“When I awake, I am still with Thee.”

(Psalm 139:18)

What waked you up this morning? (I suppose that for the sake of discussion we may assume that we are all awake?) But what waked you up? Was it you alarm clock or your neighbor’s cat or dog? Some folks with small children were awakened, no doubt, by the baby’s hungry cry or a little boy’s happy voice from his bed eagerly begging to begin another day’s play.

What waked you up this morning? Do you remember? It’s not really so important what waked us up (however important it may seem for the first few minutes after we are awakened), but rather the important thing is to what we waked up. To what or to whom did your thoughts immediately turn when you awoke? Did you wake up to an unfinished quarrel with your wife or husband? Did consciousness dawn upon you with a sinking feeling because of an unperformed duty or an unrighted wrong?

The Psalmist in the 139^th Psalm cries with a joyful shout that when he waked up it was with a thrilling awareness of God’s presence: “When I awake, O God, I am still with Thee.” Can you think of a more marvelous way to begin the day? To open your eyes from unknowing darkness to the light of reality with the thought: “This is God’s world. He is near. This is the day that He hath made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. For He is here beside me, closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. By His mercy and His grace do my eyes behold this day’s radiant glory. Therefore, if His divine purpose calls me forth from my sleep, I will arise and go out in the serene trust and unwavering courage to fulfill my divine destiny today. When I awake, O Lord, I am still with Thee.”

Of course, there is a reason the Psalmist awakened with such a tonic starter. It was in no sense accidental. His last thoughts before going to sleep were of his God. When anyone of us goes to sleep mastered by some thought, that thought is still beside us when we wake. “If it be trouble on which we closed our eyes, how swiftly in the morning does it return. And it is because the Psalmist lived with God, and went to sleep in implicit trust under the sheltering wing of the Almighty, that he could take pen and write in all sincerity, ‘When I awake, I am still with Thee.’” (Joseph Parker on Text)

This is a text for every day’s awakening. And it is important, too. We know how influential those first few waking moments are in setting the tone for the whole day. We’ve found out what getting up on the wrong side of the bed can mean. But our text’s irrefutable importance and cogent concern to our personal lives dawns upon us with tremendous impact only when we begin to think of those more dramatic and decisive awakenings we each one experience from time to time.

We live our lives not in just experiencing a succession of awakenings to one new day after another. There come those seasons of great awakenings — like the awakening of our hearts to the call of love — such as made Elizabeth Barret Browning sing:

The face of all the world is changed, I think,

Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul

More still, Oh still, beside me … and I …

Was caught up into love, and taught the whole

Of life in a new rhythm.

So also is the great awakening of our minds to new knowledge that shakes our whole universe of accepted fact and value and we experience something of the thrill young Keats got when he first read Chapman’s translation of Homer’s epic and burst into a sonnet about his mental awakening:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken.

We experience new awakenings when in youth we come to a sense of personal responsibility for our actions, and later, to a dawning social conscience, and most of all, perhaps, when as parents we wake up to the wonder and awfulness of parental responsibilities.

Now, what a difference it makes, in all these and other great awakenings, whether we wake up with or without the consciousness of God’s presence. I shall never forget the tingling chill that ran up my spine when reading years ago Frank Laubach’s book, The Silent Billion Speak, I came across the author’s bold assertion that the billion illiterates of the world are going to learn to read — that they are rapidly becoming literate. But what a difference it will make, Laubach said then, whether they are taught to read by a communist or a Christian: whether they wake to literacy and the power of the enlightened mind with class hatred in their hearts or with brotherly love implanted there by faith in Christ. “Will these billion wake up,” Laubach asked, “with or without God?” And history has been shouting at us the difference that it has been making and will continue to make. Oh, what an opportunity for the church now, when communism is being discredited all over the world, for intensified Christian missionary activity, so that the liberated peoples of the earth will awaken to their new found freedoms with the love of Christ in their hearts!

Now, let’s take all this home to ourselves and think for a few minutes about what we might call life’s “rude awakenings,” which are the common lot of all mankind, and calculate the difference it makes for us whether we experience these rude awakenings with or without God.

I know of no more rude awakening than when a person comes to a sense of sin — a feeling of personal guilt. Most modern people have been brought up under a tutelage where sin is not included in their vocabulary.

Karl Menninger, that celebrated psychiatrist from Topeka, Kansas, wrote his famous book whose title asks: Whatever Became of Sin? The book traces the fade-out of a consciousness of sin in American society due to evolving scientific explanations for human behavior. Menninger wrote: “the notion of sin as it had been taught began to undergo erosion. ‘There are no bad children,’ we were taught, ‘only bad parents.’ Sin began to be questioned. Magazine articles appeared bearing such titles as Sin or Symptom? … Offenses were translatable into psychological terms and explained by psychological theories. To call them sins had no usefulness.”

So Karl Menninger baldly states: “I believe that there is sin which is expressed in ways which cannot be subsumed under verbal artifacts such as ‘crime,’ ‘disease,’ ‘delinquency,’ ‘deviancy.’ There is immorality; there is unethical behavior; there is wrong-doing.”

We as individuals, as well as a nation, need to remember Reinhold Niebuhr’s plea, that “original sin is not the sole possession of our enemy.”

How fortunate for each one of us, when we are rudely awakened, to find ourselves, not so strong and right and perfect as we once thought we were, but sinners in need of the mercy and healing and cleansing of Almighty God, how fortunate if we are on speaking terms with God, the forgiving, loving Heavenly Father Jesus knew, and can say in the same breath as the realization dawns, not only, “I am a person of unclean lips,” but also, “Mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts, and He is speeding His heavenly messengers to cleanse my lips and my sin is forgiven and my iniquity is pardoned.”

Then there is that rude awakening to sorrow, tragedy, loss. We know such to be the common lot of mankind but we are never fully ready for ours when it comes. Then we wake, not out of a nightmare to tranquil reality but, into a reality more harsh than any nightmare our imaginative subconscious could conjure up. Oh, then what a difference if we waken with God — to find that He is still with us, supporting us amidst the swelling icy flood. How and when the strange new helping strength comes, we know not, but it does — and we know it is the Lord’s doing. He has not failed us.

Job, in the lowest depths of his sorrow and pain, nevertheless refused to curse God, declaring: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust Him … The Lord hath given; the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

No one of us can always escape the bitter and the hurt of this human life. Let us just be sure we are ready to wake in the gray morning with God.

Last of all, let us think of that last rude awakening we shall all experience when we open our eyes one moment after death. Oh, then to be able to say with the Psalmist, “When I awake, I am still with Thee.” “If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou are there … Wither shall I flee from Thy spirit?”

Some of the keenest observers and analysts of modern life are appalled at the loneliness that haunts the lives of modern people. One character in a Broadway play is a successful attorney with numerous friends, yet he feels so much alone that, when he comes to grips with the most serious personal problem he has ever known, he confides in a total stranger.

In a modern novel, a man wakes up after a surgical operation afraid, and says to his wife: “Funny thing, Laura, there isn’t anybody in our crowd that I’d want to see right now. They’re not the sort of people you want to see when you’re in trouble. Death embarrasses them. They’re swell, but they don’t want to be in at the death.”

Man’s loneliness in life is terrifying, how much more horrible must be his loneliness in death. When we face that unique adventure where neither brother nor husband nor wife nor friend can accompany us, there is only one who, having tasted death for our sakes, can go with us through the dark curtains and remain at our side when we wake on eternity’s bright and tearless morning.

“The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them … They are at peace. For though in the sight of men they were punished, their hope was full of immortality. God tested them and found them worthy of Himself.” (Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-5)