Relax and Be Raptured

I used to have a neighbor who was a retired Christian man, and every time I saw him, he'd be sitting in front of a TV set and he would open the conversation, I'm just waiting for the rapture. One day I asked him, didn't he want to see more folks saved or did he just want to sit around waiting for the rapture for himself, but he was content to just sit in front of his TV and wait for the rapture. And I believe that old boy's attitude sums up many in our churches today who have adopted the mentality of relax and be raptured.

And that's the tale of my message this evening, friends. Relax and be raptured. I believe that kind of thinking makes us lazy evangelists, keeps us from praying for the lost, hinders the work revival, stagnates Bible study, and polarizes our everyday witness to the lost around us.

A relax and be raptured mentality will kill vital Christianity and stifle the preaching of the gospel. We won't preach on hell and its terrors because we're all going to be raptured anyhow. If so many in our churches today who hold this belief of the rapture of the church, then they sure aren't living like it.

If they really believed that the time was so short and Jesus was so close to coming back again, they wouldn't waste God's precious time on TV and entertaining themselves with the nonsense of Hellywood. Yes, I said Hellywood. I used to live up in Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard.

My driver's license read Hollywood, California. But I can assure you, friends, it may as well read Hellywood just the same. Because that's where all the hell comes from that spills out and pollutes this country through the medium of the television and motion picture industry.

You want to desensitize yourself to sin? Then just watch more programming from Hellywood, where the actresses have faces like angels and the morals of an alley cat. We have allowed this world to desensitize us to the reality of eternity because we spend too much time on reality TV. Our relax-and-be-raptured mentality in our churches is turning out half-baked believers who don't read the Bible themselves.

I've never seen a day in my life, friends, where there's so much apathy and indifference to the spread of the gospel. Instead of our congregations turning out young missionaries who want to go out and risk everything on the foreign soil for the sake of the gospel, we're turning the young people away because of our lukewarm Christianity in our churches. With this relax-and-be-raptured mentality, I don't like drinking lukewarm water.

And Jesus said of the Laodicean church, so then, because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. In other words, the contemporary church, in her current condition, makes him sick to his stomach. I reckon that's why our young people today are sick of church, too.

There's so little reality of God there. How can we maintain a high pursuit of God if we have this mentality of relax-and-be-raptured? But we can change all that, friends, if we just turn back to the God of the Bible with our whole heart and give him our undivided affection instead of sharing it with the empty amusements of this world. Why can't we turn off the TV and instead go out and hand out some tracts and witness to folks instead of just sitting there aimlessly in front of that one-eyed monster until our eyes grow as big as saucers and our brains the size of a pea? I wonder what would happen if we turned off the TV long enough and went to the next room and got down on our faces before God in prayer and cried out to God for our wicked community.

Maybe God would then come clean up our community. Maybe if we interceded more for the young people who are on a fast track to hell, then maybe God would save more of them from hell. Maybe if we turned off our TV long enough and gave God that time in prayer for revival, maybe God would send revival to our families and to our nation.

Why give our free time to our TV idol? An idol is something you sacrifice to. And how much valuable time is sacrificed to TV viewing? We have sunken into an easy chair in a relax-and-be-raptured mentality of indifference and apathy while souls perish by the minute into a burning hell. But God says in his word, return to me and I will return to you.

Will we do it?