You Are Not Delulu

Scripture: 2 Peter 3:3–9 | Habakkuk 2:3 | Hebrews 11:1 | Revelation 22:20

I live with five women. My wife and four daughters. And if you want to know what it feels like to have your credibility questioned on a daily basis, try being the only man in a house full of Gen Z and Gen Alpha girls who have a word for everything.

The word lately is delulu.

Short for delusional. It means you are holding onto something the rest of the room has already decided is not going to happen. You believe it anyway. You talk about it anyway. And the people around you exchange a look and say it. Delulu.

Here is what I did not expect. The longer I sit with that word, the more I realize it is not just something my daughters say about boys who text back too slow. It is what the world says about us. About the Church. About every believer who wakes up on a Tuesday morning and still genuinely expects Jesus to come back.

And I want to be honest with you. There are days when the world makes a convincing case. The news cycles keep cycling. Leaders keep disappointing. Wars keep starting. And the promise that seemed so urgent two thousand years ago starts to feel, if we are not careful, like something we inherited from people who were a little too optimistic.

I have stood in that feeling. And I want to tell you what I found when I did not run from it

Peter saw this coming. Not the slang, but the sentiment underneath it. He wrote that in the last days, mockers would arrive with a very specific argument: "Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation." (2 Peter 3:4)

Read that slowly. They are not arguing that God does not exist. They are arguing that nothing ever actually changes. That the world just keeps going. That history is a flat line with no destination. That the people who believe something is coming are, well, delulu.

Peter called this willful ignorance. Not confusion. Not honest skepticism. A choice to forget. Because the evidence was always there. God spoke the world into existence out of nothing. He judged it with a flood. He raised His Son from the dead. These are not the actions of a God who lets things drift without a destination. These are the actions of a God who moves deliberately and arrives exactly when He intends to.

The Prophet Habakkuk wrestled with the same feeling long before Peter put it into words. He looked at his world and saw violence, injustice, and a silence from God that felt unbearable. And God answered him with one of the most important sentences in all of Scripture: "Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay." (Habakkuk 2:3)

That is not the language of wishful thinking. That is the language of an appointment. A train that has not pulled into the station yet is not a train that does not exist. It is a train that is still on its way.
The ancient Jewish teacher Maimonides understood this so deeply that he built it into his daily confession of faith: "I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah. Though He may tarry, I await Him every day." Every day. Not every decade when the prophecy conferences happen. Every single day.

Now here is what the world gets wrong about the disciples who carried this expectation. They were not naive. They were not people who had run out of other options and decided to cope with religion. These were people who had watched Jesus walk out of a tomb. They had touched the scars. They had eaten fish on the beach with a man who three days earlier had been publicly executed. Their hope was not built on a feeling. It was built on the most verifiable event in the ancient world.

Paul put it plainly. If the resurrection did not happen, he said, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:19) He was not asking anyone to believe without evidence. He was saying the evidence is the resurrection, and the resurrection demands a conclusion: if He came back once, He is coming back again.

That is not delulu. That is logic with a tomb at the center of it.
Peter also gives us the reason behind the wait. "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9) The delay is not doubt. The delay is mercy. Every day the return has not happened is another day someone who was far from God had a chance to find their way home.

The wait is not a malfunction. It is the heartbeat of a God who is not willing to close the door while there is still someone running toward it.
Hebrews calls faith the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1) Substance. Evidence. These are not soft words. They are legal words. Words that mean there is a case being built. A verdict that is coming. And the people who have been holding that hope are not holding air. They are holding the most reliable promise ever made by the most reliable source in the universe.

The last words in the Bible are not complicated. Jesus says: "Yes, I am coming quickly." (Revelation 22:20) And the Church answers: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus."

That has been the prayer for two thousand years. Every generation that has prayed it has been called something. Naive. Fanatic. Outdated. Delulu.

Every generation has kept praying it anyway.

The world is going to keep telling you that the hope is unrealistic. That nothing is coming. That everything just keeps going the way it always has. And some days that argument is going to sound more reasonable than you are comfortable admitting.

On those days, go back to the tomb. Not metaphorically. Actually think about it. A man who was dead was not dead anymore. If that happened, everything He said about what comes next is worth taking seriously. All of it. Including the return.

You are not holding onto a fantasy. You are holding onto a promise made by someone with a track record that no one in history has matched.

My daughters can call it whatever they want.

The Lord is still coming. And that is the most grounded thing I know.