WAKE UP! WAKE UP!
NO. 1445
DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,
AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.
“That, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”-Romans 13:11.
THIS exhortation, as you will readily perceive, is not addressed to the ungodly. These words are not spoken to those who are dead in sin, but to those who are alive unto God, though somewhat given to slumber. There are many expostulations and admonitions which do appeal to the wilful and wicked, to the indifferent and unbelieving, to those who err and are out of the way, but this is not one of them. Here we have a special charge to disciples of Jesus who know the time, and also know that their salvation draweth nigh. They are represented as being asleep and needing to awake from their present sluggishness; but they are not described as those who had ceased to be Christians, or whose salvation was in jeopardy. Though it is admitted that it is high time for them to awake out of sleep, their salvation is never questioned, but on the contrary they are reminded that now it is nearer than when they believed. The tone and tenor of this call to circumspection suggest to us that when we address the Lord’s people and find occasion to rebuke and reprove them we should never insinuate that they are likely to be banished from the household of faith, or to be cast away from the presence of God, or to be treated as reprobates. Even if we feel convinced that they are asleep, and that they must be aroused, we ought not to denounce them with railing accusations, or threaten them with the wailings of the lost and the doom of unquenchable fire. You would not be pleased if anyone should touch your child with a horsewhip; nor will the Lord allow us to strike his chosen with the rod of the wicked. Legal thunders are not intended for justified saints.
“The terrors of law and of God
With us can have nothing to do,
Our Savior’s obedience and blood
Hide all our transgressions from view.”
Even if the saints’ hearts are dull, their eyes heavy, and they are evidently fast asleep, we are not warranted in raising a false alarm. It is not for us to tell the heirs of salvation to awake because they are in danger of the wrath to come, for they are in no such danger; that is past and gone. Rather let us remind them that their salvation is nearer than when they believed, and so stir them up to watchfulness and activity by appropriate motives. The whip is for the slave, not for the child. The dread of punishment is for the condemned, not for the justified. The fear of wrath is not for those who are “accepted in the beloved,” but for those who reject the Savior and put from them the eternal mercy of God. While, then, I endeavor to speak frankly and faithfully to the Lord’s people, I shall try to avoid anything like a legal tone. I would fain talk to God’s children as their Father in heaven would have them talked to, somewhat sharply, perhaps, but still without a trace of the threatening which belongs to the ungodly, but not to those who are saved in the Lord.
From the connection it appears to me that Paul had in his mind’s-eve a kind of sleepy state into which Cod’s people may fall with regard to others; and upon that state of slumber we shall speak to-night.
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I. Looking at the text in its true bearings, this is the lesson-Some Professing Christians Seem To Be Altogether In A Dead Sleep With Regard To Others.
It is all very well to take a passage of Scripture, isolate it from the context, and use it as the motto of a sermon; but it is evidently not the natural and fair way of treating the word of God. You may d so for the most part with tolerable safety, for God’s truth, even when it is broken up into little pieces, still retains its purity and perfection like certain crystals, which, however much they may be subdivided, always bear the same crystalline form. So true in every particle and detail is the revelation of God, that though you should take it up and dash it to pieces, yet every little fragment will bear the original impress. But this is no excuse for treating the Scriptures in an unjustifiable manner instead of expounding them according to the rules of common sense. Texts ought always to be handled with a reverential deference to the mind of the divine Spirit who indited them. When we attempt to rivet your attention on a verse or the fraction of a verse of the Bible we desire you also to be scrupulously attentive to the affinities in which it stands. If any of my published sermons should in any instance appear to violate this rule, you will bear me witness that it has been my constant habit throughout all my ministry among you to read and open up, as best I could, the whole chapter from which I have selected a few words as the motto of my discourse. I have honestly endeavored to give you the special mind of the Spirit either in the exposition or in the sermon.
