Why Are We Still Here? :: By Alice Childs

“But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:57-58, KJV).

This was my response to a dear sister in the Lord who, like many of us, myself included, are facing serious and multiple health issues that the Enemy of Our Souls often uses to wear us down and cause doubt and depression to paralyze us. In answering her, God ministered to me again, lifting my spirit and reminding me that His plan and timing are perfect and that serving the Risen One who saved my soul from eternal Hell is my joy, my honor, and my privilege. In encouraging her, the Lord once again encouraged me. I hope this encourages you too.

“Dearest one, I have never thought you were ignoring me! I completely understand your situation. I also understand your frustration. It does indeed feel as if we are literally drowning in vapidness, lawlessness, despair, and outright demonic evil. We feel this way because this is the spiritual condition of a lost and dying world that even now teeters over the precipice of the abyss that is the coming Tribulation.

As for the question of why we are still here and the overarching question of the timing of the rapture, we must realize and accept that that event always has and always will be an ever-imminent occurrence.

I have never been one who believed that the rapture is necessarily attached to any particular feast day or event.

Perhaps I am wrong, but to my understanding, scripture clearly teaches the doctrine of imminence. From the beginning of the Church Age at Pentecost just after Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, until the end of the Church Age — which will occur with the rapture of the Remnant Church, on whatever day it happens — the rapture has always been imminent. The rapture could have happened any time after the birth of the church. It can still happen at any moment now. It will happen precisely on God’s schedule before the Tribulation begins, but only God knows the exact day and hour that will be. The rapture is always imminent.

The reason the Remnant Church is still here in this hell hole of evil that is growing darker and more demonic by the minute is because of God’s great mercy. It is as simple as that. Rest assured, though, that as bad as things are at this moment and the worse they will certainly get, our loving Father will not leave us here one second longer than is necessary in His perfect plan. As bad as it is now, we know this is nothing compared to what will happen during the Tribulation. Remember that we are promised by God Himself that His bride “is not destined” to endure His wrath – not one nanosecond of it.

Because He is love, God will give lost humanity every possible chance to be saved before He ends the Church Age. Because of His great mercy, He will even offer salvation after He will have removed His Church from the earth. Such is His love and desire that “none should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

His timing is always perfect. He knows the longing of our hearts. He longs for us to be with Him even more than we long to be with Him. Trust that truth. “… And the Spirit and the bride say COME… ” (Revelation 22:17).

As for feeling like you don’t belong here, well, that’s totally natural because we believers don’t belong here. Our citizenship is in Heaven. The truth is that we are here at our Lord’s command and for His service. We do not and cannot know who or how many we are reaching for the Lord. Every word spoken, every encouragement given, every prayer lifted on another’s behalf, every scripture shared – everything done to further the gospel, all of that is our service to our Lord – our testimony to Him – a testimony that will stand in eternity as a point of rejoicing for those who heeded the gospel or stand as a testimony against those who heard but ignored the Truth. The fact is that we cannot and will not know until we stand before our Lord at the Bema Seat just who or how many the Lord used us to impact.

In fact, I believe that the ones who may well earn the most crowns will be those who quietly served the Lord “in the background,” so to speak – those who are the billions of God’s unknown (to us) unsung heroes of the faith. Many who may have thought that they were making no impact at all may well have reached more and done more for Christ’s kingdom than those who openly had more of a public platform. We cannot know, nor are we meant to know this side of glory, how many souls our efforts, small or great, known or unknown, will have reached. This way, only God gets the glory lest we begin to be puffed up with pride, thus taking for ourselves the honor and glory due Only to God.

Don’t ever fall for the enemy’s lie that you aren’t making any effort or are not of any use or value to God. That’s Satan’s way of shutting you up and shutting down your service to God. It’s what Satan wants. Don’t fall for his tactics!

