Anticipating

Read: 2 Peter 3: 8-15a

Seven weeks. Forty-nine days. That's how long it will be until my wife and I welcome our third child into the world. As you might imagine, we are already spending a good deal of time preparing for our little one's arrival. In the last few weeks we have converted a basement room in a bedroom for our oldest child, we have been showered with gifts by our church family and begun to sort through said gifts, we have made arrangements for me to take a few weeks away from church-work to tend to my family, and we have started making arrangements for people to be with my wife while I have to be away while she is still on maternity leave. Suffice it to say, even with Christmas looming, we are eagerly preparing for the day our child arrives.

Many people do the same thing with Christmas. The retail industry has us anticipating Christmas shortly after Halloween. As we approach the end of November, we start to see all decorations going up. By the time we hit December the Christmas anticipation is in full swing--children finalizing their "list" for Santa Claus, Christmas-themed programs at churches and schools, and other community events. For some, because of their anticipation, Christmas might seen to take forever to arrive, even though a simple glance at a calendar will tell us how much longer there is to wait.

But what about those times when we don't know precisely when something will happen? That's how childbirth usually is--except in the cases of planned Caesarean births. Knowing when something is going to happen allows us to make our plans as we see fit. When we know a date or a time, we have the luxury of a "deadline"; we know all our plans, arrangements, etc. must be made/done by that deadline. When we don't know the date, time, etc., things become more urgent and pressing. When we don't know when something will happen, we tend to reprioritize so that we make sure we are ready, if it might be some time before our particular event is going to occur.

The people of ancient Israel had no idea when the Messiah was going to appear. The messages the of prophets of the Old Testament were attempts to get the people ready to recieve the Messiah when he appeared. A read through the Gospels shows that there were a great many who were not ready when Jesus finally came; perhaps they had come to believe the Messiah wouldn't come at all or perhaps they expected to the Messiah to come much later or be someone different than Jesus...whatever the reason, many in Israel were simply not ready for Jesus to come.

Peter's warning and encouragement in his letter is for the church in anticipation of Jesus' Second Coming. We have already dealt with a couple of passages that engaged this idea. The reality is that we don't know when Jesus is coming back. As a result, Peter says, we ought to be ready at any moment. Jesus might return sometime today, next week, next year, or five hundred years from now. The point is this...we just don't know. Because of that, we must make sure that we are ready now and we keep ourselves ready...just in case. As you ponder that, let me ask you this: What do you need to do in your life to prepare yourself for Jesus to come? If you knew an exact time, how would your priorities and plans be different? Make no mistake, Jesus IS coming. We just don't know when--we must anticipate it.