On Old-Fashioned Sunday, Pastor Devon Ortiz turned to a doctrine the early church preached often but is rarely heard from pulpits today: the return of Jesus Christ. Reading from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (“the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout… and the dead in Christ shall rise first”), he made the case that the second coming is not trivia about the future but a truth meant to reshape how we live now. After salvation, he noted, Christ’s return is the most-discussed subject in the New Testament.

Why the church stopped preaching it

The doctrine is often avoided because it gets misused. It can breed arrogance (“my way is right and everyone else is wrong”), laziness (“he may not come, so it doesn’t matter”), and outright foolishness: date-setters like Harold Camping, and more recently a preacher who led thousands to sell their homes and possessions before being exposed as a fraud. None of that is what the doctrine teaches. Misuse, Pastor Ortiz argued, is one reason pulpits go quiet on Christ’s return, but abuse is no reason for neglect.

A lesson from the first coming

To learn how to wait for the second coming, look at who was ready for the first. The Pharisees had every advantage (Micah 5:2 gave the birthplace, Isaiah 53 the profile, Daniel 9:24-27 the timing), yet they missed him. They “had all the education and none of the discernment.” Their failure was not ignorance but pride: they “studied to define a system, not to encounter a Savior.” A devout remnant, Simeon, Zacharias, and likely Mary, was watching instead. Scripture describes Simeon with the word prosdechomai: an active, forward-leaning expectation, the posture of someone leaning in because they know it is coming. That posture, not mere knowledge, is what honors God.

Where Victory Baptist stands

Pastor Ortiz briefly surveyed the major views (amillennialism, postmillennialism, historic premillennialism, dispensational premillennialism, and the pre-wrath position), then stated the church’s own: a pre-tribulation rapture, held not as “escape theology” but on four pillars:

1. The tribulation belongs to Israel, not the church. Jeremiah’s “time of Jacob’s trouble” and Daniel’s seventieth week (Daniel 9:24-27) concern Israel; the church does not appear in that prophecy.

2. The church is not appointed to wrath. “God hath not appointed us to wrath” (1 Thessalonians 5:9); “I will keep thee from the hour of temptation” (Revelation 3:10).

3. The rapture and the second coming are distinct events. The “caught up” of verse 17 is harpazo, a sudden, bodily snatching, happening “in the air,” unlike the return to the Mount of Olives in Zechariah 14:4. And verse 18 calls it a comfort, which it could not be if the church had to endure the tribulation.

4. Christ’s return is imminent. No sign must precede it. Titus 2:13 calls it “the blessed hope,” something to look forward to, not a dread to brace for.

The point of prophecy

“Prophecy is not made so we can know the future. God doesn’t need us to know it; he already lives it. Prophecy is made so we can change who we are today.” From that hinge Pastor Ortiz drew four responses.

1. Prepare

“Crises do not produce disciples; they expose the absence of one.” Because no warning precedes the rapture (Matthew 24:44, “in such an hour as ye think not”), readiness must be a settled way of life, not a last-minute scramble. The ten virgins (Matthew 25) all heard the announcement and all carried lamps; only five had oil. Pastor Ortiz illustrated it with his boyhood habit of rushing to fake-clean the house before his mother got home, then the day she arrived early and caught him unprepared. The question for every listener: are you prepared to stand face to face with your Savior?

2. Proclaim

The moment the rapture occurs, the window to tell others about Christ closes. Those “which have no hope” (verse 13) are the people without Christ around us, and the second coming creates urgency to reach them now. “If it’s today, I have very little time to see God save those who need it.” Relationship proximity matters: the people in our lives will open up to us more readily than to a stranger, and most who come to faith do so young. The charge was concrete: write down one name to share the gospel with.

3. Purify

“Hope does not make you comfortable in this world; it makes this world look as small as it actually is.” Drawing on 1 Thessalonians 4:1-11, Pastor Ortiz reframed holiness: not a checklist of what you wear or where you go, but the fruit of closeness to God, as Moses’ face shone when he came down the mountain. The clearest evidence of holiness, he said, is attitude; a bad attitude reveals both distance from God and a lack of maturity. “We don’t clean the house once the guests arrive; we clean it now, because he’s coming soon.”

4. Produce

“The rapture is not an escape from accountability; it is our entrance into accountability.” After meeting the Lord in the air (verse 17) comes the judgment seat of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:10), not condemnation for the believer, but evaluation. Salvation is not on the table; reward is. Self-serving works burn away as wood, hay, and stubble (1 Corinthians 3:12-15), while what is offered to God endures as gold, silver, and precious stone.

The invitation

Pastor Ortiz closed with Charles Wesley’s hymn “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending,” whose stanzas trace the same four movements, and pressed the question home: Are you leaning in toward “maybe today”? Are you prepared, proclaiming, purified, producing? The appeal was not to dress up for one special Sunday but to live, every day, as people who genuinely expect their Lord’s return.