Mark chapter 13, we'll be reading from verses 32 through 37. But concerning that day or that hour, this is Jesus speaking, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard. Keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come It is like a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore, stay awake. For you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you, I say to all. Stay awake. Mark chapter 13, Jesus is speaking about the end time, His second coming, His return, and of course the disciples and the apostles here that He's speaking to in particular are still quite confused about The fact that he is going to go to a cross and die, they didn't see and understand all that Jesus was to do until after he had died. And he's teaching them things here in Mark chapter 13 and in other places that he knows that they're not going to fully understand now, but one day they would. And he is speaking about the second coming when He returns, not as He did the first time, but as He will the second time, that we now today yet await when He comes in His power and His glory and every knee bows and every tongue confesses that He is the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings. I think Jesus knows that his apostles and those that are listening to him on this day, I think he knew and I've wondered at times in his humanity what that must have felt like to know that you're teaching things that people are hearing and to the best of their ability at the time perhaps contemplating and comprehending to some small measure, but knowing all the while that they don't get it. They don't really get it, not yet. They'll get it later. They don't get it right now. And I thought about that and I think it's very much like parenting. You tell your kids things when they're young and you try to start beginning to prepare them for things that they don't understand on the day that you tell them. tell them over and over again or you teach them lessons and you say things and truths and wisdom we hope and pray that even though they might not yet understand when they're young that maybe perhaps one day they will. And Jesus is speaking to his disciples and he is telling them one of the most fundamental truths that mankind must know and understand. He's coming again. It is, of course, and at the risk of stating the abundantly obvious to you and me, He's coming again and it's a central doctrine of the scriptures and of Christianity. There are some today who I believe wants to follow a certain type of Christianity, or maybe I should say it this way, would agree with and adopt many of the tenets of Christianity. Love your neighbor, love even your enemies. I think even to some degree men can see the value in such a teaching, how it lends itself to peace. I believe if you look the world over, sadly this has not always been true, but if you look the world over today, there is a lot of persecution going on in the world that I don't know of any place where it is properly lived out Christianity where people are harming others. When you understand what Jesus taught in the New Testament, it lends itself to a life of peace and prosperity. The Ten Commandments, if we lived by them, our society would be far ahead of where we are today. You can believe in a number of tenets of Christianity, and you can accept the moral ground upon which it rests. That is a good thing. But if we distance ourselves from this truth that Jesus tells us plainly while he was here, in plain words, at the time misunderstood, but later clear. Clear as the noonday sun, what he was saying. He's coming again. The rest of the New Testament tells us this as well, and we want to make sure that we establish it in our minds once again solidly here today. Acts 1, verse 11. Men of Galilee, the angel says, as Jesus has been taken up from their sight, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven. 1 Thessalonians, Paul writes, for the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command and with the voice of an archangel and with the sound of the trumpet. James writes, In chapter 5, verse 8, you also be patient, establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. And of course, Revelation, the entire book, but in particular, chapter 22, verse 12, behold, Jesus says, I am coming soon. bringing my recompense with me to repay each one for what he has done." These are just four verses of many in the New Testament that speak very plainly that Jesus is coming again. Peter wrote and he said, there will come in the last time scoffers who will make the claim, where is this coming again? And some will say, look, 2,000 years ago, they were saying it would be soon, that it was imminent, that it was going to take place, even perhaps misunderstood and misapplied Scripture in their own lifetimes. And we don't want to take time to look at that too closely today. But I do want to say to you today that the New Testament and the disciples in the early church and the writings of the Apostle Paul and Peter and James and the others The sense was this, He is coming and it can be any time and we don't know when that is. That was the overriding sense of the doctrine of the second coming of Jesus Christ. There was not so much an emphasis merely on it can be soon, it is simply it could be soon because we don't know when it's going to happen. And Jesus says that very plainly here in verse 32. Concerning that day or that hour, no one knows. Now, when we establish the fact, and I think we hopefully all see it, that Jesus, the Son of God, is going to return to the world. He's going to return to the earth, not set foot here again, according to Thessalonians, but he's going to gather those that are his with him to ever be with him in heaven. But when he comes back, we establish the fact that there will be that day, and that day has been established and set someday in the future. The natural question that man asks is, when? And I'm sad to say that many, even under the Christian banner, have sold a lot of books and gathered to themselves a lot of riches trying to answer that question for you, taking even the New Testament and trying to puzzle out an exact day and exact time, trying