1 Thessalonians 1: 9b-10

…. and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, ¹⁰and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.

The life of waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom of God is not an inactive and passive life of acceptance of the values, attitudes and beliefs of oppression, violence and death of the present age. The wait we as disciples participate in, is realised through our service to God and each other. We have turned from the idol worship and obsession with the culture of death all around us and its manipulation of anxiety for personal gain. The ‘wrath to come’ can be understood most perfectly as the ‘death of death’; we are no longer part of the culture of death; we have been spared its ultimate demise. We have life; eternal life that will be fully realised at the coming of Jesus in all His fullness. Eternal life has begun in the present age in each of us who have turned from idols to serve a living and true God….   Jürgen Moltmann in "The Crucified God" put it like this…

‘At the end of days God will raise the dead, and in so doing will demonstrate his power over the power of death. However, in the middle of our days God has raised Jesus from the dead, and the proclamation of this event is nothing less than the claim that the future of the new world of the righteousness and presence of God has already dawned in Jesus. This one man has been raised before all others and with him the process of the raising of the dead has been set in motion. Believers no longer live in this unredeemed world of death. In faith in the risen Jesus, men and women already live in the midst of the world of death by the power of the new world of life that has dawned in him.’

Are we actively waiting for Jesus to come and fill the new creation with eternal life?