Coming – Ready Or Not

Introduction – Childhood Game

When I was a little boy growing up in the Himalaya Mountains of northern India, one of my favorite games was hide-and-seek.

Can you picture it? The thin mountain air, the smell of pine, the deep silence between giggles as I squeezed into some “secret” spot.

I remember hiding and waiting for the big people to find me.

At first it was thrilling. But before long impatience crept in.

“Why don’t they come? Why don’t they look under the bed? Why don’t they peek in the closet?”

Never did it dawn on my naïve little mind that I wasn’t nearly as hidden as I thought.

Then came the shout every child knows: “Ready or not—here I come!”

That single line carried a mix of excitement and urgency.

It’s not a question. It’s a declaration. The seeker is coming. Game or not, you’d better be ready.

Jesus takes that childhood line and raises it to eternal significance.

Matthew 24 is His way of saying, “Ready or not, I am coming.”

But unlike a game of hide-and-seek, this is not meant to make us anxious.

It is meant to fill us with hope and move us toward faithful living.

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1. Facing Fear—and Refusing the Panic Industry

> “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.” — Matthew 24:42

Jesus’ coming has often been hijacked by fear-merchants.

You know the names: best-selling novels, doomsday billboards, social-media prophets who confidently announce dates that always fizzle.

The Left Behind series alone sold millions by turning panic into profit.

Even in more sober Adventist circles we can slide into dread, our imaginations fed by the beasts of Revelation and the dramatic pictures in The Great Controversy.

I’ll never forget something my son’s friend told me as an adult.

He said that as a boy he often lay awake at night, terrified, because of the end-time pictures impressed on him.

He wished, he said, that his parents and church had given him less fear and more hope.

What a sad commentary on how easily the blessed hope can be twisted into a source of nightmares.

But friends, Jesus did not give us this teaching to scare children or to create anxious adults.

He gave it to anchor us in the certainty of His love and the reliability of His promises.

The very word Advent means coming.

In December we celebrate the first Advent—Christ’s humble arrival in Bethlehem.

But Advent also points us forward to the second coming when Jesus will set all things right.

And between those two, as St Bernard reminded the church centuries ago, there is a third coming: Christ arriving in our hearts day by day.

That present coming is as real and transforming as any future trumpet.

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2. The Kingdom Already Breaking In

Let’s pause on that “third coming,” because it changes everything.

Jesus said repeatedly that the kingdom of God is not only future but present:

> “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).

“The kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mark 1:15).

New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it memorably in Surprised by Hope.

He insists that Christian work today is not wasted effort “oiling the wheels of a machine that is about to roll over a cliff,”

not restoring a masterpiece “about to be thrown into the fire,”

not planting roses “in a garden that will be dug up for a building site.”

Instead, every act of love, every work of art or music inspired by God, every prayer and every gospel conversation will somehow find its way, through the power of resurrection, into God’s new creation.

Think about that for a moment.

Teaching a child to read, planting a community garden, helping a neighbor through chemotherapy, composing music to God’s glory—all of it is kingdom work that will last.

Nothing done in the Lord is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

So if you have ever wondered, “Why keep serving when the world seems to be falling apart?” remember:

We are not treading water until the end.

We are building for the kingdom that Jesus is already inaugurating.

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3. The Prophets Dream—and So Must We

Isaiah 2 gives us a picture of that kingdom in poetic form:

> “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

That is not escapist fantasy.

It is God’s dream for the earth.

The 20th-century preacher of justice, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., heard those words and said:

> “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Friends, this is our calling:

not to sit back waiting for the clouds to part, but to bend the arc with our own lives—