The Lord will Return

April 21, 2013 Background Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 4:13 – 5:11 Lesson Passage: 1 Thessalonians 4:13 – 5:11 Where do you turn to find comfort in the moments of your deepest despair? What do you use to push yourself forward after circumstances in life cause you to want to give up? What comes next when situations turn for the worse and “make you wanna holler and throw up both your hands”? How do you cope with the unexpected death of a loved one? If you are a Christian, one fact seems to help in all of these situations: Jesus is coming back one day. This is more than just “by and by when the morning comes”. Neither is this just more of the “We will understand it better by and by.” Christians have a living hope. We have assurance. We know that this life is not all there is to it. If these things were not so, then why did we turn to God in the first place? We turned to God because we knew that there is more to existence than life as we know it. We experienced an overwhelming sense of emptiness and hopelessness. We understood that something was missing in our lives. Turning to God and accepting Jesus as our Savior and submitting to him as our Lord, brought us into a new reality. The emptiness was filled and the hopelessness was vanquished. Still, when life situations spin out of control, we need to be reminded of the living hope that is within us. The first century Christians apparently suffered from some of the same spiritual anxiety attacks. To make matters worse, there were some false teachers teaching that Christ had already taken back to heaven the ones who were going to go. In other words, if you were still on earth, then you missed the rapture and all hope was lost. How shocking was that news? If Jesus had raised all that were going to be raised and had taken them to their eternal reward never to return, then what good does it do to continue to try to live as a Christian? The other misguided teaching was that only those who were alive would participate in a future rapture. If this were true, then all those who have died since Jesus’ ascension would have died in vain—never to live again. As the Apostle Paul said in another letter, and I paraphrase, if there is no future resurrection of the dead, then we are the most miserable of all people. Our suffering and struggling against temptations that we would just assume give in to would all be in vain. Paul cleared up those misconceptions in our lesson today. There will be a future rapture of the church. Those Christians who are alive at the time of the future rapture will not be caught up before those who died trusting in Jesus. The dead in Christ shall be raised first. Then those who are alive will be physically changed and caught up into the clouds to join them. There is hope for Christians whether they are alive or dead when Jesus returns. They will all be raptured to meet him in the air. It is this promise that allows Christians to hope against hope. This promise allows us to be triumphant against all of the questions that were asked earlier. No one knows when the day of rapture will come. But all Christians have God’s promise that it will come. Christians are admonished to comfort each other by reminding one another of God’s promise of a future resurrection. This is our living hope: The Lord will return. Robert C. Hudson April 10, 2013