He’ll Be Coming Again

by youth pastor Christina Fischer

Note: Each of these devotional blogs entries is meant to be read on your own or if you have family or friends you live with, to be read together aloud. A suggestion is to do this after you have dinner around the table together. At the conclusion, please spend time in personal reflection or in sharing with one another your answers to the questions at the end. Be sure to conclude with prayer.

Read 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

^“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”

At my previous Church, I served in the choir and even directed quite a few of them. If you have ever served in the choir, you know that there are songs – especially in Cantatas – that stick with you and you can sing at a moment’s notice. I have many favorites as I am sure some of you do, too. These past few weeks, I have been watching old family movies and many of them featured cantatas put on by my old Church’s choir. It has been so much fun to sing along and realize how much of each of them we truly remember.

Pastor Andy’s Easter message kept reminding me of one of the songs that was a particularly poignant reminder as the Cantata’s finale. The lyrics fit so perfectly with Pastor’s message and where we are as a people today.

“But the next time He comes, He won’t have to die for me.
The next time He comes, there won’t be a Calvary.
The next time He comes will begin eternity.
And when He comes again, He’ll be coming for me.”

As we look at the Easter weekend and what it truly means for us – Christ’s death and resurrection – do we stay mindful that the next time He does return, He will be coming for us to begin eternity with Him?

Are we living in such a way that there will be no doubt as to where we are spending eternity?

Are we sitting in the grey area of faith where we fit in with our Christian friends and can answer Bible questions, yet fit in with our non-Christian friends and can fit in with things that they are doing that are not Christ-like?

Song Link: The Next Time He Comes

I pray that each of us can examine where we are in Christ and the faith building disciplines that we are being purposeful about versus what we are not being as purposeful about and we decide to live more fully for the one that sacrificed so much for us.

Reflect on these questions with someone else or on your own: