Every honest conversation about the Lord’s return eventually arrives at one name. And it is never your own.
A man can sit through a whole teaching series on the end times with his arms open. He can track the seals and the trumpets, he can hold his position on the timing of the rapture, he can say amen at the right places. And then the lights come up and he walks to his truck, and the only thought in his head is his son.
Or his wife. Or his brother, who was raised in the same house on the same Bible and now will not take a call on a Sunday.
That is the part of eschatology nobody puts on a chart. And it is the reason a lot of believers quietly stop wanting the Lord to come back — not because they doubt the doctrine, but because they have done the math on their own kitchen table and they cannot bear the answer they came up with.
If that is you, this is written for you. Not to talk you out of the fear, but to put it where it belongs.
The Fear Is Not a Sign of Weak Faith
Start here, because some believer needs permission before he can think clearly: the ache you feel over an unsaved son is not a spiritual failure. It is love doing what love does when it looks at a cliff.
Paul carried it, and he did not hide it. Writing about his own countrymen, he says something that should end the idea that mature faith feels nothing:
I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.
Romans 9:1–2 (KJV)
Continual sorrow. That is the apostle who wrote about being caught up to the third heaven. His theology of God’s sovereignty was airtight — two chapters later he is teaching election — and it did not anesthetize him. Right doctrine has never once required a man to stop grieving over the people he loves.
So do not add a second burden on top of the first by concluding that a real Christian would be at peace about this. Paul was not.
What the Delay Actually Is
Here is the truth that reframes everything, and most believers have read past it a hundred times.
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9 (KJV)
Peter is answering scoffers who say the promise has failed because nothing has happened yet. His answer is that the clock is not broken — it is merciful. The reason the Lord has not come back is not administrative delay. It is patience with people who are not ready.
Sit with that for a second, because it lands directly on your fear. You have been reading every headline as the countdown running out on your son. Peter says every day the countdown has not run out is a day purchased by the longsuffering of God — and your son is precisely the kind of person that patience is for.
The delay you have been anxious about is the very mercy you have been praying for. It is the same thing, seen from two sides.
The God You Are Afraid Of Is the God Who Wants Him More Than You Do
There is a subtle distortion that grows in a praying parent’s heart over years, and it needs to be named plainly. You begin, without ever saying it, to picture yourself as the one pleading for your child and God as the one who has to be persuaded.
That is exactly backwards, and the whole of Luke 15 exists to say so. Read the three parables again and notice who is doing the moving. A shepherd goes out after one sheep. A woman lights a candle and sweeps the whole house for one coin. And a father — this is the detail that undoes people — sees his son when he was yet a great way off, which means he had been watching that road. Every day. For however long it took.
But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
Luke 15:20 (KJV)
You are not the only one watching that road. You are the second one watching it.
And the Judge you are afraid will handle your child badly is the Judge Abraham appealed to with a question that has held up for four thousand years: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (Genesis 18:25, KJV). Whatever happens on that day, it will not be careless, and it will not be unjust, and no one will stand before that throne having been overlooked.
What Scripture Does Not Promise
Now the hard part, because comfort that overstates the Bible is not comfort. It is a loan you will have to repay at the worst possible moment.
Scripture does not promise that every child of a believing parent will be saved. It does not guarantee a deathbed conversion. Proverbs 22:6 is a proverb — a statement of the way life generally runs under God’s wisdom — not a contract that binds God to a result. And Acts 16:31, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house, is not a promise that your faith is credited to their account; the very next verse has Paul preaching the word to every person in that house, and they each believed for themselves.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is being kind at the expense of being true, and you will discover the difference at three in the morning when you need something that holds.
What Scripture does promise is better, because it is real: God is not willing that any should perish. He runs down roads. He answers prayer. He is patient beyond anything reasonable. And He is right — perfectly, finally right — in everything He decides.
So What Does a Man Actually Do
Fear left to itself either freezes you or turns you into a nag. Neither one has ever brought a soul home. Here is the alternative.
- Pray by name, out loud, on a schedule. Not vaguely, not only when the anxiety spikes. A name, spoken to God, daily. Anxiety prays in circles; intercession prays in a straight line.
- Live in front of them like a man who believes it. Peter tells wives that an unbelieving husband may be won without the word, by conduct (1 Peter 3:1–2, KJV). Your steadiness under pressure is an argument they cannot interrupt.
- Say it plainly once, then stop rehearsing it. They need to have heard the gospel from you clearly. They do not need to hear it as a monthly grievance. There is a difference between a witness and a wound.
- Keep the door open. The father in Luke 15 did not go find his son and drag him home. He made sure that when the son turned around, the road ran somewhere. Do not be the reason the road is closed.
- Refuse to carry what is not yours. You are responsible to be faithful. You are not responsible to be the Holy Spirit. Confusing those two will destroy you and will not save them.
Readiness Is Not the Same Thing as Certainty
Notice what has quietly happened in this article. The question you came in with was about somebody else. But the Lord keeps turning that question around and handing it back.
Because you cannot control the outcome for another soul. You can only be a man who is himself ready, and whose readiness is visible enough that it becomes a doorway. That is what living ready actually means — not certainty about how it all lands for everyone you love, but faithfulness in the hours you were given.
Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
Matthew 24:44 (KJV)
And here is the last thing, the thing to take to bed tonight. There is one thing you know for certain about your son, and it is not what will happen to him on the last day. It is what already happened to him at a cross two thousand years ago — that Christ died for sinners, and that the offer standing open to him is the same offer that saved you, and that it is still standing open right now, at this hour, while he is still breathing.
He is not out of time. That is what the delay means. Every extra day is not the threat closing in. It is the door being held.
So pray for him by name tonight, and then sleep. The Judge of all the earth will do right, and He has been watching that road far longer than you have.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist