{"id":149,"date":"2012-10-29T06:00:52","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T06:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/keepingthefaith\/?p=149"},"modified":"2012-10-02T15:03:49","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T15:03:49","slug":"for-the-long-haul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/keepingthefaith\/2012\/10\/for-the-long-haul.html","title":{"rendered":"For the Long Haul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>For those who grew up in the revivalistic tradition, we heard the same basic sermon every Sunday: \u201cYou are sinner. Repent or you\u2019re going to hell. And you better get to it, because Jesus could return at any second and catch you unprepared.\u201d\u00a0I can\u2019t tell you how many times I heard a preacher say something like, \u201cThe Lord Jesus could return at any moment! He could return before I finish preaching this morning!\u201d And then the speaker would preach for so long, I thought that\u2019s exactly what he was trying to achieve: Preach till Jesus got there.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t like this sort of exhortation. I was, after all, a teenager being told how big a sinner I was, but didn\u2019t feel like I had gotten to sin very much yet. I hadn\u2019t got to do much of anything! I hadn\u2019t traveled, hadn\u2019t earned my driver\u2019s license, hadn\u2019t had sex, hadn\u2019t turned twenty-one or really even lived. If Jesus was content waiting all these centuries before returning to earth, just to show up at this particular blip in history to interrupt my simple little plans, then I concluded it would be a raw deal.<\/p>\n

My feelings about so much of the \u201cSecond Coming\u201d preaching I hear still makes me cranky (but for a different reason than when I was a teenager). We are so absolutely convinced that we are living in the final chapter of human history \u2013 on the last page, if not within the last sentence \u2013 that we are in danger of giving away the future.\u00a0Growing up in a tradition where the impending, imminent return of Christ was a pillar of our faith, the question was always asked, \u201cWhat if Jesus came back today?\u201d That\u2019s a good question, no doubt. \u00a0But here is a question that might be better: \u201cWhat if he doesn\u2019t?\u201d<\/p>\n

What if Jesus does not come back today\u2026or tomorrow\u2026or next year\u2026or next decade\u2026or next century? What kind of world do we want to leave for our descendants? What kind of world will we have then? If we aren\u2019t prepared for the long haul, prepared to persevere into a distant future, then have we not given up on actually living the faith we profess?<\/p>\n

We who are Christian could take a lesson from the not-for-profit organization, \u201cThe Long Now Foundation.\u201d It has been around since 1996, and it hopes to be around much, much longer. The Long Now Foundation has one essential goal: To reverse the trend in our culture of short-term thinking.\u00a0The founders believe that our \u201caccelerating technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, and the distractions of personal multi-tasking\u201d have given us \u201ca pathologically short attention span.\u201d They want to provide some sort of corrective balance to our short-sightedness, and encourage \u201cthe long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured\u201d in centuries, not months or years.<\/p>\n

Illustrating this long-term thinking, Long Now is building a massive clock \u2013 a 21st century version of Stonehenge \u2013 that will tick for the next 10,000 years. Eventually the clock will be placed in a cave in Nevada\u2019s Great Basin National Park. The point of the clock is not to mark time; it is to rekindle our hope in the future.<\/p>\n

The church, allegedly the most hopeful community in the world, could use some of that thinking, because Jesus will probably not return before you finish reading this article. He\u2019ll probably not return today, and likely not return in your lifetime (If he does, I will happily apologize to each and every one of you publically, along with an exhaustive list of all I have been\/am wrong about).\u00a0No, \u201cGod is not slow about keeping his promises,\u201d but we must know that God works on a timetable that is all his own. And yes, maybe Jesus will return tomorrow or next year. But it might be next millennium. Regardless, if it\u2019s sooner or later, we have to be more than prepared. We have to be prepared to faithfully persevere no matter how long the wait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those who grew up in the revivalistic tradition, we heard the same basic sermon every Sunday: \u201cYou are sinner. Repent or you\u2019re going to hell. And you better get to it, because Jesus could return at any second and catch you unprepared.\u201d\u00a0I can\u2019t tell you how many times I heard a preacher say something…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":441,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,32,11],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fear","category-following-jesus","category-future","category-missional","tag-ronnie-mcbrayer"],"yoast_head":"\nFor the Long Haul - Keeping The Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/keepingthefaith\/2012\/10\/for-the-long-haul.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"For the Long Haul - Keeping The Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For those who grew up in the revivalistic tradition, we heard the same basic sermon every Sunday: \u201cYou are sinner. 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