Loving Christ's appearing, the anticipation of His return, is a vital aspect of Christian faith, as emphasized in 2 Timothy 4:8. This love for Christ's return should be a central focus, motivating believers through the desire to see Him face-to-face, share His eternal hope and home, be reunited with loved ones, and experience the redemption of our bodies. Cultivating this anticipation leads to a purer life lived in readiness for His glorious return.
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Lesson letter from Paul to Timothy, the last letter that he was permitted to rake. The Spirit of God led him to give this. Shortly before he was executed by Nero, one of the seizures of Rome, and these words were written in view of the very soon departure to be with Christ. Second Timothy chapter four, we read from the first verse.
I charge thee, therefore, before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead, that is the living and the dead, at his appearing in his kingdom, preach the word. Be instant in season and out of season. reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long-suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lust shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned undisabled. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.
For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous judge shall give me at that day, and not to me only. but unto all them also that love his appearing." That last expression has been on my mind a good day since the conference. Last night in our visiting with our nephew and niece and family, the Andersons, we were discussing the coming of the Lord and how much emphasis was placed on this in years gone by.
I remember when Christians had as a parting word to each other, Maranatha. That's when we said goodbye to each other. And we signed nearly all our letters that way. And Christians would say, well, we will do so and so if the Lord hasn't come by then. And there was a great deal of emphasis placed on the return of Christ. Also, it was considered to be fundamental to the faith. Anyone who questioned the return of Christ, and especially the rapture, the catching up of the church, was looked upon as being questionable in his theology, to say the very least.
We not only believed it, but I think that there was a... great evidence that people really were expecting the Lord to come. I would go even farther and say that probably the evangelical revival which took place within the last two hundred years, you know, that when the Reformation took place and the Protestant churches were born, came out of the Roman Catholic Church, they soon fell back into many of the dead formalities and the ways that they had brought with them out of Babylon. And it was necessary that God raise up another revival.
And out of the evangelical revival came a revival of the truth of the coming of the Lord. This was largely lost during the Dark Ages, mainly because the scriptures were closed up. There were times when the only place you could find the Bible would be chained to a lectern in some monastery or in some cathedral. And most people never had any opportunity to own one and very seldom even could hear reading from one. And I believe, as I look back over church history and I have spent a good bit of time studying church history.
It's intentionally interesting to me. I believe that a great deal of the background of those in need as we do, simply in the name of the Lord alone, was due not so much to the discovery or rediscovery of the importance of the Lord's Supper. So that was an important factor. But mainly the rediscovery of the coming of the Lord. I believe that the early believers who began to meet in the simple New Testament pattern were stirred to do so because in the setting of the Scriptures they believed the Lord is coming back. And when people believe that the Lord is coming, they want to get their lives straightened out.
This is true individually and it's true as a company of believers. Well, I'd like to look at this tonight from the... From a number of viewpoints, first of all, I'd like to say something about the motives of loving his appearing. What's the main spring of your expectation of Christ? And then I'd like to say something about the result of loving his appearing and about the hindrances to loving his appearing. And finally, give you some simple test. whereby you can discover for yourself whether you really love his appearance.
Now, as the vendor said, when he cried his patient's mouth open, this is going to hurt a little bit. But it's your time. I got hurt by it today, and I expect it to make you uncomfortable. I'd be terribly disappointed if it didn't. Because we do need to be made uncomfortable as we consider how little we really love his appearance. You of course know that there are five crowns in the New Testament and given for various reasons. In fact, all of the rewards for Christians, I'm not talking about salvation, that's a free gift, but the rewards that are given to Christians are all in connection with the kingdom.
Crowns, dominion over cities, so on. So it's in anticipation of the time when the Lord sits on the throne. that he promises these crowns. The crown is promised here. Crown of righteousness is given for loving is appearing. A crown of joy is giving for soul winning. A crown of light is given both for living for Christ, according to James one, and for dying for Christ, according to Revelation two, and so on. Let us look at the movies where loving is appearing.
Like a name for, there may be many more. One, and certainly this is number one, to see him face to face. If there is one thing that love can't stand, it is to be absent from the one we love. Mr. Anne O'Brien used to say, Three things together will kill human love. Absence, distance, and silence. Now, in our case, there doesn't have to be distance, and there doesn't have to be silence.
The Lord is glad to speak to us, and he invites us to speak to him. And there certainly doesn't have to be distance, because we're invited to draw near a true heart and full assurance of faith. But there is absence. He is with us in spirit, but we have never seen his lovely face. Whom having not seen ye love, in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Rebecca, in the Old Testament, fell in love with a man she had never seen. Nothing unusual about that, belovedly.
We've never seen the Lord Jesus, and yet believers love him more than anyone else in heaven or in earth. The Lord Jesus is our beloved. The song of Solomon refers to him in this way, and we're told in I John four and nineteen, we love him because he first loved us. We do love the Lord. And we do long to be in his presence and to be near him. And the more you think about it, the more you'll long for this to be true, provided that other things are right.
A second motive is to share his hope. When young people are keeping company, dating, there is always the opportunity to see each other. or to reg each other, or to telephone each other. But what they really long for, if they really love each other, is for that time when they can begin to share life together. And they plan their home, and they plan their future, and there's nothing quite like that first home. For my wife and me, it was a little gospel car belonged to J.O.
Brown. Probably none of you would remember him. He married us, and then he and his wife, who were then up in years, gave us their little gospel car, which was a little house built on a four-cylinder Chevrolet truck, a and eight feet long. But who minds being close together? That was our home. Later on, when our first young one came along, I added a couple of feet, kind of a buckle on the back of it, make room for a little crib, and then we outgrew that, and I built a larger one.
