Once again, with another killer hurricane on-course to slam into the Gulf Coast, I got into a conversation with a stranger about global warming and impending environmental doom.

This middle-aged businessman and father from a ritzy neighborhood in Schaumburg, whom I met yesterday killing time, asked me in a perplexed tone, “Well, where’s your hope? I thought you Christians were supposed to have hope?”

Not getting his point, I asked, “Hope about what?” He answered, “Hope that the world will get better one day.” This is when I filled him in on the upcoming Rapture and tribulation period.

While George Bush and Rick Warren—and all the other self-proclaimed Christian politicians, preachers and leaders who are biblically illiterate—talk endlessly about world peace and a brighter future for our children and grandchildren, the fact is we’re headed full-boar toward horrific times.

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Christians will escape the worst of what’s coming through the Rapture (when Jesus Christ meets Believers “in the air” as they are exited off the planet into the presence of God in heaven), upon which the Bible’s long-prophesied wrath of God will be unleashed for an extended period called the tribulation. Peace won’t arrive until the Second Coming.

“When you see that word hope in Paul’s epistles and then read that it’s about the Rapture, you get the connection; you get the doctrine involved in the hope,” explains my preacher, Richard Jordan. “Paul says, ‘Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ,’ and that’s what our hope is! It’s that patience of hope that knowing about the Lord’s coming gives to your life.”

Jordan continues, “We’re not waiting for the undertaker, we’re waiting for the ‘upper-taker.’ And we’re not waiting for the Antichrist; we’re not waiting for the world to fall apart and go to hell in a hand basket.

“Somebody asked me recently, ‘Well, is the Antichrist alive?’ but it doesn’t make any difference to me or not because I won’t be here when he takes over. The will of God is we be ‘delivered from this present evil world’ and the delivery event is going to be what we call the Rapture.

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Once the Rapture occurs, Believers immediately go before ‘the judgment seat of Christ,’ where there is a formal review of their life and ministry. It is at this time, Paul says, ‘Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.’ (I Cor. 3:9)

Jordan explains, “When Paul says the prize you win at the judgment seat of Christ is ‘the crown,’ the crown, for him, was Christ living in Believers; that was the thing that was going to thrill him at the judgment seat of Christ!

“You see, the judgment seat of Christ isn’t an issue of you going there—you hear people say, ‘I’ll endure this because, boy, if I just be faithful now, I’ll get all that pay up there in heaven!’

“But when you read the verses about what the prize is, Paul says it’s ‘pressing toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’ He says, ‘We run the race.’ Why? ‘All run, but then there’s a prize to win.’ We’re running to win the prize. We’re not running in competition with one another. You see, we’re partners.

“You ever play tennis? If you play singles and you win, the other guy loses, and if the other guy wins, you lose. But if you play doubles, you’ve got a partner. If the other dude on your side of the net wins, you win because he’s your partner. If he loses, you lose because you’re partners. It’s that way in marriage and it’s that way in the Body of Christ. So we’re not competing against one another; we’re competing against an Adversary who wants to so easily beset us in the race.

“What is this prize? This verse in Philippians 3:8 blows me away. Paul says, ‘Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.’

“Paul says, ‘I count all.’ You know what the prize is? It’s Christ! It’s Christ not just living IN me, but living out THROUGH me. It’s God manifest in us.

“When Paul says he stands there at that review and—‘What is my hope, what is my crown of rejoicing?’—it’s not some little hat he’s going to wear around that says ‘Whoo-hoo, I got more power than you got! I got a bigger house than you got!’

“You know, there’s a little song we used to sing Down South that goes, ‘Just give me a little cabin in the corner of Glory Land.’ And a guy will say, ‘I don’t want a cabin in the corner! I want a mansion on a hilltop!’ Well, that isn’t the issue! It’s Christ!

“Paul talks about how when we go from that meeting in the air, Christ literally presents us to God the Father who then commissions us in the ministry of the heavenly places to carry on the business of God in the heavens. Boy, that’s a wonderful glorious future for us, reigning there in the heavens.

“People will say, ‘Well, so-and-so died and went on to his reward,’ but no he didn’t. You don’t get your reward ’til after the resurrection; the Rapture. That’s the reason we don’t sorrow as others—because we have a hope.”