It is an age of selection and therefore an age of election.
When you take some things out of the midst of other things there will be, not only a first one, but necessarily a last one.
As there was a first one elected, called out and taken into union with a risen Lord, so must there be a last one who shall be called through the Gospel, quickened by the Spirit and bound up in indissoluble union with a living Lord.
When that last one is called and responds to the life-giving power of the Spirit the Lord will descend into the upper air and take the completed and corporate Church to Himself—the dead raised, the living changed.
When that last elect one will be called you do not know, it is not known to a single soul on earth.
Since you do not know when the last elect of God shall be called, and it is sure the Lord will come when that last elect one is called, then you do not know when the Lord will come; and so far as you are concerned, and so far as any revelation otherwise is given, it may be any hour and, therefore, “any moment”; consequently the Coming of the Lord for His Church is—imminent.
Thus the imminency of the Lord’s Coming for His Church is grounded on election.
Imminency is so absolutely linked up with election that you cannot deny imminency without denying election; and to deny election is to deny God Himself, deny Him in the very essence of His own prerogative, the prerogative of foreordination, of decree.
The imminency of the Lord’s Coming for His Church is grounded on the Lord’s own declaration that He is coming for her as a thief comes.
This is His declaration and warning to the Church at Sardis, that Church which is the symbol of Protestantism in the closing hours of the age. The warning is given to the pastor, through the pastor to the Church and through the local assembly at Sardis to the whole Church.