Come, Lord Jesus!

By J. A. Seiss

    It is a characteristic of the Bride of Christ, that she re-echoes and embodies the call of the Spirit, even the call for the Bright and Morning Star to come.  When men forget to think of the coming again of the Lord Jesus, when they cease to look and long for that as the crown and goal of their faith and hope – when they make light of it and treat it as a fable, and regard all concern about it as fanaticism – they show and prove that they do not belong to that elect body of God’s saints which constitutes the Bride of the Lamb.

    The deepest heart-voice of the Bride, with that of the Spirit Himself, is “Come, Lord Jesus; come as Thou hast promised and foreshown; come quickly!”  Taking all the precepts and teachings of the sacred Scriptures with regard to Christ’s return, it becomes a plain and evident impossibility for people to be true and obedient followers of the Gospel, and not to look, and watch, and long, and pray, and make it a great point in all their religious activity and devotion – to be ready for the glorious coming of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.

    The apostles and early Christians were all alive to this subject beyond everything else in Christianity.  It was their life, their inspiration, the pole-star of the faith and hope.  It was the thing which most marked them, set them apart from the world, and was their great distinguishing spirit, as compared with other people.  If it is not so with Christians now, it is because they have sunk away from their original spiritual life and lost their proper fellowship with the true and only Bride of the Lamb, for the voice of the Bride to her Lord continually is, “Come!”

    She is not a true Bride without having this feeling ever living in her soul, and permeating her whole being.  Destined for Christ, and having her chief joy and salvation in Him and what He is ordained to accomplish for His people, she cannot but look with all zeal and fervency for His coming.