Note: This is the twelfth in a series of letters written for those living at the end of the age, whenever that comes in the next fifteen years or the next one hundred and fifty years. Once complete, I’ll combine them into a book. You can access the previous chapters here. If you are not already subscribed to this blog and want to ensure you don’t miss any, you can add your name here.
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I love your books Wayne, but this one is making me nervous. If I’m going to be alive at the end of this age, how would you tell me to prepare myself? Scriptures tell us to be alert and persevere, but I don’t know if I will not stick with Jesus if life becomes too difficult, and that could happen living in Israel.
Benjamin, a university student in Tel Aviv studying IT
Hi Benjamin,
Let me encourage you not to try to prepare yourself. Like most things in Jesus’s kingdom, the direct route rarely serves us best. I remember as a child, through a critical miscommunication I ended up on the bus home from school without any of my three other brothers aboard, which never happened. When I arrived home an hour later, my fears had convinced me that I’d missed the rapture, especially since my parents were nowhere to be found.
I thought the only chance I had left to be saved was to prepare to face the Antichrist and resist the Mark of the Beast. That’s a tall order for a twelve-year-old in an afternoon. Fortunately, my family came home a few hours later, and we sorted out the misunderstanding. My crisis was averted, but looking back, I realize how crazy that was. To think I could prepare myself for anything like that, even at my age today, would be the height of hubris.
The drive of human effort is a well-set trap. It eats up our time and energy, with nothing meaningful to show for it. We think if someone gives us a plan, we will be able to follow it, but doing it is not in our power. I used to read Jesus’ encouragements about being alert and diligent, loving my enemies, or laying our lives down without reminding myself of the most essential one—“Apart from me, you can do nothing.”
In these last few chapters, we’ll discover how followers of Jesus will be equipped for the last days, but I want to be very careful how I invite people into that. This is less about how we prepare ourselves for what is to come and more about how we let him prepare us. Never let “apart from me, you can do nothing” get far from your awareness. It’s not skills we need but increasing awareness of and dependence upon him.
It has taken me decades to lose the religious sensibilities of Christianity that distorted the life of Jesus in me rather than enhanced it. If I can shorten that trajectory for anyone else, this book is worth my time. There is so much to unlearn and so much to discover. I can’t tell you what to do, but I can only offer some tips to help you recognize how he leads you.
The Dawn Is at Hand 
I love Paul’s advice to the Romans, which both warned them not to be distracted from true things by their daily necessities and encouraged them to wake up to a larger reality.
“But make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God. The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing! God is putting the finishing touches on the salvation work he began when we first believed.” Paul (Romans 13:11-12 MSG)
If Paul was asking first-Century Christians to live with this in mind, how much more those of us who live at least 2000 years later? It is nearer for us than it ever was for them. And yet, how much easier is it for us to get lost in the demands of daily living that we miss the greater calling that rests on us? We belong to a greater kingdom, culminating in the redemption of all Creation. All he asks of us is to stay awake.
You may have read He Loves Me and discovered the God you hoped for was real. You may have read The Shack and knew there was a different way to know God inside your pain. You may have read So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore and discovered that your hunger for authentic community can be fulfilled. Now, it’s time to hear God summoning a people whose loyalty is to him alone and whose spirits are attuned to his heart and the times we live in.
When we lose sight of his purpose in the world, it is easy to get lazy in our faith. When Jesus invites us to awaken or challenges us to stay alert, it cannot be out of fear. Fear is unsustainable and triggers responses internally that will make you less sensitive to him. We stay connected best by enjoying him and looking with anticipation at the possibility of his coming.
Those who enjoy their walk with Jesus will have all they need at hand. Those who live in fear will lack at every turn. As we will see, fear is not a motivation in this kingdom. If we get to know him well enough, we will find no fear inside his love.
Is That Why He Waits?
I have often wondered why God seemingly delays the second coming of Jesus. Has he set a specific date in the future, or is he waiting for the world to grow darker than it already is? Certainly, it has gone on far longer than the earliest followers of Jesus would have believed; they thought it would come in their lifetime.
Now, I wonder if God is waiting for a generation of his followers who will prepare the way for his coming, as John the Baptist prepared the way for his first one. I don’t see one person doing this, but might the bride of Christ, in her collective beauty, prepare the way for the second? And by the bride, I don’t mean all those who attend religious services; I mean those whose hearts belong to him and are learning to listen to him.
Perhaps already Jesus stands at the threshold of human history, knocking and waiting for enough of his followers to invite him inside to finish the story of redemption. It may be that God awaits a generation who can say wholeheartedly, “Even so, come Lord Jesus,” in the full weight of knowing the risk they are taking. We’ll never be those people as long as we enjoy the world the way it is or fear the days of his coming.
Challenging Times Ahead
The Day of the Lord will be a great day. Jesus will appear in the clouds as he makes his way to Mt. Zion to subdue the darkness of our world and redeem the Creation from the devastation and trauma of human selfishness. However, the days that precede it are dark and brutal.
