When Will Jesus Come

The speaker begins by proclaiming that Scripture foretells a future completely renewed world where Christ will reign for a thousand years, followed by the creation of a new heaven and earth. He then asks the central question, “When will Jesus come?” and explains that Jesus warned his disciples to beware of deception, linking the rise of confusion, frustration, and widespread iniquity to the signs of the imminent return. He points to today’s moral decline—sin now visible in media, churches, and public life—as evidence that the boundaries of wrongdoing have been broken, and he argues that this growing lawlessness, along with apostasy in the church, signals the approaching Second Coming. The sermon moves on to critique modern attempts to improve society through legislation and social reform, insisting that true transformation comes only through personal conversion. The pastor stresses that the church’s primary task is evangelism, not social work, because a changed heart prevents the sins that cause societal decay. He warns of a coming ecumenical, world‑wide church that will compromise biblical truth and become a vehicle for the Antichrist, urging believers to remain separate, uphold holy living, and stand as beacons of the gospel amid increasing confusion and unity movements. The message concludes with a prayer for faithfulness and vigilance as these signs unfold.

What is Houston's First Baptist Church?

Houston's First Baptist Church is a relevant biblical community where we gather our hearts, grow our souls and give our lives as we seek to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20). This podcast provides weekly messages from Pastor Gregg Matte and others. Visit us at HoustonsFirst.org to learn more about HFBC, and visit us in person the next time you're in Houston!

Thank you, choir. It is a new world. Things are not like they used to be. And the message of the Bible is that it is going to become a completely renovated and totally brand new world one day. Jesus Christ made this world for himself, to get honor to himself, to reign and rule upon, to know him and have fellowship with him. But it has rejected him and has created a chaos. But the will of God, though deferred and detained, will ultimately be done. There will be peace on this world. Righteousness will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The world will bow the knee and know and acknowledge her king. There will be a totally brand new world where Christ shall rule and peace for a thousand years shall be the order of the day. Then the earth and the heavens and the works in them shall be destroyed. There shall be a new heaven and a new earth and on and on. The question is, when will these events begin? When will Jesus come? I read to you last Sunday night that the disciples asked the Lord that question once. And he said, take heed that no man deceive you. And the entire remaining portion of the 24th chapter of Matthew is, I believe, an amplification and explanation of that simple statement that the deception and frustration and confusion and bewilderment of the day at the end of the world will herald the soon coming of Jesus Christ. You see, the Holy Spirit is a clear light, giving clear -cut, definite, specific instruction and direction. Confusion is not of God. Frustration and darkness and deception is not of the Holy Spirit. You can get a question, a controversy, an argument on any subject today. The proponents of confusion are everywhere. You'll find men that believe everything about anything. Nothing seems to be clear unless men return to the Bible and find what thus saith the Lord. And so Jesus tells us that confusion and frustration will be the order of the day. There will be, as I said last Sunday night, confusion in theology, confusion in religion, confusion as to the way of salvation. It is imperative that Jesus come, for if he does not come, the things which are dependent upon his return, the punishment of the devil, the completion of the church, the golden age of peace, and all of these things will never happen. But he will come, and they will be done. Deception and confusion in the world, in religion, in salvation, in theology, and in the church, is but one of the major signs of the coming of Jesus Christ. There are others. Jesus will come when there is confusion and deception and bewilderment as to right and wrong in this world. So, through my lifetime and yours, we have seen probably the most marked change of standards in the world that we have in all of its history. What is right is wrong. What is wrong is right. And what you and I have been raised to believe as valid and authoritative under God is now laughed at as so much Victorian shibboleth. But the truth of the matter is that iniquity is becoming stronger. Fortunately, righteousness in many quarters is increasing as well. Jesus will come when iniquity abounds. This particular rending of the word abound in Matthew 24 literally means unbound or get out of bounds. It has been true through the years that iniquity has had certain limitations, certain boundaries. There were certain things that were only done in secret, in the alley, in the brothel, in so -called dirty movies, in certain forbidden books and certain forbidden mediums. But now, sin is rearing its ugly head. It's in the church. It's in every book. It's on the screen. It's on television. And you and I can sit in the privacy of our own living room and hear words and see things that we never dreamed would be exposed to people publicly when you and I as adults today were children. Iniquity is on the abounding. The modernist is vainly doing his best to convert the world. He works with great social reform. Night and day he attempts to improve his society. But he fails to