- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
LOOKING FORWARD TO CHRIST’S RETURN.
from an old magazine.
In our Lord’s last address to His disciples, He touchingly assured them that although He was going away to prepare a place for them He would return. “I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am” (John 14 v3). This was the bright and blessed hope He set before them. True, the Holy Spirit would be with them and in them all through the time of His absence and for ever, but He would come again. He said, “I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father” (John 16.28). He assured them that in His Father’s house there were many homes, that He would go and prepare a place for them and come again to receive them to Himself that they might be with Him. No words could more plainly declare His personal return from heaven. His coming again was the only hope He gave to the ones who would so soon feel bereaved in a world that hated Him and had cast Him out.
But they were to know peace in Him and be of good cheer. Not because the world would get better but because He had overcome the world. Their true hope was that He would come again and then their sorrow would be turned into joy. It is not possible that anything can be more clearly taught than that the Christian’s position here is one of separation from the world, because we are associated with Christ whom the world has rejected, and still hates. We are here in the world though not of the world, a sufferer because of it but a minister of blessing to it, and going through it glorifying God. We are not waiting for the fulfilment of events but for the Lord Himself. It is not the mere knowledge of the doctrine of the Lord’s second coming that has power over hearts and consciences, but of receiving it as a divine revelation that produces hope and peace.