THE TIME IS NOW!

THE TIME IS NOW

                “Christ died to redeem us so He can live in us. Now we express Him. He is our Spirit. We are His flesh. Together that is a Christian.” Dr. T.L. Osborn

                “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age.” Mt. 28:18-20.

                In many ways our message has gone far afield from what Jesus commanded us to teach and for that reason, the church is largely dead and unaware of the times.

                In order to get a better picture of what Jesus was saying here, we need to picture Jesus huddled with His disciples and giving them last minute instructions before He returned to the Father. So what was Jesus referring to when He told His disciples to make more disciples just like themselves and what had Jesus been teaching them throughout His entire ministry and how did He demonstrate it to the people?

1.       His most recent teaching at that point had been that of telling them what to watch for concerning the signs of His return. In doing so, He gave those of us living in the last days a sort of check list of events that would increase like birth pangs until the entire earth was involved in the throes of a final climactic conflagration.

2.       Likewise, after His ascension, Jesus called His last living disciple John up to further describe the events that would herald His return. The book of Revelation tells us of the corresponding events that will take place on earth as Jesus, brings His High Priestly ministry to a close and prepares to return as King of kings and Lord of lords.

3.       During His end time discourse, Jesus also told us what to preach saying: “And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all nations and then the end shall come.” Mt. 24:14

                Now there are a couple of points I want to make today. One is that Jesus made us aware of the signs to watch for that would let us know when we are in the very last days and secondly, the message He gave us to preach in these last days.

                It is interesting that in Mt. 24: 14 Jesus tells us that this Gospel of the Kingdom must be preached in the entire world for a witness to all nations. And in the very next words, He says “THEREFORE.” So as has been said before, when Jesus says,” THEREFORE” we need to check to see what it is there for. In this case Jesus said, “Therefore when you see the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet standing in the holy place (let the reader understand)…” First of all Jesus is sitting there in the huddle giving last minute instructions to His 12 disciples and yet He puts in parenthesis a little warning to those of us who will later be reading these things. Then He goes on telling His disciples that it will be time to flee the city and He goes on to indicate that this is an end time event by referring to the great tribulation and the signs of His second coming.

                So Jesus makes the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION an end time sign and it must take place in the holy place of the temple… so we can rightly conclude that since our bodies are temples of His Holy Spirit then this abomination must take place in our hearts and indeed it does and it is happening right now in terms of the great falling away or apostasy we see happening in many churches and around the world.

                But we forget that whatever happens spiritually in the church happens physically in Israel. Israel is the physical template of all things spiritual. Israel is God’s time clock and of all the reasons why God brought Israel back into their own land in these last days, this is one of them. The antichrist will set up his headquarters in Jerusalem and he will not only make the third temple possible, but he will desecrate it by entering it and claiming to be God. This is a key element of the last day events and the Mark of the Beast system that will rule the world during the great Tribulation.

                So when we see Israel dedicating their Altar and preparing to build their third temple, we can also know that the time to preach the final Gospel of the Kingdom to the world has arrived.

                But the Gospel of the kingdom is not one of mere words. The Gospel of the Kingdom must be attended with all of the signs that Jesus said would go with it. In Mark 16:15-17 Jesus said: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who have believed: In My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues, they will pick up serpents and if they drink any deadly poison, it shall not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick and they will recover.” (Evidently there will be many assassination attempts made against those who have power to cast out demons, speak with new tongues and to heal the sick.)

                John the Baptist was languishing in prison and the one thing he wanted to know is if Jesus was the real Messiah. Had he been right in announcing Him as such? So He sent his disciples to ask of Jesus and Jesus told John’s disciples to go back and tell John what they saw saying: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead are raised up and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” Mt. 11:5.

                So these then are the signs that must accompany the Gospel of the Kingdom. The miracles are the witness that the message is true.

                When T.L. Osborn first went to India to be a missionary, he got entangled with missionaries from dead churches. He and his wife had wanted to win people to Christ and start up churches all over India, but the other missionaries already entrenched there would not even so much as make an altar call. So Osborn and his wife returned to America disheartened. They began to fast and pray and the Lord began to teach them about the Gospel of the Kingdom.

