What and When is the Rapture? - Part 1

**Jim Scudder, Jr.** (0:04)
You might not be comforted if you're not saved. You might not be comforted if you're not living a life to serve the Lord today.
You don't want the return of the Lord because you are squandering your days, your minutes, your opportunities.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Welcome to InGrace with Jim Scudder, the senior pastor of Quentin Road Baptist Church in suburban Chicago. He is a strong advocate of the nation of Israel and leads annual tours to the Holy Land.

**Jim Scudder, Jr.** (0:38)
Welcome back to InGrace. This is Jim Scudder, and today we are talking about the rapture. I'm going to start with a little bit of humor, talking about a word that starts with R, and it's not what you think, but then we're going to be talking about Revelation 4 We're going to see that all of a sudden, the church is no longer mentioned in the Book of Revelation, which the first couple chapters, chapters two and three, were all about the church, and then we just find that the church is not mentioned. So what is the rapture and when is the rapture will be our topic for today and tomorrow, and probably past that. And we're in a series called Armageddon's Dawn. It's a verse by verse study of the Book of Revelation. We have a prophecy chart that goes along with this study, and it's free. I would love to send it to you because this will really help give you a visual of all of these concepts of end times events that God has predicted in the Bible. To get your free copy of the Armageddon's Dawn prophecy chart, please call us right now, 1-800-78-GRACE.
1-800-78-GRACE. We would also invite you if you are ever traveling through the Chicago area, and we know many of you listen from the Chicago area or Milwaukee area. Come visit us sometime. We're in Lake Zurich, Illinois. We're about an hour northwest of Chicago, an hour southwest of Milwaukee. And if you're driving through or coming through an airport here, come on a Sunday. I'll be preaching almost every Sunday at 11 o'clock Central time, and I would love to meet you afterwards. Please come and visit us at Quinton Road Baptist Church.
Today, we're going to talk about a word that begins with the letter R. This is a mysterious word. To some people, this is a new concept, and this is an exciting concept to the rest of us. What I'm talking about today is roadkill.
Roadkill is that word that we are going to start talking about today. Yes, it is mysterious, isn't it? It's new to some of you, and it certainly is exciting when you start to look at the roadkill cafe. This was at a restaurant that I ate at yesterday. This was a piece of art on the wall. But it says, you kill it, we grill it, featuring some of our highways' finest.
And then the menu continues. Eating food is more fun when you know it was hit on the run.
Centerline bovine.
The chicken that didn't cross the road.
I have a roadkill story, as a matter of fact. We were eating at a pastor's home in Colorado. We were eating taco salad. It was delicious. I just preached at his church and I had some young men with me. And we get done eating and the wife says, should we tell them?
You don't really want to hear. Should we tell them? And we're all like, tell us what? What you had? Well, we know what we had. It was taco salad, beef, ground beef. And they said, no, it was deer. It was venison. Well, that's cool. I like venison. You know, no problem with that. Venison's good, as long as you season it heavily with other stuff. It's great. So she said, well, should we tell them the rest?
Okay, tell us the rest. And she said, well, that's venison, but it's also mule deer. Mule deer. We're like, well, that's fine. Mule deer, white tail, whatever. Venison's venison. Should we tell them the rest? She said, okay, no, probably not. She said it was roadkill.
So the advantage of roadkill is it's already tender.
It's probably already ground up and everything. They had a friend that had hit a mule deer up in the mountains of Colorado. He got out. He had permission to butcher it and brought the meat to the pastor. They had a freezer full of roadkill, and they'd serve it to unsuspecting pastor guests.
And I haven't been back to that church.
No, we're not talking about roadkill, but I thought that was awesome. We're gonna talk about the rapture. The rapture is a word that is mysterious. It's new to some of you, and it is exciting, hopefully, to you. We're gonna look at this prophecy chart, but either way, we have the future that has been charted out for us, and we're gonna talk today about the rapture of the church. We're living in what's called the church age. In the last few messages on Armageddon's Dawn, we've been reading chapter one, chapter two, chapter three of Revelation. We come to the end of chapter three, and we're gonna study this more next time where it talks about Jesus says, I stand at the door and knock. And he's standing there seeking fellowship with Christians that had grown cold. And God doesn't want us to be cold. He doesn't want us to even be worse, lukewarm. He wants us to be on fire for Jesus Christ, thinking that he could come back at any second.