It is never our words or our deeds that make the difference in people’s lives anyway. It is the powerful, active, living Word of the living God that has the power to change one’s eternal destiny. We are only the mouthpieces that spread His Word. We are the hands and feet that distribute it and the fingers that type and disseminate His Word. The Holy Spirit, through God’s Word, does the changing of people’s hearts, not us or what we say. We are merely His vessels. God doesn’t need us; He wants us. He who spoke atoms into existence, He who created all that exists from nothing does not need us. But because He loves us, He has gifted fallen humanity the honor of serving Him for our eternal good and for His matchless glory.

To us who betrayed Him, He has gifted us, first with salvation and then with the privilege and honor to work alongside the very Creator God within whose hands and feet remain the scars of the nails that He suffered on our behalf. God the Son will bear for all eternity the scars our sin placed on Him when the very Creator of the universe gave Himself as a ransom for “whosoever will” believe. Within His own incarnate body, He will forever bear the evidence of His sacrifice as atonement and payment for our sins. Those scars will be eternally evident for all creation to witness. That is the proof of His unfathomable love and amazing grace towards us.

We in these mortal bodies of flesh cannot understand that kind of love! That is why we gladly serve Him even in the midst of such overwhelming and ever-increasing evil, horror, pain and suffering. We serve Him because our Lord left His throne of glory clothing Himself in the flesh of humanity, and as sin’s perfect sacrifice, came as the God/Man to redeem us – US!

We who are guilty have been offered complete pardon. We who deserve Hell are freely offered Heaven, if we only believe. This is why we serve Him. Never ever think or allow the Adversary to stop you from serving in whatever capacity and place God has placed you! Keep going. We are almost home! You do not know what impact you are having.

Don’t stop! We are not responsible for what others do with God’s message. That is on them. But we will be held to account for whether or not we remained faithful to what our Sovereign has placed us here to do.

We cannot go by our feelings. Our emotions and feelings are subjective, fickle, and are so easily manipulated and deceived. We go by what the Word of God has already told us. That is where we find what His will is. He has already given us everything we need to know to serve Him and to do His will, whatever He has called and placed us to do. Never trust your feelings or emotions because Satan can and does so easily deceive and manipulate us through them. Rely upon God’s already completed, always sufficient, permanently revealed Word. Everything we need to know, every answer we will ever need is already there. We just need to read, study, learn, and follow it.

As for waiting on the Lord, we must do that too with patience and longing, all the while serving Him in whatever way He leads, knowing that it is only His great love that “none should perish but that all should come to repentance” that stays His call for us until the very final nanosecond. Not all will heed our warning. Not all will come to salvation. We know this, but our Merciful Father will give the world every last chance both before and after He calls His body/bride home.

I know you’re tired. We all are. I know you’re discouraged. We all are. I know your body is broken and giving out. The rest of the body/bride of Christ is failing in body too, including myself. Still, we cannot give in to the fiery darts or the relentless attacks of the Evil One – not this close to the finish line!

Hang in there! Keep spreading the only truth that can save men’s souls from Hell, then leave the results in Jesus’ nail-scarred hands. We are only the vessels. The power that changes eternal destinies lies solely with the Holy Spirit of God.

Never allow Satan to stop or sidetrack you from doing what God has called and placed you here to do. Even if you feel your part is insignificant, know that it is not. Nothing God has given us to do is insignificant in His plan. Even five loaves of bread and two little fish fed multitudes in the hands that created all things! Nothing is too small or insignificant in the Master’s hands! Keep spreading the gospel everywhere you can, including on social media if you’re on it. Keep on posting scripture. Keep encouraging the brethren. Keep praying for the body of Christ. Keep warning the lost. Keep fellowshipping, praising, and worshiping together with other believers, and keep on keeping on until Jesus calls us Home. Keep on going!

I love you, and I’m praying for you.”

Alice

7thenovel@gmail.com

www.authoralicechilds.com

 

Tribulation Chronicles Pt 11: Return of the King :: By Alice Childs

Revelation chapter 19

We have now come to the end of this series of letters addressed to those who will be left behind after the Great Vanishing – the rapture of the true Remnant Church of Jesus Christ. This letter will be the last and final epistle in this series of chronicles relating to those things that will very shortly come to pass.

