If someone broke into your home — God forbid — would you be ready? As a born-and-raised Texan, I know the easy solution to that problem is a firearm or two or three or… Pro tip: the gun better be loaded. If someone breaks into your home, it’s too late to be fumbling around in the dark looking for ammunition. Either the gun is loaded or it isn’t.

In fact, a horrific home invasion story made headlines recently. A villainous killer crept into a house and killed four young college students in 2022 and was just sentenced to life in prison. Stories like these, whether real or amplified by Hollywood, fuel gun sales every year. But if your Glock isn’t loaded by the time the black mask with a flashlight is creaking your floors in the night, it’s too late.

Home invaders — whether murderous or simply after your flat screen — are not new. Mankind has always dealt with the problem, albeit without the aid of a .44 magnum or a Winchester. That’s probably why Jesus used a similar metaphor in his teachings on the end of all things, specifically his own return to Earth. His parable captures the fear and suddenness of a break-in event, and the high stakes. In the same way a thief cannot catch someone unawares if they are ready and waiting, Jesus’s own return will expose who was ready — and who wasn’t.

“Behold, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake, keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed!” (Revelation 16:15)

“Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” (Matthew 24:42-44)

We tiptoe around the end times in many modern churches. It’s understandable. Teaching on the “end” often ranges between confusing charts laid out by an overeager pastor to doomsday negativity that seems to lack relevance to my daily life. But Jesus spoke of the end, and He focuses less on dates and timetables and more on warning the individual, how YOU can be ready when He returns.

Two more of Jesus’s end-times parables give us the same command: keep your lamps lit.

In one parable, Jesus tells us to wait at the door with our lamps lit (Luke 12) waiting for the master to return. In another, He tells us to keep our lamps trimmed and with enough oil so they do not go out (Matthew 25). If we don’t, we are respectively like lazy workers sleeping on the job or women who weren’t ready for the wedding day.

The lit lamps represent the burning fire of the Spirit within you. Your inner fire for God. Your intimacy with Him. Your prayer life. Your witness to the world as you burn. An active faith, not a dead, smoldering faith.

Untended, we all grow dim over time, like a campfire slowly melting into the night.

It is understandable. The craziness of kids. Soccer appointments and socks on the floor. Renewing your driver’s license and getting the oil changed. You’ave probably heard that faith in Christ is more than mental assent. It is an active living, fiery reality of day to day life. But we’d do well to compare our fire to Jesus’s standards, not our fellow lukewarm brethren, since the Lord also warns that the Way is narrow, and few find it.

I’ll leave you with the question Jesus asked His own disciples: when the son of man returns will He find faith on the Earth? (Luke 18:8)

We see Paul give Timothy a helpful warning about the spiritual fire he was given, telling him to “fan into flame” that which was given him through the laying on of hands (2 Timothy 1:6). Was this flame a greater deposit of the Holy Spirit or his spiritual gift of teaching? Or both?

Regardless, Paul makes clear that even if you receive something spiritual from God, it is our responsibility, not the Lord’s, to keep it burning. And if it extinguishes, God help us! Then it’s time to get on our faces and ask the Lord to reignite us again. Our fires may be suffocated by appointments and to-do lists, or worse, unfettered fears and hidden sins. But it’s not too late to reignite the fire. To light your lamp. One day — in a brilliant moment — it will be too late.

Sometimes I think we are more ready for the rise of the antichrist than for the return of Christ. The American church has AR-15s and food rations and bunkers. The moment someone suggests putting a microchip in your hand to buy something, without hesitation the church today is ready to recognize a potential “mark of the beast.”

The antichrist? We’re ready for him.

The true Christ? Maybe.