The Return of Christ: Part 3 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

And I’m here to help you take some time with God.

And your time with God really is a foundation of your spiritual life. And if you choose to ignore God in your life, you’re really making a big mistake because you’re choosing to say, I can handle life on my own, I can make things work out, I can figure out all the angles when really you can’t.

It’s not just people who don’t believe in God who do that. Many people who are Christians ignore God in their daily lives, and that is such a big mistake.

We need to constantly lean on God.

He has made our lives so they don’t work right unless He’s at the centre of them. So keep your relationship with God healthy, and you’ll find God involved at every level of your life, helping you, guiding you, blessing you, enabling you to do what He calls you to do.

We’re talking this week about Jesus coming again. Jesus returned to this world. He came once into this world, and his first coming was very different than his second coming will be.

His first coming, he came as that baby and grew up and lived that life of perfect obedience to God. He was headed for the cross from the day he was born. He came to die.

To die for you and me because God loves us so much and we had no way to provide forgiveness for ourselves that would make us acceptable to God and so God did what had to be done. He entered into our world in the person of Jesus Christ, and Jesus died in our place so that we could be forgiven. Well, that’s his first coming, humble, rejected by so many people, eventually crucified, but his second coming will be so different.

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He won’t come then, like that little baby, helpless, rejected by many people. But when he comes again, it will be so obvious to everybody who he really is. Everyone will bow before him because he is the supreme being, the ruler of everything.

In Acts chapter one.

It talks about Jesus after he had risen from the dead, and he met with the disciples. This is what Luke records.

Luke says the first account I composed Theophilus, talking about the Gospel of Luke, about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up after he had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom he had chosen. To these he also presented himself alive after his suffering by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of 40 days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God.

So he gathered them together a few verses later. It says in verse 6, and so when they had come together, they were asking Jesus, saying, Lord, is it at this time you are restoring the kingdom to Israel? There were all these prophecies about the Messiah coming and what he would do.

And Jesus said to them, It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority.

But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and even to the remotest part of the earth.

You see, Jesus says to the disciples, you don’t know when I’m going to return. You can’t say, Oh, it’s going to be next year or this time. No one knows. In fact, in the Gospels, Jesus told them, I’ll come at a time when no one expects.

But what he says is, while you are waiting, don’t be sitting around.

Get busy, do kingdom work.

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses. Jesus wants us to be actively carrying on His ministry in this world while we wait for his return.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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