When we pulled that trailer the first time, in nineteen thirty-one, we had never seen a trailer, a house on the wheel. People used to come running out of the stores as we went through the little towns in Kansas and Colorado, come running out of the stores to watch this strange thing go by, a house on the wheel, how they would look second time. And we're now pulling one thirty-one and a half feet long, and my wife wants to down the highway. fast as a long, long, sometimes a little over that, and I don't caution her, and come now very easy to live in a trailer. That was our first home. That home meant a great deal to us, but it isn't going to be our last home, and neither is the one we're in now.
For others and such years, the Lord said, I go to prepare a place, singular, For you, plural. None of this old stuff has thickened us around here, mansions here and there and the other place. That isn't taught in Scripture at all. It's true that he says in my father's house are many mansions, but he doesn't say that they're for you and me. That's theology gotten from Saul, and it's not good theology. It's not scriptural at all. We're going to be forever with the Lord. Now, I don't know if we're going to be with him, but we're stuck around in houses here and there. He'd only come to visit us occasionally. And I don't want that.
And that isn't what he promised us. If you want to read about our home, physically, you can read about it in the twenty-first, twenty-second chapters of the book of the Revelation, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, likely a space station. suspended over the earth where the bride will live with the king of kings as well as the king of the Jews. He will reign during the millennium and that will be our home for all eternity. It's magnificent. The most wonderful mansion ever built on this earth wouldn't even make a good gardener's chance compared to that.
The most valuable thing that we can get to be used in the decoration of homes as gold. That's what we paved the street with up there. I asked some children one time, why don't we pave our streets of gold? I thought they'd save because it's too expensive. Some kids said if it did, the fees would dig it up. Well, I guess that's as good an answer as any. It's a sure thing we don't have any such paving down here. Now, of course, the Lord is using figures. We don't know what heaven's like. We know more about what heaven is not like than what it is like. We know that there's no pain, no sickness, no death, no separation, no night, no temple, no sun, no moon.
The Lord is the light of it and He's the temple of it. Lots of things we know are not in that new city. Well, it's going to be wonderful to get there. Then a third reason, I think, is, and this is a perfectly legitimate reason, as long as you don't put it number one, reunion with loved ones that have gone on ahead. And loved ones in heaven will mean all of his loved ones, as well as all of your loved ones. We're pretty narrow with our affections now. I even hear people pray that the Lord would save all Christian children.
You know, taking care of homeless children ever since nineteen thirty-six, I resent that. And the time or two I've mentioned it. Why in the world do you pray just for the children of Christian? Well, if you think the Lord loves these poor little children who don't have Christian parents just as much as he loves the others, they're just as precious from the Lord's sight. When you pray for the children, don't pray just for your own kids or just for the children whose parents are believers. Pray for all children. The others need it worse than yours do. And when we get to heaven, our family will be much larger than it is now. We're very limited, aren't we, with our love and with our interests.
God bless me and my wife, son, God, and his wife, us for no more. Amen. You've heard that prayer. That's not a very spiritual prayer. But we're going to meet a loved one. I've got a lot of them over there. It's easier to set your affection on things above, the more of your loved ones who've gone on before. And that's going to be a great comfort to us now, and a great triumph for us then. See, it's necessary, absolutely necessary, that the Lord bring us back together again.
Because we belong to his body. We're all part of his body. Now the church has never been all together at one time, but one. That was on the day of Pentecost. Because the church began on that day, and all the believers were there together. As far as we have any way of knowing. Right then, they were all together. Never seen. And all the believers have been together. But they will be at the rapture when the Lord comes. we'll all be caught up together to meet the Lord in the air. Under this partial rapture theory, it just won't hold water. You belong to the Lord, you're going to be there. You may be a little embarrassed, but you're going to be there, just the same.
And then the fourth thing is the redemption of our body. Now you young people don't appreciate this, much as some of us do, we're a little older. But we need our bodies redeemed. It's the completion of our salvation. And it isn't necessarily selfish to wish for this. It's been promised to us, and we certainly need it. We are oftentimes unable to fully appreciate the Lord because of aches and pains. You'd be surprised just how many places there are that you can hurt. As you get older, you find out. The old fellow I met from West Texas, and I heard all over worse than any other place.
And that's the way of God said, no, as you get older, and that's all going to be changed. We're going to have new bodies. And that's going to be the final conquering of Satan. Satan will at last have lost totally the power of death when our bodies are redeemed and are made just like the Lord Jesus. That will complete our salvation. Now ask for the result of loving his appearing. Not the result of his appearing, but the result of loving his appearing. What effect will it have upon you? What effect does it have upon you when you love his appearing?
Well, first of all, it results in purity of life. He says in first John chapter three, He that hath this hope set on him. purified himself even as he is pure. People are conscious of their own dirt when they get in the presence of clean people. This is true physically. It's true moral. And the more you are in the presence of the Lord Jesus, the more you want to be purified. Now, pure earth has two different meanings.
It sometimes means clean, pure from impurity, from immorality and from all of the evils that contaminate our world, the moral pollution, as Brother Mr. Gunn called it, on Sunday. But purity can have another meaning, as many druggists can tell you. You can buy pure cyanide potassium. It's a deadly poison. But it's marked USP. You know that it is pure, finite of potassium. It doesn't have anything else in it. It's all of one kind. Now, God wants us to be pure, not simply uncontaminated and not simply clean, but He wants us to be all of what we are.
Remember this hot and cold thing. Remember this...