I’m so tired right now, I can barely type. I wasn’t going to blog this evening (I’m writing this around 10:30 PM on Sunday), but as I sat here bleary-eyed, a couple thoughts came.
We’re barely into a new year and the big “R” word—Recession—blares from the front page of the newspaper. The economy in my area is already on the downswing. Companies have frozen hiring in most cases. A quick look at Monster.com for my area shows a depressing increase in junk jobs (“Make Millions from Home Licking Stamps for Envelopes!!!”). Folks have that flinty stare, the kind of look reserved for bothersome teenagers blasting hip-hop out of their cars. Except folks stare off into nothing, as if to warn away life itself.
Everyone talks about the price of gas (“Yeah, but waddya gonna do?”), the out-of-touch presidential candidates (“Yeah, but waddya gonna do?”), and that nagging fear that things really ARE not as good as they used to be (“Yeah, but waddya gonna do?”). The voices all reflect two states of being: helplessness and tiredness.
And it does seem to me like people seem stricken with tiredness, as if we could all hibernate and sleep through whatever it is that’s afflicting us right now. A Rip Van Winkle sleep. The sleep of the not-quite-dead, yet not-quite-alive.
But that’s the sleep of the damned, if you ask me.
We are the Church of the Triumphant Lord Jesus. It’s not time to be drowsy. It’s time to trim the wicks and check our supplies of oil. The world may be in the throes of somnambulism, but we Christians can’t sleepwalk through life. We cannot allow the enemy to lull us to sleep through materialism, through the threat of losing all the cheap junk we’ve accumulated for ourselves, or through the threat of threats. The gates of hell were not built to withstand the onslaught of even one wide-awake Christian on fire with the Holy Spirit.
Do we believe that?
Tired? How can we be tired when we’ve been asleep for so long!
The old Christian band Harvest had an album called Only the Overcomers. If the times are threatening, it’s time for the overcomers to stand up and be counted. It’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work.
I asked last Friday about the pressing needs you all felt at your churches. I ask now: “What’s your next step?” How will you overcome that issue? How will you be the source of change for the better in your church?
Because the days aren’t growing any brighter. The Bible promises that darkness is coming. And we also know that when darkness comes, the tendency is to sleep. It’s natural. That’s what the world will be doing, just more so.
What will the Church be doing?
As hard as it is to do with our schedules, etc. the need of Christians to get outside the four walls of our buildings and serve those around us and minister God’s grace to them is going to be even more pressing as the economy takes a turn for the worse
We can either live like the rest of the culture and complain about our material lack, or we can show our neighbors that there is something (and Somebody) beyond the trials of this world. it’s time to once again be the Church instead of just going to chcurch.
These Cerulean Sanctum posts always seem to have it’s thumb directly on the pulse of our times — it’s downright uncanny. We ARE in the midst of the sleep of the damned. That’s so well put. It’s like a lethargic, bleary-eyed stumbling through this world on it’s way to eternal damnation.
What to do regarding the Church at large? It seems since these are spiritual issues, they can be only overcome using spiritual means. In a word: more focused, deep, fervent intercessory prayer for these specific issues. Not a prayer or two shot off with the passion of someone who wants to check “Pray for Church off their prayer list. No, with the passion of someone praying for the Church with the same intensity and desire you’d see if a person’s child was kidnapped and the mom or dad spent their days and nights crying out to God from the depths of their being for their child’s safety and return.
Do we have that kind of fervent passion for the health of the Body? Do we see it as OUR problem, and not the leadership’s problem or someone else’s problem (like someone with the “ministry of prayer — what is that notion, anyway?! — we ALL have the ministry of prayer)? Is fervent, deep, focused intercessory prayer for the health of His Church our driving passion? If not, why not? And then, for the Church to be in a state of readiness to receive the directives He wants us to carry out.
So the first and primary response, I think, is to shut off all the mindless time wasters and retreat to one’s prayer chamber, fall on our faces before Him, earnestly pleading for God to bring passion and a renewed sense of the set apart nature of His Church — that in all places everywhere His true Church gathers, that He would breathe life into these dead bones and restore to us a sense of wonder, renewed joy, and fervent passion to see His name honored throughout the world (and especially amongst the people who are called by His name), and that He would purge from us all that displeases Him and ALL that weighs us down and makes us lethargic and spiritually dulled.
Would that God would grant us hearts desperate for Him — hearts that would treasure the joy of intercession far above the joy of eating, sleeping, or anything else!
Dire Dan: I guess Oengus might be tired to respond to your “When you’re tired” post. Oh, wait…I’m tired too, need to go to bed! 🙂