change the heart. We have more legislation and more laws to control the behavior of man today than the Roman Empire ever knew. Our entire reason and basis for our wonderful system of democracy, perhaps based upon the Roman Empire and her laws and judicial systems and governments, have now increased by sevenfold all of the laws that they had. Law and its entanglement is most difficult. Even today, many lawyers and legislators and lawmakers are attempting to interpret and tangle out, untangle, and make order out of the difficulty and straighten out the problems that are ours because we do not know what the law is. We make new laws to explain the old laws. It is, for example, against the law in Oklahoma City to drive an automobile down the main street of town. That law has been on the books for over 40 years. They never did change it when the horse and buggy went out and the horse, the horseless chariot came in. Man and his frustration in attempting to legislate action by making laws is lost in a maze of bewilderment. We have, in this nation, in the past three and a half years, spent seven billion dollars, three billion dollars, and have passed seven major laws regarding pollution from the government down. And yet, we have, as a commentator said last Sunday on CBS television, made absolutely no progress in the matter of controlling pollution of the waters. Think of it, three billion dollars, seven major laws. Why? Because the Bible says, the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it? And out of the heart proceed the issues of life. Now, I do not believe that law is unimportant, nor do I take any issue with those who are attempting to make the world a better place in which to live. But I want to say simply that the philosophy that man could be saved by his social environment was blown to bits thousands of years ago when God in the Garden of Eden gave man a perfect social environment and he sinned and fell. The world will never be made a better place in which to live until there are better men to live in the world. The heart, desperately wicked, must be changed. Our beloved nation is staggering under the weight of colossal problems that are the result of sin in the human heart. New sinful indulgences are being practiced. A vice squad officer came to our pastor's conference a few days ago and told us within ten blocks of where you and I stand of stories of sin and movies and descriptions of lewd acts and things that I, a grown man, would never have imagined that goes on in the movies that people can walk in and stick a quarter in a slot machine and see every kind of perversion that you can imagine. What is happening? The Bible simply tells us that the mystery of iniquity does already work. The principle of sin, that rebellious nature in the heart of each one of us which really wishes we could act independently of God is growing in its intensity and moving toward the climactic battle of the ages in the battle of Armageddon when righteousness and unrighteousness will meet head -on and settle the question once and for all, whose world is this? Then Jesus is going to come when religious, when religious faithfulness has become frustrated and deceptive and blurry. There was a time that if you could not depend on the government and the court and the cop on the beat, you could at least depend on the church. You could at least depend on what the preacher said. There was one bastion of faithfulness to the truth and the right in our society and that was the faithful preaching of what thus saith the Lord. Today it is a different story. You will search in most cities through church after church after church to find the clarion call of the gospel being preached to men. The Bible says in 2 Thessalonians 2 3, let no man deceive you by any means for that day shall not come except there first be a falling away and the man of sin be revealed. Apostasy, meaning to fall away from the truth, the church being the guardian of the truth, will be a major sign of the coming of Christ. For example, we are witnessing a falling away from the Bible itself. It is not loved and revered in the home. It is not preached in the pulpit. It is not taught in the school. It is not honored in our society. Need I tell you that the average American would spend many more hours a week in front of the television set than in front of the Word of God? Need I tell you that for the first time in 2 ,000 years, the Bible is now not the bestseller, not number one in sales in this world. There's a falling away from the doctrines of the Bible. The world church cannot be built without apostasy, where there is compromise of conviction. There can only be unity. The Bible says, how can two be at walk together except they be agreed? And the great movement toward a world church, one conglomerate of religions, is sacrificing on every hand the major doctrines of the Bible, the Word of God. There is a great falling away from evangelism. The sharp tools, the resources, the intellect, the know -how, the prowess of the church is being misspent and divested in a thousand social reforms. And far too few churches in this world have any time left over to do the main thing. Now, I do not want to seem anti -social. I believe the church is the most important factor in keeping a society from rotting and becoming a decadent and putrefying one than any organization in the world. But listen to me. We are not going to become solvers of world social conditions by dealing with the symptom rather than the disease. It is in the human heart that the issues of life, from which the issues of life proceed. A newspaper wrote me and asked me for a copy of our church budget. They wanted to run an article on the amount of money that we spend in social affairs as opposed to