I like to sleep. Actually, I love to sleep. Bedtime is one of my favorite times each day. I get into my pajamas, settle under my fluffy blankets and thank God for another day. Imagine my interest when Pastor Ben told me that last month’s spiritual theme at Faith Alive was “Awake, O Sleeper,” based on Ephesians 5:14.
While he references scriptures that talk about physical sleep, Pastor Ben is mostly talking about spiritual sleep. However, he talks about their interconnectedness by saying, “Spiritual sleeping is detrimental at every level to our health…whatever happens in the spiritual realm effects the physical and vice versa.
“Spiritual sleeping is a stage and period we lose spiritual sensitiveness and alertness. At this time we become dull, lukewarm and inaccurate in our spiritual judgment and decision. We become so shallow in understanding, careless in handling spiritual issues and unconscious of spiritual moves that we begin to allow some unwanted seeds of the world to creep in and choke up the seed of the word of God in us.
“This reduces our spiritual performance and in turn leads to spiritual poverty. If not interrupted through some spiritual means, it brings about spiritual death. A careful look into the scripture above, it is clear that sleeping comes before death; that was why the sequence of the command above was that one has to awake from sleep then come out of the dead. It was to avoid all of these that we received the call to awake.”
If you want to read more verses about sleep, Pastor Ben cites Romans 13:11, Matthew 25:6, Mark 4:38-39, Jonah 1:6, John 10:10, Matthew 26:40-41 and Matthew 24:42.
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