Love fall days, cooler weather and freshness in the air.  Sunlight is different, to me it is softer.

It hasn’t frozen the produce, yet, so we are still able to harvest fresh vegetables and use and/or can them.

Galatians 4:4-5 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,

⁵ To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

How many times have we heard or read the statement ‘Jesus is coming soon?’

Several times a week if we have contacts with other Christians or their writings.

When I accepted Christ over 50 years ago that was the chant, ‘Jesus is coming soon.’  It has not changed much through the decades.

I have to admit, I am a very impatient person – I can see your heads nodding in agreement.  When I ask God for something I figure He should give it to me immediately, after all that is when I need it.

However, God doesn’t work on our time tables.  The Jewish people waited thousands of years for their Messiah, unfortunately for many of them, when He came they didn’t accept Him.

It has been said that the early Christians would greet each other with the question, ‘have you seen Him?’

There was an expectation that when Jesus said He would be coming back soon, that it would be in our time, not God’s.  And it is the same today.

It doesn’t matter if Jesus comes today or a thousand years from today, His expectation is that we live our life so that others can learn of His salvation AND that we are ready at any time for Him to come back.

Much of the training a Police Officer goes through is never used in actual service.  However, he must train and be ready to act when necessary, or his or others may lose their life. 

I can remember once when we had a car chase that ended up in the suspect’s car going off the road and down a steep grade for a couple hundred feet.

One of the other officers asked me to go down and check on the occupants because I had the Emergency Medical Technician training and it would appear the suspects would probably need it.

As I ran down the hill I kept thinking, I wish I had the book right now!  When I checked out the car all suspects had disappeared into the brush.  We did capture then later that morning.

I had to be ready to treat those suspects, if needed, until an ambulance arrived on the scene – having the book would not have helped me, I had to be READY.

It is much the same when we expect Jesus to come.  We never know when it will happen – and through the last 2000 years, many have passed away to become face to face with Him – if they were not ready when they faced Him, it was too late.

While it is good to feel the urgency of His coming so that we keep on track, to worry about it is counterproductive. 

He WILL come on HIS time, it is up to us to continue to serve Him until that time comes; whether in our death or seeing Him come down from the clouds.

For those of us that are impatient and once we pray we expect that prayer to be answered immediately – and become disappointed when it doesn’t happen on our time frame, we need to pray for patience.  It doesn’t do us any good to get anxious and over wrought He answers those prayers as He sees fit.

Doesn’t mean that we should stop asking, or that we should give up, it just means that HIS time for us is not yet.

Later, Art :-)