Yesterday around 5:45 p.m., when weekday foot traffic seems to be at its heaviest right in Times Square, I passed through the intersection of 42^nd and Broadway to notice a man standing still amidst a swarm of jostling bodies.

He was holding up with one hand an open Bible that had a sign taped to it reading, in big black block letters, “REPENT NOW! END IS NEAR.”

It instantly reminded me of a time several years ago when I was walking through perhaps this same intersection and was struck by something I heard listening to a cassette tape of an old Bible study I had recorded off the website of Oklahoma preacher Les Feldick. Feldick had just commented to a woman in his audience—who he identified as being in her late 80s—that he thought she could very well still be alive when the Rapture occurred!

I specifically remember him saying, “I think we’re that close.” This study, I figure, was given in the mid- to late-’90s.

As someone who has frequently gotten it in my head that the Rapture must not even be five-10 years off, I was very intrigued to hear my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) , say in a Sunday sermon the week before last that we’re witnessing a “sea change in global history” that will play out for decades to come.

Specifically, he said, “If you’re my age—in your mid-50s—you’re probably not going to get to see it all finish. If you’re 30 or younger, you’re going to watch this happen. Change is taking place in the whole world today. In our nation you see it, but the whole world is really ahead of us, and that change is what’s fueling all that stuff in the Middle East today, frankly.

“What’s happening is that the underpinnings the Protestant Reformation gave to the last 500 years of Western culture—and have dominated the culture of the planet for the last half of a millennium—have been destroyed; they’ve been abandoned. The psalmist said, ‘If the foundation be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?’ Well, you just go the way of the world like everyone else.”

I thought his whole sermon so completely summarized things as they are that I copied most of it down for anyone else interested. Here it is with just a little editing and tweaking here and there:

“In America today, we’ve got a tremendous amount of liberty and freedom. In economic terms, you call it ‘disposable income.’ If any one of us just took the junk from our closet at home and obtained the wholesale value of it, there’s no telling how many orphans in India we could feed.

“The reality is we have so much liberty and freedom—economically, socially, politically—that even though there’s a whole world war going on, we can just turn on Jay Leno and forget about it. Most of the people in the world can’t do that. I’ve been in many places in the world where when they go to bed at night you know what momma’s worrying about? What she’s going to feed the kids for lunch tomorrow. And that’s every day, and that’s more people than not on the planet.

“Old Bob Jones said it: ‘When the money runs out people get real basic.’ Well, we’ve enjoyed the luxury, but the things that produce that liberty and freedom. . . As the world loses its underpinnings, it goes back to basic things.

“And the questions that face the world today—and are going to face the world in the next 100 years—we’ll see change the whole planet; the social order of the planet as history moves westward. It jumped the pond and now it’s going to jump the ocean as it goes west and east. It’s ‘blood and beliefs,’ is basically the way they say it: ‘What do you think God wants done and who did you come from.’

“And when you get back to those fundamental basic questions, people don’t have light about it. That’s what the world’s religions try to discuss; that’s what they try to work out without the light of God’s Word.

“Do you know every pagan religion, every human philosophy can be found in God’s Word? People talk about Aristotle, Plato, Euripides—all these great Greek philosophers. You’ve got Aristotle’s Golden Mean. Did you know he stole that stuff out of the Word of God?

“All those Greek philosophers are just a bunch of plagiarists. All that stuff was right there in the wisdom literature (Job through Song of Solomon) of God hundreds of years before they came along, and they never gave God credit for any of it. You ever see Aristotle quote Scripture? He does quote it, but he never gives God credit for it. You don’t get a big name by giving God the credit, preaching Christ. You want to preach yourself instead.

“What’s needed is a foundation built on truth, and can I tell you that as the world whirls around, there’s nobody else ever going to show up like Jesus Christ. The one thing you’ve got that’s different from everybody else is you’ve got the one Person who is the truth. And truth in the Bible is not, ‘Well, I’m right and you’re wrong.’ Truth in the Bible is reality.

“What’s the source of ultimate reality? What’s the real deal here? Paul says we look at things not seen because things seen are temporal. They’re not what’s real. The things that are not seen are eternal.

“How do you get in touch with that? The only way is by faith. But you have to have faith in what ultimate reality is and that’s who Jesus Christ is. That’s why it’s not a thing, and a theology, and something you’re doing. It’s something outside of you—it’s in a person. It’s in God Himself. And when God stepped out of heaven and took upon Himself humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, and the eternal God become the God-man in the man Christ Jesus, He gave you the ability to reach out and make God tangible, and get a hold of Him, and He’s the bridge.

