[b]Revelation 3:2,3 (niv)[/b] - [color=CC0000][b]Wake up![/b] Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have recieved and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not [b]wake up[/b], I will come like a theif, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.[/color]
[b]Ephesians 5:14 (niv)[/b] - for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said: '[b]Wake up[/b], O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'
THE world is still sleeping its sleep of death. It has been a slumber of many generations; sometimes deeper, sometimes lighter--yet still a slumber like that of the tomb, as if destined to continue till the last 'trumpet sound; and then there shall be no more sleep.
Yet God has not left it to sleep on unwarned. He has spoken in a voice that might reach the dullest ears and quicken the coldest heart. Ten thousand times has He thus spoken and still He speaks. But the world refuses to hear. Its myriads slumber on, as if this sleep of death were the very blessedness of its being.
Yet in one sense the world's sleep has never been universal. Never has there been an age when it could be said there is not one awake. The multitude has always slept, but there has always been a little flock awake. Even in the world's deepest midnight there have been always children of the light and of the day. In the midst of a slumbering world some have been in every age awake. God's voice had reached them, and His mighty power had raised them, and they walked the earth, awake among sleepers, the living among the dead.
The world has written at large the history of its sleeping multitudes; it becomes the Church of Christ to record the simpler, briefer annals of its awakened ones. Doubtless, their record is on high, written more imperishably than the world can ever accomplish for its sons, yet still it is well for earth to have a record of those "of whom the world was not worthy".
Their story is as full of interest as it is of importance. The waking up of each soul would be matter enough for a history--its various shakings and startings up, ere it was fully aroused; the word or the stroke that effected the work; the time, the way in which it became awake for eternity and for God, as well as its new course of light after it awoke--all these are fraught with an interest to which nothing of time or earth can ever once be compared. And then, when the voice of God awakes not one, but thousands, it may be in a day; when whole villages and districts seem as if arising and putting on new life--how intensely, how unutterably interesting! At such a crisis it seems as if the world itself were actually beginning to awake, as if the shock that had broken the slumbers of so many were about to shake the whole world together. Yet alas! the tokens of life soon vanish. The half-awakened sleepers sink back into deeper slumber, and the startled world lies down in still more sad and desperate security.
The history of the Church is full of these awakenings, some on a larger and some on a smaller scale. Indeed, such narratives form the true history of the Church, if we are to take our ideas of this from the inspired Church history given us in the Acts of the Apostles.
Many a wondrous scene has been witnessed from the day of Pentecost downwards to our own day, and what better deserves the attention and the study of the believer than the record of these outpourings of the Spirit? Besides the interest that cleaves to them there is much to be learned from them by the Church. To see how God has been working, and to observe the means and instruments by which He has carried on His work, cannot fail to be profitable and quickening. It makes us sensible of our own short-comings, and it points out the way by which the blessing may be secured.
-Horatious Bonar
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SI Moderator - Greg Gordon
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