Maranatha

When the Christians in the first century celebrated the Lord’s Supper, they would say a prayer that ended with “Maranatha,” meaning “Our Lord, come.” As Christians, we look forward to the second coming of Jesus, that time where He will return to us in order to eradicate all sin once and for all, deal with Satan, pour out judgment on those who have rejected Him, and make a new heaven and earth filled with His presence and perfection. 

As the church, we await our bridegroom who will wipe away every tear, vindicate all evils done to His bride and take her to His kingdom to truly live happily ever after. One day we will receive our fairytale ending, and it will be real. 

All of it is possible because Jesus has risen. It is the resurrection of our Savior that makes the second coming a reality. A dead savior can’t come back for us. A dead savior can not prepare a place for us. A savior cannot have ultimate victory over our sin and death if he himself was still in the ground. 

Our Redeemer lives! And because He lives we can claim all the promises in Scripture, from the promise that He is with us and gives us everything we need, to the promise of our future life with Him. 

The fact that Jesus will return should not be just an event we look forward to, but it should affect how we live today. 

Both at the beginning and at the end of Revelation we are told what we should be doing while we wait. In Revelation 1:3 John wrote, “Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy aloud, and blessed are those who hear and obey the things written in it, because the time is near!”Jesus gave the same wisdom in Revelation 22:7. He said, “Look! I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy expressed in this book.” 

We must read and keep the words found in our Bibles. In order to “keep the words,” we must learn how to study so we can understand and then rightly live according to what God is telling us. 

Here are a few things this will require of us:

1. Dedication – We must be dedicated to the Word of God, and we can’t be dedicated if we don’t make it a priority. It might be time to declutter our lives in regard to how we spend our time. 
2. Time – It takes time to read, study, understand, and apply the teaching of Scripture. Sometimes we are forgetful, distracted, uninterested, slow to understand, or easily distracted. We won’t grow in our knowledge of God if we don’t take the time to get to know Him and His word. 
3. Humility – You will come across things in Scripture that you don’t like. God is not like us and His ways are not our ways. Instead of letting pride tell us that we know better, we need to take those uncomfortable and hard truths and trust that God knows what He is doing.  

Praise the Lord that He has risen and will come again. Let’s do what the first century Christians did and add a “Maranatha” to our prayers because I’d love for Jesus to come back as quickly as possible.