Our business now

We have been called to turn to God from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). He's coming from heaven to change our bodies to be like His (Philippians 3:20-21). As far as I can tell from Scripture, He could come at any moment. We do well to remember that we won't all die, but we'll all be changed (1 Corinthians 15:51–52).

It might make sense that we should just sit here, waiting for Him to come get us. But that's not the conclusion that Scripture draws. To the contrary, the scriptural conclusion is that we should be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).

It was a big shift in my thinking several years ago when I realized that the hope of a bodily resurrection, and the hope of the Lord's bodily return makes Christianity intensely physical.  We're not waiting to be made less physical (2 Corinthians 5:1–4), and we're not waiting for new bodies. No, we're waiting for Him to come and redeem us, making our bodies like His. It is "with these eyes" that I shall see God (Job 19:26–27). We're not waiting for a replacement, but for a change.

John 14:3 and John 14:23 give us two different ways the Lord "comes" for us. In John 14:3, we have the Lord coming to receive us to Himself. This seems like the same event that's described in 1 Corinthians 15:51–57 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18. 

Frankly, this seems to me to be the single hardest thing to believe in all Scripture. I don't mean it's the hardest thing to see in Scripture. I mean it's the hardest thing to see as a reality. It means I need to be walking around seeing more than meets the eye, so to speak. It's not easy to carry that around in my head.

But that's only the first "coming" in John 14. The other is in John 14:23 – the Father and the Son will both come to abide with the one who loves the Lord Jesus and keeps His word. This second coming (yes, I did that deliberately) is evidently not physical. We don't expect the Father to come physically, for one thing. And the promise here isn't general, it's for that specific person who loves the Lord and keeps His word. So this isn't the same thing event that 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 tell us about. 

But there's a sense where this is the greater of the two. This isn't the Lord coming to deliver us from this present evil world, this is the Lord coming to be with us in it. The Father and the Son will come to abide with us – live with us – in the present evil world while we wait for the Son of God to come from heaven and save us from it.

And we might notice it's characterized the same way Colossians 3:17 characterizes how we are to do "all things." There, too, it's the Father and the Son together: we do all things in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

I'm more and more convinced that we ought not to have two "buckets" in our lives: one for the sacred, the other for the mundane. Rather, everything we do – all things – are to be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. That means that the most mundane things I do are sacred because I am "in Christ."  And it's amazing to see that the expectation that He is coming for me isn't supposed to drive me to do less here and now: it's to do it for Him, in His name, with thanksgiving.