to draw lines and connections between events in our lives and the second coming of Christ And Jesus here, without any equivocation, with no confusion of words, with no ambiguity at all, says, no one knows. Not even the Son. And this of course has tripped many up. It's confused many. It's confused me, perhaps, as well, and others. What does he mean? How can the Son of God not know when that day is going to come? Is this something that only the Father knows now? Or how do you puzzle this out? What is he saying? And I think the answer lies in the fact that he's speaking as a man, of course. And he is speaking as an ambassador from God, that there will come a day when I return. And Jesus is speaking to them and telling them the message of God as God's ambassador to the world. And just in a similar way, if you can think of it in this type of an analogy where there's an ambassador to another country, he knows perhaps more than he has been authorized to say. Jesus was under the, of course, the instruction of His Father when He came into the world, and as a man, it was not His to reveal the time that He would come again. It was not in His purview at that moment to tell the people when He would come again. The answer clearly to the question, when is Jesus coming back, no one knows. We think today, and we've probably all been in this line of thinking before, that you look around at the world and you think, boy, it can't be long now. And I see some sense in that. I'm not ignorant of the connections that seem to be made, and yet at the same time, I am left with the answer that Jesus gave. No one knows. No one knows. One thinks about the way the world has changed so rapidly over the last 50 years of my life. The technology that has reshaped the way that we think and relate to one another. The sin that is so rampantly on display. The news from all over the world that gives us cause for concern, and rightly so. And we think, how can this go on and on? And the answer is, I don't know. No one knows the answer, and by the way, I don't think it would do us any favors if we did know. You ever had that thought, boy, if I knew when I would die, I'd live differently, or that'd be an advantage to me. I tell you, you didn't know it wouldn't. It wouldn't be an advantage to you at all, I don't believe. Some would say, boy, if I just knew when he was coming back, it would be an advantage, because I could know what? when you can take your Christianity seriously and when you can't? You see, I think there is a connection here to be made to the Sadducee in the New Testament. The Sadducees, along with the Pharisees, there were three main parties. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the two primary ones at the time of the Lord, and the Sadducees were Jews, of course, and members of the Sanhedrin, and yet they had a peculiar belief, or lack thereof, I should say. They did not believe in the resurrection from the dead. They did not believe in spirits. They did not believe in angels. I've kind of wondered them in my days of studying Scripture. What would drive a person to follow the law of God without believing that there was anything past this line? And the answer, I believe, comes in this. They believed, and again, this is my assumption or my thought. I can't validate this. I don't know any Sadducees, but I suspect that the idea then is that I live according to the law because of what it can do for me here in this life. And today, what I would like to share with you, and I don't know that any of us fall into this camp, I don't think any of us are Christian Sadducees, but I think there are many who are, or at least in a practical sense might as well be. because their Christianity is only related to this life for them. The Joel Osteens of the world, the many others, we won't list them all, who teach and preach a Christianity that is to impact this life only, they may as well follow the banner of the Sadducee and call themselves such. To think that Christianity is only about this life is to entirely miss the message of Christ in the New Testament. You see, He's coming again. And when He does, everything in an instant changes. For those who know Him, for the better. For those who do not, for the unspeakable worse. We don't know. It's no favor to us if we did, but because we don't know, what then are we to do? And this is maybe, if nothing else, just I don't know if this is helpful or not, just something of a course correction, if not in our steps in life, and in the direction of our life, and where we are in life, if nothing else, maybe a mental, emotional, and of course, spiritual course correction, if it's necessary today, and I think sometimes it is, to be reminded of what we already know, but then to consider what we already know more deeply or more thoroughly than we've considered it in the recent past in our life. Because we can get so consumed with the day-to-day, we can get so consumed with Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and the work that we have to do and the challenges that we face and the money in the bank or the lack of money in the bank or the health concern here, or that concern there, and all of these things, we can almost live like a Christian Sadducee in a sense, where we have forgotten Jesus is coming again. Jesus is coming again. Our Savior, our Lord, who stretched His hands and died for us, It's coming in power and glory that you and I cannot now imagine. And every eye is going to see Him. As the lightning from the east to the west, we're all going to see Him. And people say, well, how can that be? We live on a planet that's round. I'll tell you that God made the physics of the world, and He can suspend them any time He wants. And at that moment, I believe that the world is going to stand in utter shock and silence, but we ought not. Our lives must be firmly rooted in the reality of Jesus' return. In fact, we must be longing for it in one sense, looking for it, anticipating it, not dismissive of our life here, and we're going to talk about that briefly. but reset the stake in the ground of our Christian hope, which is Jesus is coming again. Who's going to win the presidential election? I don't know, but I know Jesus is coming again. What's my life going to be between now and the time that I go back to this body, goes back to the dust from which it was created? I don't know. How am I going to meet my end? I don't know, but I know Jesus is coming again, and He said He's going to take those that are His with Him. That's what I know. That's what I know beyond anything else. And I pray that I do not fall victim to what is so easily done in our day to make my Christian faith merely a means to an end in this life and absent of the reality of the return of Christ one day. If we don't know, If we don't know when it's coming, then what are we supposed to be doing? Finding a place in the mountains somewhere and build a little cabin and fish in the rivers and grow food on the land and hide and just wait it out? That's not what we're told to do. Not as a principle. We're told. Jesus says, look, I'm not going to tell you when, but it's coming. And so I want to encourage us all today with what Jesus said, and this is all we want to present to you today, is what He said about how our lives ought to be lived in the light of His return. Be on your guard. Verse 33, be on your guard. said it so many other places. By the way, he says, be on your guard multiple times in this 13th chapter of Mark. Be on your guard. Be on guard in your life. This is not, I believe, something we ought to take and misunderstand and misapply and turn into some sort of paranoia. So I do not want to go that route, but I do want to tell you, if you're not on your guard spiritually, you need to be. Be on your guard. You know what they tell boxers right before they start to fight? Protect yourself at all times. Between the sound of that bell and the next ring of the bell, protect yourself. Be on your guard. I'm coming again, Jesus says. When? I'm not telling you. And it's for your own good that I'm not telling you. Be on your guard. Do you live your life like that? Again, I'm not telling you to be a paranoid person or to withdraw, because that's the easy thing to do, right? The easy thing to do is just withdraw in and then do nothing. And I'm reminded of a sermon that I was told about I didn't hear, but it's well known among many of our preachers and others. The minister school, Brother Curtis preached a sermon on a pet rock. And he told the people the week before, next week I'm preaching on a pet rock. And so people were interested. What is he talking about? Next week, sure enough, he brought a pet rock and he preached on the Ten Commandments and he said that pet rock hadn't broken any of them. But he also hadn't fulfilled any of them. You know, you can live your life and kind of just Try to just stay above the mark, just above it, and just kind of drift into the world, unguarded, a heart open to the lies that this life is more important than the next. And I want to ask you that very plain question for you to answer in your own heart. Do you live? Do you think? Do you meditate on and do you pray? And do you consider this life more important than the next? Maybe we should consider them all as one, and not one more important than the other, but at a minimum we ought to be considerate of the fact Jesus is coming again and I need to be on my guard. Be on guard. Keep awake. Just be awake. Wake up, Jesus would say. And I'm guilty of slumber and weariness. and sleeping when I should be awake. My heart has been sad, broken, as our nation has slumbered its way to this place of chaos and despair. Because we just went to sleep. We just lulled to sleep by material prosperity. Jesus says, I'm coming again. And all of this is going to be completely done away with. Be awake. Wake up. Saved and lost, by the way. Wake up. Human being, wake up. You're not a collection of chemicals. You're not just a material being. You are a creature made in the likeness of God. It's why there's an empty hole in your heart if you don't know what is beyond this life and beyond what's merely under the sun here. Wake up! Wrestle with the reality that there are things in your heart that this world has not, and by appearance, cannot answer. And Phil, there are things there that you know are deeper than the scientists, they're deeper than what your eyes can see, they're deeper than what your ears can hear, they're deeper than what your mind alone can understand. It is that that is being human, which is being alive in God. Knowing your Creator. And as we fell, man did, in that garden so long ago, and we became separated from God in death because of our sin and our rejection of Him and our rebellion against His law. We became sinners, and God in His love sent His own Son so that we might have a way back to Him through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ who lived a perfect life before the law of His Father, and so became our willing sheep to the slaughter, so that sin might find its recompense in blood, which according to the Bible, we are told that there is no remission of sin without blood. Jesus shed it on the cross, and it is the price that has been paid for all of mankind to come to know God. And He's coming again. But he will not come as a baby in a manger. He will come as king. Be on your guard then. Be awake. Stay awake, he says. And then he goes on. It's like a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his serpent in charge, each with his work. We're now, of course, between the moment that Jesus rose from the grave after paying the penalty, we are now in between that point and the point that he returns. And we don't know where that is in the future, we don't know how far it is in the future, but we know we're in between it. And he just told us what we're to be doing. Be on guard, stay awake, and I've given you your work. You have a work. Each his own work. I have things that God calls me to do in my life. You have things that God has called you to do in your life. And you and I need to do those things in light of His second coming. He's coming again. This is not a doctrine that we can tiptoe on. This is not a doctrine that we cannot put and point to as being central to the understanding of the New Testament message of God to man and the message of Christ and those that the Spirit moved upon to write these books of the New Testament to us. We cannot make this as though it is something that is optional to the true understanding of what God has told us. Now listen, I believe we've been, I don't know how to say it, I believe many fall in to what we might call just good old hard shell ism, if we can call it that, where we draw lines where we ought not to draw them. And we make distinctions where we ought not to make them. But listen, this is a non-negotiable. Jesus is coming again. If that were not true, If we did not believe that in our bones, how much different would our lives be lived? What would we be willing to do and not to do? This is not an extra. This is not a place where we have room for disagreement. And I'll say this in clarity, in case some might be thinking it, how it's all going to take place, I have my opinions. The tribulation, the thousand years, all of this, and the post-tribulational, all of the different amillennial, premillennial, postmillennial, all of that, all of them at least understand Jesus is coming again. Ultimately, it's going to be what he says to us here, he's coming again. So be on your guard, keep awake, and do your job. Do your job. Do what I tell you to do. In the meantime, stay awake. Because again, he says in verse 35, you do not know when the master of the house will come. Jews would split the day up into four watches. We have them listed here. You don't know when he's going to come. The first watch in the evening, or at midnight, which is the second watch, or when the rooster crows, the third watch, or in the morning, the fourth watch. Stay awake. You don't know when He is coming. You don't know when this moment is going to take place. So be awake. And if we're not, If we don't stay awake spiritually, if we don't engage, if we don't put up our guard against the enemy, against our own flesh, against the world that we now live in, that inundates us with one lie after another, if we don't do these things, if we don't stay awake, if we don't keep up our guard, there is an alternative. When He comes, He's going to find you sleeping. Have you, like me, to my shame, ever felt the Lord come to you in whatever capacity? He came through a song, through a conversation with a friend, just driving down the road and His Spirit comes and tugs at your heart and you startle almost because you've been asleep. Sometimes he'll come and he'll nudge you. Wake up. I'm coming again. Get up. Where have you been? I left you at the door to keep it and I told you to stay awake. Sometimes Sometimes He allows all kinds of things in our life. Sometimes we can't map them one to the other, but sometimes He comes and it's like spiritually, it's like, yeah bud, I went to sleep. And as you look back over that time that you were spiritually asleep, you see the damage that has been done. Sarah says, and she's probably true, that I could sleep through a hurricane. I could sleep through a tornado. It's probably true. A person who's asleep doesn't know the damage that's going on, doesn't know the things that need to be done. They're just asleep. And he says, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep, verse 36. Just, Lord, if you'd have just told me, I'd have been ready. I did tell you, he will say. I did tell you. I told you I was coming. And so I told you to be ready. I told you to be prepared. I told you to be on guard. I told you that you won't know. And the writers of the New Testament later would say similar things. He comes as a thief in the night, but that isn't how it is to come to his people who are looking and watching and waiting. It should be, ah, that's what I've been looking for. He says this, and we'll close with these thoughts, what I say, verse 37, what I say to you, I say to all, I say to all, a preacher, a minister, one who is tasked with and tasked by the Lord to do this, not by man merely, tasked to prepare and to share the Word of God, has a, at a minimum, something of a constant alarm clock spiritually. Every week, Sunday comes. or a Thursday Bible study, or something comes, or someone wants to talk about something. And so there is a need, of course, for pastors to be watchful and awake. And I'm afraid that maybe that's far too many pastors are sleeping on the job today. But Jesus isn't talking to just his disciples here. He's talking to us all. every last one of us be awake. You know when the Spirit impressed Mark to record this conversation that Jesus said, do you know that when Jesus said, what I say to you I say to all, perhaps in his mind he saw this very moment. I'm saying this to you. I'm saying this to you. Are you asleep? Are you living your life in such a way that sleep does not, spiritual sleep, is not hindering you from following the Lord where He wants you to go? And I'll tell you, we've all woken up on some mornings perhaps said, boy, I'd just love to just stay here. I'm just so tired. I've got so much to do today. I've got this conversation or that thing that's going on at work, and I just want to stay here. Spiritually the same thing happens, I think. It's just easier. When you boil it down, it's just easier to live our lives spiritually asleep than it is to live them spiritually awake. But Jesus is coming. And people around us need to know that. We need to tell them, both near and far, because this life is quickly to pass us all by. And what a sad thing it would be to live our lives physically awake, but spiritually asleep. I didn't give you a title today. I had several that were running around in my mind. nothing that really worked, but if there is something that I do want to leave you with, an idea of a central thought or something to cling to, to maybe register these thoughts once again, is just a warning to Christian Sadducees. Living life as Christians, but you know, when it comes to Jesus' return and That idea seems to take a backseat. It needs to be front and center, ever and always. It needs to be something of a North Star of our faith, to ever and always be looking to the return of our King and the return of our Savior, and to then share that with as many people as we can that they might be ready when He comes.