‎Why Jesus Is never called “The Late Jesus”‎

By Chioma Obinagwam
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‎Across all of human history, spanning thousands of years and countless civilisations, not one person has ever referred to Jesus Christ as “the Late Jesus.” That singular fact, small as it seems, carries the weight of eternity.
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‎Confiance News gathered from a sermon delivered by the Provincial Pastor of Lagos Province (LP) 40 of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Pastor Bola Odutola, drawn from 1 Corinthians 15:13-19 and Acts 17:26-27, centred on a theme that presses on every living soul: The Mystery of Time and You.
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‎God Is a mystery, not a math problem
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‎The teaching opened with a declaration that cuts through modern arrogance: trying to understand God is not humility. It is foolishness. God does not owe humanity an explanation. He issues instructions. Man is expected to follow.
‎When Job, broken by suffering, bombarded heaven with questions, God did not answer his theology. He answered his audacity.
‎”Who is God? Where did He come from?” Odutola asked pointedly. “Those are no-go areas.”
‎This is a God so vast, the pastor noted, that He can compress the oceans into a bottle and still use that bottle to flood the earth. The Earth belongs to Him, and so does everything in it.
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‎Time is not what you think
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‎One of the teaching’s most striking propositions reframes how believers understand time itself.
‎”God does not know one million years. What He knows is eternity. Time is an interruption of eternity.”
‎More precisely: time is God’s way of preventing everything from happening at once. It is not a prison. It is a system. A divine arrangement that sequences destiny, consequence, and purpose across a human lifespan.
‎And that lifespan was not designed by accident.
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‎When Jeremiah, having eaten his fill, sat questioning his own origins, God’s response was immediate and personal: “I knew you before I formed you.” The preacher drew from this a sharp point: your birth country, your era, your circumstances, none of it was up for a vote.
‎”If God had asked you where to be born, you would have chosen another country. You would not have chosen Nigeria. That is precisely why He did not ask you.”
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‎The arithmetic of a life
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‎The teaching drew a sobering portrait of human aging. In youth, there is strength but no wisdom. In old age, there is wisdom but no strength. Isaiah 50:9 frames this not as tragedy but as divine programming: instalment degradation, built into the human system from the start.
‎”You don’t need to do anything to grow old. Just sit down.”
‎Nobody escapes problems either. If there is no crisis in a person’s life right now, the Odutola warned, it is not absent. It is on pause. It is being prepared.
‎There are no new sins, only new people committing them. There are no new challenges, only new people experiencing them.
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‎Time wasted Is destiny wasted
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‎The teaching closed with four prayer points that cut to the core of the message: that a person’s tenure on earth is a stewardship, not a guaranteed tenure of ease.
‎The final reference was vivid. The thief crucified beside Jesus escaped eternity’s worst outcome in his final hour. It was not too late for him.
‎The closing prayer captured the entire sermon’s burden: “May I carry a grace that will always make me escape.”
‎As a former United States president, Bill Clinton,once observed about Nigeria specifically, “There is nothing wrong with Nigeria that cannot be fixed within eight years.” The Provincial Pastor cited this not as political commentary, but as a reminder that time, properly used, holds redemptive power.
‎The question this sermon leaves every reader with is direct: what are you doing with yours?