What a congregation loses when the last chapter goes unpreached
Ask the average churchgoer in America when he last heard a sermon on the return of Jesus Christ. Not a passing reference at the end of a message about something else — an actual sermon, with a text, taking an hour of a Sunday to say that the Lord is coming back and here is what that means for your Tuesday.
Many will not be able to remember one. Some have never heard one in their lives. They have sat under faithful preaching on marriage, generosity, anxiety, forgiveness, and grace — all of it needed, none of it wasted — and somewhere along the way the last chapter of the story quietly stopped being read out loud.
Nobody voted on it. That is the strange part. No board met and decided the second coming was optional. It simply drained out of the pulpit the way water leaves a cracked basin — slowly, without a sound, until one day you notice the thing is dry.
Why It Went Quiet
Be fair to the pastors. The reasons are not cowardice, most of the time. They are scar tissue.
A generation of preachers watched prophecy get handled badly in public. They watched date-setters name a year and take a congregation down with them. They watched newsletters that could find the antichrist in every headline and a fulfillment in every earthquake. They watched charts become the point and Christ become a footnote on the chart. They concluded, understandably, that this subject attracts a certain kind of crank and produces a certain kind of damage, and they decided to preach something safer.
There is a second pressure, quieter and more respectable. A church aiming at the unchurched neighbor learns fast which subjects make him lean in and which make him check his phone. Practical help leans him in. Bowls, beasts, and trumpets do not. So the calendar fills with series on habits and household peace, and the return of the King becomes the thing you mention at funerals.
Both instincts are trying to protect people. Both end in the same place: a congregation that cannot see past its own lifespan.
The Text Does Not Treat It as Optional
Roughly one verse in every twenty-five in the New Testament touches the return of Christ. It is not a specialty topic; it is the horizon everything else is drawn against. And the one book that is most avoided opens with a promise attached to nothing else in Scripture:
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.
Revelation 1:3 (KJV)
A blessing on the reader. A blessing on the hearers. Which means a church that never opens the book has quietly stepped out from under a blessing God offered it — not because the members are rebellious, but because nobody read it to them.
And notice what the apostles do with the doctrine. They never leave it hanging in the air as speculation. Every single time, they land it on the ground.
- Grief. Paul teaches the Thessalonians about the resurrection and the descent of the Lord, then says: Wherefore comfort one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:18).
- Purity. John says we shall see Him as He is, then: And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself (1 John 3:3).
- Endurance. James tells suffering believers to be patient unto the coming of the Lord (James 5:7).
- Integrity in the ordinary. Peter asks, given that it all burns, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness (2 Peter 3:11).
Comfort. Purity. Endurance. Integrity. Every one of those is on the list of things pastors most want to produce in their people — and the apostles produced them by preaching the return of Christ. We kept the goals and threw away the engine.
What the Silence Costs
A church without a horizon does not become neutral. It becomes small.
Watch what happens to the grieving. A believer buries his wife and receives sympathy, casseroles, and a sermon about how God is near the brokenhearted. All true. But he was not given the one thing Paul actually handed the Thessalonians — a specific, physical, dated-by-God promise that the dead in Christ shall rise first and that he will stand next to her again on a real morning. He was comforted with sentiment when the apostles would have comforted him with an event.
Watch what happens to the frightened. The believer with no framework for the end takes his framework from the news instead, and the news is engineered to keep him afraid. Every crisis feels like the crisis. He does not need someone to tell him nothing is wrong; he needs someone to tell him the God who wrote the ending is not improvising the middle.
Watch what happens to the ambitious. A man building a life with no horizon will build it entirely inside his own eighty years, because those years are all he can see. Retirement becomes the last chapter. His money, his calendar, and his risk tolerance all quietly reorganize themselves around a finish line God never drew.
And watch what happens to the drifting. Peter tells us the last-days scoffer does not begin by denying God; he begins by saying Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were (2 Peter 3:4). Nothing changes, so nothing matters. That corrosion works on believers too, and the only solvent for it is the thing that has stopped being preached.
Preaching It Without Becoming a Crank
The correction to bad prophecy preaching was never no prophecy preaching. Here is what sober looks like.
Set no dates, ever. Jesus closed that door Himself: But of that day and hour knoweth no man (Matthew 24:36). Every man who has opened it has ended up embarrassed and has taken believers down with him.
Preach the season, not the schedule. Christ rebuked His generation for being able to read the sky and not the times. Reading the season is commanded. Assigning it a calendar date is forbidden. Those are two different activities and confusing them is what wrecked the subject’s reputation.
Keep the Person above the program. The book is called the Revelation of Jesus Christ, not the revelation of the timeline. If your listeners leave knowing more about the seals than about the Lamb who opens them, the sermon failed even if every detail was right.
Say plainly where godly men differ. Distinguish the certainties — He is coming personally, bodily, visibly; the dead rise; He judges; He reigns — from the arrangements believers argue about. Teach your conviction, name the alternatives honestly, and let the congregation see a man who is confident without being brittle.
Land it on Monday. Never let it stay theoretical. Finish every prophecy sermon by answering the only question the pew is actually asking: so what do I do tomorrow morning?
If You Are Not the Preacher
Most of you reading this do not stand in a pulpit, and this is not permission to grade your pastor on the drive home. Do these things instead.
Read the book yourself and claim the blessing of Revelation 1:3 with your own eyes. Put the return of Christ back into your family’s ordinary conversation — at dinner, in the car, when the headlines are ugly — so your children grow up knowing the story has an ending and the ending is a Person. Comfort the next grieving believer you meet with an actual promise rather than a warm feeling. And ask your pastor, kindly and without an edge, whether the church might sit in 1 Thessalonians 4 or Revelation together this year. Most pastors are not avoiding it because they disbelieve it. They are avoiding it because they have never been asked for it.
The Blessed Certainty
Strip away every chart and every argument and what remains is a promise made by a Man who has never broken one.
Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
John 14:1–3 (KJV)
If it were not so, I would have told you. That single clause is the whole pastoral case. He is not managing your expectations. He is not being poetic with grieving men who needed something to hold. He is telling you He would have said so if it were not true — and then He walked out to a cross to guarantee it.
A church that says that out loud is not a church of cranks. It is a church of people who know how the story ends, and who therefore have nothing left to be afraid of on a Tuesday. Live ready. Not afraid.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist