The End Is Near

 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Now as to the times and the epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you.  For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night.  While they are saying, "Peace and safety!"  then destruction will come upon them suddenly like birth pangs upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.

But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober.  For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night.  But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.  For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with Him.  Therefore encourage one another, and build up one another, just as you also are doing.

Sermon for Last Sunday in the Church Year                                         11/20/22

The End Is Near

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Once again, we have come to the end of the Church Year.  One more time God has given us the grace to remember together that this world is not all that there is, and the end is coming.  Our theme, this morning, is; the end is near.

Paul writes to the Thessalonians - and really intended and expected that all Christians everywhere would finally hear his words, that they really did not need to be told what he was about to write.  "You have no need for anything to be written to us about the times and the epochs."  He was reminding them of the obvious - something that they could sense from the world around them and its corruption, and something that was part and parcel of the Christian hope - the end is near.  You don't need to be told this either - you know it already, and you have heard it year after year after year.  We don't know precisely how many "last days" there are, but each day that passes brings the end of time one day closer for sure.  And we know, as Paul says, that the day of the Lord, that last great day of resurrection, will come just like a thief in the night.  It will come suddenly, unexpectedly and with no warning.

That day is described as coming like a thief in the night because it is not going to be generally expected by the world around us when comes, and because it is not bringing good things to all.  In fact, for most people, the day is a day of horror and sorrow and damnation - and the public humiliation of being called out before all of mankind as one of those who stupidly refused the goodness and love of God.

That day is going to come when the world least expects it.  When the world around the church and outside of the church and posing as part of the Church finally convinces itself that nothing is ever going to happen, and that the end, long-promised in Scripture, is really not going to come, that is when it will happen.  It is going to catch them all off-guard.  They will be like the pregnant woman who set out shopping or goes to work in the morning, and is suddenly disabled by the onset of labor.  There will be no warning, no time to prepare, no last-minute accommodations or getting ready.  They will be caught flat-footed and red-handed in their sin and unbelief.

Paul writes, "But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day." He means that you, on the other hand, should never be caught off-guard.  You know it is coming.  If you haven't wrapped your mind around that thought yet, get wrapping!  The end is coming and it is coming soon.  The difference between you and the world around you is day and night – you are of the day and in the light of the Lord and His Word, and the world is of the night and in darkness.  The day of the Lord should not catch us unprepared, or surprise us in sin and unbelief.  We know that the end is near.

We also know the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  We know that He died for us.  We have heard and believe what a terrible thing sin is, and how great a price was paid for our salvation!  The price is the cross.  We look at it every week, on the altar, on our hymnals, on our paraments, and on the processional standard.  We rehearse and remember each week what Jesus did on our behalf and hear how He has cleansed us and how He forgives us.  We eat of His body and drink of His blood – the body which was given for us and the blood shed for us in death – and do so, as Jesus commanded, also in remembrance of him.  We walk in the light of God's grace and love day by day – which means that we are to keep that truth uppermost in our minds day to day, not just on Sundays.  Paul suggests, and God says clearly, that we cannot honestly believe all that He has revealed to us and still be caught off-guard, unprepared, and self-deceived.

That is what Paul calls sleeping, in our text.  Sleeping, or drunk.  "For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night." Either we must be wide awake, alert and prepared, expecting Jesus to return, or we are either unconscious or purposefully out of contact with the realities that God has pressed on our attention with so many warnings and exhortations.    "But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation."  We are the people of the day and of the light – not lost in the dark like the world around us.

That means that there must be a difference in how we handle life and the expectation of the coming of the end, and how we handle ourselves in that expectation.  We are not to be of the number of those who sleep, as though they did not know which day is coming.  Sleep, here, means to act as though unaware of the great spiritual realities confronting us.  We cannot behave as though we have all the time in the world and no urgency about what we do.  We actually do have all the time in the world, but the world is simply running out of time, and there are so many who need to know of Jesus, and we need to prepare ourselves as well.  We need to be alert and sober.  In part that means we need to be honest about our sins - and confess them, and repent of them and hear and believe the gospel of our forgiveness and salvation.  We also face terrible dangers, and not the kind that everyone around us face.  We face discrimination and persecution which God promises will only grow more severe as time passes.  We face strong temptations to doubt.   We face temptations to lusts and pleasures.  We face temptations to fear.  And we face death.

These are not pretend terrors and dangers.  They are effective and powerful.  They are the tools of the enemy – the devil who prowls about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.  All too often, Christians are deceived by what they perceive to be a long time and God delaying His return.  We have each seen friends, and sometimes members of our own families, seduced by this problem of perception and led to walk away.  But the end is coming and it is coming soon!  Those who fall asleep, as regards the faith, are distracted by the pressures of life.  There is so much else to do.  They slowly find themselves weaned of the habit of regular worship – weaned away to visiting, traveling, sporting events, and who knows what all.  They find themselves weaned away from hunger for the truth, and attracted by short services, or entertainment, or a warm and sticky sense of nostalgia - rather than the pure milk of the Word, and the wonderful treasure of the Holy Supper.  Now, occasionally missing worship may be inconsequential, but when we allow ourselves to be persuaded that it doesn't matter at all, sometimes we find ourselves slipping away.  It starts by irregular attendance, perhaps missing once a month, then attending once a month, then once every couple of months, and then it seems to be too much trouble and takes too much time to stop and worship at all.

