“Wake up, and put some strength into what is left, which must otherwise die. For I have not found any work of yours completed in the eyes of God.”

(Revelation 3:2)

Waking people up is a thankless job. Every soldier in the army hates the bugler. In a family she whose chore it is to go about waking up the others every morning puts a strain on whatever tender ties may bind her to them, but it must be done for however sweet sleep may seem, it cannot compare with the glorious possibilities of being awake to conscious existence in this wonder packed universe.

St. John pictures the living Christ coming to the church at Sardis and saying: “Wake up …. You have a name for being alive, but you are dead …. Wake up, put some strength into what is left, which must otherwise die …. If you do not wake up, I shall come upon you like a thief, and you will not know the moment of my coming …. Wake up!”

That is not very pretty talk. Certainly it is not conversation calculated to stir one out of a stupor into jubilant wakefulness, nor evoke feelings of affection for the waker-upper. But sometimes the sleep is so deep that rough shaking is required to awaken.

The Church of Jesus Christ at Sardis in the Book of Revelation is the picture of a church asleep. Indeed, John says of this church that it has a reputation for being alive, but he who knows its spiritual condition knows it to be dead.

The city of Sardis was one of the oldest, richest, and most fabulous cities of the ancient East. It was the capital of the kingdom of Croesus, whose name became a proverb for wealth: “rich as Croesus.” Indeed, it seems that Croesus invented money. The people of Sardis through the long years of its existence paid careful attention to trade and business and pleasure, but the record of the years is that they grew soft militarily and were repeatedly conquered notwithstanding their almost impregnable fortress high on a mountain pinnacle.

Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote contemptuously of Sardis and its people: “The tender-footed Sardinians, who can play on the cithara, strike the guitar, and sell by retail.” “To put it into the modern idiom,” said William Barclay, “Sardis had become a city of amateur dance band musicians and shopkeepers. The strange fate of Sardis was that life had grown too easy. The people had grown flabby and sunk into an easy and voluptuous decadence. The fate of the church at Sardis was the same.” (Barclay — Letters to the Seven Churches)

Spiritually they were asleep. However painful the waking up might be; however unpopular it might make the waker-upper, the living Christ, the Lord of the Church at Sardis, set himself to awakening them.

Has this text any reverence for the church of Jesus Christ in America today? Does it speak to our condition in the Presbyterian denomination? What about us, Rosemark Presbyterians — how awake or asleep spiritually are we?

A few years ago the American church had a reputation for being very much awake and alive. Compared with the churches in Europe and Britain, the American churches could show better attendance at worship, more activities, larger contributions, more extensive buildings, but in recent years the spiritual birth rate in the American churches has fallen behind the rate of population growth for the nation as a whole. We Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians have been losing members at a distressing rate. Have we a reputation for being alive today, but are in truth spiritually dying?

How awake and spiritually alive are we? Here is a quick, three-point check you and I might make on our own, and diagnose our own condition.

First, are we awake to God’s presence in our own personal life? Are we aware of God’s existence? Do we hear His voice and heed His commands?

“John Donne had a picture made of himself wrapped in winding sheets and placed in a coffin. At this he looked daily to remind himself of the final adjudication of death. But that grim realist did not think of the fact that the startling picture might represent the possibility of a man’s being dead (spiritually) while he was alive.” (Interpreters Bible)

Often times people in distress will say: “God seems so far away from me. I try to pray but it is nothing but empty words.” What does this reveal: that God who once was closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet, has suddenly ceased to exist? — or — does it mean that spiritually this person is in such a condition that he is dead, or asleep, or deaf to God and His commands?

When first I went to the theological seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, my dormitory room was on the busy, downtown corner of First and Broadway. The automobiles, streetcars, and heavy transport trucks kept up such a racket all day and all night that for two weeks I could neither study nor sleep. But gradually I adjusted to my surroundings. As I became attentive to my studies and the routine needs of my body for sleep, I became deaf to the noisy traffic. But when I went home for the Christmas holidays the quiet was so oppressive that I lay awake, sleepless, most of the night. It makes a deal of a difference in our living, what noises and realities we are habitually awake to in our daily life.

Back in the 1960s the Idlewild congregation built a magnificent new educational and recreational building. Shortly after moving into the completed structure a teacher of a teenage class of boys and girls in the Sunday School said in exasperation after a particularly trying period of instruction: “We’re missing the boat in our Sunday School. We’ve built a superb building and we have organized and trained a fine staff of church school teachers, but we aren’t getting the job done. The members of my class had all been up so late on Saturday night watching television or out on parties that they couldn’t keep their eyes open or take part in a class discussion.”

What are we in the habit of listening to? To whom and to what are we awake, and to what are we asleep? Are we awake and attentive to the voices of the community or to Christ?

