If Christ is not our life, if we are not living in total dependence on His Person and Presence, then we are not ready to appear with Him in glory. This means that the majority of churchgoers today may not be prepared for the coming of the Lord—partly because of the false teaching surrounding the catching up ("rapture") of the believers.

The personal fulfillment of the feasts flows from and is part of the kingdom-wide fulfillment. The kingdom-wide fulfillment benefits the elect only as they experience the personal fulfillment.

The death of Christ on the cross of Calvary benefits us only as we appropriate this kingdom-wide fulfillment in personal fulfillment. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost benefits us only as we appropriate this event, bringing it into our experience.

So it is true that the kingdom-wide fulfillment of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles will benefit us only as we experience them in individual, personal fulfillment.

One of the greatest errors in contemporary Christian thinking is that the culminating acts of redemption will fall upon the believers without any present or future exercise of faith and obedience on their part. The current belief is that the coming of the Lord and the resurrection from the dead will bring to each Christian, no matter how lukewarm and worldly, a sovereign, inevitable deliverance.

The idea is that we shall be ready to meet the Lord and return with Him in glory because at some previous point we have made a profession of belief in His death and resurrection. We accepted Christ years ago and now we are waiting for Him to come and take us to Heaven, after which we shall return as the mightiest of kings and lords. Even if we did not have the Scriptures, our common sense ought to warn us that something is wrong with such thinking!

The spiritual aspects of the coming of Christ, the resurrection from the dead, and the Day of the Lord, are taking place in the victorious saints now just as they have in the victorious saints throughout church history.

It is now that the Lord comes to His elect. It is now that the spiritual power of the resurrection is to be grasped (Philippians 3:10,11). It is now that the Day of the Lord dawns in our hearts (II Peter 1:19; Revelation 2:28). He who has an ear to hear and eyes to see always will know of the Lord's working. He who waits for these events to happen to him will not be prepared and will have his portion with the unbelievers.

Let us consider the following verse:

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (John 14:3)

"I will come again, and receive you unto myself."

The context of John 14:3, which is verses 2-23 of the fourteenth chapter, suggests that verse three is not referring to the worldwide appearing of the Lord but to the coming of Jesus to the individual believer.

To be continued.