Rapture Day - Maybe Tonight, Lord?

Much fuss in the media about this guy, Harold Camping, an American Pastor who has declared that May 21st is Rapture Day.

He has calculated from Scripture [KJV, naturally]that today is the day – Christians will be swept up to heaven, and everyone else is damned.

As Joel Edwards said on Radio 4

“If he is right, I should not be here right now!” It is very sad that this man has convinced so many people with his false claims.

I love my Bible – and I love maths too – but I do not believe we can calculate The Day.

Jesus said we couldn’t know it in advance. That’s the whole point! Mr Camping cannot have read Matt 24;42.

Christians are called to ‘take up their cross daily and follow’ Jesus. To live and work for Him until He decides our time here is up.

The great Lord Shaftesbury – the “People’s Earl” who achieved a phenomenal amount of social reform in his lifetime was asked, as an old man, just how he had managed to get so much done.

“I lived every day as if today might be the day my Lord returns” he said. For him,committed  service for God and his brothers and sisters was a way of life.

Horatius Bonar, the Scottish hymnwriter longed for Christ's return. It is said that each night as he closed the curtains, he would look up at the stars and say "Maybe tonight, Lord?" and each morning as he opened them, he would look out at the dawn and say "Maybe today, Lord?"

But from dawn to dusk, he spent his time sharing the good news with everyone he met!

Bonar wrote

Go, labour on: spend, and be spent,
Thy joy to do the Father’s will:
It is the way the Master went;
Should not the servant tread it still?

I am confident that Shaftesbury and Bonar are having a great party in heaven – along with lots of other people [who are probably not on HC’s approved list, even if they are on Rob Bell’s – but that’s another issue entirely] I am confident that when God says so, I shall be there too. I am really looking forward to that [partly because someone else will have put out the chairs and made the tea, and we won’t have to get there early to unlock and sort out the PA…!]

I do not know if it will be today – neither do you – neither does Mr Camping. But I am not going to sit around waiting for The Rapture, because the Bible in front of me quite clearly states, without any complicated mathematical calculations - and whichever version I read from, that my commission is

“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

But if I’m not around tomorrow, you’ll know where I am! [special note to KMFC readers – if the Rapture doesn’t happen, I shan’t be at our church in the morning, as I’m preaching elsewhere]