“And there’s not anything else like that in all the world, and there never will be, and that’s why the issue is preaching Christ; making Him the issue. That’s why Paul says it’s He ‘whom we preach.’ (Col. 1:28)

“ ‘Whom we preach.’ It’s easy to read over that but there’s something profound in that you don’t want to miss. Christianity is not a religion. It’s a relationship with a person. That’s why he says it the way he does. Who is the ‘whom’? It’s ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory.’ (Col. 1:27)

“When you come to faith in the fact that He hung on that Cross and was put dead cold in a tomb and yet He came back to life. Anybody who will look at the historical evidence will know assuredly of a historical fact that has nothing to do with faith. It’s easier to go into a court of law, and with the laws of authenticity, demonstrate the validity and believableness of the resurrection of Jesus Christ than it is to prove Columbus sailed to America or that you’re sitting in that seat this morning.

“It has nothing to do with faith—it just simply has to do with historical reality. What faith has to do is what God says that fact means, and when you come to the place where your faith understands that Jesus Christ got up off of that cold slab and walked right through that stone sepulcher and came out the other side as a living Savior.

“Christ is not a religion for you to follow. It’s not a bunch of rites and ceremonies for you to perform. It’s not a theology for you to believe. You know the Lord Jesus Christ never went around and said, ‘Repeat after me.’ Go through Paul’s epistles. He never said anywhere, ‘Now I want you to bow your head and pray this prayer after me.’ Preachers do that! There’s nowhere in Scripture anybody ever did that!

“Christianity is not a set of formulas or a theology for you to master. It’s a person for you to trust. Now the way you trust Him is by trusting His Word. Understand it isn’t a bunch of theological points—it’s HIM.

“If you ever could get this through your head—God doesn’t want your perfection. All the perfection preaching that’s out there—the rules, the regulations, the standards: ‘You gotta do this, you gotta do that.’ If God wanted perfection, you know what He would have done? He’d have just stayed home! He had it in heaven all around Him. There’s no imperfection in heaven, if that’s all He wanted.

“You know what He wants out of you? All He wants is your trust. He wants you to trust Him. He wants you to believe Him. He wants you to rely on Him. When God put Adam and Eve in the Garden and He said, ‘Don’t eat of that tree,’ He wanted them just to trust Him. To say, ‘He’s got our best interest at heart and if He says, ‘Don’t do that,’ He’s got a good reason for it and I’m just going to trust Him.’

“The whole problem with Adam and Eve was they came to the place where they didn’t trust God. And in Gen. 3:22, when God drove them out of the garden, He said, ‘The man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ They didn’t know good and evil because they were trusting God to know it. They no longer trusted God’s word about it, and the problem was they weren’t trusting.

“The thing God is most concerned about for you is freedom. That’s what faith is all about. Faith is the ability for you to have the absolute complete freedom in your inner person to do exactly what you choose to do. Without that personal privacy, you can’t make a personal choice—a free choice—and God loves freedom. He loved it so much He was willing to risk it—risk His whole plan in Christ on giving you freedom. He gave it to Adam.

“If you need to find purpose and meaning while you’re here and who you are, where do you find it? You better not find it in your job because it might not last. You don’t want it in your performance because you’re going to get old and slow down. You need your identity in something that doesn’t change. Chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow only leaves you wet and unsatisfied.

“Paul says, “If our gospel be hid it’s hid to them who are lost.’ So what’s the problem lost people have? Their minds have been blinded by the Adversary. That’s why Paul says ‘we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood.’ There’s a spiritual battle going on in the lives of people.

“You know what the problem with being lost is? It’s not that you’ve got this particular sin or that particular sin in your life; it’s that you’re dead. You know why lost people can’t save themselves? Same reason a dead guy can’t get out of a coffin. He’s dead!

“You see when you think you can do something, you don’t realize the desperate strait you’re in. The Bible says you’re ‘alienated from the life of God.’ (Eph. 4:18) So what you need is life, and that’s something you can’t give yourself. You see that’s what religion misses. Religion goes back to Adam and Eve in the Garden and man’s attempt to try and reconcile himself back to God on works.

“It’s when you simply trust in Christ’s death at Calvary to pay for all that’s wrong with you that God can then give you His righteousness in Christ. And when you’ve got God’s righteousness, then He can give you His eternal life, which is the resurrection side of it. We forget the reason He cleansed us is so that He could then fill us with His life.

