February 27 - Mark 13: Playing It Well

Jesus was preparing His disciples not only for His impending death and resurrection but also for His second coming.  The end of His physical life on earth was quickly approaching and He had more to teach them.  He had perfectly chosen each lesson, the content, the setting, and the timing.  There were few details about what would happen when He would "enter in grand style", but He kept reiterating one instruction - "You're placed there as sentinels to truth.  The  Message has to be preached  all across the world.... Stay with it....Stay at your post.  Watching."

Peter later repeats this teaching, which Paul had also emphasized:

Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life?  Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival... So, my dear friends, since this is what you have to look forward to, do your very best to be found living at your best, in purity and peace.   (2 Peter 3:11-14)

My internal response to vigilantly waiting for His return is okay, but how?  I'm looking for something I've never seen or experienced before.  I'm not getting a whole lot of detail about what to expect and it's been a very long time in coming.  In the midst of my daily life, I infrequently think of the second coming, so it probably doesn't impact my thinking and living as it should.  What does it actually mean to live at my best, to stay at my post?  I know the obvious answers - to live a holy life, to seek God - but how does His impending arrival truly influence my life today?   Can't say that I've had any epiphany, although I do think God is opening my heart to more of His sovereignty in my life and my lack of it.

"...how can the characters in a play guess the plot [of a drama]? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

"The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were going to get married next month, perhaps you were going to get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of a great scientific discovery; you may be maturing great social and political reforms. Surely no good and wise God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this short? Not now, of all moments!

"But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. The audience, if there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of heaven fill the pit and the stalls) may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the play from outside, never meeting any characters except the tiny minority who are 'on' in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely. "  (C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night, essay)