The King returns to his kingdom after a long journey. His castle stands tall. The banners flap above the fortress. The soldiers still wear his colors and speak his language. All is as it was, externally.

He first notices something amiss as he walks among the people. They still consult his precious book he left them — but not with one eye anxious for his return. The people keep many of his wise precepts, it is true, yet he himself is little sought after, little missed. He overhears prayer in his name, yet few gaze over the walls, pleading at the heavens for him to come again.

How many have made his return their lifelong psalm?

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,     and in his word I hope;my soul waits for the Lord     more than watchmen for the morning,     more than watchmen for the morning. (Psalm 130:5–6)

We have his laws, his book, his name, his people, his songs, his ordinances — but not him as he intended it to be. Have we really noticed? Have his good gifts become enough for us? Are you and I really waiting for him to return?

Behold, He Comes

The final picture of the church recorded in Scripture shows her in a posture of yearning. Her best hopes and expectations find summary in one word: Come!

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” (Revelation 22:17)

Come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:20)

When the deep enchantments of worldliness wears off, we better hear this groaning of the Spirit within, crying out for Jesus to return to us. This alone is the consummation of heaven for God’s people:

Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. (Revelation 21:3)

Immanuel, God with us, is not just his Christmas name. This must be his everlasting name, lest our heaven live elsewhere.

“The church’s best hopes and expectations find summary in one word: ‘Come!’”

A tearless eternity? Pointless, if the King of glory is not there to wipe sorrows away. Reigning on the throne of the cosmos? Child’s play, if we reign not with him. The death of death, the abolition of sin, perfection of life with angels and endless comforts? A cage and a prison, if Christ be not with us. The insistence at the bottom of every born-again heart, the one desire it will not be refused: Come, Lord Jesus!

Come Quickly

It is not enough for our faith to know simply that Jesus is coming back. Eventually works drowsiness and mischief in our hearts. Unintentionally, we banish him to the ever-Tomorrow, the distant Never. We no longer expect him anytime soon, so we drop anchor and make do without him. “Your kingdom come,” we begin to pray from memory, but not from the heart.

Thus, in the final chapter of Scripture, Jesus tells us more.

Behold, I am coming soon. (Revelation 22:7)

Behold, I am coming soon. (Revelation 22:12)

Surely I am coming soon. (Revelation 22:20)

He exclaims that he is not just coming, but coming quickly. This little adverb moves his return from inevitable to imminent, from someday to any day.

Jesus would have us waiting, expectant, peeking again and again at the clouds with childlike anticipation. Quickly sends us to live atop the watchtower, squints for his appearance upon the horizon. Jesus would not have his people take naps at the news of his return.

Stay awake — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning — lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake. (Mark 13:35–37)

He wants us talking about his return, hoping in his return, praying for his return. He expects us to trim our lamps, prepare the house, and ready the Master’s favorite meal. He is coming back, soon.

Counting Time

How do we appropriate this revelation two thousand years later? Quickly, the scoffer thinks. Two thousand years stretches the word beyond credibility. How can we truly believe such a promise?

What is this but the insect speaking back to the mountains about time? The God spanning everlasting to everlasting — not the gnat of a few seconds — says quickly. The forest of Lebanon — not the housefly — bellows, “I come soon.” We sprout in the morning and die in the afternoon; his roots go deep. The Ancient of Days is his name.

The humble psalmist teaches Israel to sing to her Maker, “A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4). The apostle tells us not to overlook this fact, “that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Generations of men have come and passed; his moon has only seen two nights. He “is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Peter 3:9).

And he waits purposefully. He waits for the last sheep to come into the fold, and then he shall return. Yet his return will be swift and when most do not expect. As with the final days of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the last morning before the Flood, when he comes, all wedding planning, football games, and vacations will be rendered obsolete.

Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. (Revelation 22:12–13)

Men will reap what they have sown. Repent and believe.

For Love and War

Christian, your Lord comes quickly. Does this not speak of your Savior’s love?

As the Bride cries, “Come! Come! Come!” he does not respond, “Fear not; I will come back when I get around to it.” He doesn’t say he’ll add it to his list. He assures, “Behold, I will come with haste, with intention, in earnest.” Quickly lays this promise upon our hearts: “I will not tarry a moment beyond what is best.”

Once the last recipient of my crimson blood is washed, once the final sheep makes it into the fold, I will be there and bring you where I am. In a moment shorter than a lightning flash, I will be there. I will not walk. I will not delay.

“In a moment, the trumpet shall blast, the wall between this world and the next shall fall, and the Lord will be before us.”

Will he find us looking over the walls for his coming?

This world is not our home. We are not yet in our element. We open the window and send our dove to and fro about this earth, finding that it returns to us having found no solid homeland. But in a moment, the trumpet shall blast, the wall between this world and the next shall fall, and he will be before us, with us. The Lord of lords and King of kings, dazzling as the sun in all its strength. This present world will pass as a dream. We will look and shout and point,

Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him,     that he might save us.This is the Lord; we have waited for him;     let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. (Isaiah 25:9)

“What is wrong with the American Christian Church, and how can its life and ministry be renewed?” That question, recently asked by Dr. Tim Keller, is bold. Something indeed seems wrong in many churches. We do need renewal. But our Lord has not forsaken us. If we will stay open, he will help us.