Now, you will see that the connection here is this. Paul has been bidding us to pay attention to relative duties. As citizens, he bids us render honor to magistrates, and to those who are in authority, and to pay all lawful dues and customs, and the like, telling us that we are to owe no man anything except to “love one another;” and then he shows us that the law of love is the abstract and the essence of that great table of the law which concerns a man’s relation to his neighbors. He goes on to exhort us to keep that law of love, to manifest love more and more; and, when he has done so, he interjects this sentence, “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep.” Now, I gather that he means that many Christians are in a sleepy state with reference to the law of love, with reference to their obligations to others. Beloved friends, true godliness makes a man look to himself. It commences by convincing him of his own sin, and by leading him personally to lay hold on Christ by faith that in his blood he may find salvation. It then makes the man feel his personal obligations and his individual responsibilities. It sets him free from many of the yokes with which his fellow men would load him, and bids him obey his own conscience before his God, to be a law unto himself and to stand and walk as before the Most High, judging righteous judgment as to the Lord’s will, and not basely bending to evil at the advice and persuasion of other men. I would to God we could get some Christians, some professed Christians, to be a little more independent; but so many of them are like the rotten houses of which we have not a few in this neighborhood; they could not stand alone, they must keep together, for they prop one another up. If you were to pull down one of the houses in some of our streets, they must all fall; and so there are sets of Christian professors that lean one upon another, upon the custom of their set and sect, and church and community. They have never dared to study Scripture for themselves and follow it, nor have they ever tried to form their own personal conscientious convictions. One of the first works of the Holy Spirit is to make the man look at home, and to consider the condition of his own soul.
When the Spirit of God has made a man thus to stand on his own footing before God, and to feel his personality, there springs up a danger that such a man may say, “I shall henceforth keep myself to myself. My chief business will be indoor work, to see after the rightness of my own spirit and to keep myself prospering before the Lord. Other people must see to themselves, and I must see to myself.” The principle of individuality might be thus pushed to an extreme, till what at first was necessary grit in the spiritual constitution, making the man truly a man, may be so unduly increased that he becomes at last an unkind, ungenerous, cruel, selfish thing, deprived of the best part of his humanity. Thus, then, we are brought back to this, that albeit every man must give an account of himself before God, and must personally be born again, and personally be reconciled to God by Jesus Christ, yet, “no man liveth to himself,” nor was he ever meant to do so. No man can compass the ends of life by drawing a little line around himself upon the ground. No man can fulfill his calling as a Christian by seeking the welfare of his wife and family only, for these are only a sort of greater self. There are outgoing lines of life that bind us not only with some men, but, in fact, with all humanity; so that, if we did but know it, the thought of one brain, the utterance of one lip, the movement of one pair of hands does in its measure influence the whole human race to some degree and will do so till time shall be no more. We are placed, therefore, in a most solemn position; and it is with regard to this that it is high time that we should awake out of sleep.
Into what a deep slumber some professing Christians have fallen! How utterly insensible they are to the sins and sorrows of those around them. They believe God has a people, and they are very glad he has, as far as they are capable of being glad of anything that does not concern themselves. But, “the world lieth in the wicked one,” and multitudes are perishing. They are sorry it is so, that is to say, they go the length of saying they are sorry. It does not cause them any sleepless nights, it does not disturb their digestion, it in no way interferes with their comfort, for they do not seem to think that it has anything to do with them. I know some that are in such a sleep who drug themselves with almost as much regularity as they feed themselves. They take that great and precious truth of the divine sovereignty, and turn it to a most detestable use; for they say, “What is to be will be, and the Lord’s purpose will be fulfilled. There will be some saved and others lost.” All this is said as coolly as if they were talking of a wasp’s nest. As for those that are lost! They dare not injure their logic by indulging a little mournful emotion. Were their minister to weep over the lost, as Jesus wept over Jerusalem, they would say he was unsound-a duty-faith man, certainly, and, probably, an Arminian. And they would straightway quit him, and think that he could not have really received the mind of the Spirit of God. Yet, in the judgment of all who think aright, one of the finest traits in a Christian’s character is the deep sorrow which he feels over souls that are being lost and the great longing of his own soul that men would turn unto God and find peace through Jesus Christ. O sirs, I fear there are many professors in a deep sleep as to whether others are going to heaven or to hell! The drunkenness that is around them they look upon as a matter of course. The blasphemy which greets their ears does not chill their blood: they say it is very usual and very shocking. The Sabbath breaking they take to be a kind of necessary evil. The rejection of Christ by men they look upon as no sin at all, and they even quarrel and cavil with those who think that sinners are blameworthy in rejecting the Son of God, the Savior of sinners.
I trust that many of these are God’s people, and, if they be, it is high time that they should awake out of such a sleep as that, so unlike Christ, so alien to the spirit of love, so contrary to the mind which God would have his Spirit work in all his people. Alas! that they should have sunk into so dead a sleep.
