officials what he had discovered, they removed the handle from the Broad Street water pump. When the source of the epidemic was cut off, the disease was stopped in its tracks.

It is hard to believe that such a simple solution had been so difficult to discover. The other doctors had wasted precious time trying to stop the epidemic with medicines, diets, and bed rest. Treating the symptoms of the disease was not effective; the answer was to address the cause.

The victorious Christian life which leads to being prepared for the coming of Jesus will never be attained until we stop addressing the symptoms and start getting down to the cause of our spiritual problems.

In the past, our mistake was to try to mop up the water without turning off the spigot. The mistake of this generation may very well be to let the water run and just get used to it. I greatly fear this is what may be happening in many instances.

Pride, selfishness, bitterness and resentment, lust and the like have always existed since sin began. The new spin we are putting on these character defects in this generation is that we have begun to see the abnormal as normal. We have accepted the unacceptable; we have actually institutionalized our dysfunction.

All of this has resulted in the preaching of a gospel that has no teeth. It is weak and symbolic. Our generation has created a god in our own image. He is pictured as standing with his hat in his hand and with his head down, pleading with us to do him the favor of letting him save us. Instead of preaching God's requirements for us, we have now laid down the ground rules of what it means to have salvation, and the result is that we have in many places nearly slipped into spiritual anarchy.

We will not really understand and experience the power of the gospel until we cease to believe and teach that God is somehow accountable to us, and that because He loves us, we have Him over a barrel and He will just have to get used to the way we are.

Back in the old days we heard a lot of preaching about the coming of Jesus. Those were better days in many ways, because the coming of Jesus is a powerful incentive to live right. In 1 John 3:2-3 we read, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure."

There is nothing wrong with getting ready for the coming of Jesus. In fact, there is everything right about it. Getting ready and being ready are not legalism, salvation by works, or anything of the sort. The truth is, when Jesus comes there will be only two groups--those who are ready to meet Him and those who aren't; those who prepared themselves for His coming and those who didn't.

I think where the point is missed is that we forget where we live. If we lived with perfect hearts in a perfect environment, we wouldn't have to worry about getting ready and keeping ready.

I have seen pictures of men who work in underground coal mines. After working underground in the mines all day, it is understandable that when they come up and are ready to go home, they need to take a bath. I don't work in a coal mine, but even when I work outside all day, I can get pretty dirty and develop a powerful thirst. When I am finished working outside, I take a good shower and have a cool drink. The shower cleans me off on the outside, and the cool drink is part of what keeps me clean on the inside.

The victorious Christian life works on the same principle. You may say, "But we are not saved by works." Who said that we were? Just remember that Jesus is the shower and the cool drink. I don't clean myself, the soap and water do. But I have a part to play. I have to get into the shower. The cool water is necessary for the health of my body, but I have to drink it. Those who say we don't have to do anything because Jesus has done it all would understand better if they would get a job in a coal mine!

We live in a culture that is not so much about dirtying the body but about contaminating the soul. Once someone spit betel nut juice in my face. Friend, today's culture is spitting on our souls every day, and we must be continually dealing with the problem or else we can easily become badly contaminated.

A Christian who is not aware of this, or who thinks that when you live in a stinky part of town you have to stink, has forgotten the promise that, "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Although we live in a sinful environment, the promise is that sin will not have dominion over us. If you have ever wondered what it means to live a victorious Christian life, that is what it means.

Getting ready for the coming of Jesus is no more a burden than getting ready to receive someone you love very much whom you haven't seen in a long time. As sons and daughters of God, the coming of Jesus is to be something we look forward to. Listen to this text in Titus 2:13: "Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ."

The victorious Christian life is one in which a person who knows that God loves them and who in turn loves the Lord with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their mind, has a blessed hope in that they look forward to the coming of Jesus. They feel less and less comfortable with all that is going on in this world.

It reminds me of the song we used to sing, "This world is not my home, I'm just a'passin' though. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue." The problem with many of us is simply that we have somehow lost the blessed hope.

One day I was walking along with a mission president in Southern Asia. He was a national who had visited the United States as a delegate to an international meeting. He said something I will never forget. He said, "I can't imagine anything heaven may have that you there in the United States don't already have."

Perhaps that is the problem. For many Christians, life here is more real than the possibility of life in heaven. It could be that many have built or bought a mansion here and so have little incentive when they hear that Jesus has gone to prepare a place of them. Come to think of it, this may be why we are not hearing much about the coming of Jesus anymore. Who needs it?

Do you plan to be ready for the coming of Jesus if He should come in the year 2002? If the answer is Yes, then what is your plan of action? It is one thing to pray before we go to bed at night, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." That is one thing. We can have the assurance that, if we have from our heart hidden our life in Christ, then we are, as we sing, safe in the arms of Jesus.

But, then, what if we don't die in the night? If our lifestyle is one of telling and laughing at off-color stories; if we spend three hours a night watching people steal, kill, commit adultery, and all the rest; if we are dominated by temper, selfishness and pride, I don't see how the Lord is going to be able to take us to heaven. Those were the very attitudes that got Lucifer expelled from heaven and Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

I like the way my dad puts it. He says that obedience didn't put Lucifer into heaven, but disobedience took him out. Obedience didn't put Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden, but disobedience took them out. Jesus has a huge problem. If he can take living people back into heaven who are not obedient from the heart and who are not living according to His revealed will, He is going to have to take the devil back, too.

Yes, Jesus has a problem, but so do we. We have been given the cure. Sin is only fatal to those who insist on staying with it. How shall we escape if we neglect to be saved? Contrary to what you may have heard, it is possible to live a victorious Christian life. We don't have to stay down when we fall. We can stay on the road as long as we keep our eyes on Him who is the author and the finisher of our faith.

Jesus is committed to getting us ready for His coming. I do not know exactly how that will be, but we have the promise that He who has begun this good work in us will finish it. The biggest mistake of our lives will be to resist salvation and not cooperate with the Holy Spirit in every way so that He may indeed work in us both to will and to do His good pleasure.

The good news is Jesus is coming again. It is also good news that we don't know when. But the good news is that the signs are telling us His coming is nearer than when we first believed.

The good news is that when He comes, He will make all things new. He will wipe away all tears from our eyes, and there will be no sorrow or death or crying, and all that is bad and evil and dangerous will be done away with forever. We are all dead people without Jesus. He is our hope; He is our help. "O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come." Jesus is coming again. You and I, by His grace, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, will be ready for His coming. By His power we are now victorious Christians. Praise and honor and glory be to the Lamb, now and forever more. Amen.