Hello, hello, hello ladies and gents. It's your girl Kirby Kelly and welcome to this week's episode of the botan beloved podcast. I'm so happy that you're too.

Hello, hello, hello ladies and gents. It's your girl Kirby Kelly and welcome to this week's episode of the botan beloved podcast. I'm so happy that you're tuning in. I don't know if this is your first time your second time maybe

been a loyalist since the very beginning, regardless of how long you've been here or how you got here. I'm happy you're tuning in. New episodes are every Wednesday of this is your first time, but I am super excited to dive into today's podcast episode as you can tell by the title today, we are going to be talking about being a people of endurance of what it means to be steadfast in our faith amidst suffering amidst the things that we are going through.

And I know that during COVID, during Rona, during the pandemic, during lockdown, during quarantine, all of those things this season that we are just now coming out of and for some of us are still in.

For many of us in the Christian sphere, for those of us who are in Christian households, we've probably heard many people just within these past two years really talking about the end times, right?

We hear things like, well, Jesus is coming soon. X, Y, and Z are the antichrist. This thing is the mark of the beast. This thing is not the mark of the beast. When this thing happens, Jesus will come swoop us up.

You know, I can't wait for the rapture to happen. The rapture is going to happen this time. It's not going to happen until this yada yada yada, right? Like we've heard so much talk like this and for some of us, it might be confusing. It might be overwhelming.

But guys, I recently read a book about the different views and interpretations of the end times, also known as eschatology. And you know, some people believe in a rapture before the tribulation.

Some people believe that we as believers will endure the tribulation. And then when Jesus comes, that is when we will be raptured up. That's when we will be taken up.

Now, I'm not here to get into necessarily that theological discussion today. But I do want to share something that through reading that book for my master's class, I had to read it and write a paper on it. What my view was, how I interpreted the book.

The book, what I got out of it through analyzing revelation is both eschatological language and a letter to the original writers and being apocalyptic literature, all that good stuff.

In reading it, I was convicted so hard. I've seen people try and use Christianity for the longest time as a cop out for hell.

I'm sure many of you guys have probably maybe even thought that before or have seen people think that you know that some people only want to be Christian because they think that it'll get them out of hell.

And it's like, okay, well, at least I believe in God and at least I'll get out of hell. And they don't pursue a relationship with God.

They don't understand the depth, the reality of what it means to identify as a Christian, to be a disciple of Christ.

To be a Christian is to have an eternal relationship with God, to be saved and freed from our sin and to be present with him at the moment of our salvation until heaven and eternity.

Hell isn't just a bad, scary, terrible place, but it is separation from God. It is the concentration of wrath against sin. It's a place that we do not want to be.

Christianity isn't a get out of hell card. I say all that because I think we as Christians, those of us who understand this as faulty thinking, have fallen into another escape dilemma.

Maybe we'll be raptured before the tribulation and everything, then we'll go absolutely crazy and we'll miss out on it.

But in this time where there will be persecution like no other before the coming of Christ, suffering like no other judgment like no other, I want to pose a question to you.

What if that didn't happen? What if that didn't happen?

You know, I was always taught, okay, the rapture is going to happen. We're all going to get swooped up and saved and then it'll be this seven year of tribulation that will be absolutely crazy.

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