It is Time to Get Up and Go to Work-10/25/2011

"And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed." Rom 13:11

Every morning we are blessed to see a new day. As some of us bound out of bed toward an invigorating cup of coffee and all the exciting tasks the day brings (or as some of us hang on to our pillows and the last shreds of unconsciousness as if it were the cure to all of life's ills), let us be reminded of what it means to wake up and get up. We do so because there is a time for sleeping and a time for waking. There is a time for resting and a time for working. There is a time for being still and a time for being active. Sleep, rest and stillness merely serve to recharge us for the things that must be done.

Beloved, far too often we clutch the pillow of neglect in our spiritual lives. Times when we are called to go to the harvest, visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, work while it is day and to rejoice and be glad in that day, we instead pull the covers over our heads while slapping the alarm clock to silence. In so doing, we are clinging to the darkness in our lives and it is a darkness from which we have been saved. In so doing, we are neglecting that salvation. The Hebrew writer asked rhetorically, "How shall we escape [just punishment]if we neglect so great a salvation?" Heb 2:3.

We must wake up and, as Jesus said, "Work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night comes when no man can work." John 9:4. Just as in the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant, there will come a time when a season (or a lifetime) of idleness and improvidence will show up demanding payment, at which time it will be too late to attempt to get things done. Do you remember the people of Noah's time?

There are no easy chairs in the house of the Lord. Let us focus on accomplishing what we were saved to do. Let us rise with glad hearts, thankful for the blessing of waking and the ability to accomplish. And let us cheerfully seek and accomplish the work of the Lord. "For they that sleep sleep in the night: and they that are drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, since we are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love' and for a helmet, the hope of salvation." 1 Thes 5:7.

Loving Like Jesus,

Lee