This sort of thing can be tough for us scripturally challenged Methodists! Someone mentioned John 3:16, somebody else said 1 Corinthians 13. A Honduran woman said, through a translator, “I love that passage toward the end of Luke’s gospel, where Jesus says that the world is coming to an end, the moon will turn blood red, and everything will be burned and disappear. Such a comfort.”
That’s her favorite Bible passage? A comfort?
A nurse, sitting next to me whispered, “I talked with that woman in the clinic today. She has had four children, three of whom died in infancy because of hunger.”
Then it hit me. Sometimes the difference between bad news and good news (gospel) is where you happen to be when you get the news. What sounded like bad news to me, “This world, which has been so good to you and your family, is ending. God is going to destroy all of it. This isn’t the world God wanted; this is the world you built” seen through the eyes of the poor, is good news, gospel.
From William Willimon’s blog, A Peculiar Prophet
my husband often comments how it’s only western christians (or unpersecuted ones) who care about being raptured pre-tribulation because we don’t want to suffer. the persecuted world doesn’t care. they just think, “come, jesus, asap.”