Wake up people
Mar 1
Romans 13:The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.
Slumber is a kind of less than sleep. It is like a snooze, not a deep sleep, just a light closing of the eyes etc. But it is not in a state of alertness. Paul here tells the church at Rome to wake up from their slumber. Sometimes we need to be blunt and tell people to wake up. We cannot always preach sermons which are nice and which are uplifting. Sometimes we need to keep it real and speak the truth.
Satan would like you and me to be asleep or at very least at slumber. When we are in slumber we are not alert, things can happen around us without us realising it. How do I know if I am slumbering? Well usually you don’t which is why we need to keep one another accountable. When you see a fellow Christian who has lost his or her way it could well be they have fallen into slumber and in that state they are ripe for the devils picking. So we need to not just leave them but gently remind them of their first love for Christ.
We have a young student from Reunion island who has come to stay with us for two weeks on an exchange program. Imagine if in the time she lives with our family we are all slumbering and we do not share the love of Christ with her? That would be a shame and a disgrace, if we indeed believe that people without Christ will be damned to an eternity apart from God. So we need to keep it real, and we need to make sure that we show love and love is sincere. Paul says wake up and be alert for the day of our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. Paul must be referring to the salvation of the body and they were probably expecting Jesus to return in their lifetime. But now we are much nearer that day, so we cannot afford to sleep and be slumbering. My prayer is that God wakens me to do his work in the field.
Making him visible
Mar 1
Last night in church we saw a clip from Philip Yancee’s talk on prayer. He was speaking about the angle of repose. The angle of repose is when a rock is teetering on top of another and looks like it could topple at any minute. Then at some point it finally tips over.
He spoke about two ladies working in Pollsmoor prison not far from where I live, and how they had heard of the violence in the prison and they started going daily to teach the inmates and hold bible studies. And in the next year after they had taught, the number of incidents dropped from 267 acts of violence the previous year to only 2 in this year.
When Yancee met these ladies a few years later he asked them about it. They said that God’s presence was always in the prison but they just made it visible. Again, this is exactly what God has been showing me. His goodness and blessings surround us all the time, but sometimes we need to make them visible so we can receive them. Prayer is one of the tools that we can use to do so.