Different
Times  Different Signs
Keith
McFarren
December
7, 2025
Matthew
24:36-44
    The strange thing about the season of
Advent is that it takes us and sits us down in the space between God’s kingdom
that is already here and the kingdom of God that has yet to come…and then we
are asked to wait.  And while we wait in
between these two kingdoms we are asked to figure out what we should be doing as
Christians as we faithfully wait not only for the birth of Jesus but as we also
wait for the fulfillment of God’s coming kingdom.
    As a people, waiting is hard for us to
do.    We want everything right now.  Fast food wasn’t fast enough for us so we put
in drive through windows.  And we still
have to wait.  Prepackaged meals (TV
dinners) that went into the oven weren’t fast enough so we developed the
microwave to speed things up.  We don’t
like standing in line.  How many times
have you jumped from one line to another only to see the original line you were
in start moving faster than the one you jumped to?
    That’s why Advent is such a difficult
season…because it causes us to do something that we don’t feel comfortable doing…and
that is waiting.  
    For those of us who don’t like to wait, the
season of Advent becomes more like a wrestling match pitting the poor, puny
overmatched, little thought of season of Advent against the world champion,
never ever defeated season of Christmas.  
    And as always…Christmas wins out and the
Season of Advent becomes nothing more than a few days on the calendar to mark
the number of days until Christmas arrives.
    But there is more to Advent than just
being used as a countdown until Christmas.
Advent is meant to remind us that we, as a people, are headed
somewhere.  As a people we have a holy
destination and that’s why we start every Advent season with a check of the map
to help us see exactly where it is we are headed.
    The prophet Isaiah, in 2:2-5, describes a
future day when the “mountain of God’s House,” (the Temple) will be sitting at
the highest pinnacle, and all the nations of the world will stream to it to learn
and to live by God’s ways.  There will
come a time of universal peace, Isaiah says, when all nations of the world will
turn their weapons into farm tools, and no one will be at war and no one will ever
learn about war again.  Isaiah then finishes
up his proclamation by issuing an invitation to all the world to live in peace
and live in the light of God.
        That’s
where we are headed.  That’s our final
destination as Christians.  But we don’t
know when that day is coming, but we’ve been promised that it will.  So, all we can do is wait.  
    But even though we don’t know when the
second coming of Christ will happen, we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that
Christmas is coming.  December 25th…no
doubt about it.  Our dinner table may not
look quite as flamboyant as Martha Stewart’s.
The decorations in our homes may not be as beautiful as the one’s
photographed in Midwest Living Magazine’s Christmas edition.  And our families may not all be cheery and
have big smiles on their faces like the people on TV…but we do know that
Christmas is coming and we know what day it will be here.  Every year we celebrate the birth of Christ
on the same day.  
    But the other part of Advent…this vision
of Jesus’ second coming and this vision of peace and love throughout the world stuff…all
this stuff that Isaiah seemed so hyped up about…who knows when all of this is
going to happen.  All that Jesus tells us
about his second coming is, “Of that day and hour no one knows.”    
    Advent’s message is that God in Christ is coming to the world.  With this being said
we can look at his coming from three different points of view:
    First, we can look at the coming of Christ
as a past experience…as something that has already happened.  We believe that the promises from the prophets
in the Old Testament were fulfilled and came true on Christmas day.  We believe that Christ came for us and died
for us.  It has already happened and we
believe that it happened and we live as we do and we believe as we do because
it has already happened.  
    We can also look at the coming of Christ
as a present day experience.  We can look
at Advent as a time for rebirth and renewal…something we can do today.  We can make a decision right now to make a
commitment to God and start a brand new relationship with Jesus.  
    Or we can use Advent to renew a
relationship we once had with God.  A
relationship that over a period of time caused you to go one way and God
another.  Through Advent we have the
opportunity to draw closer to God than we’ve ever been before and to rebuild
and strengthen our relationship with him.
    Our scripture reading today also allows us
to look forward to the coming of Christ as a future experience; an experience
in which he will someday come and when he does, he will return quickly and
quietly and unpredictably and judge us.
    Since Advent promises us the coming of the
Lord, its message is to prepare and be ready for the future.  Jesus is coming back whether you or the world
is ready or not.  For those who are not
ready or for those who are unprepared, his coming means judgment.  But for those who are ready his coming means
salvation.
    We are told that the people of Noah's day
were destroyed by the great flood because of their wickedness.  But that’s not the analogy this morning in
our scripture reading.  This morning,
Jesus compares the apathetic attitude of the people of Noah’s day to the apathetic
attitude or the “ho hum” attitude that is present in many of our lives today.
    Before the great flood Jesus said that the
people “were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage” (24:38)
and Jesus isn’t finding fault with that.  

