What Jesus actually commanded about His return — and why it looks like an ordinary Tuesday
Ask most Christians what it means to be ready for the return of Christ and you will get an answer about information. Know the sequence. Know the signs. Know which nation lines up with which chapter.
Now go read Luke 12:35–48, where the Lord Jesus gives His own instruction on being ready for His coming, and count how much of it is about information.
None of it.
Every single command in that passage is about posture and about work. He never tells the servants to calculate. He tells them to stay dressed, keep the lamps lit, listen for the door, and keep feeding the household. That is the whole curriculum. It is the most practical readiness passage in the Bible and it is almost never preached as prophecy — which is exactly the problem.
Dressed, Lit, and Listening
“Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; And ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately” (Luke 12:35–36, KJV).
Three images, and every one of them is ordinary.
“Let your loins be girded about.” A first-century man wore a long outer robe. To work or to run, he pulled it up and tucked it into his belt. Girded loins simply means: dressed to move. Not dressed up. Dressed for work. The opposite of girded is not sinful — it is loose, comfortable, settled in, unable to run without tripping.
“And your lights burning.” An oil lamp does not stay lit by itself. Someone trims the wick and adds the oil, at intervals, all night, for hours of nothing happening. Readiness is not a state you achieve. It is a fire someone keeps feeding in the dark.
“When he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately.” The test of a household is the speed of the door. Not whether the servants love the master — they will all say they do. Whether the door opens immediately, which tells you whether anyone was actually listening for it.
Ask it of yourself plainly. If the knock came during your Thursday — not your Sunday, your Thursday — how long would it take you to get to the door? What would you be putting down? That lag, whatever it is, is the honest measure of your readiness. Not your eschatology chart.
The Verse That Should Stop You Cold
“Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them” (Luke 12:37, KJV).
Read that again, because it inverts everything.
The master comes home at midnight, finds his servants awake and dressed — and then He girds Himself. He tucks up His own robe. He seats them at the table. He serves them.
That is not how households worked, and every person listening knew it. The Lord is telling us what the end of watching looks like, and it is not an inspection. It is the Master of the house waiting on His servants at His own table. The same One who girded Himself with a towel in an upper room and washed feet will gird Himself again at the end and serve the people who stayed awake.
If your picture of the return of Christ produces only dread, you have not sat in verse 37 long enough. Watching is not bracing for an audit. It is waiting up for someone who is coming home to serve you.
The Second Watch and the Third
“And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants” (Luke 12:38, KJV).
The second and third watches are the hardest hours of the night — roughly nine in the evening to three in the morning. The Lord picks them on purpose. He is not describing the excitement of the first hour of waiting. He is describing hour six, when the house is silent, when nothing has happened, when the sensible thing would be to lie down and set an alarm.
That is where the church has lived for two thousand years. Deep in the watch. And the specific temptation of the deep watch is not to deny that He is coming — it is to quietly conclude that He is not coming tonight, and to live accordingly.
“Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not” (Luke 12:40, KJV).
Notice what that verse forecloses. He does not come at an hour you calculated wrong. He comes at an hour when ye think not — which means any hour you have confidently ruled out is a candidate, and every system that tells you the hour has already failed its first test by existing.
Prophecy study is good and this site will keep doing it. But the moment a chart lets you say “not yet, not for a while,” it has quietly done the opposite of what the passage commands. The doctrine of imminence is not a timeline. It is the removal of every excuse to be unready tonight.
Peter Asks the Question We All Ask
“Then Peter said unto him, Lord, speakest thou this parable unto us, or even to all?” (Luke 12:41, KJV).
Is this for the leaders or for everybody? The Lord does not answer directly. He raises the stakes instead:
“Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing” (Luke 12:42–43, KJV).
There it is. Watching and working are the same activity.
The blessed servant is not found staring at the horizon. He is found so doing — handing out the household’s food at the right time, in the middle of an ordinary shift. The most prophetically alert thing you will do this week is probably feeding somebody who is depending on you: your wife, your kids, the men in your group, the person nobody else is checking on.
Then comes the warning, and it is blunt:
“But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and maidens, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware” (Luke 12:45–46, KJV).
Trace the sequence, because it is a diagnosis. It starts in his heart — a private sentence nobody hears: my lord delayeth his coming. He does not renounce anything. He just moves the date back in his own mind.
And immediately two things follow. He starts mistreating the people under him, and he starts feeding himself. Both of those are what a man does when he believes the accounting is far off. Bad eschatology does not stay in the head. It shows up in how you treat the household and how much you take for yourself.
Which means the honest question is not “what do you believe about the end times.” It is: has anyone in your house felt the effects of you privately deciding He is not coming soon?
Much Given, Much Required
“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48, KJV).
This is where the passage lands on the modern American believer with real weight. You have more Bible than any generation in history. Study tools, translations, teaching, whole libraries in your pocket. Much has been given.
Given for what? Not so you can identify the antichrist before your neighbor does. Given so the household gets fed in due season — on time, by you, while the Master is away.
What Readiness Looks Like Tomorrow Morning
- Dressed to move. Nothing in your life you would be ashamed to be found holding. If there is something, that is the first item on tomorrow’s list, not next year’s.
- Lamp tended. The Word today, not in bulk on Sunday. Wicks get trimmed at intervals or they smoke and go out.
- Door watched. Live so the knock would be welcome, not an interruption you have to clean up after.
- Household fed. Find the one person whose portion is your job and give it to them this week, in due season.
- No private delay. Kill the sentence “my lord delayeth his coming” wherever it has quietly settled into your calendar.
He Is Coming Home to Serve
Here is the mercy in it. You cannot gird yourself into acceptance. The servants in this parable are already His — they live in His house, they have His keys, they were given His work. Their watching does not earn their place. It proves it.
And how did you get into that house? Not by staying awake. By the death and resurrection of the Master Himself, who came the first time not with a sword but with a towel, who was numbered with the transgressors and raised on the third day, and who now tells His servants to keep the lights on because He is coming back for them.
So stop trying to pin down the hour. Gird your loins. Trim the lamp. Feed the household. And listen for the door — because when it finally opens, the One standing there is going to sit you down and serve you at His own table.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist