"Short-timer" Attitude in the Church

By David Hobbs

Most of us have run into “short-timers”: that employee counting the days till his retirement, or the military man about to be discharged. For seniors in May it’s called “senioritis,” but it’s all the same: someone who is so distracted anticipating what’s about to happen that they are no longer focused on what they should be doing.

I’m afraid we have many in the church afflicted with the same short-timer mentality anticipating the rapture: kicking back, singing songs, almost a party mentality thinking they’ll soon be walking those streets of gold and nothing down here will matter any more: “Let the Anti-Christ have it, who cares? I’m out of here.”

Yet Jesus told us to occupy until He comes, and He’s not here yet. It would be bad enough if we knew for a certainty that the rapture would happen this month, say. But in truth nobody knows when it will occur, and in the meantime people are dying every day without Christ, our  culture is in moral free-fall, we are in the midst of an abortion holocaust, we urgently need a fresh move of God to sweep souls into the Kingdom, and we desperately need a corporate cry from the Body of Christ along the lines of 2 Chron. 7:14--for God to hold off judgment and reverse our slide into destruction. It’s perhaps the most critical time in the church’s 2000 year history, where we need every hand on deck giving it their all; and yet we’ve got this crowd hanging out waiting for the rapture, accomplishing nothing and demoralizing the rest.

If the rapture did occur today, would they even be taken? And what would their reception be in heaven, this Laodicean crowd who are “rich and in need of nothing,” yet are spiritually blind to the day in which they are living? Jerusalem was destroyed because she didn’t discern the time in which she was living, and missed the “day of her visitation.” She wasn’t welcomed triumphantly into heaven like many today expect to be.

This has gripped me so much that I wrote the following letter to the editor of my local newspaper, which is my forum for addressing affairs of the church and of the culture.

Dear Editor,

Jesus dictated letters to seven different churches in the Book of Revelation. Many commentators believe each church represents an age in church history. The last church was at Laodicea, which Jesus condemned as lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. He said He would rather they were cold (living like heathen) than lukewarm, and threatened to vomit them out of His mouth because He so loathed their lukewarmness. Yet the commentators call our day the Laodicean Age of the American church..

It was under the watch of the modern church that prayer was removed from the schools and over 55 million babies were aborted. It was under our watch that the moral underpinnings of this nation collapsed leaving our culture in its present frightening state of free-fall. Where is the preaching from the pulpits against sin? The divorce rate of church members is about the same as that of the unchurched, though Jesus plainly forbids it. Ditto out-of-wedlock births, living together unmarried, and many other areas where the church has copied the world instead of influencing it for the better.

Has God changed? But the church has abandoned many of its bedrock doctrines such as the holiness of God and His abhorrence of sin.

Sadly many parishioners attend church in the midst of a world that is going to hell without lifting a finger to stop them, with the ghostly cries of millions of aborted babies echoing in their deafened ears, while they sing songs, hear an uplifting sermon, then go to Dennys to eat pie and talk about being raptured to heaven before the judgment hits. What if the next event on God’s prophetic timetable, instead of the Rapture of the Church, is spewing them from His mouth?

 That was kind of a harsh note to end on, and I know there are many Christians in our local area who are deeply committed, working among the poor and needy, evangelizing the lost. etc. And I hate to risk demoralizing them by painting with a broad brush. Yet we must keep the big picture in mind. There has got to be accountability at some point for what has happened on our watch. When I see from where the church has fallen since I got saved in 1974--it’s stunning.  But who is talking about it? Who is repenting? Who is praying? Yet we think we will be whisked away to heaven in triumph while the unsaved world faces the consequences for what we have allowed to happen! We have accommodated the world and its sin instead of rebuking it. We have played church instead of being The Church. John the Baptist rebuked Herod for his adultery and was beheaded for it; our “Christian” nation reelected Bill Clinton after his escapades and we merely grumbled about it.

The church needs the equivalent of a glass of ice water thrown in its face.