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Welcome to Daily Drive Time Devotions. We're looking in our fourth day of our
look at 1st Thessalonians chapter 4, verses 13 to 16 today. These truths about
the Second Coming that are contained in this chapter are all about hope.

There's only one right foundation for the future. There's one foundation only
for the future that I can build on, that you can build on, that's going to
guarantee a life of security, a life of joy, and that is the foundation of hope.
It's the only foundation that lasts.

There's an incredible difference between a wish about the future and a hope for
the future. If it's not built on the truth, it's just a wish. If it's not built
on a certainty, it's just a wish.

It's not a hope. A hope has to be something that you are absolutely certain of.
Well, only God knows the future.

I don't, you don't, but God does. So God alone can give us hope for the future.
He can tell us what we can be certain of.

In Jesus Christ, we have a hope for the future. We have a certainty about what
God's going to do. And Paul, in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 13, talks about
this hope.

He starts in a way that might make you wonder at first. He says, "Brothers, we
don't want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep. " Fall asleep, he's
talking about those who have died, believers who have died.

Hope has to be built on truth. And Paul is saying, "I don't want you to be
ignorant because then you won't have hope. " He doesn't want you to be ignorant
of the truth.

You hear a lot about the second coming. And some of it is based on truth. Some
of it based on hope.

Some of it's based on fear. Some of it's the truth. Some of it's just one
person's opinion.

If it's not the truth, it doesn't matter how many people say they believe it.
It's a foundation that in the end will fail. I know a lot of people who are
talking about the second coming, even interested in the second coming, but they
never built a foundation of understanding the truth of the second coming.

They've never gotten the foundation of the truth down in their life. Well, 1
Thessalonians chapter 4 is where you start. Paul in this chapter writes some
very practical answers to some questions that they'd written to ask him about.

In fact, the whole letter is written back to them based on some questions that
they'd asked Paul. He writes to them not just because they have some
intellectual interest in the second coming. He writes to them not just because
of their curiosity about when Jesus Christ would come again.

Paul's writing to them here grows out of a very personal concern that these
people had. Listen to what he had to say, beginning again in verse 13.
"Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep or to
grieve like the rest of men who have no hope.

We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring
with Jesus those who have fallen asleep with him. According to the Lord's own
word, we tell you that we who are alive, who are left till the coming of the
Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. " Paul had told
them about the second coming when he'd been with them for two or three weeks and
started this church, and they believed it.

They believed God's word, God's truth. Paul had taught them about this, and they
had a sense of the fact that Jesus might come again at any moment. Paul hadn't
given them any dates or times.

He just told them it could be at any moment, and they believed this. Between the
time when Paul had taught them this and the time when he wrote this letter, some
of their friends, some of their relatives had died, and they began to have some
questions. The questions that the Thessalonians were facing were questions like,
would they see their loved ones again?

Were they somehow separated now? Where were their loved ones now? Would their
loved ones face God's judgment somehow when Jesus returned?

God has an answer to these questions. He doesn't want us to be ignorant. Why is
it important that we as Christians not be ignorant?

The very answers that are in this chapter, "so that we'll know what has happened
to those that we love, and so that we'll not grieve as those who have no hope. "
If the world can't see hope from you as a believer, it can't see hope. So there
are clear answers to these questions when you look at what Paul has to say about
the second coming of Christ here.

He talks first of all about what will happen, and as he talks about this, there
are four things that he talks about. He talks about return, resurrection,
rapture, and reunion. Remember those four words.

We're going to talk about them the next two days together. Return, resurrection,
rapture, and reunion. He talks to this group of people that's confused, that's
wondering what's going to happen when Jesus comes again, and he says first of
all, return.

Jesus is going to return. The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a
loud command in verse 16, with the voice of an archangel, with the trumpet call
of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. There is no doubt as you study
the scripture that the Bible teaches Jesus Christ not only came the first time
to earth, but he is coming again.

One scholar estimated that there are 1,845 references to Christ's second coming
in the Old Testament, where 17 books give it prominence. In the 260 chapters of
the New Testament, there are 318 references to the second coming of Christ. One
out of 30 verses, 23 of the 27 New Testament books refer to the second coming of
Christ.

For every prophecy in the Bible concerning Jesus' first coming to this planet,
there are eight which look forward to his second, to his return. This is a truth
that is throughout the Bible because God doesn't want us to miss the hope. Jesus
Christ is going to return.

When Jesus Christ returns, as you look throughout the New Testament, two major
things happen. First, he gathers the Church to himself, the personal return
where he gathers the Church, the Bride of Christ, and secondly, he judges the
world, those who do not know him, the visible return of Christ. Now, without
getting into a long discussion, some people think these happen simultaneously.

Others think that they happen with a period of time in between them called, you
might have heard called the tribulation. In this passage, Paul is talking about
the first of these, the gathering of the Church, and it's interesting to me as
he talks about Jesus' return that these verses pay particular attention to the
sounds that will accompany the second coming of Christ with a loud command, of
the voice of the Archangel with the trumpet call of God. There will be a loud
command.

John 525 says, "I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the
dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. " Now,
if the dead will hear and will live, let's just follow the thinking of those in
Thessalonica here. Does that mean somehow that they're not living until Jesus
comes again?

