It was just a regular day working in the call center until someone showed us all, on the television, a scene that looked like something straight out of an action movie. When it finally dawned on us that the live news footage of the twin towers in NY was real, and that credible reports of two similar plane crashes had just occurred, hardly any one of us could focus on doing any work. Then not long after this, the cry of a woman pierced through the air. She was one of the customer service representatives working with us in the call center, yet she was discretely and desperately trying to call around on her cell phone to find out if a loved one, who I think was her brother, had gone in to work that morning at the World Trade Center. And when she received a call that he could not be found, she let out a loud, shrilling cry and jumped up from her seat in a panic. To this day, I still don’t know what became of her brother. As I sat at my cubical wondering what was going to happen next or whether they were going to let us go home early, a nearby manager, who I knew was a Christian, pulled out Gospel tracks from within her desk and passed them out to every customer service representative in her vicinity. As she did this she earnestly said, “Please take this and make your choice for Jesus today!” A little later, she and a few other employees gathered in the lunch room and entered into a fervent season of prayer. Then as I suspected, they let everyone go home early. As I drove home in my car I was listening to a song by Richard Smallwood called “Psalm 8", when I suddenly saw a plane flying off in the distance. This puzzled me because I thought all planes were grounded in light of the attacks. Then my mind immediately began to think about the second coming of Jesus and if this event was the catalyst that would rapidly accelerate things toward His return. On that day, the sense of the nearness of Christ’s return was so palpable to me. As soon as I got home, I gathered in the living room with my mother and my brother and we began to pray. As of today, that was 20 years ago in South Florida.

Many of you can remember exactly where you were and what you were doing on September 11th, 2001. Since that tragic day, our world has dramatically changed, hasn’t it? But then again, our world has dramatically changed since March 2020, when we were all ushered into a global pandemic! And just within the span of these last 20 years, we’ve experienced the rapid increase of what Jesus prophesied would happen in Matthew 24, like deception, false Messiahs & false prophets, wars and rumors of wars, nations rising against other nations and famines. We are presently experiencing the global “pestilence” of the COVID-19 virus and its variants. We’ve definitely been experiencing earthquakes in various places, with the one that recently devastated Haiti still fresh in our minds. Many Christians continue to be persecuted in many places around the world, lawlessness still abounds and I’m sure you can all testify to experiencing the love of many growing cold! Yet in the midst of all this, Jesus tells us things like, “…See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” Matthew 24:26b NKJV. Or things like, “…all this is only the first of the birth pains, with more to come.” Matthew 24:8 NLT. Therefore, when you put all this together, you get the picture that humans are going to continue to cause things to get worse before they get better. As a matter of fact, you get the picture that these things are just the dress rehearsal that’s building up to what we’ll discover today, in Revelation 7:1-3, is called “the winds.” And though you may have heard Jesus say, in the midst of all this, “Don’t be troubled. Don’t panic. Endure by faith in Me until the end and you will be saved.”, you may also be saying… dare I say it… “But God, what are You doing in the midst of all this?” So, what is God doing in the midst of this rising turmoil in our world? And this is actually a very good question to ask. So let’s listen in for God’s answer as we search His word together, beginning in Revelation 7:1, which says…

Stay Tuned for Part Two…