Left Behind

Text: Matthew 24:36-51

Focus: Being Ready

Function: To help people be busy now with Kingdom business.

Form: Story Telling

Intro:

Wow!

⁵⁰the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour that he does not know. ⁵¹He will cut him in pieces and put him with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

This is a an heavy passage. It gets heavier when we realize to whom Jesus is speaking!

He is speaking to the last days saints. He is speaking to the Christians on the planet when He comes a second time. Most likely, he is speaking to us.

And what is Jesus warning about?

He is warning us to be ready for His return.

I am going to build the sermon around this next illustration, but I want to explain that I am not using it to mock our understanding of the second coming of Christ. But this illustration helps to put it in proper perspective.

I heard Tony Compolo speaking once. Most of us know who he is. He is a famous Preacher who has two passions, one for Jesus' salvation from sin, and the other for Christians acting with and for justice. He was talking about Christians being ready for the second Coming of Christ. And he was talking about movies. He said: “I used to hear in youth group this phrase as a warning. I used to hear, `what if Jesus returned and you were sitting in a movie theater?'”

Now all of this comes from a time when good Christians were not supposed to go to movie theaters.

Now many of you might remember this. I was about 12 years old when I went to my first movie ever. It was a big discussion in our house. The boy scouts sponsored a field trip to the movie Namu, the Killer Whale. My dad was big in Boy Scouts. Whenever we had a Boy Scout Jamboree, with hundreds of Boy Scouts from all over the region, and we had Sunday Morning worship, my dad was always the preacher.

He won more people to Christ, did more Christian ministry to people outside of Church through Boy Scouts than anywhere else.

But the problem at the time was that there was some sort of unwritten rule that if you were truly a Christian, you didn't go to movies.

I never ever was really sure why. I think it had to do with supporting the lifestyle of movie stars and everyone knew that their lifestyle was very wrong.

And across the nation, it sort of became a badge of proof that one was truly saved. It was legalism that translated to this mentality: “if you truly belong to Christ, you will take a stand against evil by not going to a movie.”

So, the people who were helping to form Tony Compolo's theology were so big on taking a stand against other people, that they turned not taking that symbolic stand a line in the sand as to whether or not one truly belonged to Jesus.

You get this, right? You have not sinned by going to a movie. And, if Jesus came back and you were in a movie theater, it wasn't going to make a difference. This is legalism. It is a form of abuse. It is a form of hypocrisy.

I had one dear saint, 30 years after this movement who was really concerned when our Church sponsored an outing to see the movie China Cry. It is a movie about a woman who comes to Christ in China, forgets about it, but later has to face a firing squad because she realizes that something real happened. And God saves her life. Every man who was shooting at her missed. Every one. It is a true story.

This woman told me that her and her husband felt convicted about going because he was to be head usher the next day and she was concerned that it would completely blow their witness if an unbeliever came to church the next day and had been at the same theater the night before and saw them at the theater.

I explained to her that only certain kinds of Christians knew that some Christians do not go to movie theaters and that an unbeliever who heard us talking about it wouldn't think anything less of her and her husband because they had no idea that we had such rules.

So, when Tony is talking about this, it is a big thing, but only in certain Christian circles.

Imagine this. Tony Compolo is hearing this hell fire and brimestone sermon about going to movies and just what he would say to Jesus if Jesus returned while he was in a theater. Or what would he do if Jesus returned while in the theater. Or what if Jesus decided to pass him over because he was in the theater. It was a message based on fear about a doctrine that has nothing to do with what the Bible teaches and Tony, in his sarcastic sort of way raised his hand in the middle of the sermon, while the preacher is just getting fired up and says: “We wouldn't get to see the end of the movie.”

And that answer sort of took the thunder out of the lesson his youth leader was teaching.

Here is the thing about this passage, and what we are doing when Jesus returns.

This passage can give us some pretty good preaching, but it can also be abused and taken out of context.

I thought about that a lot when I was growing up. I thought about what would happen if whatever activity I was doing would be acceptable to God when Jesus returned. Would I want Him to “catch me” doing this or that when He returned?

I certainly would be embarrassed if Jesus returned and I was in the middle of doing something that I knew was wrong.

That IS what this passage is about. Jesus is coming back. He is coming at a time when we least expect it. It will be a shock. It will be great for some, and terrible for others.

Some will be taken, and others will be left behind. Be ready.

BE READY. That is the main point. Be ready.

Are you ready?

What made this worse for me was the fact that I, like Tony Compolo was raised in the Wesleyan Tradition.

I'll give you a little bit of theology in order to make help see just how significant the fear that Compolo's mentor's tried to use on him.

Don't get me wrong, Jesus is pretty clear here, two will be taken and another left. It is important for us to be ready for Jesus return.

But the Wesleyan tradition taught us that if we died with any sin that was not confessed, we would not be saved after all. To make it simple, it was sort of the argument between the Methodists and the Baptists.

So, for me and Tony Compolo, this passage carried a lot of weight. What if Jesus returned right in the middle of a moment of weakness? Would Jesus forget all the love I had for Him?

Or for Tony, would Jesus keep him out of an eternity in heaven just because he went to see a movie?

And you may be asking why I am bringing all this up!

If God is love, then fear is not a great motivator to follow Jesus.

Now again, don't get me wrong, Jesus makes some very sobering warnings here in this passage about Christian sloth, or worse, the abuse of religion.

So, let us think about Jesus' return in light of the fear that it might somehow be evil if Jesus came back and we were in the middle of a movie.

Think about it. There is this group of Christians who have convinced themselves that because they do not go to movies, they must truly be faithful and dedicated followers of Jesus.

And somehow, any Christian who doesn't join them in their crusade against Hollywood actors must be a sinner.

But does taking a stand against another group of people make us Christian? Does taking a stand against someone else make us pure in God's eyes?

It is coming close to 4 years when I preached my trial sermon here and preached about how we are called as Christians to shine a light for Jesus instead of cursing the darkness.