Be Found Doing Something When He Comes Back

Somebody in your church has a chart. Seven feet of butcher paper, beasts and horns and a dotted line labeled "us, probably," rolled up behind the coats. I've met three men who owned one. All three loved the Lord. All three had read more Daniel than I have. And all three, if I'm honest, were a little less reliable about showing up for the church workday than the guy who had never heard of the seventy weeks.

That's the tension worth sitting with. Because the disciples asked Jesus the exact question the chart is trying to answer, and He didn't answer it.

Acts 1, the last conversation before the ascension. They ask, "Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" Reasonable question. He'd just spent forty days teaching them about the kingdom. And He says, "It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me."

He traded their calendar question for a job assignment. He does it every single time.

The most spiritual thing in the parable is dinner

Matthew 24. Jesus has just said no one knows the day or the hour, not the angels, not the Son in His humanity, only the Father. Then He asks His own question: "Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his master made ruler over his household, to give them food in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find so doing."

Food. In season. Household.

That's the standard. Not a prophecy conference. Not a chart. The servant Jesus praises is the one who got the meal on the table at the right time for the people he was responsible for. Dinner at six. The mortgage paid on the first. Your mother-in-law's prescription picked up because she can't drive anymore and nobody else was going to do it. The math homework checked, badly, by a tired dad at the kitchen counter.

And notice how the evil servant goes wrong. It doesn't start with cruelty. It starts with a timing calculation: "My master is delaying his coming." He does prophecy math, gets a wrong answer, and the next verse has him beating his fellow servants and eating with drunkards. Bad eschatology came out sideways as bad treatment of people. It usually does.

Dressed for work, not braced for impact

Luke 12 gives the posture. "Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning; and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding."

A girded waist meant the long robe was tucked into the belt so you could move. It's the first-century version of boots already laced. Lamps lit, door unlocked, jacket on. Ready to work, not curled up in the basement with canned goods.

Then Jesus says something that should stop you cold. When the master comes and finds them watching, "he will gird himself and have them sit down to eat, and will come and serve them." The Master takes the towel. He waits on the staff. That's the man you're waiting for, and it's why living ready produces steadiness instead of dread.

If your study of the last days has made you anxious, clipped with your kids and suspicious of your neighbors, you've picked up the wrong end of it. Paul finishes the clearest rapture passage in the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians 4, with this: "Therefore comfort one another with these words." Comfort. That's the assigned emotional output.

Nobody can lend you oil at midnight

Ten virgins, Matthew 25. Five brought extra oil, five didn't. The cry comes at midnight, the foolish ones ask to borrow, and the answer is no. Not because the wise ones were stingy. Because there wasn't enough to split.

Some things can't be shared out. You can't run your Christian life on your wife's devotional habits, your parents' church membership, or your pastor's study time. Being near the oil isn't the same as having it. Plenty of people are warmed by somebody else's faith for thirty years and have never personally trusted Christ for the forgiveness of their own sins.

If that's you, settle it before you read another paragraph about the end times. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." Not a path among several. The one. Grace through faith in a crucified and risen Savior, and nothing added to it.

The sin was burying it

The third parable in that chapter is the talents, and it's the one that indicts comfortable people. The condemned servant didn't gamble the money away. He protected it. "I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground." He gave it back intact and got called wicked and lazy for it.

Luke's version puts it in four words: "Do business till I come."

So do business. Start the small group even though you're not qualified. Give the money instead of modeling a spreadsheet about giving the money. Take the promotion that costs you a hobby and buys you the ability to fund a missionary. Invite the neighbors whose politics make your jaw tighten. The risk of looking foolish is the price of not being the guy with the shovel.

Sheep, goats, and a cup of water

Matthew 25 ends with the nations divided, and the evidence produced at that judgment is startlingly unspiritual. Hungry, fed. Thirsty, given a drink. A stranger, taken in. Sick, visited. In prison, not forgotten. "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me."

None of it requires a platform. All of it requires a calendar and a car.

Pick one that's actually in front of you. The widow three doors down whose gutters are full. The single mom at church who hasn't had a Saturday off since March. The guy from your old job who got out of county and can't get a callback. Put it in your phone with a day attached, because mercy that stays in the "someday" folder never happens.

Learn to open your mouth

Acts 1:8 wasn't a suggestion for the gifted. Witnesses. The whole point of being left here instead of taken home at conversion.

Most Christians aren't cold, they're unequipped. They freeze because they've never practiced a first sentence. Fix the mechanics. The Way of the Master approach gives you a simple, repeatable way to move a normal conversation to the law, then to the cross, without tricks and without shouting. Learn one framework well enough that you're not inventing it under pressure at a job site.

And study the prophecy itself, properly, instead of absorbing it in fragments from headlines and comment sections. Jack Hibbs at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills teaches through it verse by verse, and an hour with an open Bible and a teacher who stays in the text will do more for you than any chart. What you're after is the hope, not the adrenaline. John says it plainly: "everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure." Hope that doesn't change your Tuesday isn't hope yet.

So set the alarm for the same time you always do. Make the lunches. Make the call you've been ducking. Mark 13 ends with the master returning at an hour nobody guessed and finding the household either awake or asleep, and Jesus says, "Lest, coming suddenly, he find you sleeping."

If the trumpet sounds while you're carrying somebody else's groceries up a flight of stairs, you won't need to explain yourself.