Skip to main content

I Woke You Up

  For 364 days of the year growing up, I was not the easiest child to get out of bed. If the circumstances required me to be out of bed at a particular time it usually involved cajoling, threats, and occasionally a glass of cold water.

 Yet on one day of the year, I was ‘up and at em’ way too early. In fact, it became a requirement for me to yell out from my room “Can I get up yet”?  Can you guess what day that was?


  If you have not figured it out, it was a day that started with presents under the Christmas tree. You see on that day, there was something worth being awake early.

   There is a common phrase in scripture (Ephesians 5:14, Romans 13:11-12, 1st Thessalonians 5:6-7) that links being asleep to folks in a dangerous spiritual condition. When it comes to the things of the Lord, we are just kind of out of it. We like a kid in the morning, barely awake wanting to stay in bed.

    Maybe we would be more awake, if like a kid at Christmas, we focused on what was awaiting us. The blessing of God that comes to those who are eagerly anticipating them. Instead of being a church asleep at the wheel. We were bouncing in our beds ready to go.

  If we are asleep spiritually it may be because we are not thinking there is something to be awake for.  But the presence of God is something we should be excited for!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?   You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.   You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.   Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

  In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt.  He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!)  Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest.  Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt!   Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way.  He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal.  As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself.  He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors.   But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

  Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair   It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission.  It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...