Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (8th March, 2026).
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘The expectation of Jesus’ coming provides a goal that shapes and unifies life … keeping us free from trivia.’
― Eugene H. Peterson[i]
‘I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and … that ultimately, at the world’s finale, in that moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed.’
— Ivan Karamazov [ii]
‘It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine’
— R.E.M[iii]
READ: REV. 22:16-21 (NIV)
DAVE
I’m not sure who’s job it is to name storms.
But last weekend, the UK was battered once again by another storm in a chain of storms.
Whoever named last weekend’s storm didn’t really prepare me for it, I feel. Storms should have a name that sends a shudder down your spine—something that says ‘beware’.
Like in Pinocchio, when the whale is called Monstro. That’s a name that instils the gravity of its power. You brace yourself. Monstro is not coming to play pat-a-cake.
Monstro would be a good name for a storm.
Instead, we got Dave.
I know a few Daves, so I was off my guard.
I was thinking, if this storm in anything like Dave Jenkinson, it’s going to fix a few things as it passes through. Maybe, as it billows through the trees, it will make the sound of, ‘It’ll be reet.’[iv] Or if it’s like Dave Malloy, will I wake up to a garden full of cups of tea?[v]
But this Dave wasn’t like those Daves.
Instead, I spent the night tossing and turning, listening to every one of our roof tiles rattling. I lay there, trying to sleep, thinking that it is certainly not going to be brews littering my lawn in the morning, and hoping—desperately hoping—that the storm would stop.
There’s something about a storm that gets you praying.
In such storms, it’s often the words of Jesus, when he encountered a storm, that always come to mind, ‘Peace! Be Still!’[vi]
Words that were once a command from Jesus become a desperate plea from us.
Not just in wind and weather, but in every storm that doesn’t let up: In the news cycle that won’t slow down, about a world that seems increasingly difficult to govern, or trust, or hope in. In the sense — not quite despair, but something very near to it — that things are getting worse far faster than anyone is fixing them.
‘Peace! Be still!’
In even clearer language, ‘Make it stop!’
It is a good and honest prayer. But there is a deeper prayer beneath it. One I also utter whenever the storms of life hit. A prayer that has been on the lips of God’s people for two thousand years. A prayer so short it takes less than a second to say. A prayer that, when we understand what it means, changes not just how we pray, but what we are fundamentally praying for.
It is the last prayer in the Bible. Three words long: ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’
MARANA THA
But before we unpack what those three words contain, we need to sit for a moment with the man who prayed them — and where he was when he did.
John, writing the book of Revelation, was a political prisoner. Exiled to the island of Patmos most likely for declaring ‘Jesus is Lord!’ in a world in which people already claimed that title for themselves.
Patmos may sound like a holiday (especially when a storm is rattling your roof tiles). But John is not having a vacation— he is isolated from those he wants to be with, and both he and they are struggling under the brutality of the Roman Empire. It’s from this place—this place of suffering—that he writes to other believers who are also suffering.
Revelation was sent as a letter to seven churches in Asia Minor (the west of modern day Turkey); written to encourage hope-filled worship in dark times. As such, more than any other letter in the New Testament, it is riddled with songs of praise: ancient hymns, credos and doxologies that were already part of the furniture of a worship service, so to speak. Familiar declarations of the Christian hope and comfort of the gospel.
So, I need you to imagine that, as this letter is being read to the gathered believers, and the reader comes to what we now know as chapter 22 verse 17[vii], “Let everyone who hears say, ‘Come!’” (22:17, NRSV), the whole congregation would join in the prayer, shouting, responding, ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’[viii]
This is not John’s prayer, exclusively. He’s not coined it as a nice way to finish a letter with a flourish.
It’s their prayer, too.
In fact, it is among the very oldest prayers of the Christian church. This prayer ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ (as we read it in Revelation) is the Greek translation of the older Aramaic prayer: Marana tha.
In the early 50s AD, Paul quotes this prayer as he signs off his first letter to the Corinthians and does so using the Aramaic.[ix] For Paul to expect his Greek-speaking readers in Corinth to be familiar with this Aramaic phrase, strongly suggests that it already had a key place in early Christian worship.
