If we don’t look to Jesus, sermons will be dull, and television will be more appealing than God’s Word. The way to stay awake is by remembering what Christ has done for us on the cross, how he washed our sins away, and that he will return to call his children home. We do not stay awake by sheer determination and conflict with the world. We do so by living in gratitude for the cross. 

He sat in church while the pastor delivered eternal truths but could not stay awake. Soul-saving exhortation was coming at him, but he was busy catching his head every time he nodded off. It wasn’t that he had had a busy week or even stayed up too late the night before; it was that he was bored. He felt he had heard it all before, so he let his eyelids droop.

His sleepiness also manifested itself in other ways. The surrounding culture had been moving further and further away from the truth, but it happened so subtly that he didn’t find it interesting enough to note. Sure, there were the occasional moments when it became so glaring that he couldn’t help but notice, but he would be asleep again in a few days. For example, he recently saw the uproar about the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. The controversy was whether the creators meant to create a scene that resembled DaVinci’s Last Supper painting using transvestites. He was fired up for a while because he thought they had mocked his faith. He settled down when the creators said everyone misunderstood their intention. His once crystal-clear perception of the situation was now muddied, so he let go of his concern.

The problem was the culture had already desensitized him enough that he failed to realize that even if they didn’t intend to mock his faith, it was still the normalizing presentation of transvestites, and other strange pagan perversions on a world stage. Those depravities had become so commonplace that it didn’t register on his Richter scale.

Later that week, he intended to pick up his Bible and read it, but there was a new movie streaming that he wanted to watch, so he opted for that instead. Afterward, he called his friend to rave about how much he loved the show, unconscious of the fact that the film promoted some of the same sexual deviations represented in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

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