Seventh-day Adventists believe strongly in the soon return of Jesus. So strongly, in fact, that our denomination’s founders put the second-advent doctrine into the very name of our denomination. That’s why we call ourselves "Adventists."

But, as a whole, Seventh-day Adventists—especially the young—don’t look forward with eager anticipation to the second advent. And I would suggest that a major reason is that we don’t feel "ready."

Adventists talk a lot about "being ready" and "getting ready" for the coming of Jesus. But what does readiness entail?

Does it mean being perfect? Not if I understand my Bible correctly. We read in 1 John 1:8 (NIV): "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."

Those are strong words—"deceive ourselves"…"the truth is not in us." And the text says nothing about any future point when those words won’t apply. It doesn’t say, "But before Jesus comes there’s going to be a group of people who will have it together so totally that they’ll be able to say they’re without sin."

Just in case the foregoing words aren’t strong enough, however, God, through the writer John, repeats and rephrases the statement a couple of verses later (1 John 1:10 NIV): "If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives."

Some might argue that John is here talking about claiming to have never, ever, ever sinned—but that it wouldn’t be inappropriate to claim that we haven’t sinned in, let’s say, the past twenty-four hours or the past two years. That would be acceptable. The problem comes only if we claim to have been perfect from square one.

That’s not how I read the text, however—especially when I couple it with 1 John 1:8. There we have the present continuous—"If we claim to be without sin.…"

But, in a sense, I digress. My point about our fear of the second coming revolves around our use of the word ready, which inevitably conjures up images of the need for (if not perfection, at least) a substantially improved level of performance.

And we’re not sure we’re there yet. If perfect performance is the goal, we can be quite certain that we’re not ready. And since we don’t want to find ourselves on the outside, where all the weeping and gnashing of teeth is going on, we hope deep down inside that Jesus will just stay away. At least for now.

I suggest that there are better questions than Am I ready? Ask instead, Is Jesus my Friend? Is Jesus my Savior and Lord? If we can say Yes to those questions, then how could we possibly be any more ready?

Remember the thief on the cross? On the scale of behavioral improvement he hadn’t made much progress. But he had, to quote Jesus’ own words (used elsewhere), "crossed over from death to life" (John 5:24 NIV). He was so ready for the second coming that Jesus could promise him that it was as good as done (Luke 23: 42, 43).

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