Ready or not

Happy new year! We have begun a new year in the Church. It seems a bit confusing that the Church’s year starts before Christmas but actually it makes sense. This is because in this year we are beginning by getting ourselves ready to greet our Saviour at Christmas. Advent always seems a strange time, it is the time when we are looking to start again, we are getting ready.

Every new year people come up with different ideas of how they might change, or new things they may take up. Well we all know that the beginning of December is not the best time to take up a new hobby but in the Church it is. In our new year of the Church we are reminded at the beginning of the year what we are looking to do, which is to welcome Jesus. At the beginning of our year we are waiting for Jesus and this waiting isn’t just about sitting down and twiddling our thumbs, it is about doing something different, something in preparation.

As we wait, we are of course waiting for Christmas but we are also waiting for Jesus to come again in our world to change things, to change us. 

I don’t know about you but when I was a child I really liked playing hide and seek. It was always fun thinking that I was so well hidden no adult would be able to find me, of course I never thought about the fact that when you hide behind a long curtain your body is covered but your feet still stick out ! I would hide and wait to hear the words, “ ready or not, I am coming to find you “. There was always the warning that if you hadn’t found a good hiding place you could ask for more time.

I was thinking about this as I was thinking about today and advent. We all know and believe that Jesus is coming again. We all pray for Him to return but if He did would we be ready ? 

Going back to the curtain, my body was hidden but my feet would stick out. It is a bit like us when we look as if we are being really good, when we feel that we are being great Christians but then something happens and we get caught out for not being quite as good as we seemed. Our feet may be sticking out ! Or, to put it another way we have realised that we can’t hide anything from God.

When we played hide and seek there was always the mad rush of finding somewhere we could hide and a little panic about the game being ruined if we didn’t move quickly enough. In our walk with Jesus we aren’t to look for a mad rush and knowledge of when He is coming back, we are told in the Bible that only God knows. 

It does mean that we should always be ready for God to come back. But this isn’t in a mad panic way, it is in a way where we have changed our lives to be more like God. It is in a way where we have taken the time  to make sure that we are spending time with God, praying, reading our Bibles, trying to live more and more like He would.

Playing hide and seek involved waiting. Waiting to be found. In the same way when we feel ready for God, when we feel like we are behaving well so we will be waiting for Him to come again. We may be praying for something to happen and be fed up of waiting but we do know that we are waiting with God with us, trusting Him. God has never promised an easy life but He has always promised to be with us and so as we wait for God, we know that He is with us always and we can turn to Him. Yes, we look at the world and wish it was better, we pray for change but we trust that God is with us and He will help us to be more and more like Him so that we can make a difference in the world by the way that we live.

When we played hide and seek we would wait to hear those words, “ready or not?’ God says those words to us always. He has promised that He will return whether we think we are ready or not. God has a way of breaking into our lives that can be unexpected. In our day to day lives things happen that we didn’t expect but we know that God surprises us whether we think we are ready or not. Sometimes this can be in a difficult and painful situation and all we can do in this is ask God to support us with His love. Other times God breaks into our lives in an unexpected way of joy and it is in this we can turn to God and praise Him, giving thanks. God breaks into our lives, yes, but He always does this with love.

How does this all fit with our gospel (Matthew 24:36-44) today ? Well, in the gospel reading Jesus talked about when He would come again and He talked about the people in the time of Noah who were just carrying on with their lives as if nothing mattered, then of course they were surprised. 

God judges us and in advent this is something else we think of.  God judges us, He tests us, to see if we are ready for Him. If we are ready to be transformed daily more and more into His likeness. The descriptions Jesus gave of two people working in a field with one being taken and one left sounds quite scary. Jesus was talking about people being brought into relationship with Him, those who will go to heaven. We need to stay close to Jesus, not just to make sure that we will go to heaven but so that we can enjoy a relationship with God here and also in the future. We are preparing ourselves daily to be more like God, and we are always preparing for the time of rejoicing when we will be with God forever as we enjoy life everlasting.

Ready or not ? God’s coming – are we ready ?