AFTER the Great Vanishing (rapture of the Church) occurs, if you are still here, I hope by now you will be able to recognize it for what it was: the removal of all true believers who made up the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ. The signs of the times in which the world finds itself all point to the extreme closeness of this ever-imminent event.

My purpose in writing these chronicles has been twofold: first, to try to wake up as many unbelievers as I can to come to salvation in Christ BEFORE the rapture occurs, so that you too may be “among the missing.”

I want more than anything for YOU to be counted among us, the glorified Church, in Heaven seated around the throne of Almighty God, sharing with us the joys of Heaven in the presence of our Lord while this sin-blighted world is destroyed. I want you to commit to salvation now, BEFORE the rapture occurs, so that you may be able to escape the coming time of the wrath, justice, and vengeance of our holy God that will shortly be poured out upon a wicked, utterly debauched, and depraved world system.

My second purpose in writing this series has been intended to be a written record – an explanation and a warning chronicling what is shortly to come to pass for those of you who have chosen to be left behind – those of you who could have escaped the coming judgments, but who, for whatever reason, chose not to believe upon Christ for salvation so as to have escaped these coming horrors.

As scripture teaches us, God has “not appointed” His body/bride, the Church, to suffer this time of coming judgment – this time of His wrath. Read 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, paying particular attention to verses 8-9. The context of this entire letter and chapter in particular is addressed to the CHURCH and is speaking of the salvation of our spirits from eternal death and the redemption of our mortal bodies from “corruptible to incorruptible” bodies at the time of the rapture. The Church is NOT APPOINTED to endure the wrath of God, which is the entire focus of the 7-year Tribulation.

It has been to you, the left-behind ones, that I began this series of missives – these messages from the missing ones.

I wish to end this series with a brief recounting of the triumphant return of King Jesus. I will not go into it at length here, for I wish you to read of this event for yourself. You will find the details recounted in the last few chapters of Revelation (chapters 19–22).

In these last few pages of God’s inerrant and infallible Word, you will find the breathtaking descriptions of the utter defeat, ruin, and annihilation of the Antichrist and his evil False Prophet. You will read of King Jesus coming to earth and going to Bozrah to rescue the remnant of His People Israel; of the last battle at Armageddon which, as it turns out, will really be no battle at all, because the Conquering King will merely SPEAK, and ALL rebellion will be instantly crushed and silenced.

You will read of the vast myriad of the armies of Heaven comprised of:

  • the already raptured and redeemed Church in our resurrected, immortal bodies
  • the entirety of the angelic host
  • all of the souls of the righteous dead from the Old Testament time right on through to those souls who died for the cause of Christ during the time of the Tribulation who will, upon returning to earth, receive THEIR resurrected, immortal bodies.

All of us (the resurrected and raptured Church) will be returning WITH the Lord. We will be following along behind our Conquering King as He returns to earth to set His foot once again upon the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, Israel, at the end of these last seven years of human history. We will be returning to a world that has been destroyed under the rulership of the Usurper of the Ages – the fallen Cherubim Lucifer, also known as Satan (Revelation 19).

You will read of King Jesus, subsequent to His bodily return to earth, separating out all of saved humanity from all those who are lost and doomed to Hell (the “sheep” from the “goats,” as the living Gentile survivors of the final Holocaust are called by our Lord in Matthew chapters 24—25) from all over the world, those who are left living at the time of His return.

You will read of the beginning of the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the nature of His LITERAL Millennial (1,000-year) Kingdom that He will establish here upon a newly renovated and restored earth, an earth very changed in topography and purged from all sin and its calamitous effects (Revelation chapters 20–22).

All of this and much, much more you need to read for yourself in the Lord’s own words, for I cannot do them justice.

I want to leave you with a listing of references from both the Old and New Testaments that will help guide you as to WHERE in God’s Word to find pertinent passages on these soon-coming events. And as always, I want to leave you with the passages that tell of God’s great salvation and how you – ANYONE who is willing to do so – can come to Christ for the salvation of your souls.