evangelism affairs. I declined to publish that budget. They wrote back and insisted. Again, I said, we do not publish our church budget for the world to sit in judgment on and make a judgment as to whether we are properly giving the right amount to what you define social and evangelistic outreach because they are inseparable. And I further added, when we win a family to Jesus Christ, a young couple like this couple whom you met this morning, when they are saved as the result of evangelistic outreach and a society is kept together, when a home is kept intact, when children are kept from becoming rebels and going on dope and becoming poor, when housing because the family is not together is cared for, when a man is a loyal contributing member of society because he pays his bills, does not rob from his neighbor, does not go on welfare, is not poor and needs to borrow and needs to have a handout to be able to live. We have solved a thousand social problems because we have won that man to Christ. And I refuse to separate the two. I submit to you that there is no greater healing agent in a sick social order than a church that is winning men to Jesus Christ. Ultimately, the only way in this world that you are ever going to keep a big business man from polluting the rivers is not by passing laws, but by winning the man to Christ so that he will not be so selfish that he wants to make money at the sacrifice of my environment. The two are inseparable. We are falling away from evangelism. There is a great apostasy in the church from holy living. The Bible says, come out among them from among them and be ye separate. All through the pages of the word of God, God sets a standard for his people. In every epistle, the message is the same. Listen to the word of God in 2 Corinthians. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. All things are become new. And he adds, come out from among them and touch not the unclean thing. The Bible says, if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not any. Now that does not mean that we do not like to go to a good baseball game, or see a good television program, or enjoy an afternoon at the beach. But it means that if a man has given himself in total to a love of a world system which is diametrically opposed to humility before God through the medium of the gospel, there will be a basic orientation of everything that he is and loves and does toward the will of God, rather than in opposition to him, away from God and the things of the world. The average church member can do anything in this world and get away with it without fear of discipline. While I am not in favor of kicking out all of the sinful church members because I would have to be the first to go, I believe it is the responsibility of the church to increasingly elevate a standard and raise the status of holy living that is commanded by the Word of God. But let me be very clear to say to you that the worse people are, the more they need to be in church. I've said it before, the church is not a showcase for saints. It is a hospital for sinners. I don't mean that every sinner needs to join the church until he has been saved. But when we are converted, we do not become perfect instantaneously. We come just as we are with our sins, our failures, our frustrations, our weakness to his strength and power and sufficiency who takes us where we are and begins to make of us what we ought to be. And we do not go about kicking the weak new baby Christian in the teeth. But again, the church needs to be raising to her young people and her old. God grant that we should ever do less, that there is a standard of holiness, that God expects something from the Christian who is indeed the salt of the earth. And when apostasy abounds and when confusion abounds and falling away and frustration and bewilderment and apostasy and all of these things and iniquity and sin abound in the church, then the Bible says the coming of Jesus Christ is very near. Number four, Jesus will come to this world when the world ecumenical movement is at its zenith. I said to you this morning that everything that the Lord has, Satan counterfeits. He has a counterfeit plan of salvation. He has a counterfeit Savior, a counterfeit Trinity, and he has as well a counterfeit church. Now the Bible says in the last days there will be a pseudo church, a false church, a counterfeit church, and a ecumenical world church that has prostituted its precepts, that has given the virgin purity of the gospel to the harlotry of this world, and there will be confusion and deception and putrefaction and falling away of the world of the church, the body of Jesus Christ. Now it is imperative that there be a movement toward unity before Antichrist can take over this world before the coming of Christ. I have told you that when God's cup of divine indignation is filled to the brim and God can no longer leave his Holy Spirit in the body of believers in a filthy, rebellious world, the rapture of the church will take place and the believers will be caught out. Then for a period of time, three and a half years, sin will be rampant. The world will get all of the sin it wants, and what it has reserved will be released, and the world will experience an awful onslaught of sin. It will be so terrible that men will seek death, but it will flee from them. They will cry for the rocks and the mountains and beg to die, but will be unable to die. Then Jesus Christ is going to come. But before he does, out of the resultant frustration, Antichrist will arise with a plan for world unity. And his plan to bring peace out of frustration will be that the whole problem with the world through the years and the decades and the centuries has been that there have been rules. And a world with no God, no