That is the sleep into which so many are lulled.  That sense that it is not urgent is the drink which intoxicates so many and blinds even our reason and dulls even our senses until those who have become drunk cannot tell that they have stopped believing.  They cannot feel the big emptiness inside until it is too late.  Like the drunk who thinks he is sober and could fool anyone, and yet everyone else can see that he is unsteady, sometimes we become so sure that we know all that we need, and we don't need a sermon or a Bible Study, that we anoint ourselves priest and expert, and then we will just believe what we want to and make sure our religion doesn't get in our way or accuse us of sin.  There are entire church bodies that have followed that path!

But the time for such silliness and unconsciousness is at night, in the dark – that is to say, those are the thoughts and the errors of the world.  We are of the day.  We know our need, we know the danger, we know our weakness, and we know where we find our strength and comfort.    We understand that all we possess in Christ is the gift of God through His Word, through the hearing of His Word.  We need that comfort, even when we are not aware of our need.  We need that strength, even when we do not feel our weakness.  We need the Word – and it is not the Pastor's word, even though he speaks it.  It is God's Word, poured out through the mouth and lips of the faithful preacher.  And we need the heavenly food which God sets before us in this Holy Supper!  This isn't some ordinary bread and wine, this is the very body and blood of Jesus Christ, once given and shed on the cross for us, now offered to us by Christ Himself, from the hands of His called servant.  It is a heavenly mystery which delivers all that Christ won for us by giving His body and shedding His blood.

True, we cannot see all of that or taste it, but we are not so sleepy or intoxicated that we cannot believe that God can do what He promises.  Here is forgiveness, and because it is forgiveness, it is also life and salvation!  This holy food does not merely nourish the tissues of our body, it feeds and strengthens our soul and comforts us in times of distress and temptation.  And since we are of the day, and not of the night, we need to be alert and sober, and prepare ourselves for the coming day, and the dangers that await us on the way.

Paul speaks here of the breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of the hope of salvation.  That is our armor – faith in God, love for one another, and the confident expectation that when this life is done, life isn't over, rather, death is.  Our faith is the very thing that the world around us calls superstition, and foolishness, and wishful thinking.  This is the armor against the pessimism of this age, the hopelessness that settles upon so many.  No matter what is happening around us, even in our own lives, we know that we have God's love and that His will for us is always our salvation.  We can trust God – and faith always does.  Knowing God does not decrease your pain or limit your frustrations.  It isn't intended to do so.  The pains and frustrations probably increase.  The devil wants you to doubt, wants you to despair, wants you to give in to hopelessness.

Faith gives us the answer.  Trust in God is powerful stuff.  God's strength is perfected in our weakness.  His power shines through our troubles when we give up on ourselves and trust Him instead.  Then His Word carries remarkable power!  It doesn't magically make our troubles go away, like in a Harry Potter movie.  But, through His Word, God strengthens us to be equal to the obstacles, challenges, and dangers that we confront.  He may even use them for His glorious purposes.  Eventually the troubles of life will go away, or God will take them away, or He will take us away out of all of them, but while we struggle, He is there to strengthen us, protects us, and bring us through.  So our hope is in Him.

And we have one another.  We are the ones who are to be like "God with skin on" to our brothers and sisters in Christ.  God has given us to each other to encourage and comfort one another, to hold our hands in times when we need that, and to help us bear the load.  We work for one another.  We feed one another.  We drive one another places.  We sympathize, and weep with, and rejoice with, and confess the faith with one another.  We do it out of love – not obligation.  That is why the last verse of our text says, Therefore encourage one another, and build up one another, just as you also are doing.

Then, while we stand protected by faith and encouraged by our love one another, we have the helmet of the hope of salvation:  For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with Him.

On this last Sunday of the church year, we face the end of the world.  It is a somber and serious topic.  But it is not a cause for fear for the Christian.  God is with us every step of the way, and we know that the end of the world is not the end.  Of the world, yes, but not for us.  God has destined us for salvation!  Whether we live, which Paul refers to here as "awake", or we have passed on, which Paul calls "sleep", we are with the Lord, and our hope is sure and we will live forever.  So, for the Christian, the end of this life and the end of this world are, like the end of the church year, part of the plan of God.  They are a cause for remembering God's faithfulness and love, and encouraging one another to hold fast and be faithful and never lose hope.

We know that it is not death to die – and while we live, we have God's help, comfort and strength.  And so we prepare.  We live as His holy people and we encourage one another, and we share the good news of Jesus and of forgiveness and of salvation.  We don't hide, and we don't run, and we don't try to blind ourselves with the intoxications of this world.    For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night.  But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation.  For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with Him.  Therefore encourage one another, and build up one another, just as you also are doing.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
(Let the people say Amen)