It’s later than you think.

One question we rarely hear asked today, but as an Elim pastor, it was in the air every Sunday evening: “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” I loved end-times preaching!

It’s the question the disciples asked, gazing up at the massive, immovable stones of the temple. Standing right next to them was Jesus. He saw something else. Where they saw permanence and longevity, he saw collapse. The very stones that shaped their sense of relevance, identity, worship, and safety – he said would be torn down. All of them. Not one left upon another. Total disaster. That wasn’t sensationalism. It was prophecy with a deadline. And it came to pass, quicker than they could imagine… but for a few short years things ticked over, unchanging. The status quo was what it was. Until it wasn’t.

The disciples, shaken at this announcement from Jesus, ask their tangled question – the fall of the temple (it hurt to even consider it), the return of the Messiah, the end of the age – as if it were all one and the same. Jesus gently unpicked their confusion. He speaks of war, betrayal, persecution. The gospel proclaimed across the known world. And the fall of Jerusalem as covenantal judgement. “This generation,” he says, “will not pass away until all these things take place.” At that moment, their expression must have looked much like mine when my smart friend Ben explained that, in quantum physics, a particle can behave differently simply because it ‘knows’ it’s being observed.

And we, centuries on, have watched the world crumbling, too – not just in the streets of Jerusalem, but across the flickering glow of our televisions and phones. We’ve seen cities shelled world-wide, hospitals bombed, children weeping, thousands dying at the barbaric hands of others. Every headline another groan. We are not untouched. We are just distracted. Sunday for many has become a two-hour blip – neatly packaged, swiftly forgotten. It’s not marking us. Not the way it should.

What we need is a trumpet.

Not the sound of mere routine. But the sound that arrests. That reorients. That wakes us to what matters. We need to hear again the voice of Jesus – steady, clear, unflinching – calling us to our great hope: himself. Not politics. Not optimism. Not nostalgia. Christ. And yes, there is the sound of a certain Trump that’s begun to stir global nerves anxiously again. But let’s not let that not drown out the more urgent sound – the voice of the Bridegroom saying ‘ Stay awake.’

Matthew 24 is not a puzzle or an enigma machine code to crack. It’s a radical, audacious call to faithfulness when the ground shifts, trembles and shakes.

It reminds us that Jesus didn’t just see the end. He walked through it. The city that would fall, first tore him apart. The darkness he spoke of fell on Golgotha. And still, he will return – personally, visibly, rightly. Not metaphor. Not myth. He’ll do it with unfettered power, majesty and unimaginable glory.

And perhaps, sooner than we imagine.

God’s strange way of building a church

This is about me not you, but welcome to my world. I’m not very tolerant. Yes, I’m aware of it, and working on it. Let me explain. Every once in a while God seems to move someone across my path who is being a bit… weird. Not dangerous. Not heretical. Just enthusiastic, excitable, oddly calibrated. The sort of person who claps a half second too long. Who says amen when everyone else has moved on. Who looks like they are having a genuinely excellent time when the rest of us are maintaining respectable spiritual posture. They’re a bit like the Labrador that you have said the word, “walkies” to. That strangeness pokes and provokes me.

I’ve had my fair share of being called strange or weird but it’s other people’s state that makes me cringe! And almost every time, my internal reaction tells on me. It shows me there is still real work for the Holy Spirit to do in my life. Not on the other person. On me. I don’t need a mirror.

The passage that suddenly stands up, finding me in those moments is 1 Corinthians 12:12-26. Paul is speaking to a church overflowing with spiritual energy and social awkwardness. Gifts everywhere. Noise everywhere. People speaking, moving, interrupting, expressing. It was an eager and excitable congregation that would make most leaders hosting a morning meeting break out in a cold sweat! And yet, instead of telling them to tone it down or attend a seminar on emotional regulation, Paul does something more unsettling. He reframes the whole situation.

He says the church is a body. Not a committee. Not a carefully managed environment. A body. With parts that do not look alike, do not function alike, and do not always behave in ways that feel convenient. Some parts draw attention whether we want them to or not. Others operate quietly and then feel resentful that no one noticed. Some look impressive. Others look, by human judgement, a bit unnecessary. Yet Paul insists that God arranges the body as he chooses. Not as we would order it. Not as our preferences would design it.

That is where tolerance gets exposed. Because most of us are not irritated by sin when we meet strange believers. We are irritated by difference. Volume. Intensity. People who do not read the room and appear not to care that there is a room to be read. Paul does not call that discernment. He calls it forgetting how bodies work.

The eye does not get to vote the hand off the body. The head does not get to dismiss or chide the foot for being clumsy, sweaty or oversized; even when the foot keeps tripping over the same obstacle. That’s not all. He goes further; the quieter parts do not get to resent the louder ones simply for existing at full volume. Paul presses the point harder. He says the parts we consider weaker are not weird, but indispensable. God gives greater honour to the parts that seem less respectable. That includes the ones who make us shift in our seats.

What makes this uncomfortable is that Paul leaves no room for spiritual superiority dressed up as maturity. He does not say tolerate them because you are further along. He says you need them. Their odd wiring. Their unfiltered joy. Their inability to be cool. God uses that very strangeness to stop the church from becoming a social club for people who agree on tribal tone.

The Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by enthusiasm. He is not threatened by people who feel things publicly. Often our irritation reveals less about their lack of wisdom and more about our love of control and predictability.

Paul’s vision does not ask me to celebrate everything or suspend discernment. It asks me to surrender the quiet belief that my way of being faithful is the normal setting. And that surrender, irritating as it is, keeps turning out to be part of how the Spirit does his work.

So yes, I’m self-aware and know I’m still a work in progress. Maybe, I’m the only odd one in the room!