From the very beginning, the church has been a people praying, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
And so, the prayer the church was born with is the prayer the Bible ends with.
AMEN, ALL THINGS NEW
Underneath this prayer, from one side of it, is an angst—a push, if you like.
An acknowledgement that, to use someone else’s words, ‘the earth—raped, robbed, torn, filled with anger and revenge, with hurt and pain—cannot remain as it is.’[x] Something has to change.
It’s a push that stems from the oldest and hardest of questions: The problem of suffering.
The Bible, wisely, does not offer a single neat answer to the problem of suffering. Within its many narratives, it gives us several different angles, approached from different directions, at different depths.
But what it does give us, throughout its vast story and right at the end of it, is this promise: That one day,
‘ ‘[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”’ (Rev. 21:4b, NIV)[xi]
Or, as John writes it again in Revelation 22:3, ‘No more curse.’
One day, God is going to heal his creation of everything that spoils and damages it.[xii]
When John writes Revelation, he doesn’t flinch from the horrors of history—he is graphic in exposing them and staring them in the face. But hope runs all the way through it, and blossoms, in the 21st and 22nd chapter of this letter, in this final vision of when God wipes away all our tears. [xiii]
What a picture: God will not delegate the wiping to an angel. Like my mother used to, when I was distraught, God will personally wipe them away. Every. Single. One.
And God will do this when he, ‘makes all things new.’
The word new here is kainos—not brand new, but renewed. Refreshed. Restored.
Not scrapped and replaced, but healed and made whole. [xiv]
God is not discarding creation, but mending it—bringing life where there was none. And to create anew in this sense, to call forth new life from what was old and dead, to renew what is beyond renewal — that is God’s work exclusively. As only God can create, only God can renew his creation. [xv]
Which is why the resurrection of Jesus is so significant. It is not simply a happy ending to one man’s story. It is the first new thing — the first instance of kainos renewal breaking into the present age. This one new thing changes everything, as we looked at last week, in the Easter story.[xvi]
More than this, with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we can already have a foretaste of this very future. Paul calls the Spirit ‘the firstfruits,’[xvii] and elsewhere describes the Spirit as the ‘deposit guaranteeing our inheritance’ — the Holy Spirit is the advance arrival of the new creation within the old one. The Spirit plants the future in the middle of the present world, in us—helping us crave this future and also helping us express this future. We are to be a sample of what is coming.
Like those perfume sachets you used to get in magazines, if that helps?
As believers—as a community of believers—we are to be a breathing signpost of the future.
Paul’s letter of Ephesians is a treaty on this—and we’ll be beginning a journey through that letter next week.
And at the heart of this new future, as John writes, is a person: God.
‘God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them.’[xviii]
The full Triune God—not merely spiritually present, but fully, tangibly present.
This has always been God’s purpose for his creation, for this world. The final state of things we look forward to is not — as it is so often misunderstood to be — ‘when believers escape upward to heaven, but when God and heaven come down permanently.’[xix] It is not an escape from material existence, but the very fulfilment of material existence.[xx]
In the new creation, John tells us, we shall live in God’s immediate presence, immersed in it as we are now immersed in daylight.[xxi] And there will be no night.
When John and the early church pray ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ this is what they are praying for. Not relief, in itself. Not merely ‘get me out of this situation,’ as good as that prayer is. But the arrival of the One whose presence is the light. The completion of a creation God has never abandoned.
‘Come and make it all new.’
I suppose then that this prayer, in a way, contains all our prayers.[xxii] Every prayer we have looked at in this series, plus many more are contained in the three words, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
Every storm prayer. Every lament. Every wordless groan. Every, ‘How long, O Lord.’
It even encapsulates all the slogans we see on social media: ‘End Injustice!’, ‘End Trafficking!’, ‘End Racism!’, ‘End the war!’.
But ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ goes further than our prayers and slogans. It contains all our cries and raises them. Not only ‘end injustice’, but ‘end every root of injustice.’ Not only ‘end suffering’, but ‘end the very conditions in which suffering is possible.’
‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
I need to say, here, that John and the early church—and many people since—have not prayed this out of wishful thinking. I mean, sure, when we go through suffering, who doesn’t hope it will come to an end. But there’s more going on here, more than the push that sufferings induce.
