Listener: I do not take it lightly when the Holy Spirit gives me words for Daily Bread which indicate that we are living in the last days. Yesterday when He gave me the words, The day is coming and shall soon be when all Believers will experience this spiritual embrace of the Lord, I knew that He was referring to the rapture of the Church. I do not believe that Holy Spirit made this reference because of the current pandemic or that the pandemic is part of the tribulation, which is the expression of the wrath of God, from which the Body of Christ has been saved. But I do believe that the time of the end nears. Today Holy Spirit led me to give you my testimony regarding that belief. This is a difficult post and lengthy; I have delayed making it until late in the day. As I awakened this morning, He gave me a vision or perhaps a dream. I saw a group of people standing in a cemetery where several generations of my family are buried. Then I saw the face of my grandfather, who died forty years ago. He was speaking my eulogy. In the dream/vision I shouted, “This cannot be. It was prophesied that I would not die!” The prophecy to which I referred was given almost ten years ago, when a visiting prophet spoke over me and ended, to his surprise and my amazement, with the words “You will not die.” I was quite healthy at the time so this was obviously not reassurance of my recovery from some illness. Nor was it a statement regarding the eternal life assured by my acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior. What the prophet, other spiritual leaders of the church and I believed was that since I was the oldest member of that church, this prophecy seemed to indicate a relatively limited number of years before the rapture of the Church. Later, as I wondered whether to believe the prophecy, Holy Spirit said: If you believe it, you should cancel your life insurance. But this was not an easy decision. I had obtained rather costly life insurance a few years previously which was sufficient to cover a mortgage on the house and land which had been in my family for generations. I did not wish to leave that mortgage as part of my legacy. So, I prayed as I have so many times when faced with a difficult decision and needed to know what to do. The answer came the next night, when I was awakened from a sound sleep by the words “shield and buckler.” I immediately arose and checked for Scripture references to those words. The one which was most applicable was Psalm 91:4 He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler. I accepted this as confirmation that I was to trust in God rather than in an insurance policy. The next day I pulled the folder holding my insurance papers, preparing to begin the process of cancelling the policy. To my utter astonishment, I learned that the company name of the friend who had found the coverage for me was Shield and Buckler. God very graciously supplied that second confirmation. I cancelled the life insurance policy. I believe the prophecy. Given my current age and even the possibility of extended life expectancy, I will be surprised if we wait as long as two decades before Jesus calls us to come to Him in the air.