My opening illustration about missing the rapture came from the fear-based religious environment in which I was raised. No one wanted to miss the rapture because it was our ticket out of the horrors the world would go through at the end of this age. But that came from the mistaken belief that Jesus would evacuate the faithful before the world got too dark. I don’t believe that anymore.
Read Jesus’s account of the end times, or the book of Revelation, looking for when Jesus actually comes. It is always as after the troubles that ravage the earth at the end. That has caused some to argue for two appearances by Jesus, one to rapture out those who are his and a second one where he comes back with them to redeem Creation. In my view, Scripture doesn’t support that possibility.
For those alive at the end of the age, there’s no doubt they will live through challenging times. Three critical challenges await—the deception of darkness, the calamities of nature, and persecution against the followers of Jesus. It’s fitting to be reminded that Christians already endure all of these today somewhere on the globe. It will just be more widespread at the end of time.
So, what do we need to live through those challenges? We will need a heart that seeks the truth to combat the lies of darkness, as I wrote about in chapter eight. If we are not looking for truth above comfort in our lives today, we’ll be led by anyone saying what our itching ears want to hear. For the calamities of nature, we will need a growing trust in God’s ability to sustain and provide for us, even by supernatural means, if need be. Finally, for persecution we will need to draw on God’s grace when we need it most. Previous generations have shown that this is not only possible but preferable. Persecution has always focused his people and made them stronger.
Jesus promised us that our safety in all these things depends on him, not us. “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.” (John 10:27-28, emphasis mine)
You dare not face the challenge of those days trusting in your own strength. Trusting his is what you want him to cultivate. No matter the circumstance, he is big enough to hold you in the storm. He will show you the truth if you want it, provide for you through any calamity, and strengthen you to stand in any persecution.
He Is Already Preparing You
Where do we get this trust to endure the unthinkable? God can supernaturally give it to us in the last moment if he needs to, but he’d prefer that we learn to live there in the challenges we already face today. That’s why the New Testament writers said to rejoice in suffering; it can produce the very things we’ll need most in the last few days—perseverance, character, and hope. (Romans 5:3-4) The truth is, we need those things today, too.
Whatever troubles we go through with him today will prepare us for more difficult challenges ahead. One of the motivations of my own journey is to take whatever life throws at me—betrayal, scarcity, aggression, disease, even persecution—and bring it inside my relationship with Jesus. Our stresses today can prepare us for greater challenges to come if we lean on him and do not give in to the bitterness of self-pity.
Ask him to teach you how to rely on his grace daily; when the time comes, you’ll be ready for whatever happens. As you seek what’s true, even when it challenges you, when you trust God’s provision both physically and spiritually at the end of your rope, and when you suffer for being a follower of Jesus, absorb the pain inside his love. That’s where you’ll find Jesus’s presence, wherever love draws you, and in whatever way you can offer that love to others, even those who wrong you.
Remember, apart from Jesus, we are insufficient for any of this, but with him inside us showing us the way, we will learn some incredible things. When we find love in less challenging days, we’ll grow to trust his love when in more difficult ones.
You cannot learn this from a book or a seminar because it is not a matter of technique but growing trust in his love and in learning the power of love in times of crisis. That is what Jesus wants to shape in you as you learn to follow him. I can’t give you a standard approach because we all start from different places and face different challenges. Yet, he will shape our hearts through the very circumstances that we experience, both pleasant and painful.
The Power of Love
Love is the opposite of fear, so when we are afraid, we know there’s more we need to learn about love. We dare not give in to fear in the circumstances we face or even about the events at the end of the age. Anything we do from fear is destined to fail in the same way our own human effort will. It also desensitizes us to his work and his voice inside us. The first thing we all need to learn is to lean out of fear and into love, where we’ll find the freedom we seek.
The same trust that will get you to the end of the world is the same trust that will allow you to triumph over the struggle you’re having today.
It may seem unfair if you find yourself alive in that last generation. Why should we have to face a more significant challenge than those before us? It reminds me of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, wishing these events had not happened to him.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Whether his coming is in two years or two hundred, if you’re alive during those times, it’s because God has chosen you to be, and his love will be sufficient to carry you through it. Take hope in that and know that all those who have gone before you will be cheering and praying for you to succeed in the face of those troubles that precede his coming.
Your Light Has Come
The end of this age is “crunch time” for the followers of Jesus. This is where it all resolves, and if you focus on the challenges of those days instead of the opportunities, you’ll be defeated before you begin.
Our focus for the last days does not need to be on the challenges but on the glory to come. One day, Jesus responds to the invitation of his bride in the words of Isaiah 61, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.”
Those who follow the Lamb wherever he goes, who learn to love as he loved, will be a bright light in the growing darkness of a world separating itself from God. That’s how we anticipate his coming, not hunkering down with all the challenges it might present, but with an awakening to the reality that God the Father as the Ruler of All will be revealed in his children.
In those days his light will arise, and the glory of God will rest on his children. This is why we remain on this earth: to reflect his glory. We do not belong to the night; we are children of the light.
That’s how Paul encouraged the followers of his day:
“But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.” (I Thessalonians 5:4-5)
Those who follow him will not be surprised when these darker events unfold; they’ll see it coming and respond with joy—the bridegroom is at hand!
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