If they've already died, are they somehow not living until they hear him in his
return? That their soul and body go into a grave and they're asleep and then
when Jesus returns maybe they come back to life? Is that what the Bible is
teaching here?

Well, let me give you the answer now and then we'll play it out in a few
minutes. The answer is that is not what the Bible is teaching. In a moment,
we'll see that what the Bible teaches about the difference between our soul and
body when we die helps us to understand the resurrection of the body.

But here, I want you to hear the sound. Jesus returns with a loud command. We'll
respond to his voice.

It's with the voice of an archangel. Daniel chapter 12 verse 1 talks about an
archangel by the name of Michael. In fact, he's the only angel that's called an
archangel in the Bible.

At that time, Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will stand up.
The idea in this chapter is the angel standing to call the people. In Daniel 12,
1, Michael is talked about in regards to the second coming of Christ.

Standing up, the loud command of God, the voice of the angel and then finally
you have the trumpet call of God. It's going to be quite a day. This anticipated
trumpet call.

The Bible talks about this in 1 Corinthians 15, 51, and 52. Very important
verses when it comes to understanding what's going to happen at the end of time.
Let me read those verses, 1 Corinthians 15, 51, and 52.

Let me tell you a wonderful secret God has revealed to us. Not all of us will
die, but we will all be transformed. It will happen in a moment, in the blinking
of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown.

For when the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with
transformed bodies. And then we who are living will be transformed so that we
will never die. These verses echo what we're studying here in 1 Thessalonians
chapter 4.

Look at what happens when the trumpet sounds. The Christians who have died,
what's going to happen to them? The Bible says they're going to be raised with
transformed bodies.

Now remember the word bodies, we're going to come back to it in a minute. Very
important about what happens to us when we die. They're going to be raised with
transformed bodies.

And then we who are alive will be transformed in the body so that we'll never
die. We don't have to die and then be raised with a transformed body, we're just
immediately transformed. We're going to see what's going to happen exactly with
that in our study tomorrow.

But first, what happens to those who've already died in Christ when Jesus
returns? The Thessalonians were very concerned about these people. We've talked
about return, the first of our four words.

The second word is resurrection. The dead in Christ will rise. The dead in
Christ will rise first.

Paul had been asked about those who died, those who had fallen asleep. The word
sleep in Greek is "kymatereion". It's the word from which we get our word
cemetery.

Cemetery comes from the Greek word, it means a place where our bodies sleep. And
the New Testament teaches that our bodies rest there until the resurrection to
be with the Lord. But listen to this, our spirits, when we die, go immediately
to be with the Lord.

And let me explain, when you die, if you die before Jesus comes again, is your
body immediately resurrected? No. Remember, when Jesus died and was resurrected
three days later, they went back in the tomb, they looked in the tomb and the
body wasn't there.

It had been transformed. It was resurrected to become a perfect body that would
last forever. His body disappeared because it was resurrected.

When a believer dies today, does his body, does her body disappear after three
days or five days? No. When you and I die as believers, we're not immediately
resurrected in the body.

Does that mean that when I die, my soul stays with my body and somehow it goes
to the grave and waits for Jesus to come again? The answer to that is also no. I
think most of us know intuitively that when we die, our spirit and our body
separate.

The Bible teaches us that our body stays here on earth, but our spirit goes to
be with the Lord. You don't have to study the Bible very long to discover this
truth. Jesus talked about it on the cross when he said to the thief, "Today
you're going to be with me in paradise.

" The thief's body stayed on earth, but his spirit was immediately with Jesus.
Not when I come back, when I return, but today you'll be with me in paradise.
Paul talked about it to the Philippians when he said, "To depart from this body
is to be present with the Lord.

" A sense of immediacy. Again and again, the Bible focuses on this fact. Hebrews
12 says that we go to heaven to be with the spirits of those who've been made
perfect in the Lord.

So if you and I die now, our spirits go immediately to be with the Lord in
heaven. The Bible's very clear about that. The Bible doesn't tell us what we're
going to look like in our spiritual body, so I don't know.

I don't know exactly what a spiritual body looks like, but the Bible does say
I'm going to be present with the Lord, and that is what is most important to me.
If you have somebody who's a believer that you know, you know they've trusted
Christ and they've died, there is no doubt in my mind at all, because I believe
the Bible leaves no doubt at all, that they're immediately in the presence of
the Lord. To me, that is encouraging.

To me, that is hope, but it's not the end of the story. There's a resurrection
that's going to happen someday. If our spirits immediately go to be with the
Lord, is that the way that it always stays?

No. When do we get our resurrected body? Well, that's where we're going to begin
our study tomorrow, because this is a subject that takes two days to reflect on
and look at in this incredible chapter, 1st Thessalonians chapter 4.

As we close today, I'd like to close with a spirit of thanksgiving. Just tell
Jesus thank you, because when he talks about his return, to him it's a very
personal thing. Let's pray together.

Jesus, thank you that you're coming again. As we read what you have to say in
the scripture about your return, it is often not about dates and events. It's
about love.

It's about your desire to be with us, and for us to be with you for eternity.
Lord, help us to think about the second coming personally, because it is your
personal return. And God, I admit that I don't think about it enough.

I pray that you'd help me to think about what will happen at the end of my life
as a daily consideration in the way that I live my life. I ask this in Jesus'
name, amen.