John’s and the early church’s prayer is, first and foremost, a response.
In the verses immediately before this prayer, Jesus speaks three times:
‘Look, I am coming soon.’ (Rev. 22:7, NLT)
‘See, I am coming soon.’ (Rev. 22: 12, NLT)
‘Yes, I am coming soon.’ (Rev. 22:20, NLT)
Jesus speaks—promising to come. And John answers, ‘Come.’
Or, if you prefer the fuller four-word version of this prayer,
‘Amen! Come, Lord Jesus.’
That word amen is worth a mention. It means, roughly, ‘so be it.’
Or, as The Beatles sang it, ‘Let it be.’
Or, if you prefer, how Captain James T. Kirk used to say it in Star Trek: ‘Make it so.’
And so, this prayer is not wishful thinking; that we are just pushed to pray by what we experience. It is a response, pulled from us by the promise Jesus himself made and will keep.
He is coming—the Living God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the great I AM—to make all things new.
UNCOMFORTABLE WORDS
If that’s what we’re praying for… then it raises a difficult question.
Who can actually pray this prayer?
Sure, we can say the words. But, it should be obvious that ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ has never seriously been prayed if you are in love with the way things are.
You have to want another world.
I don’t mean a desire to live on Mars. I mean a yearning for things to function differently. You have to acknowledge that something is not right, here and now. Some thing beyond human resourcefulness, ingenuity, and technological advancement—as good and brilliant as those things are. There’s something only God can put right.
That’s why, more often than not, these three words have generally been the prayer of the suffering. The persecuted. The oppressed. Those who feel the underside of it all.
In apartheid South Africa, for example, Allan Boesak, a leading theologian in the liberation struggle, prayed:
For the pain and the tears and the anguish must end…. Come, Lord Jesus
For the comfort of this world is no comfort at all…. Come, Lord Jesus
For there must be an end to the struggles when the unnecessary dying is over…. Come, Lord Jesus
For the patterns of this world must change…. Come, Lord Jesus
For hate must turn to love; fear must turn to joy…. Come, Lord Jesus.[xxiii]
Or, as Jesus taught us: ‘Your Kingdom come.’ Same prayer. Different words.
It is the prayer of the uncomfortable. The enslaved. The exiled. The imprisoned. John on Patmos. The early persecuted believers. Boesak’s South Africa. The underground church today, in contexts we would not choose to imagine.
This prayer is their lifeline—their daily prayer.
Meanwhile, in the comfortable West, we have quietly let go of the hope of Jesus’ return.
Now, I want to be clear about what I am not saying.
I am not saying that talk of Jesus’ return has disappeared. In some places, it is still spoken of often—and not always helpfully. Sadly.
At one extreme, there is a kind of end-times fixation—anxious, speculative, always trying to map out timelines, predict dates, or read the headlines as coded signs of the end.
And yet, Jesus himself was clear that the timing is not for us to know.
The thing is, when this kind of speculation takes hold, it rarely produces hope. More often, it produces fear, or distraction. It can turn the promise of Jesus’ coming into something to be paranoid about rather than something we hopefully anticipate.
And this tends to go in two equally unhealthy directions.
One diversion is the idea that our task is to bring about the end—to establish the kingdom ourselves, or to, at least, set the stage for Jesus to return. History shows us that this kind of thinking always, and dangerously, tends towards flexing power or seizing control. It’s affected Europe’s history, and sadly, continues to play a subversive role in modern politics.[xxiv]
In the other direction, there’s a form of disengagement. That, if everything is going to be wrapped up, why invest deeply in the world as it is? Why labour for justice, peace, or reconciliation? And so, in this posture, “Come, Lord Jesus” slowly becomes a passive wait with the plea of, “Get me out of here.”
But that is not the prayer we see in Scripture.
Bono, U2’s frontman, reflecting on conversations he had with Desmond Tutu—a man who prayed through the worst of the apartheid and continued to pray through the best of the reconciliation—once said that Tutu taught him:
‘Prayer is not an escape from real life but a passage toward it.’ [xxv]
In other words, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ is not a retreat from the world, but a deeper engagement with it. It is a way of pleading for the world—on its behalf.
