No one knows the day or the hour of Christ’s return, but Scripture calls us to live with expectation. One way to examine our hearts is by asking three simple questions:
• Am I living for temporary things or eternal ones?
• Am I pursuing God’s purpose or my own plans?
• Am I growing in holiness or chasing the pleasures of this world?
Jesus doesn’t call us to live in fear or speculate about dates. He calls us to faithfully serve Him, walk in obedience, and be found doing His will whenever He returns.
Eschatology matters. As a radio host used to say, “What’s the point, Caller? Get to the point!” What is the point of our lives? What does God equip us to do, and call us to do?
Keep ratcheting up our inner experiences of “being close to God?” And what metric can we use to determine when we are close enough? When our experience is deep enough? Isn’t fruit supposed to be visible?
Or, participate in our Lord’s grand program (great commission) of restoring His battered creation, one step, day, year, generation, and century at a time? Does God gives us stuff to do? Or are we just supposed to sit in our sandboxes(1) and see who can emote the loudest?
Postmillennialism gives us the MIDDLE distance, the centuries between HERE and THERE. This fallen world is not the preparation for the real event, but a real event in its own right, the place where we grow in faith by obediently exercising dominion. Stewarding what has been given us, and leaving the improvements for generations yet unborn.
A faith that focuses on the middle distance, that which we can hope to achieve in the next three centuries with the one life we are given, is more likely to leave a legacy of long-term faithfulness. Absent that perspective, we risk seeing our life’s work squandered by a Jerry Falwell, Jr.
(1) In programming argot, a sandbox is an isolated computer system, carefully separated from the real system in the real world where real work gets really done. You use a sandbox for developing and testing new software. But the goal is to eventually put that new software to work.