Repentance, Prayer and End Time: Christian Jargon in Crisis?

I have witnessed how Christians respond in times of personal, local, national or international situations of crisis. Most of the time I came across Christian responding following three ways:

1. We need to repent.

 I have absolutely no doubt about the need for repentance in crisis. All the prophets and ministers come up with this message, especially in seasons of crisis. Here are my questions: when you say repent in crisis, do we imply that the crisis is the judgment from God? Can we attribute all the crises to God? Another direction in which I am concerned, why are we preaching aggressively repentance ONLY in the context of crisis. When everything is going fine, do we need repentance? I believe that repentance must be part of our daily devotional life before God. It is not something that we need to preach and think only in the season of crisis. Repentance is an essential part of daily Christian life. Moreover, let us not forget that before we preach repentance to others, we need genuine repentance. Otherwise, we will be hypocrites.

 2. Prayer

 When the crisis comes, Christians are revived in prayer. My concern again, the revived prayer life and increased time of intercession are not something that we need to reserve only for the seasons of crisis, though both are needed in difficult times. Prayer and intercession are the way of life for a Christian and the church. Bible encourages us to pray always. I feel that we all need to know the absolute need for prayer in our daily life. Again it is not a seasonal but prayer must be an integral part of our Christian walk.

3. End time 

Any natural calamity or any uncommon development happens, there are Christians all of sudden come up with preaching of the second coming.  Some go extreme by predicting the date of the coming of Jesus. Most of the time, people terrify the church with their preaching and connecting the biblical prophesy with current events. Most of the occasions, such preachers misinterpret the bible and they have a lot of errors. I do not want to discuss problems with interpretation now. My question is why we are preaching about second coming only in the time of crisis? I observed the greatest difference between most of the modern churches and the early church is that we do not have the prayer “Maranatha” but the early church had this prayer regularly. In fact, the first-century church believed Christ would come in their generation. That's why they preached the gospel everywhere. Noah preached the message of judgment and hope to the world. In contrast, today's eschatological preacher would not go out and tell the message of the gospel to the world outside the church.  The Christian life must be centered on the second coming of Jesus. It is not something that we occasionally preach. It should be the hope of every day. We need to live every day with an expectation of second coming. We need to prepare and be ready for the Second coming of Jesus every second, not just occasionally. It is not a topic that once in a while take and bombard people.


My aim in this article is to emphasize the need for prayer, repentance and preparation and expectation of the second coming of Jesus in the everyday life of a Christian. I do not intend to deny the importance of prayer, repentance or heightened awareness of second coming in the context of crisis like COVID -19.