Every Tuesday I play basketball with a bunch of friends.  Unfortunately for my odometer and credit card, the gym is about 45 minutes away.  So that leaves me with plenty of time to check on the fam.  (I mean I have to keep an eye on them.  They moved to Alaska!  Who is crazy enough to WANT to do that?  I heard it was 30 below last year.  That is just wrong.)  So I have made it a normal call for me on my drive to basketball.  Recently my dad and I somehow ended up talking about the end times.  He was sharing with me how when he was young he was sure that Jesus was coming back before the end of his life.  Then as he got older he was sure it would happen in my lifetime.  And now that he just doesn’t know when that is going to happen.  It was interesting to hear that from someone (no offense dad) that has lived long enough to change their minds about something like that a few times.

But the whole conversation got me thinking.  It made me realize that we as the church don’t live like Jesus could be coming back at any moment.  I would say that we usually live life not even thinking about that any more.  Why is that?  It seems like the last several decades the church has convinced us that it is about to happen.  Even dc Talk said “the signs of the times are dropping like flies”.  The New Testament Christians lived as if it was about to happen.  But we don’t.  I wonder why that is.  Are we spending too much time trying to figure out when Christ will return?  It almost seems like we are looking to the Biblical prophecies about the return of Christ as clues to help us figure out when it will be.  But I am not convinced we are supposed to know.

1 Thessalonians 5 tells us that His return will come like a thief in the night and when we least expect it.  We can look at all the prophecies all we want, but we may be misinterpreting “fulfillments”.  We can look at them all we want (and I’m not saying it is bad to do so), but the truth is we don’t know when Christ will show up.  But regardless we should live our lives like He is coming back at any moment, because it’s the truth.  He could come back very soon…or in several hundred years from now.  I’m not saying we should just drop all responsibilities and get caught up in some craze, but let’s live life on purpose, knowing that it is His timing and not one that we figure out on our own.