It’s not about building bunkers in our backyard, but a call to build bigger tables in our world.
And this is exactly what John is encouraging. He is not calling the church to withdraw, and he’s definitely not calling them to take control. He is calling the church to be a priestly people.
Not warlords or spectators— but servants. A people who stands before God on behalf of the world, and in the world on behalf of God.
A people who pray for justice, and practise it.
Who long for renewal, and live in ways that anticipate it.
A people who do not bring the Kingdom—again, that is exclusively Jesus’ work, God’s work alone— but who seek it, embody it, and point toward it.
So yes—there is a fanatical extreme where people still talk a great deal about Jesus’ return, but not in a healthy way: restless speculation… anxious control… or quiet disengagement.
But the other — equally dangerous, and far more common in respectable church life — is the quiet, comfortable neglect.
A Christianity in which Jesus is a helpful moral teacher, our personal Saviour and protector of our way of life, but in which his actual return is not something we hope for, long for, or truly expect. In which, if we’re honest, we’d rather he didn’t come back. Because, for us, things are going fairly well.
If ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ doesn’t naturally rise in us — then perhaps the question worth sitting with is: what have I become comfortable with that I shouldn’t be?
Some people walk about with their head in the clouds. Others walk about with their head in the sand. The church is called to be neither.
Not the fanaticism of those who have mentally left the planet, nor the complacency of those buried in the present age.
But a people who live fully and faithfully in the present—with hearts genuinely oriented toward the future.
THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE SAY COME
And that kind of life is not something we generate on our own.
As Paul writes in Romans, the Spirit ‘intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.’[xxvi] The Spirit does not pray us away from reality. The Spirit silently groans within reality, in us and through us,[xxvii] yearning over our world, praying it toward its redemption.
And when Revelation 22 says, ‘The Spirit and the Bride say, Come’ — this is that groaning made audible. The Spirit and the church together, not retreating, but leaning forward into the future God has promised.
The Spirit— groaning alongside creation, the advance presence of the future—cries, Come.
The Bride—the church, in all her beautiful imperfection, across all the centuries and languages and storms—says, Come.
John, in his exile in Patmos, said it all those years ago. And we join in with the same cry.
‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
I want my prayer to be like John’s. His prayer is, ‘I want you to come.’ His heart burns not just for what Jesus will do, but for who Jesus is.
I was reminded recently of something Pete Greig wrote, and it felt like the right place to close this series:
‘The point of prayer is not the power that it releases but the person it reveals… I don’t pray because I am into prayer. I pray because I’m into Jesus, so we talk. I don’t believe in the power of prayer, I believe in the power of Jesus, so I ask for his help. A lot. The vision is Jesus.’[xxviii]
‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
His presence is the fix. His presence does not merely accompany the new creation. He is not merely the ‘Amazon delivery man’, dropping it off, or leaving it with our neighbour if we’re not at home. By the way, the Holy Spirit is not the currier, either (as some people mistakenly reduce him to be).
God’s presence—tangibly and physically, in the fullness of the Trinity— is the new creation.
In a real sense, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ not only contains all our prayer, it is the prayer to end all prayer, because when Jesus comes, prayer itself will no longer be necessary. We will see him. Face to Face. The conversation we began in prayer will become an endless face-to-face encounter.
I don’t know when Storm Dave’s next cousin will arrive. I have no clue over its name.
And I don’t know what storms are forming in some of your lives at the moment, the ones you haven’t mentioned to anyone—the ones battering the walls of your world.
But as we close this series, my hope is simple. That beneath the desire for the storm to stop (because, let’s face it, it is the storms that generate our prayers), there is a deeper desire: a longing for Him.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Not just, “Come and fix things.”
But,“Come.”
Be here.
Be known.
Because You are the light that has no dark side.
‘Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.’
– Augustine of Hippo[xxix]
‘We wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ …’
— Titus 2:13 (NIV)
ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES:
[i] Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1991), p. 191
[ii] From Fyodor Dostoyevsky (AD 1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov, as quoted in the epilogue of Tristan Sherwin, Living the Dream? (Black Coney Press, UK, 2019), p. 339.
