Stay Awake

He sat in church while the pastor delivered eternal truths but could not stay awake. Soul-saving exhortation was coming at him, but he was busy catching his head every time he nodded off. It wasn’t that he had had a busy week or even stayed up too late the night before; it was that he was bored. He felt he had heard it all before, so he let his eyelids droop.

His sleepiness also manifested itself in other ways. The surrounding culture had been moving further and further away from the truth, but it happened so subtly that he didn’t find it interesting enough to note. Sure, there were the occasional moments when it became so glaring that he couldn’t help but notice, but he would be asleep again in a few days. For example, he recently saw the uproar about the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. The controversy was whether the creators meant to create a scene that resembled DaVinci’s Last Supper painting using transvestites. He was fired up for a while because he thought they had mocked his faith. He settled down when the creators said everyone misunderstood their intention. His once crystal-clear perception of the situation was now muddied, so he let go of his concern.

The problem was the culture had already desensitized him enough that he failed to realize that even if they didn’t intend to mock his faith, it was still the normalizing presentation of transvestites, and other strange pagan perversions on a world stage. Those depravities had become so commonplace that it didn’t register on his Richter scale.

Later that week, he intended to pick up his Bible and read it, but there was a new movie streaming that he wanted to watch, so he opted for that instead. Afterward, he called his friend to rave about how much he loved the show, unconscious of the fact that the film promoted some of the same sexual deviations represented in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Later that night, when he lay down to go to bed, he attempted to pray but was asleep within minutes.

On Saturday, he went for a long walk down a dirt road. The country scene was beautiful. Everything was green, and the morning summer air was still cool. Something in him came to life as he realized he had not been walking closely with his Savior. All these instances of drowsiness came to mind. He pulled out his phone and opened his Bible app. He turned on the audio option, put his phone in his shirt pocket so he could hear, and he continued to walk.

He was listening to Mark chapter 13, and when he came to the end of the chapter, he was jolted when the last three verses told him to “stay awake.” Jesus said, “No one knows when the Master will return, so we must be ready.” He realized that was part of the reason he was spiritually sleepy. He had forgotten that all of this will be over soon. He had been lulled into believing life would continue as it always has, but it won’t.

Feeling convicted about his lackadaisical attitude, he continued listening to chapter 14, and there it was again—another passage about sleepiness. This time, he was in good company because the Lord was praying in Gethsemane, and he kept asking his disciples to pray with him, but they kept falling asleep. Jesus understood what was going on. He told them, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  Then he tells them, “The hour has come. Rise, let us be going.”

He pondered where it was they were going. Jesus’s betrayer was there, and Jesus was moving toward his death. The death that would wash him clean of every sleepy moment—every faltering of the flesh. Scripture had not condemned him. It pointed out his sinful tendency and reminded him that even the disciples had struggled and that Jesus was the answer.

He realized that the way to stay awake was to keep his eye on Jesus. A hundred worthy causes deserve our attention if we are awake in this world, but if we do not focus on our Savior, we will still be asleep no matter how much we engage with them.

If we don’t look to Jesus, sermons will be dull, and television will be more appealing than God’s Word. The way to stay awake is by remembering what Christ has done for us on the cross, how he washed our sins away, and that he will return to call his children home. We do not stay awake by sheer determination and conflict with the world. We do so by living in gratitude for the cross. That is the only way we can properly confront the pathologies of our culture and worship our Lord personally. It is the only way we can point the world to him. It is the only way we will be ready when the master returns and says, “The hour has come. Rise, let us be going.”

-D. Eaton