A second check to determine whether we are awake and living spiritually or are asleep and dying, let us ask ourselves: Am I awake to what God is doing now in history, the arena of His activity?

Frederick K. Kappel, when Chairman of the Board and Executive Officer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, said in an address: “Eighty percent of the world is having a brand new experience. For the first time in history they are waking up to the fact that the price of rice is related to the kind of government they have.”

Do you know a better way to describe what education really is than this: waking up to the significance of relationships? James Watt idly watching the teakettle in the kitchen, suddenly waked up to the fact that there was a relationship between the sight of the steam pouring out from the spout and the jiggling of the teakettle’s top. When there was not steam coming out the top was not moved. This discovery of relationships — the sight of the steam and the presence of power to move — was a leap forward educationally, not only for James Watt, but for the world. It became the basis of the whole industrial revolution of the Western hemisphere.

The writing prophets of Israel had this in common — an ability to discern the relationship between the moral and ethical principles in the character of God that He had revealed to Israel in the Mosaic law, and the judgments God was bringing in the events of history upon all individuals and social systems which transgressed those principles.

Amos saw the powerful and privileged people of his day, “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes,” and he also saw God standing in the midst of his nation as a builder with a plumb line measuring the square and the crooked, condemning to destruction individuals and social systems built out of line with the divine specifications.

To a captive, politically oppressed people in Babylon, Isaiah announced deliverance and freedom by the hand of God in the arena of history: “The Lord hath made bare His holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”

Do we need to be an Amos or an Isaiah to see in this our time, at the end of long centuries of colonial exploitation, whole nations springing to freedom, and communist dictatorships collapsing under the weight of their bumbling failures and cruelty, and the jubilant rising of oppressed people in Asia and Africa and Europe, and even in our America, rejoicing in the new universal respect that is coming to men and women and little children regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude — Do we need to be an Amos or an Isaiah to see that it is the arm of the Lord that is performing this marvelous thing?

Centuries ago it was written in the Bible. Behold, before our eyes it is taking place. Are we spiritually awake enough to behold it as His handiwork, or are we spiritually dead as were those critics of our Lord in the long ago who saw Him heal the sick and the demon possessed and said that it was in the name of Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that He cast out demons?

Finally, let us try this check on our spiritual life: Ask yourself, “Am I awake to the hope to which God calls His people?”

Notice the sequence we have been following in this three-point eternal life insurance check up: (1) Am I awake to the reality of God’s presence in my personal conscious existence? (2) Am I awake to what God is doing in the arena of His activity, in the history of our times, to bring social conditions into conformity to the Biblical revelation of His character? and (3) Am I awake to the future’s glorious hope to which God has called His people?

Look at that pitiful crowd of despairing slaves in Babylon to whom Isaiah came with his electrifying announcement: “Awake, Awake, put on thy strength, O Israel; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem.” The words of this poet-prophet are in a mood diametrically opposed to the condition of the people to whom he speaks. He is announcing: “The days of mourning and servitude are over. Zion is no longer a slave.”

Has the deliverance actually taken place? No. Have the slaves left the city of their captivity? No. Has their physical condition begun to improve ever so slightly? No, not in the least. What has happened? A new spirit has come. A spirit of understanding of God and His will, a new awakening to the power and loving kindness that is His, a new confidence and assurance and hope that He will bring it to pass.

I once called on a patient in the hospital who had been gravely ill. In the depth of despondency and in great fear this patient had been when last I saw her. But this afternoon, though still weak, still with the look of death upon her, she had a new light in her eyes and in her voice a ringing confidence. “I’ve turned a corner,” she said. “God will restore me.” Now there was peace and calm and confidence, when before there had been only anxiety and disappointment and despair. What had happened? Was she really already well? No. Stronger? Not yet. She said she had awakened to the glorious reality of the hope to which God calls His people. She had received the inner assurance that God would accomplish it. For her, it was as good as done.

In a letter to a friend Edward Rowland Sill once wrote: “Haven’t you often been newly startled at the sudden realization of how much people owe to hope?” Well, if we haven’t, we will waken to that realization one day when something takes place to dash hopes we have placed in a business deal, or a professional accomplishment, or a friend’s faithlessness. As we suddenly feel years older at beholding the smashed pieces of that broken hope, we learn how much people owe to hope; how much we depend upon hope for life itself.

Oh, yes, if only we can cling to that hope for our future in Jesus Christ that God holds out to us, we can say with James Stewart: “Life may prove harsh and difficult enough; may deny our dreams and half starve our hopes, but if we can say, ‘I am with Christ, and through Christ with God,’ we have our reward. We have found on earth the very peace of heaven.” (Stewart — The Gates of New Life — p. 149)