[iii] Lyrics from (you guessed it), It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine), by R.E.M, featured on their album Document (1987)
[iv] Dave Jenkinson is a wonderful man and an elder at MCC, and this is his oft quoted motto. If he chooses to be buried, I imagine it will be carved in writing on his headstone.
[v] Mr Malloy is another wonderful man. He used to be the administrator at MCC and quickly earned the nickname ‘brew ninja’ by one of my predecessors. Blink, and somehow a brew would turn up on your desk—every ten minutes or so. His wonderful daughter, Kay, is the current administrator—she has inherited his ninja skills and frequency.
[vi] You can read the account in Mark 4:35-41. You can also read my sermon notes on this passage, here: SON OF MAN | THE STORM
[vii] This shouldn’t come as a surprise, and yet it still does for many, but the original texts of the New Testament (and the Old, for that matter) do not come with chapter and verse numbers, nor section titles, as we have in our modern translations. There’s nothing wrong with these additions—they prove very useful in navigating the Biblical books. I’m thankful for them. However, they can be problematic in our forgetfulness of this; especially when ‘headings’ guide our understanding of the text more than the text does. As an aside, knowing this makes it more impressive when the NT authors quote and weave together verses. Not to mention how impressive it is when Jesus opens the synagogue’s scroll of Isaiah and unrolls it to where he wished to read from, as noted in Luke 4:17. Isaiah is no small scroll.
For those wondering when chapter and verse were introduced, that’s a longer story, but fascinating, nonetheless. I’ll let you peruse that answer in your own leisure time.
[viii] Richard Bauckham, Come, Lord Jesus! in The Gospel of Advent: Devotional Readings from Christianity Today (2021), p. 21
[ix] 1 Corinthians 16:22. The Aramaic ‘Maranatha’ can be read as either ‘Maran atha’ (‘Our Lord has come’) or ‘Marana tha’ (‘Our Lord, come!’). Both together are a kind of summary of Christian faith: he came; he is coming again. Outside of the Biblical documents, the next time we encounter the Aramaic form of this prayer (Maranatha) is in an early Christian guide to church practice, known as the Didache, from around 100 AD. It is found in a passage detailing the Lord’s Supper, Didache 10:6, as a prayer that was part of the meal.
Again, it can be understood both ways, and this has always caused some debate over whether the early church expected a second coming. But the idea of Christ’s return is based on more than this text. To quote Paul and 1 Corinthians, once again, when he speaks of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, he mentions that ‘every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again.’ (1 Cor. 11:26). Other texts from the epistles could also be quoted in support, as well as from Acts. As a sample from various authors: Titus 2:13; Hebrews 9:28; 1 Peter 1:13; Acts 3:20-21.
Also, again, when John quotes the prayer at the close of Revelation, it’s in the Greek, not the Aramaic form. There is no translation issue here over the prayer, nor its source and place in early church liturgy. It is clearly, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’
As an additional note, regarding the use and popularity of this prayer, it is striking how familiar both John (in Revelation) and Paul (in 1 Corinthians) are:
‘Our Lord, come! May the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you.’ (1 Cor. 16:22b-23)
‘Amen! Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all.’ (Rev. 22:20b-21)
[x] Allan Boesak, Comfort and Protest: The Apocalypse of John from a South African Perspective (Wipf & Stock, Eugene, OR, 1987), pp. 126-127, 136, as quoted in Ben Witherington III, Revelation, The New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), p. 275
[xi] In the OT, Isaiah is possibly the most prolific in this hope (though, certainly not exclusive in expressing it): God will remove the shadow of death from the earth, swallowing up death forever, and wiping away our tears (Isa. 25:6-8), desolation, destruction and war will end, supplanted by peace and righteousness (Isa. 60:18), and weapons of destruction will be beaten into tools of cultivation (Isa. 2:4-5, and Micah 4:3-4). It will be, in Isaiah’s words, a new world (Isa. 65:17-18), one in which God dwells with humanity and is the source of their life and glory (Isa. 60: 19-20). All imagery, btw, that John paints with in Revelation 21 and 22.
