Sermon Tone Analysis

Spoiler Alert: Jesus Wins

A shoeshine man named Sam worked in a building that put him in contact with many students of theology.

Sam loved the Lord and listened intently as the young men would discuss and debate their positions.

Two men especially interested Sam.

These men had different opinions on the book of Revelation.

Day after day, Sam listened to eloquent and often passionate discussions in defense of the various views.

One day, in the middle of a debate between the two men, one jokingly looked at Sam and said, “Sam, what do you think all these things in the book of Revelation mean?”

With a smile on his face, Sam looked up and said simply, “Jesus is gonna win.”

Since we have just celebrated the birth of Christ, it may seem odd to you that we would talk today about Jesus’s second coming.

We have spent some time scratching our heads in wonder that Jesus came so humbly.

He was born into a poor family.

He had a feeding trough for a bassinet.

His first visitors were a group of smelly shepherds who were looked down on by society.

One of the reasons we are amazed by this is because these circumstances aren’t the way it should be.

It was beautiful that Jesus came in this manner precisely because it didn’t fit the splendor his coming deserved.

Jesus’s second advent is the opposite; it comes with the splendor our King deserves.

Anytime we talk about these future events, we run the risk of getting bogged down on how everything will play out.

There are different camps on that.

A shoeshine man named Sam worked in a building that put him in contact with many students of theology.

Sam loved the Lord and listened intently as the young men would discuss and debate their positions.

Two men especially interested Sam.

These men had different opinions on the book of Revelation.

Day after day, Sam listened to eloquent and often passionate discussions in defense of the various views.

One day, in the middle of a debate between the two men, one jokingly looked at Sam and said, “Sam, what do you think all these things in the book of Revelation mean?”

With a smile on his face, Sam looked up and said simply, “Jesus is gonna win.”

That’s your spoiler alert.

Jesus is gonna win.

It also might spoil any notions that we might tease out the nuances of the end times.

So if you came ready to defend your pre-trib position and have a host of Left Behind books for citations, you can relax, stack up those books, and prop up your feet on them.

If you have an arsenal of post-millennial talking points ready, save them for lunchtime discussion.

If you’re an amillennialist, we have a free Bible for you at the end of the service.

Totally kidding.

More importantly, if you didn’t really get any of those terms, don’t worry, because that’s the last you’ll hear of them today.

We are talking about the fact that Jesus is gonna win.

We will also talk about why that matters to us.

If we’re honest, many of us will admit that most of the time it doesn’t matter to us that Jesus will return.

It’s not that we don’t care.

It’s more like we’ve got more pressing, day-to-day issues that command our attention.

Plus, my jokes about those different end times positions really come out of cauldron of debate that has turned many Christians off to discussing the second coming of Christ.

That’s no good.

Part of our Christian life involves looking forward to Jesus’ return.

You might be tempted to think you can simply keep your nose down and be a good Christian without all that end times stuff, but consider the research of Paul Lee Tan.

He writes,

Both the Old and the New Testaments are filled with promises of the second coming of Christ.

There are 1,845 references to it in the Old Testament, and a total of seventeen Old Testament books give it prominence.

Of the 260 chapters in the entire New Testament, there are 318 references to the Second Coming, or one out of thirty verses.

Twenty-three of the twenty-seven New Testament books refer to this great event…For every prophecy on the first coming of Christ, there are eight on Christ’s second coming.

r every prophecy on the first coming of Christ, there are eight on Christ’s second coming.

Let’s give our attention, then, to Jesus’ second coming today.

Turn in your Bibles to .

This is our main text today, but we’ll also look at some other passages later on.

Please stand and follow along as I read.

Let

And this is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Roy B. Zuck, The Speaker’s Quote Book: Over 4,500 Illustrations and Quotations for All Occasions (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1997), 340.

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Why is Jesus coming back?

The Apostle Paul wrote this passage to early Christians at Corinth at a time when their loved ones who had placed faith in Christ years ago were beginning to die.

This raised the question in their minds about what exactly happens to those people.

There was a fear about what comes next.

Paul admits that if the answer to that question is nothing, then we Christians should be pitied.

Put simply, the hardship that comes from living as a Christian is really only worth it if there is a hope beyond this life.

That hope is found here in Christ’s promised return.

So what is that hope?

Why must Jesus come again?

The Apostle Paul provides three clear reasons in this passage.

Quite helpfully, he shares what comes next in the order.

To gather his people

Jesus will come again to gather his people.

Our passage says [15:23] “at his coming those who belong to Christ” will be gathered to him.

This is echoed in other parts of the Bible.

In , Jesus said of himself,

Paul clarifies more about the order in .

So there’s resurrection and then collection.

This reminds us that believers of Christ truly belong to Christ.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes about the coming of Christ and reminds us,

We shall not approach this teaching theoretically or academically or as if we were trying to fit in the parts of a jigsaw puzzle and establish a theory.

Let us rather approach it as we are exhorted to do by the Scriptures.

It is something that should rejoice our hearts, should comfort us, should stimulate us to holy living.

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Church and the Last Things (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998), 93.

He’s right.

This isn’t a jigsaw puzzle.

It’s a promise that our Savior will never leave us nor forsake us.

It is a hope that all of us confidently have in him.

I love those final words of .

“And so we will always be with the Lord.”

Then Paul adds this line in the next verse ():

The truth that Jesus will gather us to himself is a reason to encourage each other.

That word for encourage is a pretty common one in the New Testament - parakaleo (παρακαλέω).

It literally means to call to one’s side, and it is translated in various places as comfort, urge, and exhort.

That means sometimes the truth that Jesus will bring us to himself is a comforting balm to the soul, and other times we might use this truth to remind our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to keep pressing on and follow him wholeheartedly.

Which type of encouragement do you most need now?

Is it the comfort that reminds you of our future hope, or is it the urging to keep your focus on Christ?

And as you look around you at your fellow Christ followers, which sort of encouragement do they most need?

If we talk about it, we will be about it.

So let’s encourage one another with these words.

To conquer his enemies

Jesus will also return to conquer his enemies.

What enemies are those?