His Coming
So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.
2 Peter 3:14
These words refer to the Second Coming of Christ and to the promises of a new heaven and a new earth. When we focus our minds on God’s agenda we live life with heaven’s agendas more firmly embedded in our thoughts. If we would arise every day and pray to our God, “Lord, perhaps today is the day that You will return, and if so help me to be faithful and live today as though at any second I may be standing in Your presence,” or if we would when we retire each night express to Him, “Lord, perhaps tonight will be the night spoken of in Your Word, when two are lying down and one taken and the other left and if so, if I arise in the morning in Your heaven, let my heart be pure tonight, let my sins be confessed, and fill me with Your Spirit,” if we would pray and think and live like this, if we would make every effort to be spotless and blameless and at peace with Him, we would be more joyful in our walk and more effective in our witness.
What we expect to happen, we look for, we anticipate, and we modify our thoughts and our lives to accommodate. Christ taught us to always look for His coming, and though He also warned us not to set dates or times — no one knows the precise day or hour but the Father — His command to always look helps us to constantly be in preparation for His coming.
One day life as we know it on this earth will end. Perhaps the Lord will return this day, this week, or this year. We do not know, but we also know that death awaits us all and at that moment, for us each personally, the world has ended. That, too, could happen at any moment. We are not fully prepared to live until we are prepared to die, and preparation for death means to have our thoughts fixed on eternity.
We have the temptation to become so invested in this life that we do not want to let go of earth. Even Christians can become too invested in serving God here, too invested in the sense that we have our own projects and become overly emotionally invested in what we do to the point that we forget why we do it and for whom we do it. We fight death and fear it, and we fear it in part because we feel that our pet projects for God have not yet been completed. But to the believer to live is Christ and to die is gain. We are not prepared to end our life here until we are prepared to enter into eternity with Christ. Try as best as you can to do all you can while God has you here on earth. Live each day in the power of His presence and seek to accomplish all that He enables you to accomplish, but at the end of it all, do not long too greatly for that one last project here on earth to be completed. Look to eternity, there is where Christ has prepared a place for you, and there and there alone will we find the highest fulfillment in our tasks for His glory.
Look to His coming — tonight, today — and allow that vision to change your view of life here. Every bit of earthly life will be destroyed — only the Word of God and the souls of people last into eternity — so let Him lead you to what is eternal. In so doing He will guard your heart and prepare your mind for what is ahead.
