Holy Waiting: How the Return of Christ Should Shape the Way You Live Today
There is a strange irony at the heart of modern wedding culture. Couples will spend tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours planning a single ceremony, pouring meticulous attention into flowers, venues, and seating charts, while giving almost no thought to the decades of marriage that follow. The ceremony, after all, is only meaningful because of what it points toward. When the planning consumes everything and the actual marriage receives nothing, something has gone deeply wrong.
Many Christians make the exact same mistake when it comes to the return of Jesus Christ.
The question of when Christ will return has generated endless books, prophecy conferences, elaborate charts, and social media rabbit holes. And yet the New Testament is remarkably uninterested in answering that question. In fact, Jesus himself declared plainly in Matthew 24:36 that no one knows the day or the hour, not even the angels, not even the Son, but the Father alone. What the New Testament is deeply interested in is a different question entirely: given that Christ will return, how should we live right now?
That is the question the Apostle Paul addresses in 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, and the answer he gives is both clarifying and convicting.
The Day of the Lord: What It Is and Where It Comes From
Paul opens this passage by invoking a phrase loaded with Old Testament meaning: the day of the Lord. The prophet Amos first wrote it down in Amos 5:18-20, where he delivered a jarring correction to the people of Israel. Many of them were eagerly anticipating the day of the Lord, imagining it as a day of vindication for them and judgment for their Gentile enemies. Amos dismantled that assumption with vivid force. The day of the Lord, he warned, is darkness and not light. It is like fleeing a lion only to meet a bear, or escaping into your house only to be bitten by a serpent. There is no escape for the unrighteous, Jew or Gentile alike.
Jesus picked up this imagery in Matthew 24 and expanded it in a striking way. He described the day of the Lord as coming like a thief in the night, a detail not found anywhere in the Old Testament. And in doing so, he did something else remarkable: he identified himself as the one coming on that day. In the Old Testament, the day of the Lord is the day Yahweh comes in judgment. Jesus applied that same language to himself, a quiet but unmistakable claim to divine identity.
Paul draws directly on this teaching from Jesus. When he writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:2 that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, he is not reaching back to Amos. He is repeating what Jesus taught. And that context shapes everything that follows.
Two Groups, Two Experiences
Paul describes the day of the Lord differently depending on who is receiving it. For those who have persistently rejected the grace of God offered through the gospel, the day will arrive exactly as a thief arrives: sudden, unexpected, and bringing loss. They will be saying “peace and security” right up until the moment destruction falls, much like Belshazzar feasting in Babylon while enemy armies surrounded the city walls. Paul is not being cruel in saying this. He is being honest. And his honesty is itself a form of mercy, a warning to anyone still standing outside the grace of Christ.
But for those who are in Christ, the picture is entirely different. Paul says plainly: you are not in darkness. You are children of light, children of the day. The day of the Lord will not overtake you like a thief, not because you know when it is coming, but because you know that it is coming, and you are living accordingly.
A Chain of Metaphors with a Single Point
To explain what prepared living looks like, Paul builds a vivid chain of contrasting images. On one side: darkness, night, sleep, drunkenness. On the other: day, light, wakefulness, sobriety. These are not random word choices. Each pairing reinforces the same truth. Those who live as though Christ is not returning are spiritually asleep, stumbling in the dark, unaware of what is approaching. Those who live in light of his return are awake, alert, and clothed in the armor of faith, love, and the hope of salvation.
The same contrast runs throughout Paul’s other letters. In Ephesians 5:8-9, he urges believers who were once in darkness to walk as children of light, with lives characterized by what is good, right, and true. In Romans 13:11-14, he calls believers to wake from sleep because salvation is nearer than when they first believed, and to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. That passage famously struck Augustine to the core as he sat in a garden in spiritual crisis, and he rose from reading it a changed man.
The consistent message across all these texts is the same: the proper response to the coming of Christ is not calculation, but transformation. Not figuring out when, but becoming who God has called you to be.
Encouraging One Another Along the Way
Paul closes this passage with a word that is easy to overlook but deeply practical. He calls believers to encourage one another and build one another up. This is not a sentimental add-on. It is a recognition that the race is long and the finish line is not always visible. The world, the flesh, and the enemy are all working to lull believers into spiritual sleep, to convince them that holiness is old-fashioned, that eternity is not quite real, that sitting down is easier than running.
What every believer needs is someone running alongside them, reminding them that the finish line is real, that the effort is worth it, that the day is coming when they will hear the words they most long to hear.
Hebrews 10:24-25 makes the same appeal, urging believers not to give up meeting together but to encourage one another all the more as they see the day approaching.
Every day that passes, the return of Christ is one day closer than it was yesterday. That is not a reason for anxiety. It is a reason for holy, joyful, wide-awake living. Not obsessing over when, but being ready for whenever. Not sleeping through the night, but walking in the light.
That is what it means to wait well.