Others there are, dear friends, who are prone to be overtaken with an oft-recurring sleep. I know a brother who often takes forty winks in the day-time: you may nudge him, and he will wake and listen to you, but he goes to sleep again in a few minutes if you let him alone. He will attend to you with much pleasure if you pull his coat again; but he soon returns to his dozing. Who can blame the sleeper when it is a question of infirmity or sheer exhaustion? I never like to blame people too hastily when they go to sleep in a place of worship, for I remember thinking rather hardly of a brother, who went to sleep one Sunday morning under my sermon; but when I found that he had been sitting up two nights with a sick wife and had been doing a full day’s work besides, then I was sorry enough to have thought a hard thought of a worthy man. I rather wondered, when I understood the case, whether I should have been able to come to worship at all. Well, without blaming any of you, then, for the weakness of the flesh, I take this sleepy habit to be a fit illustration of the state in which some Christians are to he found. They go to sleep and then they wake up for a little; they have fits and starts of wakefulness, and then off to sleep again they drop. Does this describe you, dear friend? At that missionary meeting you woke up when you heard the cry of the perishing heathen. You wanted to get out into the street at once and tell poor sinners about Christ; and you did empty your pockets into the plate before you left the building. Have you cared much about China or India since then, though you know that there are millions of people,-millions dying for lack of knowledge? They have not troubled you much, have they, since that missionary meeting? Perhaps to-night I shall pull your coat tail a little and you will be awake again, and you will be very much concerned, and you will pray earnestly for your neighbors and your ungodly friends. But, I fear, you will soon go to sleep again. You have gone back to your slumbers so many times before that now it is “sleeping made easy.” Could not your ministers lodge a grievous complaint against you for this? You do get on fire with love for souls when the discourse is specially arousing, but then after the sermon is over, and the week of special services has ended, you go to sleep again. Many Sunday-school teachers there are of that kind. They do sometimes talk to their children about their souls with tears in their eyes; and then, again, their ardor evaporates, and they get through their duties in little better form than merely reading the Scriptures, and explaining them in a dry, dull fashion. My slumbering brethren, you could be awake. You might be awake! For sometimes you are so. There are times when your whole soul seems on fire. If anybody had spoken of you then, they would have said, “What a fine man that is! What love he has for Christ! What concern for the souls of men! He ought to be sent forth as a missionary at once.” Wait till you see him asleep! He can sleep very soundly! In fact, he is as great at sleeping as at waking. He can descend into depths of stupidity and indifference as naturally as he just now rose into heights of fervor and enthusiasm. Yes, there are many such, and I would say to any brothers and sisters who are conscious of a propensity in that direction-is it not high time that you, that I, that any, that all of us should awake out of sleep?
There are those, again, who fall into a kind of somnambulistic state. They are doing a good deal for their Lord and Master, but yet they are asleep. If judged them by their outward actions we should think they were wide awake, and they do what they do very well. But have you never seen a person who has a habit of walking in his sleep? It is a strange sight. Persons have been known to walk along giddy heights safely enough when they have been fast asleep, where they would not have thought of venturing if they had been wide awake. And we have known, sometimes, professors going on very safely, carefully, exactly, in positions where others have fallen, and we have admired their prudence and discretion, and attributed it to the grace of God, whereas in part it has been attributable to the fact that they were spiritually asleep all the time. It is very possible to walk long and far and yet remain asleep; it is very possible to appear very devout when, indeed, you are very sleepy. It is very possible to sing hymns when
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III. I close with a third remark. It Is Worth While Waking, For There Is Something Worth Waking For.
He says, that it is high time that we wake out of sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. As I already remarked, he does not say, “for if you do not wake you will be lost.” Neither does he say, “You Christian people, if you remain in this dull state, will perish without hope.” No, that is the threatening of the law, and suits the tongue of Moses, but Jesus does not talk so. No, no, he sets his servant speaking to us in a gospel tone, “Now is your salvation nearer than when you believed.”
Undoubtedly, dear brother, it is nearer in order of time. How long is it since you believed? Ten years? You are ten years nearer heaven, then. Your salvation, that is, your ultimate, complete salvation, the display and manifestation of your complete deliverance from evil, from sin, from death, from hell, is nearer by so many years than when you believed. Some of us are five-and-twenty years nearer heaven than we were. Ought we not to be more awake? The farther we are off from heaven, the less we may feel its influence; but we are getting so much nearer that we ought to be increasingly sensitive to its mysterious spell. Oh, to feel more of its power! We shall soon be in heaven, brothers. We shall soon be there, sisters. Do not let us go to sleep now with the golden gate right before us, and Jesus waiting to admit us. Nearer glory! Is it not good argument for being more alive unto God?
