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Luke 21:8 And he said, "Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and, 'The time is near!' Do not go after them.
The time is near….and it has been for thousands of years. I am not always sure what that time is all about, but it is near. The Mayans thought the time was going to end in 2012, or so some people thought. A preacher named Harold Camping predicted several dates for the end of the world starting in 1994 and then had to revise the dates he picked several times when his predictions didn’t come to pass. I’ve seen the saying on signs. I’ve read it in opinion pieces. I’ve heard about it on podcasts. I’ve watched preachers talk about it. The time is near…..well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What’s that to us? The only time we really need to worry about is right now, and how we are spending that time.
Jesus told us not to pay attention to people who focus on the end times and claim to have superior knowledge, but instead to focus on what we can do right now, right here, to bring about God’s will “on earth, as in heaven”. The end will come like a thief in the night, nobody knows when, and who cares anyway? What good would it do to even know such a thing?
What we need to know is that we have been sent out with a huge task – to take God’s love into the world and tell everyone the good news about Jesus until we take our last breath….or the “time” finally comes. Yes, in a sense the time IS near – time for us to choose whom we shall serve, time for us to wash one another’s feet, time for us to speak about peace and justice on behalf of the hurting, time for us to hold out these three things: faith, hope and love – and believe that the greatest of these is love. That’s the kind of “time” that is near.
