Ready or Not—Here I Come! (Podcast)

Ready or Not—Here I Come! Podcast by Pastor John MacArthur

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I invite you again this morning to open your Bible, if you will, to the 24th chapter of Matthew. We are again this week going back to what is becoming for us a familiar text, this great sermon of our Lord Jesus Christ on His own second coming that occupies chapters 24 and 25 of Matthew’s gospel. We have come now to the section in verse 36 through 51. We began in our last time together to look at these verses, and we’ll conclude that look this morning.

We sang this morning a hymn that indicated that we were looking for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And all of us as Christians so live in anticipation of His coming. One theologian – I believe it was Oscar Cullmann – said, “The Christian exists in a tension between what is already and what is not yet.” We have already experienced salvation; we have not yet experienced the fullness of salvation, that is, the redemption of our bodies. We have already received the power of the Holy Spirit; we have not yet seen the fullness of that power in bringing us to full glory. We have already received life eternal; we have not yet participated in the resurrection.

And so we are in a sense caught between the already and the not yet, and we live in that tension. Looking back to the cross, looking forward to the second coming, living already in the last days and not yet in the last of the last days. Every believer, then, lives with a sense of what is already true and what is not yet come to pass. We live with that excitement, that thrill, that joy of looking for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the writer of the Hebrews puts it in these words: “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many, and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation” (Hebrews 9:28).