Interesting times!

I am a great music fan. I am one of those people who can just sit and listen to music and do nothing else while doing it. I find it relaxing. But I like songs with decent lyrics. I know I am getting older as I don't really like much of the music in the charts these days. I like songs that have a meaning or a story. So over the years I have enjoyed David Bowie, Queen, Billy Joel and more recently Coldplay and Elbow. These are artists who have written some great anthemic songs backed up with great musicality. I recently taught up in Bedford to the Frontier Project students on Eschatology or End Times. And I was reminded of the great REM classic - "It's the end of the world as we know it!" The first line is - "That's great it starts with an earthquake." Then as I turned up last Friday to bring my teaching, I heard the tragic news that there had been a devastating earthquake in Japan. The sixth most powerful earthquake in history and 8000 times more powerful than the one that just hit New Zealand. It is hard to imagine what this nation is going through right now and we must continue to pray for them. We must pray for the Comforter to go and descend upon this devastated country and for God to bring life out of a dark situation. This is a very secular nation that is in desperate need of the Father's love.

The thing I am hearing a lot at the moment is that Christians and non-Christians are asking whether these are the signs for the end of the world? Does this mean that Jesus is coming soon? Well Jesus said that there will be signs that point to the end times. And even though we need to be aware of these signs, we mustn't try and work out that this is imminent. What we need to focus on is getting on with what God has called us to do in the area He has placed us. Even Jesus didn't know when He would come back. Only the Father knows when this will happen, so we don't need to fear or get obsessed with specifics. Jesus said that the last sign to occur before He comes back would be that the gospel would have been received by all nations or as the Greek puts it - all people groups. Now it is estimated that there are still around 6800 unreached people groups which represents approximately 2.8 billion people. This may help you see that there is still a long way to go before Jesus returns. Jesus taught that we need to be prepared for His coming at all times but that our primary call is to love God and love others. I want to live my life for His glory so that He will say to me - "Well done good and faithful servant."

I don't believe it is the end of the world as we know it! These events that are occurring around the world should remind us of the frailty and shortness of life and provoke us into action. The reality is that we are surrounded by people who desperately need to know the love of our amazing Dad in heaven. We rejoice that we have already seen six new adoptions into God's family this year. But there are so many more that God has His eye on. There is a harvest that is ripe, ripe, ripe! Jesus didn't teach us to pray for the harvest to come in but for the workers to go out and bring it in. This is starting to happen, Praise God! But this isn't it. It is just the start. Let's go and show others the Father's love by loving them with the love that we have received. May God bless you loads. Until the next blog - Have fun!