Some of you are sixty years nearer to heaven than you were. You have been in Christ now more than half a century. Well, well, brother, are you not glad of it? Would you like to live those sixty years over again? Would you like to go back and tread that weary road a second time, clambering again the hill Difficulty, and sliding down again into the Valley of Humiliation. Would you wish to march a second time through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and into Giant Despair’s castle? “No,” say you; and you need not fear the return journey, for you shall not go back again. Rejoice that you are so much nearer heaven in the matter of time. Therefore, keep wide awake, and looking out for it. When little children have been taken from their inland homes to the sea they have been very eager to see the ocean, and yet they have been ready to go to sleep as they approached the end of the journey. They have never seen the sea before, but mother says, “Wake up, children, you are coming near the sea.” Soul, soul, soul, we have never seen heaven, but we are getting nearer. Let us keep awake. Jerusalem, my happy home, shall I enter thy sacred precincts sleeping? Shall I come to the last hill, from which I am to take a view of thy glittering vanes and golden streets, and shall I be half asleep within view of them? Come, no, no, no; my heart, wake up! Heart, wake up! thou art getting nearer home. “A day’s march nearer home” thou hast come even this day, be ashamed to slumber.
And, if we are getting nearer in point of time, I hope we are getting nearer in point of preparation. Christ is preparing heaven for us, and his Sprit is preparing us for heaven. Well, then, if we are getting more ready for heaven, we ought to be more awake, for sleepiness is not the state of heavenly spirits. Heaven is the home of activity, not the dormitory of unconsciousness. When our bodies shall have been raised from the dead, they shall enjoy life and energy, and be for ever free from fatigue and sluggishness. Let us, as we are getting ready for celestial company, be fuller of life and fuller of energy.
More ready for heaven, then reap, reap, reap with stronger arm. Do another man’s work, if thou canst, as well as thine own. Thou hast nearly accomplished thy life’s labor, therefore throw all thy strength into that little which remaineth. So near heaven; then pluck another brand out of the burning. If thou art more fit for heaven thou hast more love, more grace, more pity; then reach out both hands to bring another poor soul to Christ. If the golden gate shall soon be open to thee, and thou shalt be shut in for ever in the blest place of rest, be sure to show others the way to that gate, that thou enter not alone. Your salvation is nearer than when you believed, therefore do something more to prove that you are ready for it. And, lastly, as your salvation is nearer than when you believed, let us hope your realization of it is more clear. Have you tried to realize the glory to be revealed? Within a short time you will be with Jesus-
“Far from this world of grief and sin,
With God eternally shut in.”
Your head will wear a crown, your hand shall grasp the palm of victory; you, even you, shall walk the golden streets, and see that face which is brighter than the sun. It may be that to-night you will be made free of the New Jerusalem: to-night you may leave that narrow room and that hard bed, the abode of poverty and care, and you may be away up where they keep eternal sabbath, and the congregations never break up. You will be there, brother, even you. There is a crown in glory which no head can wear but yours. You will be there. Well, now, it really seems to me that, if I can realize that in so short a time my eternal salvation shall be consummated, and I, even I, shall be among the blood-washed throng, to see my Savior’s face, I cannot any longer neglect a single opportunity of serving my Master-cannot any longer let poor souls go down to hell without endeavoring to save them-cannot any longer neglect prayer-neglect opportunities of usefulness, or live otherwise than as a man should live who has his foot upon the doorstep of heaven and his finger on the latch. What manner of persons ought ye to be to whom heaven is guaranteed by promise, and to whom it has been sealed by blood to be your special heritage,-the portion of a people whom every moment brings nearer to eternal felicity? What manner of persons ought ye to be? May the Spirit of God make you to be just that now, and he shall have praise for ever. Amen.
I have said nothing to the unconverted because I have been admonishing you to say something to them. If you will catch the spirit of my text, you will each one feel for them and begin to speak. But if I were to wrench the text from its connection, and apply it to the unconverted, what a sledge hammer it would be! Shall 1 read the text as I should have to read it if it spoke to the unregenerate? It runs to the Christian, “Now is your salvation nearer than when ye believed.” Oh, ye unconverted men, must I read the text as it would have to run if it were written to you? “It is high time that you should awake out of sleep, for now is your damnation nearer than when you first heard the gospel and rejected it.” Take heed, take heed. God grant you grace to take heed and to believe in Christ. Amen and Amen.