[xii] John is not exclusive in presenting this glorious hope. Paul also lays it out in Romans 8:18-24; Peter preaches it Acts 3:21; Jesus proclaimed it, and the resurrection, in Matthew 19:28 (sometimes its translation ‘in the Kingdom’, but the Greek is ‘in the regeneration.’—as mention in your Bible’s footnote); and Isaiah foretold it, as recorded in Isaiah 25:6-8; 26:19. To name a few.
[xiii] Revelation 21:4a; Rev. 21:5. People sometimes complain that there isn’t much evidence of a loving God in the book of Revelation. But can you imagine a more tender image of the love of God than wiping every tear from our eyes?
[xiv] The Greek word translated new throughout Revelation 21–22 is kainos (καινός), which typically carries the sense of renewed quality or freshness — the renewal of something that already exists rather than its replacement by something entirely novel. The other Greek word for new, neos, implies newness of time (something that has not existed before). John consistently uses kainos: God is not discarding creation. God is renewing it.
[xv] In biblical Hebrew, the verb bārā’ (בָּרָא) is used exclusively of God’s creative activity — never of human making. Human beings can asah (to make or do) and yatsar (to form or shape), but bārā’ is reserved for the divine alone. The same distinction holds in the promise of new creation: only God can do this, as envisaged in Isaiah’s visions: ‘“See, I will create (bārā’) new heavens and a new earth.”’ (Isaiah 65:17a, NIV). Similarly to the prior footnote, and the Greek word for new, in this text from Isaiah, the verb חדש (hadash) means ‘to be new’, as in repair, renew, rebuild, refresh.
As an aside, this act of calling forth life from what is old and dead, brings to mind the barren womb of Sarah. In the human effort, as good and as necessary to procreation as it was, Abraham and Sarah could not bring about God’s promised child on their own. Only God could do it. God had to do it. There had to be a miraculous act prior to the human act, and not an of rejuvenation (as Sarah’s womb had, heart-wrenchingly, never been capable of conceiving), but of renewal of Sarah’s womb.
[xvii] Romans 8:23 (‘the firstfruits of the Spirit’) and Ephesians 1:13–14, where Paul describes the Spirit as the ‘deposit guaranteeing our inheritance’ (NIV). The Spirit, in other words, is not only the presence of God now but the advance arrival of the future.
[xviii] Revelation 21:3 (NIV)
[xix] Ben Witherington III, Revelation, The New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), p. 254.
[xx] Michael J. Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly (Cascade Books, Eugene, OR, 2011), p. 164.
[xxi] Rev. 21:23; 22:5
[xxii] Marshall Segal, The Prayer to End All Prayers, Desiring God (2022), available at desiringgod.org.
[xxiii] A. Boesak, Comfort and Protest: The Apocalypse of John from a South African Perspective (Wipf & Stock, Eugene, OR, 1987), p. 138, as quoted in Ben Witherington III, Revelation, The New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), p. 285
[xxiv] Barbara R. Rossing’s The Rapture Exposed is a fantastic treaty on this. It was published back in 2004, but is still relevant. Highly recommended.
Additionally, our attempts to set the stage, so to speak, even when our motivation to do so it good, also reminds me of Jesus’ words that, not only will we never know the time, but also, ‘the Kingdom is not ushered in with visible signs.’ (Lk. 17:20, italics mine).
I will add, I am also not one of those who believe that humanity, in its own gradual progress—evolutionary or spiritually through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—will get there eventually, despite the tremendous progress we have made. As if, one day, we just go, ‘Oh! Look, we’re here and we did not know. All things are new. How and when did that happen?’ I firmly hold to the conviction—a conviction of historic Christianity—that it is Jesus who will bring this renewal (and with it the resurrection) at his visible second coming.
Again, to reiterate what I have already said in this message: the great restoration, like creation, is God’s work, and God’s work only, from top to bottom.
[xxv] Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (Hutchinson Heinemann, part of Penguin Random House, London, UK, 2022), p. 453
[xxvi] Romans 8:26 (ESV).
[xxvii] And I mean this us in a thoroughly plural way.
[xxviii] Pete Greig, Dirty Glory (Hodder & Stoughton, 2016), pp. 54–57.
[xxix] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1 (trans. E.B. Pusey)
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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