As we begin a new year, I’d like to raise the question that I may have raised before, but I raise it every year about this time. Can you and I live in such a way that we can actually hasten or speed forward the day of the Lord’s return? It’s a question I think is well worth considering at the beginning of every new year.
Now that we are in the new year, my team at PassionLife and I are busy thinking big questions once again. Our US staff is flying from all over the country this week to meet up with me here in Atlanta, and our board of directors is also flying in from all over the country. We spend about two days together as staff and board, going over our strategic plans for the coming year, evaluating the opportunities and challenges that we’ll be facing this year, wrestling with the larger, thornier issues of developing a world missions organization that saves the innocent and brings good news to the guilty. These are the big, big questions we face every year that guide us throughout the year in terms of what we’re going to do in Africa, what we’re going to be doing in China, what we’re going to be doing in Cuba, and then raising the money and mustering the prayer for as much progress and success as we can.
This year, it also forces me to think about my own life. I’m now 69. I’m in very good health for being 69, but at some point, this could change. My wife, Kristen, has Parkinson’s disease, which is a challenge for us in terms of how much I can be gone, especially overseas. Her mother lives with us and will be 102 this coming February, just a few weeks away from now. So, that also is a challenge for us to make sure that we’re continuing to provide the care that she needs here in the home.
Just like you, we have to balance all these different things between family and mission, marriage and children, and the work God has called us to do together. And above all of that, you’ve got this sense that God has called us to do certain things and has actually reserved certain good works for us to do that we need to do, and we need to be about those things.
In my life and yours, I hope PassionLife is a big part of what God has called us to do to bring lifesaving help and pregnancy crisis intervention into countries where abortion, infanticide, and gendercide are especially concentrated. And that’s what we want to give ourselves to; we want to give ourselves to it with all fervency as well.
Which brings me back to the question that I started with: What can we do, or can we, in fact, live in such a way as to speed forward the return of Jesus Christ?
At one level, the answer is clearly no because God is sovereign, and He has in His mind—the end is clear from the beginning, and He has His plans that no man is able to thwart one way or the other. But from a human experience side, which the Bible addresses, time is a little bit more tricky. We live in time, and the scriptures actually teach us to think about time as something that we can delay or advance in terms of the return of Christ by how we live.
Let me show you where that is found in the Bible. In 2 Peter chapter 3, beginning in verse 8, we read the following words:
“Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Peter is addressing the accusations of some that the Lord is not returning, that He has forgotten His promises to return. Perhaps people expected Him to return within just 10, 20, or 30 years of His resurrection. Paul is reminding them that God does not think of time the way we do. That from His perspective, you could say after 2,000 years, it’s been like two days to Him, or one day can be in another way, a thousand years to Him. He’s outside of time.
But we live in time. And so the Lord’s delay has a purpose. He’s delaying His return and the consummation of the age for a very specific reason.
He goes on:
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
From this human perspective, then there is a delay in the return of Christ in order for the Gospel itself to reach its full impact in the lives of people throughout every generation and then more and more around the world. And this is what you and I are a part of at PassionLife. We’re part of advancing the redemptive glory of the Gospel as we go to places like India and throughout Africa, and Cuba and other places in Latin America, presenting ourselves as helpers to those who are in crisis, specifically those in a pregnancy-related crisis, teaching the church how to do pregnancy crisis intervention, and helping people to learn how to choose life and to trust in Christ for their daily bread as well as all the other needs of their life.
God is delaying his return in order for us to finish and accomplish this work to the degree that He has appointed it. So, that’s strange language, but it is Biblical language. He goes on to say:
“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief.”
*o, on one hand, there’s this sense of His delaying and being patient while He’s waiting for people to come to the knowledge of the truth. And on the other sense, His coming is quick, fast, like a thief in the night, unexpectedly, as a surprise.
And then:
“The heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.”
So, there’s this dramatic moment in which there’s this climactic point of history in which the world as we know it begins to break down, where the Gospel has reached its fulfillment, and the new creation and the new heavens and new earth begin to form, however that unfolds.
And then he comes to the point that I wanted to make today:
“Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?”
This is the dramatic high point for me, that there’s a way for us to live in 2025 that actually speeds up the return of Christ. It has to do with dedicating ourselves to live holy and godly lives together and to be about the work that the Lord has called us to do together. To be followers of Christ, to be lovers of His kingdom, to be good husbands and wives and fathers and neighbors and all the other things that we’re called to be, to be a witness and a testimony to the grace of God, and to do the things that we’re called to do and have the opportunity to do together.
For me and my family, that is mostly related to PassionLife. We have been in the last year to Mexico, Cuba, Zambia, and China, and a couple of other places just don’t come to mind right now. But even now, Mark Nicholson is planning, within the next week, to leave for Africa, where he will be going to Liberia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. These are not easy places to serve. But he is going to meet with some pastors there, and they are together going to be training pastors in these three countries that we’ve never been to before, and seeing if we can’t raise them up in a way to teach the Gospel of Life—our four questions—in a way that will go out to many, many other pastors and churches in these needy and desperate countries, and together to see the church stand up and bring good news to the broken, to be rescuers to those who are in a pregnancy-related crisis, and to help people who already have the guilt and the grief of abortion in their life, come to know as a sweet taste the forgiveness of God and the freedom from guilt that He can bring to us.
This is the mission. And every time a woman or a couple chooses life, and every time they come to know Jesus Christ, we have advanced the kingdom a little bit further, and we have hastened the day of the Lord’s return.
So, 2025 is going to have its challenges, its disappointments, its painful moments, its tears, but nonetheless, we get to live in a way that actually advances the kingdom of God. And I am pledged to do that with you this year, to live a personal life and a mission-minded life, which I invite you to join with me, and together, let’s see what we can do in the neediest parts of the world to bring the good news of the Gospel of life and see the return of Christ. Amen. God bless.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.