But we sure won’t make progress merely by doubling down on doctrinal orthodoxy, as if our only problem were theological erosion. That problem is real. My hunch, however, is that if you’re visiting this website, you already care about solid theology. So do I. And I sure hope we never stab our Lord in the back by betraying the truth of his gospel. But we need more than glorious concepts. Even if every Christian from sea to shining sea suddenly had accurate doctrine, there could still be something wrong with us, and we might still need renewal.

We Christians in America today are walking through pressures, temptations, strife, and exhaustion — for starters — such as I have never seen before. We have only one way forward. Our Lord above is calling us to a deeper place with himself and with one another. Our times demand shared resilience — steadfastness and solidarity together. The worst thing to do right now is drift apart. The best thing to do is strengthen our relationships, for Jesus’s sake. Then, together, we’ll be able to face any future, by God’s grace.

Beauty Amid Brutality

Here’s a good objection to what I’m proposing: we’re lousy at staying friends. Our love just doesn’t last. We fragment too easily, walk away too quickly, stand aloof too stubbornly. And how can we face the opposition of an adversarial world when we can’t even get along together as Christians? It’s time to turn a corner and love one another more deeply than we ever have before, more deeply than we ever dreamed we could.

The early church did not go viral in the Roman Empire by winning arguments. Make no mistake, they were serious thinkers. But they captivated people’s hearts by the beauty of their character and their relationships — especially their relationships. The truth of the gospel became visible in the profound community the Christians experienced in their churches.

Tertullian famously quoted the amazement of that cynical world: “Look how those Christians love one another (for they themselves hate one another), and how they are ready to die for each other (for they themselves are readier to kill each other).” In a world of brutality, it was the Christians who created a new world of beauty. The gospel always creates beauty, whenever we yield to its obvious implications. For example, if nothing will ever separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:31–39), why do too many of us Christians separate from one another? How crazy is that? And how does that weakness prepare us for the trials of tomorrow?

Doctrine Creates Culture

This article is a protest, a confession, a lament, and a plea — all rolled into one. And here’s the point. Our broken relationships really are saying something. They reveal that we do not believe the gospel as deeply as we need to. And our only remedy is to flat out believe it — for all that it’s worth.

“Our broken relationships reveal that we do not believe the gospel as deeply as we need to.”

Take Romans 15:7 as one illustration of what I mean: “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Embedded in that magnificent verse is this simple insight: gospel doctrine creates gospel culture. You can see it in the text: “Welcome one another [gospel culture] as Christ has welcomed you [gospel doctrine], for the glory of God.” That is the cheering truth and the beautiful community that can prevail over all this world.

Let’s think it through, starting with the phrase “for the glory of God.” Nothing less than the display of God’s glory in the world today is at stake here. And where can his glory be seen? The Grand Canyon, the Swiss Alps, the beaches of Hawaii, for sure. But an easier way to see his glory is to drive down to a healthy church on Sunday morning, walk in, take a look around, and notice how the people welcome one another with the welcome of Christ himself. That church is translating its doctrine into its culture, and the glory of God is so obvious you might be moved to tears.

Christ Has Welcomed You

But what if a church’s gospel doctrine does not set the tone of its culture? If perceptive people come in and experience a theologically strong but relationally weak church, and then reverse engineer the situation, surmising from the relationships what the theology must be, what might they think?

They might assume that our Bible says, “Say hi to one another, as Christ has said hi to you.” But no! The actual message declares, “Christ has welcomed you.” He has moved toward us all and reached out and said, “I want you in my reality. I welcome you. I will never stop welcoming you.” Those four words, “Christ has welcomed you,” bring to a practical focal point all of Paul’s doctrine in Romans thus far. Those four words flow out of profound theology. And they have the power to transform our churches into cultures of welcome, where friends can stick together long term, the way Christ sticks with us.

“Something greater than human niceness is energizing a truly orthodox church.”

Something greater than human niceness is energizing a truly orthodox church. Christ is there, setting a new tone through his gospel. How dare we who agree on the biblical gospel settle for less than his wholehearted welcome as the felt relational culture of our churches?

Way Out of the Swamp

So many of us have been recovering gospel doctrine wonderfully over the past twenty years or so. Now it’s time for us to allow our doctrine to exert its full and intended authority — through the beauty of our relationships. We’ll get nowhere by watering the gospel down! But I believe we will gain great strength for the future if we will follow our Lord into regions of glory we have not yet deeply visited. Why not admit our failures and fall into each other’s arms with tears and apologies and new beginnings? Our new solidarity will strengthen us for any future!

I believe we have come to a fork in the road. We must choose which way we will go. In his Lectures on Romans, Martin Luther showed us the alternatives:

Who then can pride himself over against someone else and claim to be better than he? Especially in view of the fact that he is always capable of doing exactly the same as the other does and, indeed, that he does secretly in his heart before God what the other does openly before men. And so we must never despise anyone who sins but must generously bear with him as a companion in a common misery. We must help one another, just as two people caught in the same swamp assist each other. . . . But if we despise the other, we shall both perish in the same swamp. (115)

We will either believe the gospel as never before and come together, or we will die in this wretched swamp we’re all slogging through. I don’t see a third option. Do you?

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16001142/god-wont-leave-salvation-to-chance