    The point is not that people were doing
these things; the point is that they were so caught up in the everyday routines
of their lives that they forgot to include God into it.  Their problem wasn’t their "gross sin."
The problem was their "secular indifference."  The people of Noah’s time had grown to be nonchalant
about God" (Bruner, 881).  
    Having been a righteous man
and having found favor with God it’s hard to imagine that Noah wouldn’t have
told his neighbors what was going to happen and that they should change their
ways and listen to what he had to say so that they, too, might be saved.  But I can also imagine the people thinking
that Noah was nothing more than a religious fanatic - or maybe a little bit
crazy - or both.  
    It’s easy to get caught up in
our everyday routines.  We get caught up
in placing so much emphasis on the things of this world, our ourselves and our
own wants and needs, that it’s easy to forget the spiritual side of life.  And when we forget about our spiritual lives,
like Noah’s neighbors did, it just could be that we might be hearing the
warning but we don’t take it seriously.  
    That is until the waters begin to creep
toward our homes, and then over our ankles and our knees, and our waists and then
up to our armpits.  But by then it will
be too late.  The time for preparation is
long past.   And so it will be with the
coming of the Son of Man.  We need to
prepare or the time will come when it will be too late.
    Security systems are big deals in today’s
world.
There are
residential systems and commercial systems.  Do it yourself systems and professionally
installed systems.  
    There are video surveillance systems,
there are cameras and alarm systems.  You
can have security officers drive past your house every so often or if you just
plain don’t feel safe with all of the above you can even have an armed
uniformed or plain clothed security officer walk around your property 24 hours
a day.
    With the way our world is nowadays we need
it because we don’t always feel safe.  We
need security because we don’t want someone breaking into our house or our car.  Whether it’s day or night we need something
that is going to alert us if someone tries to break in.  We have security systems because we want to be
ready.  We want to be prepared just in
case it happens to us.
    We don’t know when Jesus is going to come
again.  Jesus told us that even he didn’t
know.  Only God knows for sure.  
    The one thing that will lead us to an
eventual disaster is when we think we have plenty of time.  When we think we have plenty of time to get
our relationship back in order with God.
 
     Paul
reminds us in 1st Thessalonians 5 that “When people are saying, “All is well; everything is peaceful and
secure,” then disaster will fall upon them as suddenly as a woman’s birth pains
begin when her child is about to be born.
And there will be no escape.” (5:3)
    He could come today, or tomorrow, or next
week or next year. That’s the mystery – we just don’t know.
    Security systems will work in the secular
world but they won’t work in the spiritual world.  He’s coming quickly and he’s coming quietly,
like a thief in the night and he wants us to be ready.  He wants us to be physically ready but more
so, he wants us to be spiritually ready.

    Because when he comes there will be no
time for looking back…no time to pack our bags, no time to go get money out of
the bank or deciding which of our coveted possessions we want to take with
us.  No time for looking back into the
past wishing that we had done this or done that.  No time for looking back into the past
wishing we hadn’t said this or said that.
No time for looking back into the past wishing we had lived our lives a
different way.  
    He’s coming quickly and with the blink of
an eye or with a beat of your heart he’ll be here and who you are at that very
moment in time and how you are living and how you are treating others in that
very moment in time is going to make all the difference in the world.  
  Living a life filled with the spirit of
expectancy and living a life-style of preparation will inevitably result in an
attitude of readiness. We do not know when Christ's second coming may be; it
could be in a day or a year or a century from now. We do know, however, that he
challenges us to be ready for that day in every way in which we live our lives.
    Use the reality of Jesus’ return as a
constant reminder that we have to be ready…because when we live in a state of
readiness, it is then that we are best prepared to serve him faithfully and to
serve him effectively until the day he returns.