Knowing Our Timely Purpose

       As Jesus’ earthly ministry was drawing to a close, He prepared His disciples to carry out their timely assignment. “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
      As the end of this Church Age draws nearer, our understanding the chronos times and the kairos signs of our age help us to focus on our timely assignment. The timing of the Rapture is not dictated so much by when He needs to come to take us back to our prepared place in Father’s House in the 3rd Heaven. For we know for certain that we shall be caught up at the appointed time to be seated as the immortal, heavenly court to execute God’s vengeance against evil.
       Those of us who are “in Christ” have already been sealed by the Holy Spirit for that Day of Redemption, when we shall receive our glorified bodies, fully sanctified and complete in Him.  We already know that “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Pet. 1:3-4).
         When we understand the times and the signs, we recognize that the rapture is related to the war with Gog of Magog (the Antichrist), which is the same 3½-year war described in Ezekiel 38 and 39, as well as other prophetic passages about the coming of the Day of the Lord. God shall indeed rend the heavens in response to the prayers of the Jewish nation overwhelmed by the sudden and swift invasion of the Antichrist’s coalition of Middle Eastern armies.
         It shall be the appointed time for Christ to come again because of God’s promise to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He promised that He would not allow them to perish from the earth. He would keep them from passing away as a people, for a remnant shall finally recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Hosea’s 3rd Day revival shall surely come to pass when the heavens are rolled back and Jesus stands on the Mount of Olives, splitting the mountain to make a way of escape.
       The Chronos Lesson: Like the tribe of Issachar, this timely understanding tells us what we need to do. We are called to be wise stewards of our time. So what is so pressing for us now that it should take precedence over everything else that the Church ought to be doing? We are to steward the last great revival on the earth through the Church while we’re still here.
        We are to continue to preach the Gospel to anyone who will listen, and to preach it in such a way that there are signs, miracles, and wonders confirming the good news of what Christ’s finished work has provided for all who are willing to believe in Him as their Savior. All because we have been with Jesus (Acts 4:13). This is what we see in the book of Acts at the start of this age.
        It is time to be about Father’s work, what He has purposely determined from the beginning to be done. Let us pray boldly as the early disciples did. “Now, Lord, look on their threats, and grant to Your servants that with all boldness we may speak Your word, by stretching out Your hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be done through the name of Your holy Servant Jesus.”