Your troubles forced you to the throne of grace, more faithfully and for longer periods than ever before. You can remember the trial you passed through and you were relying on the Lord every hour. For example, you can remember the month when you didn’t know where the next pay-packet was coming from, when your circumstances at work were very difficult. Take thy rest eat, drink and be merry.” Many of you have experienced those varied times. When all is soft and comfortable then he will say, “Soul, soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years. I] A Christian is most likely to sleep when his outward circumstance are most pleasant.Ī man doesn’t sleep when he discovers his hot water bottle has been leaking, but when an electric blanket has warmed up the bed to the ideal temperature and he can curl up under the sheets then he sleeps. There are not two classes of Christians, the sleeping Christian and the awakened Christian, but rather there are times when every Christian can fall asleep and that sleep last far too long. WHEN ARE CHRISTIANS MOST TEMPTED TO SLEEP? Now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed.ġ. It is high time now to wake up out of our sleep. Let us be about our business, trusting in God to work in us both to command and to do his will. We are too deeply asleep.” That is a typical case of what John ‘Rabbi’ Duncan called “Can’t-help-myself-ism.” Let us listen to what God is telling us, and depend on his grace and trust in the power of his Spirit. It is not for us to cry, “We cannot wake up. Isn’t God saying, “Wake up!” and all that God commands he enables us to perform. We cannot say that the reason the professing church in Europe sleeps today is because God has given it sleeping sickness. When this state falls upon a congregation we cannot say that it is because of God. The prophets and apostles and our Lord himself all charge our conscience with that message. In our text he exhorts the Ephesian church, “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (v.14).Īll these references tell us one thing that it is possible for a true believer in Jesus Christ to become a sleeping Christian, and a real gospel church to fall asleep. He tells the Thessalonians, “Let us not be like others who are asleep, but let us be alert” (I Thess.5:6). He charges the Corinthians to awake unto righteousness. He tells the Roman congregation, “The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed” (Rom. So the apostle Paul is constantly exhorting churches to wake up. The risen Christ addresses the church in Sardis and tells them, “I know your works, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.” You have a number of parables he told in which his application at the end is made to someone he calls a, “wicked and slothful servant!” Wickedness was conjoined to slothfulness. So you have our Lord telling his disciples to watch and pray. They could see mighty miracles but still sleep. These were years of successful evangelism and revival but Christians could still sleep. They can hear the gospel preached with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, but Christians sleep. This is the era of the new covenant, but Christians can sleep. In the New Testament there is the same refrain. There are the words of the great prophet Isaiah, “Arise, shine for thy light is come!” Christ the light of the world has appeared what are we doing lying down in the dark? Amos addresses the laid-back church of his day, “Woe to them that are in ease in Zion.” Or you think of the mighty storm threatening death to all aboard a ship while the prophet Jonah sleeps through it all: “What do you mean O sleeper?” cries the captain. He is the slothful man who sleeps while others work and God casts on him a pitiless gaze. There is a figure in the book of Proverbs called the sluggard. They are warned of the dangers of spiritual sleep, that such a slumber is like a coma that will result in death unless the believer awakens. Often in the Scriptures believers are exhorted to awake. Ephesians 5:14 “This is why it is said: ‘Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'”
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