rule, no army, no police, no preaching, no law, no discipline, no regimentation at all is the answer. They will acclaim him as God. They will follow him. Then, for him to be able to overtake, to take over the world and set himself up as God, it will be in parity that the world will be a unified one. We are moving, as you know, toward one world court, one world police system, one world language, English. The English government, British government has gone on our decimal system of finance. There will probably be one world system. There is one world system of weights and measurements. There will be one world church, and when everything is in unity, it will be easy for Antichrist to take over and militate the hosts of the devil against the soon coming hosts of Jesus Christ that preclude the battle of Armageddon. Now, this unified church, the world church, the united church that people are talking about, will be the church of Antichrist, and it will be a prostituted church that perverts and compromises the doctrines of the word of God. And only a faithful remnant will refuse to join and stay true to the gospel. Let them call us funny fundamentalists and conservative clowns, if they will, I choose to stay with the purity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, the Bible tells us that this world church, this harlot church, this unity church, unified church, will be one of great compromise. I challenge you to read the record and see what they are doing. The World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, inner church movements are fostering the building of the world church, and I believe ultimately of the church of Antichrist. I urge every true believer, every born -again Christian to disassociate himself from them. I would leave such a church immediately. I could not support its policies and programs. I could not embrace its false doctrines. I could not support its diverted and compromised ministry. The ecumenicist often quotes the prayer of Jesus that his disciples may be won. That prayer is a reality. There is a kindredshipness. There is a kinshipness. There is a unity, but it is a believer's unity of the spirit, of the truth, of the fidelity of the gospel. It is not an organic unity of a mingling of denominations and churches. I could not have support its pacifist leaders, its liberal compromising ministry. I could not identify myself with its selective service card burning revolutionaries. They're preachers that are proponents of revolution. I challenge you to find me one out of 95 or 100 preachers who are members of World Council Churches that believe the virgin birth, the efficacy of the blood, the veracity of the scripture, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the bodily resurrection from the dead, or the soon return and reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. I charge the ecumenical church with being grossly indifferent to the souls of men. Their leaders do not believe in the total depravity of man. They believe that every man has a spark of a spark of goodness when united by his own good works will make himself a little god. The dry rot of their local churches is the result of their failing to believe in the task of world evangelism, which is sounding the death knoll of the church because they simply do not believe that men are lost. To be sure, when clearly stated and understood the evangelistic imparity, the gospel fidelity, the purity of God's word is not at the heart, the purpose, or the outreach established and stated reason for existence of the World National Council of Churches. It is up to the believer to be spiritually discerned, not to be caught up in social reform and movements to so aggrandize the Christian that he himself is the savior of the world and its ills, rather than pointing men to the death and burial and resurrection of the Christ, the one who was indeed the personal savior of all mankind. There are two other things I should like to say. Jesus will come again when there is a great power from the north that invades the south, the invasion of Russia, which will ultimately come on Israel, and when Israel blooms and is a grand prospering nation ready to receive her in soon coming king. These two matters I shall deal with again when I resume the question, when will Jesus come on another soon Sunday night? May we stand and pray together. Our Father, we know that indifference and apostasy and ecumenicism and unity and rebellion and lawlessness and confusion are major signs of the coming of Christ. Thank thee that thou hast warned us of them and said, Beware of men who come in sheep's clothing, but inside are ravening wolves. Help us with great fidelity to stand true to the gospel and the mission of the church, and repute error were found regardless of consequence. May we not contribute to the world's deception and frustration and confusion, but be a clarion -calling lighthouse of the gospel, pointing the way to a dark and needy world, saying, Jesus is the way, he is the way, this is the way, walk ye in it. Thank thee that thou hast given us the privilege of being servants, enlightened of the gospel, guardians of the truth, and evangelists of the message of God. May we on this corner and in the corners where we live, attend school and work with increasing fidelity to Christ, stand as lighthouses in a dark world, with stability in an uncertain world, with faithfulness in an apostatizing world, and with independence if necessary in a unifying world that unifies itself but away from God. Thank thee for this church for its scores of incomparable pastors and thousands of people who have stood true to the gospel of Jesus on this corner. God bless them, and may it ever be the same. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.