“How does God the Father take you and put you into Christ Jesus? Paul says, “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body.” How you get into Christ? God the Holy Spirit takes you and baptizes you into the Body of Christ and that happens the moment you trust Him.

“Now you don’t feel it, you don’t sense it; it’s a non-experiential thing that happens, but it’s something just as real as anything physical you experience. In fact, it’s more real than a lot of what you experience because a lot of times you experience things and your experience turns out to be not too very reliable.

“When the Bible says we have eternal life as a present possession, that’s not just that when I die I go to heaven, but it’s that I have that life right now—as my life! Paul says, ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live.’ When you really get a grip on that, and that gets a grip on you, and you begin to study in God’s Word about what God’s doing today in forming the Body of Christ. . .

“I mean, why did He equip you to live on Planet Earth for His glory? Because He’s got something He’s going to do with you for Himself in the ages to come. That’s what you learn in the first half of Colossians 1—you learn about this great cosmic plan that God has to glorify Himself through His Son Jesus Christ.

“He’s going to do it on earth through a kingdom given to the nation Israel. That’s what the Bible calls prophecy. That’s what God’s been talking about since the time He put man on the earth. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ And the verse says, ‘The earth was without form and void.’ It’s that literal earthly purpose God has to make His Son the head of the government of Planet Earth.

“But He also created the heavens, and just like He puts a government in the earth, He puts a government in the angelic realm. He has an agency to exalt His Son there too, and that’s what the church the Body of Christ is all about.

“God has one purpose—to glorify Himself in His Son—but He’s going to do it in two realms. One is in the earth through Israel and one is in the heavens through the Body of Christ. That’s why He has a program in the Bible called prophecy—what He’s been teaching and preaching about since the foundation of the world—and a program He calls ‘the mystery’—a separate distinct program that was kept secret in God since the foundation of the world but was then revealed to us through Paul’s ministry.

“As Paul writes in Romans 16, ‘Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, But now is made manifest.’

“That verse is designed to make you grow up spiritually, and if you don’t get this verse you’re never going to grow up spiritually. You’re always going to be a little spiritual pygmy; a spiritual baby on milk. You’re never going to be an adult who eats meat, sits at the table and does work for God on an adult basis.

“He says the ‘preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery.’ It’s HE who has to be related to. You see the relationship is to Him, not to a bunch of doctrines, creeds and thinking patterns. I’ve got a relationship with Him!

“Galatians 4:19 says ‘until Christ be formed in you.’ What’s Paul want to live in you? Your dependence is to be on who God has made you in Christ. That is, your total dependence on him—that’s what faith is all about.

“Paul says, ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.’ Any system that takes you away from just resting in Christ, he says, ‘Beware.’ He says in Colossians 1:28, ‘Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.’

“That means watch out for the error, the false. ‘Teaching every man’ is what the verse in Galatians 4 is about when it says, ‘Until Christ be formed in you.’ He’s formed in the believer through the doctrines of His Word. The Word in the Bible is called ‘edification.’ It’s building up in your understanding that doctrine that really is the mind of Christ. I Corinthians 2:15 says, ‘For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.’

“If you want to know somebody, you really need to know them to know their mind about something, don’t you? You know you can’t look at somebody and tell what they’re thinking. I know you think you can, but you really can’t. Until a person speaks their mind, you don’t know their mind. If you’re going to know a person, that’s how you’ll know him.

“How do you have the mind of Christ? It’s in His Word. Paul says ‘it is God who works in you to will and do His good pleasure.’ How does He work in you to will and do His good pleasure? Does He just come down out of heaven and go, ‘Whap!’? Drill a hole in your noggin, cram it in and cork it up so it doesn’t get out? No. He gives you His Word so you have an objective standard to read and to study.

“That’s why the Bible version issue is such an important thing. Hey, folks, if that’s the mind of Christ, you don’t want to have something in it that ought not be there and something left out that ought to be there. That’s an important thing and that’s why Satan attacks that.

“You’re going to get the mind of Christ formed in you by believing some words on a page in a book. And you know why you want to pray about that? Because when you see the words on the pages of the book they scare you to death, don’t they? They begin to change your life. For some folks they change where they go to church. They change what you think about things.

“And you know what comes along when that happens? It changes what other people think about you. Then you begin to find out who you’re really interested in pleasing. God’s Word is a wonderful book. It reads you more thoroughly than you read it. It’s a ‘discerner of the thoughts and intents of your heart’ more than you’re a discerner of it.”