<p>13:35 <i>Therefore stay awake. For you do not know when the lord of the house comes, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning</i>- The motivation for watching, being away at the Lord's coming, is because we have a duty to the rest of the household. Pursuit of personal salvation is not of itself a very strong motivator. And we must be ever alert because we do not know when He shall return; for Bible prophecy is to be understood after the event, or whilst the event occurs, and is not intended to provide a timeline of future events.</p><p>The Lord says that we are <i>all</i>&nbsp;the watchers of the door of the house of the ecclesia (Mk. 13:34,35; Lk. 12:39,40), as the prophets were the watchmen over the city of Zion, God's Old Testament ecclesia. We <i>all</i>&nbsp;therefore have a responsibility to guide and warn the ecclesia, not just to scrape out of condemnation for ourselves, but from a genuine, earnest desire to help others to the Kingdom road.<br />We must speak the word as others are able to hear it, expressing the truths of Christ in language and terms which will reach them. There are some differences within the Gospels in the records of the parables. It could be that the different writers, under inspiration, were rendering the Lord&rsquo;s Aramaic words into Greek in different styles of translation. Also, we must bear in mind the different audiences. Mark speaks of the four watches of the night which would have been familiar to Romans (Mk. 13:35 cp. 6:48), whereas Lk. 12:38 speaks of the Jewish division of the night into three watches (cp. Jud. 7:19). See on Lk. 6:47.</p>