                So when they went back into the many foreign lands that they ministered in, they bypassed the deadbeat missionaries and began to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom and to heal the sick and the lame just as the Bible said. So during their ministry the eventually found themselves preaching to millions of eager people, healing hundreds of thousands of people of all kinds of sicknesses and blindness and deafness and the lame and so they ended up evangelizing entire continents simply because they took Jesus at His Word and ministered the way Jesus instructed us to minister.

                So, here we are. Israel is back in their land. They are about to build their third temple. The antichrist must surely be in the wings. The Jews have said that he will be a Jew, but it will not be Jesus and they are already claiming that this one (Whom we know to be the antichrist) will be their Messiah. Everything is being set up for earth’s final days. The spirit of antichrist is rising in the world. The nations are in turmoil and what we Christians can expect to see next is a sudden global rise in persecution and hatred against true Christianity as well as true and faithful Jews… especially Messianic Jews.

                This sudden rise in persecution is going to take most of the church by complete surprise because they have long forgotten how to watch for the signs of Jesus’ coming and they are still playing church as if we have hundreds of years to go. WE DON’T HAVE HUNDREDS OF YEARS TO GO! IN fact according to Revelation 11, the Two Witnesses will show up and do their ministry in connection with the building of this temple and their ministry will last for 1260 days, which amounts to the first half of the Tribulation.

                Paul states categorically that we will be here to see the great falling away and the rise of the antichrist. So all pre… post and mid-trib arguments aside, we WILL see these events take place and in fact we are in the middle of the great falling away right now as churches all over the place are abandoning the foundations of the Gospel and joining hands with the Pope in his formation of the global religion (made up of all religions equally) and we know this global religion to be none other than the religion of the Beast and he will enforce the Mark of the Beast and as we know the technology is now in place to control the buying and selling of the entire world. Everything is in place… so why are we still playing church? Why are we still not preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom with signs following?

                Concerning the Mark of the Beast, there are many differing ideas of what the Mark will involve. Here’s the way I see it:

1.       The technologies are now in place for identifying and tracking every individual on the planet. So this will certainly be a part of it. Whatever form it finally takes… don’t allow them to implant anything in you or on you.

2.       It will most definitely involve our faithfulness to Jesus Christ and to His Word. So whatever they do to try to force you away from your fidelity to Jesus and His Word, even to the point of death; do not go for it. 

                T.L. Osborn had the right message and God honored that message with His miraculous signs back in the 1940s. In this, God has shown us that if we take Him seriously, then He will attend His Gospel of the Kingdom with signs and wonders.

                There was a movement of signs and wonders in the charismatic movement, but the church was not yet mature enough to handle it rightly. And just like Peter’s nets broke the first time Jesus had him lower them, so the movement got off track and turned it all into selfishness and prosperity and fleshly entertainment. The nets broke and there has resulted a great falling away.

                But at the end of His ministry, Jesus had Peter lower his nets in again and this time the nets held. Likewise in the days just ahead, the church is going to be purified and matured through persecution and blood and fire and columns of smoke. People’s motives for coming to Christ will change. They will no longer come seeking self- fulfillment, but they will come because it is the truth… a truth worth living for… a truth worth dying for …and they will come to the Lord in the face of great adversity and danger.

                What we have failed to do in times of ease, we will do in times of great adversity and persecution. This time we will preach the Gospel of the Kingdom … and this time it will be accompanied by signs and wondered, but not so as to make popular smoke and mirror shows on TV. It will be done by the nameless, faceless followers of Christ as they humbly minister to neighbors and friends and people they encounter on the street and they will do so at great danger to themselves for daring to speak the name of Jesus. But like the early church, they will turn the world upside down with the Gospel of the kingdom with signs following.

                The structures of our country are going to be broken down so much so that no one will be selling their own particular brand name. No one will consider that the ministry of Christ has been replaced with “Christian” hospitals and “Christian” Psychiatrists    and “Christian” institutions.

                This final move will be a grass roots move of God attended with real power and a foundational message and by its very nature it will involve a call out of Babylon, because it will stand in juxtaposition to the global kingdom of the antichrist. Our choices will be two: Jesus Christ or the antichrist.

                And in this final move of God the sons of God will be revealed as spoken of in Romans 8: 19, for in that day our message will be much like T.L. Osborn’s:

                “Christ died to redeem us so He can live in us. Now we express Him. He is our Spirit. We are His flesh. Together, that is a Christian.”

                It will be demonstrated with power and the world will hate it. But His sheep will hear His voice and they will come into the fold.