Listed below are passages for you to read. Study them; memorize as many of them as you can. Hide them in your hearts because even these days before the rapture happens are growing increasingly darker. You will need the Word of God more than ever as we await our Lord’s soon return. However, AFTER the Great Vanishing (the rapture of the true Church) occurs, for those of you left behind, God’s Word will become much more scarce and far more valuable. It will be much more precious to you than all the wealth of the world combined, even more precious than the very breath in your own body.

Mark and learn these passages, for they will become to you as nourishing meat and bread are to a starving man, or living water to a soul dying from thirst.

Passages that tell of:

THE RAPTURE

(also known as the “Blessed Hope” of every Church-Age Believer)

John 14:3
1 Corinthians 15:51-53
Titus 2:13
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17
2 Thessalonians 2:1-13
Philippians 3:20-21
Revelation 4:1

THE TIME OF JACOB’S TROUBLE

(aka The Tribulation also referred to in scripture as The 70th Week of Daniel, and in many places referred to as “the Day of the Lord.” ALL of these titles are referencing this same seven-year time period AFTER the departure of the Church, when God once again turns His full focus onto national Israel and the Jewish people).

Daniel chapter 9
Matthew 24 & 25

Both of the New Testament passages in Matthew 24 & 25 are relating the same events that are told of in Daniel 9.

The New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke that are addressing Jesus’ Olivet Discourse pertain specifically to the JEWS who will be alive during these seven years. Further passages that reference this 7-year time period:

Job 20:28-29

Isaiah 2:12
Isaiah 4:3-6
Isaiah 11:11
Isaiah 13:4-6
Isaiah 13: 9-11
Isaiah 19:16-17
Isaiah 24:21-22
Isaiah 26:1
Isaiah 27:1
Isaiah 27:12-13
Isaiah 63

Jeremiah 30:7-8
Jeremiah 46:10

Ezekiel 30:3-4

Joel 1:15
Joel 2:1-2
Joel 2:23-28
Joel 2:32
Joel 3:12-18

Amos 5:18-20

Micah 4:6-8
Micah 5:8-9

Zephaniah 1:14-18
Zephaniah 3:8
Zephaniah 3:11-20

Zechariah 9:16-17
Zechariah 14:20-21
Zechariah 13:8-9

Malachi 4:1-2

Matthew 7:22-23

Mark 12:26-27

John 12:48

Romans 2:5
Romans 2:16

Revelation 6:15-17
Revelation chapters 6 – 22

These are but a PARTIAL listing of passages contained in BOTH Testaments that reference this same seven-year time period known popularly as the Tribulation, but more accurately should be called The Time of Jacob’s (Israel’s) Trouble or Daniel’s 70th Week.

SALVATION

Psalms 3:8
Psalms 37:39
Psalms 62:1

Titus 3:5

Ephesians 2: -9

John 3:16-21
John 6:44
John 15:1-27
John 14:6

Acts 2:36-41
Acts 4:12
Acts 16:30-33
Acts 28:28

Romans 3:23
Romans 10:9-10

1 Corinthians 15:1-4

Hebrews 7:25

Dear Reader, let me implore you one last time to come to Christ for salvation NOW. Please, I urge you; do this now BEFORE the Great Vanishing of the Church happens. This vanishing, when it occurs, will be the rapture (the catching away to Heaven) of all genuine believers from this earth to Glory. The Bible says that “today is the day of salvation….” Please don’t put off the salvation of your immortal soul—not for one second longer, for we do not know when our final breath may come.

I want to leave you now with some of the very last words recorded in the Bible. These words are the longing and heart’s-cry of every believer. If you will but come to Christ, they will become the longing of your heart as well.

And the Spirit and the Bride say, COME. And let him that heareth say, COME. And let him that is athirst COME. And WHOSOEVER WILL, let him take the water of life freely.

Even so, COME, Lord Jesus!

MARANATHA!

alice.joan.childs@gmailcom