Awake!

by Dr. Keith A. Ogden, pastor of Hill Street Baptist Church

First and foremost, let me say Happy New Year to each one of you. My prayer for the City of Asheville and the readers of the Urban News is that God will continue to shine His face upon you and your family. 

Paul in his letter to the Roman church said, “Now it is high time to awake out of sleep” (Romans 13:11). In 2009, this nation and the Body Christ must awake out of its sleep. We all know that sleep is necessary; without proper rest we become irritable and inefficient. I’m a living witness lately as to how important sleep is to the body: my grandson Tayshon has a way of waking me up about 4:00 a.m. saying, “PAPA get up! Eat, eat!” and don’t we become irritable with each other because of insufficient rest.

But we are also warned: “give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to
your eyelids” (Proverbs 6:4). The writer goes on to say, “Do not love
sleep, lest you come to poverty” (Proverbs 20:13; see also Proverbs
6:9-11).

Obviously, sleep can also be dangerous. If I call
Samson to the witness stand he would testify, because the Bible says in
Judges 16:19, “Delilah lulled Samson to sleep with his head in her lap,
and she called in a man to shave off his hair, making his capture
certain. And his strength left him.”

Sleep can also be
harmful. Eutycus, in Acts 20:9, puts it like this: “And there sat in a
window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen into a deep
sleep: and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and
fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead.” Did you ever
fall asleep while driving? Most of us have, at some point, only to
awaken without incident or accident, thank God for his mercy!

But
more detrimental than sleeping too long or at the wrong moment is
spiritual sleepiness. We need to be mindful of this day, day by day,
because God has allowed us to see another year. The Bible says that
Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy. Satan likes to set what I call
sand traps; in other words, his intent is to sow sand in the eyes of
men, women, boys, and girls. We become blind sleepers, if you will,
with scales on our eyes.

Oftentimes, it appears that whole
world is indeed asleep in the devil’s lap. To prove my point we can
look at 1 John 5:19: “We know that we are children of God and that the
world around us is under the power and control of the evil one.”

Unfortunately,
some Christians, too, are what my late mother, Mrs. Ora V. Ogden, would
call sleepyheads. To them Paul exhorts, “Awake to righteousness, and do
not sin” (1 Corinthians 15:34); “let us not sleep, as others do, but
let us watch and be sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:6).

Well, in 2009 if
we are going to be about our Father’s business in helping, and winning
the lost, the least, and the left out, we must awake from our sleep; if
the Body of Christ is going to become a “Missional Church,” we must
awake from our sleep.

In 2009, we Christians should be alert
because salvation is nearer now than ever than we first believed. In
other words, an alert life is part of the abundant life promised to us.
A wide-awake Christian has a joy of living that the slothful do not
experience, that is, the joy of moving on from one good degree of grace
to another.

In 2009, we must be vigilant. In 2009, we must stay on
our toes. In 2009, we cannot afford to waver while on this faith
journey. And so, my appeal to all that read the fragments of these
precious words the Lord has placed in my spirit, is that we all take
heed, and awake from our sleep.

Not only must the Christian
community awake from their sleep, but this nation, our governmental
officials and leaders must awake from their madness, greed and sin, to
do what’s right for all people. May the appeal to wake up out of the
state of worldly carelessness and spiritual indifference, touch a
responsive chord in your heart because you realize your salvation today
is nearer!