The Hour You Are Actually Living In
The season you live changes what faith looks like
There is a phrase that appears in Scripture with a kind of urgency that modern readers tend to absorb as background noise.
The time is short.
We hear it and nod and continue. It has been said so often, across so many centuries and so many sermons, that the edge has been worn off it. It no longer lands with the force it was carrying when it was written. And yet the text keeps returning to it, as if the writers understood that this particular truth, more than most, required repetition precisely because the human tendency to drift toward comfortable indefiniteness is so persistent and so powerful.
Paul writing to the Corinthians: “But this I say, brethren, the time is short” (1 Corinthians 7:29, NKJV). Peter: “But the end of all things is at hand; therefore be serious and watchful in your prayers” (1 Peter 4:7, NKJV). John in Revelation: “Behold, I am coming quickly” (Revelation 22:12, NKJV). The urgency is not incidental to the message. It is the context in which the message arrives. And a faith that has been quietly stripped of its urgency is a faith that has been subtly weakened at one of its load-bearing walls.
What does it actually mean to live as though the time is short? Not anxiously, not in a state of perpetual alarm about prophetic timelines, not in the way that produces the kind of breathless intensity that burns out after six months and leaves people more disillusioned than before. The urgency the text is pointing to is not that kind. It is the urgency of a person who knows that the window of opportunity for certain things is real and finite, and who therefore brings to each day the quality of attention it would receive from someone who understood that not every day is guaranteed to be followed by another.
Peter says to be serious and watchful in prayer. The word translated serious carries the sense of being of sound mind, exercising proper judgment about what actually matters, not being swept along by the currents of distraction that the culture is continuously offering. Watchfulness and prayer are the two practices he names, and the combination is not accidental. Prayer keeps the connection to the source alive. Watchfulness keeps the awareness sharp, the recognition that what is at stake is real and the complacency that is always available is not a safe place to rest.
Paul, writing his own account of the spiritual life, does not describe a person who has arrived at a comfortable plateau. “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me” (Philippians 3:12, NKJV). The pressing is present tense. It is ongoing. He describes himself as forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward, straining toward what lies ahead. This is not the posture of a person who has finished the work and is waiting for the results to be announced. This is the posture of a person who understands that the race is not over and is running accordingly.
The opposition is also real and also present tense. Peter does not describe a defeated adversary. He describes one who “walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8, NKJV). The seeking is active. The activity is current. And the response the text calls for is not bravado or fearless confidence that the threat is negligible. It is sobriety, vigilance, and resistance, grounded not in self-confidence but in the faith that what has been provided for the believer is more than adequate for every attack that will come.
Fear and trembling, Paul says, is the appropriate posture in working out salvation. Not terror. Not the fear that God is looking for a reason to condemn. The fear that knows the weight of what is at stake and does not treat it as an abstraction. The fear that stays awake rather than drifting. The fear that keeps the hands busy rather than folded in idle waiting for circumstances to improve before effort begins.
The promise left to the believer is genuine and its terms are accessible. But the person who treats that promise as a cushion to rest on rather than a foundation to build from has misread what it was given for. A promise received in full comfort, with no corresponding seriousness about the conditions attached to it, is not a promise being received. It is a promise being borrowed from without being entered into.
What was given, and what it was given to produce in the person who genuinely receives it, is the other side of the urgency question.
Focus Verse: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." — 1 Peter 5:8 (NKJV)
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