What if today was your last day?

Acts 2:14–21

But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day; but this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth beneath, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and manifest day. And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Are We Living in the Last Days?

Hebrews 1:1–2, “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”

1 Peter 1:20, “Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the last of the times for your sake.”

1 Corinthians 10:11, “These things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.”

In all these texts the “last days” or the last times or end of the ages came began when Jesus came.

The coming of the Messiah was the beginning of the end, the beginning of the “last days.”

We are living in the last days, because the last days began with the first coming of Jesus, and will reach their climax at the second coming of Jesus. The “mystery of the kingdom” (Mark 4:11) is that we live between the beginning of the end of the age and the end of the end of the age.

What does the last days mean to you?

When we say a person is in their last days, it means they are about to die. Many of us could be in our last days and not really know it. Covid sped that up for many, accidents etc. We just don’t know when our last day is.

Jesus said in Luke 21:9–11, “When you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified; for this must first take place, but the end will not be at once … Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom will rise against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.”

So there is no doubt that the last of the last days, will be bleak in many ways, both morally and socially bleak, with great upheavals in nature itself.

The question is, what if this was your last day?

Do you remember what the Lord Jesus said in Luke, chapter 13, when there was a tragedy in his day?

Luke 13 Now there were some present at that very season who told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 And he answered and said unto them, Think ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they have suffered these things? 3 I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all in like manner perish. 4 Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think ye that they were offenders above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

He asked the question, “Do you think that those on whom the tower fell were more wicked than other people?” There have been some ignorant Christians who often suggest when there is a disaster, it is always God’s specific punishment.

That’s not what Jesus says in Luke 13. He raises the question himself, and does not allow the people to go around it. .

“No,” he says. “But I tell you, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” The likewise there does not mean you will all die exactly the same way by a sword or with a tower falling on your head.

What he is saying is the most significant thing about what takes place is the death itself.

What if this was your last day, week, month or Year?

Dr. Maurice Rawlings, M.D., cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga, was a devout atheist who considered all religion “hocus-pocus.” To him, death was nothing more than a painless extinction.

But in 1977, Rawlings was resuscitating a man who came back from the edge of death. The man was terrified and screaming. Rawlings wrote: Each time he regained heartbeat and respiration, the patient screamed, “I am in hell!” He was terrified and pleaded with me to help him. I was scared to death.… Then I noticed a genuinely alarmed look on his face. He had a terrified look worse than the expression seen in death! This patient had a grotesque grimace expressing sheer horror! His pupils were dilated, and he was perspiring and trembling—he looked as if his hair was on end.*

There are many stories of near-death experiences in which people report moving down a peaceful tunnel toward a gentle light, but Dr. Rawlings’ research, which appeared in Omni magazine, demonstrated that about 50 percent of near-death victims report seeing lakes of fire, devil-like figures, and other sights reflecting the darkness of hell.

“Just listening to these patients has changed my whole life,” claims Dr. Rawlings. “There is a life after death, and if I don’t know where I’m going, it’s not safe to die.” Through these experiences, Dr. Rawlings began studying what the Bible had to say about hell and other subjects, and he became a Christian. Two of his books are: Beyond Death’s Door and To Hell and Back.

Death is hanging over all of us. In fact, we all stand under this curse because of our own rebellion before God, whether we are washed away in a tsunami or die of cancer, or covid or something else.

“Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” That’s what Jesus says. There is a sense in which one of the things a tragedy does is, it makes us stop for a moment and realize how fragile we are, how mortal we are, and it is uncomfortable.

Start talking about death and dying and watch people.

When you read some of the literature of the Puritan period and see what some of them said as the Black Death swept through London, they wrote poems like, “For I am sick, and I must die. Lord, have mercy. For I am sick, and I must die. Lord, have mercy.”

Now we say, “I am sick, and Obama Care had bloody well get me better, that is why we voted it in.

There is a sense, then, in which we need to think about death more realistically than we do. We need to think realistically about life and death before we come to the peculiar parameters of that tragedy.

At the beginning of World War II in Oxford at the University Church, C.S. Lewis was asked to speak to them. The war was still in its early months. Warsaw lay shattered. The Nazi armies were victorious throughout Poland, and it was not going to be all that long before the troops swept west all the way to the coast.

Lewis got up, and this is what he said.

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians, and at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war.

What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we … indeed how can we … continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Now it seems to me that we shall not be able to answer these questions until we have put them by the side of certain other questions, which every Christian ought to have asked himself in peace time. I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns, but to a Christian, the true tragedy of Nero must not be that he fiddled while the city was on fire, but that he fiddled on the brink of hell.

You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in the pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source, but then that source is the Lord himself.

“They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of his church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometimes overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them. The moment we do so we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant.

We must ask how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues but not under the shadow of a European war would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.”

“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”

Then right at the end he says, “War threatens us with death and pain. No man, and especially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane, need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called ‘life.’ But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that, of a machine gun bullet now or of cancer 40 years later.

What does war do to death? It certainly doesn’t make it more frequent. One hundred percent of us die, and that percentage cannot be increased. It puts some deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.

Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I can’t believe that either. If military service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at 60 or the paralysis at 75 do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past.”

What is Lewis saying? I think he is saying, we stand here and worry about should we be in school while a war is coming, but that is not what should be our first worry. Our first concern should be in light of eternity, what will happen to us when we die, that should be our first concern, and everything thing else is trivial.

If this were your last day, what would happen to you when you die? When was the last time you thought through that?

What Should We Expect Before Jesus Returns?

Does the Bible teach that as the end of the last days draws near, spiritual conditions will only get worse and worse?
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2 Timothy 3:3 says, “Understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman,” etc. 2 Peter 3:3 says, “Scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming?’ ”

(2 Timothy 3:1) and read all the way down to chapter 4, verse 8, so the context is clear. Hear then what Holy Scripture says.

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

1 John 2, says, “My dear children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so too already there are many antichrists by which we know it is the last hour.” What does Paul think is characteristic of these last days? This is a pretty depressing picture.

The end of the last days will not be totally bleak and will not be totally glorious. In the midst of great stress and global trauma and bloody persecution, the Holy Spirit is going to be poured out again and again on the faithful, confessing church of Christ, and she will burn with passion and shine with truth until every people and tribe and tongue has seen the light of the gospel.

The Bright Part of Joel’s Prophecy

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.

Joel says that one feature of the last days will be the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on people of every kind—men and women, young and old, high and low. God’s people will be clothed with power; they will receive power. And the main effect of this power seems to be bold, prophetic speech. Believers of all kinds are going to be so gripped by the Spirit of God that they see the greatness of Jesus and the purpose of Jesus with extraordinary clarity and speak it with extraordinary boldness. That’s the bright part of Joel’s prophecy.

There is a promise that in the last days the Spirit will be poured out on all flesh, all the nations will be reached. The true church of Christ will be awakened and revived and sent with extraordinary passion and zeal and prophetic power. And there, in the midst of terrorism and war and persecution and natural disasters, Christ church, will finish the Great Commission, and welcome the King.

The question is, Do we want us to be a part of that bright, bold, prophetic, Christ-exalting, risk-taking, end-time band of disciples? Can we get the focus off of us and assume our responsibilities, taking the clear and glorious message of Christ, everywhere, no matter what: “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

What if we lived as if this were our last day?