Time to Wake Up

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. (Romans 13:11)

As I sit here early in the morning listening to the Spirit of God and waiting for whatever He wants to teach me, I think about the potential significance of these words. I had a very tiring day of work yesterday tearing off and putting down shingles on a roof, and though the breeze was good and the temperature rather pleasant the work still left me rather sore and tired. We had to work a couple extra hours to finish the job and so my body and mind was rather certain that a single nights sleep might not be enough to prepare me to get up early for another day without quite a bit of resistance.

But after a little food and a shower and somewhat fitful sleep, I woke up a half hour before my wife's alarm went off at 5 A.M. and felt the gentle urge that I should get up to have enough time to spend with God before this day got busy. I never really know what I will be facing in a day and whether my normal plans will play out or whether I will be faced with some unexpected trauma or challenge. But God is never caught by surprise and is faithful to offer me all of the preparation that I need if I am just willing to cooperate with Him. But I am free to choose whether or not I will be prepared or will prefer my own comfort and desires and suffer the consequences of being unprepared.

The idea or image of waking up from sleep has certain implications usually associated with it. In the Bible there were times when people missed out on important preparations because they allowed sleep to preempt more important activities that would have prepared them for what God knew was coming. The disciples could have had very different results and the story of their responses during the last hours of Jesus' life would have been dramatically different if they had resisted the urge to snooze in the garden and instead prayed for strength and wisdom and Jesus had instructed them to do.

Sleep is a very healthy activity that is extremely important to engage in on a regular basis, and we should not make the mistake of linking a sense of guilt to healthy sleeping. That is one of Satan's tricks to keep us from sleeping soundly and getting the refreshment that our body and mind needs. But there is a time for everything and just as there is a time to relax and allow our body to catch up and prepare us for another day of life, so there is a time to quit sleeping and move on to the next phase of our day and engage deliberately in the activities that God intends for us to do.

Problems arise when a person gets so emotionally addicted to sleep that they cannot embrace the duties of the morning cheerfully and transition into a day of positive activity. I know this from first-hand experience as well as observing it in many others. Sleep can easily become more than just an important time of repair and restoration for our body and mind; it can also become a place of escape from reality when life is such that we want to avoid or hide from it. Sleep can easily become something of a drug, a place in our mind where we can hide from difficult circumstances or hard choices. It seems so innocent to just close our eyes and doze off instead of having to face some pain or negotiate our way through some hard choices well outside of our comfort zone.

The importance of waking up at the proper time and transitioning into a day of activity is something that healthy people choose and is not to be easily manipulated by our feelings. It is often a sign of immaturity when a person has continued and great difficulty getting up each morning and preparing for a day of productive activity. It takes self-discipline to be able to get up on time dependably and is an important part of the training of children and youth. If they do not learn this lesson early and well it can become an issue and problem that may plague them for years and mar their lives in unexpected ways. It is also a sad mistake to leave them dependent on their parents to wake them up for years instead of allowing them to suffer some natural consequences of not learning this important life skill.

Failing to wake up on time sometimes results in tragic consequences and ruined lives. Unfortunately it is too often a part of our mindset that people who “have it good” never have to discipline themselves to get up early but somehow have the “freedom” to just sleep in whenever they feel like it and never have to exercise the effort it takes to get out of bed and move into a day of work. But this is a dangerous deception that needs to be overcome, for genuine living and healthy relationships depend on developing self-control and a balanced life so that we can live integrated lives with others around us.

The idea of not waking up at a proper time implies that we may miss something extremely important that will happen whether or not we are prepared for it. I know there have been times that our family needed to get up earlier than usual so that we could get to an airport in time to catch a plane for some trip we had planned. Overcoming the desire to sleep just a little longer either on our part or our children's would result in missing our plane when the time came and would include a lot of serious disharmony, accusations, blame and recriminations among us. But none of the blaming or shaming would undo the natural consequences of the choice to not begin the day by getting up at the proper time and engaging earnestly in the activities that needed to happen so that we could get out of the house on time to make it to our flight.

This verse seems to refer to a issue of time in salvation in its references to night and day and the use of the word nearer. There is certainly a time coming in God's plan of salvation that we need to be ready for in order to enjoy the benefits of participating in that salvation. Just believing that God loves us is not enough to save us, as wonderful and true as that is. There is a part for us to play in connecting and receiving the gifts and requirements needed in order for us to be transformed and prepared to live in the presence of God's fiery love and passion. God will not override our will to prepare us for His presence. He will provide everything we need to be prepared, healed and re-created in His image. But if we choose to sleep a little longer and give preference to our feelings or our mistaken ideas about Him instead of making difficult choices that are outside of our comfort zone, we will be terribly disappointed when we discover that we were too late in making the truly vital choices of life.

Jesus told a story of ten virgins who were planning to participate in a wedding. They were supposed to be waiting for the Bridegroom to appear to take them into the house where the wedding would move into a more intensive phase, but they all succumbed to falling asleep. They were all startled awake by a cry, “Behold the Bridegroom is coming!” Jesus says that the preparations they had made previous to this point made all the difference in whether they were able to fully engage with the joy and celebrations or they were left scurrying around trying to make up for poor choices and ending up missing out entirely in the end.

While God has certainly provided everything needed for our salvation, we must ourselves interact with His provisions fully both by cooperating with His instructions and by waking up at the proper time so that we can be in sync with what is really going on. This verse strongly implies that it is time for us to spiritually wake up out of the fatal sleep of complacency and ignorance that we have slumbered in for so long and enter into the experience of true love and transformation that God desires to work in us at the heart level.

For me to be able to love others in the ways described in the surrounding verses will definitely take a miracle of salvation to accomplish. But that cannot happen unless I am willing to quit sleeping in my own dream world of selfish reality and accept the discipline needed to train me to get up on time and interact with God for my own salvation. There is a time for everything, but there also comes a time when it is too late.

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