Ready Or Not

READY OR NOT

“Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” 3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Matthew 24:1-4

Intro: A young lady was very busy getting ready for a blind date.

This was not just dinner and a movie;

her dinner reservation was at an exclusive downtown restaurant with live music and dancing.

Wanting to make a good first impression she had taken the day off work.

She cleaned her house;

she went out that afternoon and got her hair done.

She had a manicure.

When she got home she did her makeup,

put on her best dress

she was all ready for her date’s arrival.

The expected time for his arrival came and went,

but she continued to wait patiently.

Finally after waiting over an hour and half she decided she had been stood up,

so she put on her old everyday clothes,

let her hair down

took off her makeup

gathered all her favorite junk food and sat down to watch TV.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door; it was her date.

He looked at her with surprise and said,

“How can you not be ready? I gave you two extra hours and you’re still not ready to go!”

When is Jesus coming again?

I want to be ready for His return.

Do you know for sure that you are ready for the return of Jesus?

The Good News is that we don’t have to be caught off guard and unprepared.

You can be ready for the return of Jesus.

When we talk about Jesus coming again there is tension between two extremes.

• Scripture shows us Christ’s return is both IMMINENT and DELAYED.

The belief that Christ’s return is imminent is not new.

Jesus’ followers have been looking for His return right from the beginning.

The disciples and the early church believed that they were living in the last days

They believed that Christ could come back at any time

1 John 2:18 (NIV) “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.”

This opens up a whole other question for debate: Who or what is the antichrist?

Would we recognize an antichrist if we saw one?

• The Greek 500. antichristos an-tee'-khris-tos an opponent of the Messiah:--antichrist.

In its simplest from means anything in opposition of Jesus.

We…, like the Pharisees and early Jews who asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

We want to narrow down the law

and narrow down the rules

and box everything into a small, limited definition.

The more defined, the more narrow the definition,

the more easily we can check it off our list of things to observe and do.

So we tend to, in the same way of thinking about the antichrist,

try to boil it down and define it as one person.

If we can identify a single thing or person as the antichrist then surely we can avoid it.

For example the early church believed that false teachers

who pretended to be Christians

would try to lure new or weak Christians away from Christ.

Then finally…, before the world would come to an end one Great Antichrist will arise

Daniel 7 and Revelations 13

For hundreds of years, Christians have been fascinated (and often obsessed) with “the antichrist.”

Out of this has come centuries of commentaries

and modern plots and schemes

in which a singular messianic representative of Satan would usher in the beginning of the “end times.”

Writers such as Hal Lindsey (The Late, Great Planet Earth)

and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (the Left Behind series)

have fueled the fire in recent generations,

as their books describe how the antichrist would become take on human flesh

and be the incarnate evil upon the world.

The list of those being labeled as “the antichrist” is long going back to the Roman emperor Nero,

Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, JKF, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan,

Bill Gates, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden.

The belief of many is that this antichrist figure is to be the final opposition to Jesus,

bringing a final battle of good versus evil.

Some thought of this beast that would rise in opposition to Christians as the Roman Emperor.

For it was the Romans who crucified Jesus on the cross.