Acts 20:6-12 And we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came to them to Troas in five days… Of all the "ills that flesh is heir to," insomnia is one of the worst. This desperate disease requires a desperate cure, and Hugh Latimer tells of an afflicted lady who had, without avail, tried everything in the whole range of the medical pharmacopoeia, and at last, in this desperation spirit of "Physic, I'll no more of it!" cried out, "Oh, do take me to the parish church! I've slept soundly there the last forty years, and I think I could sleep again!" Taken to the parish church she was, and to be sure sleep soundly she did! Some of us ministers "thank God and take courage" when we see here that churchly somnolence is not to be always laid at the door of our prosy preaching, for here the doughty Paul was the preacher. Andrew Fuller did right well that day in Kettering when, observing several in his congregation give way almost at the beginning of the service, he flung consternation into their heavy-headed midst by bringing down the big Bible three times on the desk, and exclaiming, "What! asleep already! I often fear I preach you asleep, and grieve over it; but the fault cannot be mine today, for I have not yet begun!" Ah! but there is in the Church today a sleep worse a million times than this excusable napping of the lad Eutychus — the slumber inexcusable and profound of the unsaved soul! Asleep in the arms of the sleepless devil, who keeps cuddling and crooning over you as the anxious mother does over the starting, nervous child lest the slumber should be anywise broken. Around you now, unconverted Church member, are ease, and comfort, and prosperity. A cosy position brings drowsiness, and it has brought it to you. You are asleep now, asleep in the never-dying soul of you, asleep in the Kirk of God! How to arouse you from this slumber, how to awaken you from this sleep of the spirit, is the problem that presses for immediate solution. Oh, to lift the knocker of your slumbering soul chamber, and give one mighty house-quivering crash this day! Why, I heard of a man on whom this awful sleep of indifference had stolen till nigh shaken to pieces in a carriage collision, who remarked as he drew a long breath at the very thought of it, "Ay, God knocks hard sometimes. Before I would awake, He knocked me fifty feet down a railway embankment!" A hard knock indeed, because a loving one! And such may be yours. "Sleeper, arise and call upon thy God!" for "now it is high time to awake out of sleep." "The night is far spent, the day is at hand." Awake! awake! I. THE SLEEPER IS INSENSIBLE. Tick-tack, tick-tack goes the clock in the still muffled chamber of sleep; you hear it not. Eyes closed, limbs motionless, you are unconscious. So with the spiritual sleeper. The soul is unconscious and insensible. The mighty movements of God are unheard. Up and down the Bethel ladder do the angels go, but the rustle of the garments of glory never touches the ear; the great daily traffic from heaven to earth passing by your very door, and shaking every casement in the house, affects you not the slightest. Oh, the multitude of slumbering souls in the gospel Kirk of this gospel day! The pulpit is taken as a matter of course, with the tang and gust of a penance about it. Oh, the bitter waste of preaching Sabbath after Sabbath, year after year, the sweat and toil for nothing! Oh, what will arouse the masses of the sleeping in the Holy Sanctuary? Can nothing he done with them? Wake! awake! Some years ago a minister, sad at heart with this pulpit sadness, at the close of a heavy Sabbath day flung himself down, as Elijah did under the juniper tree, collapsed: "O Lord, let me die!" He fell asleep, and in his sleep he dreamed, and this was his dream: His own people, his own pulpit, himself the preacher. Never before had he felt so near to God, so conscious of the powers of Eternity. His heart overflowed in holy yearning, his lips had been touched by the live coal, and the words like flowing lava burned as they came. Unction, fire, melting, beseeching "even to tears," his that day. And in this minister's dream, how did the congregation appear? Never before had they been so listless and inattentive; heads swaying in somnolence from side to side; yawning to right of him, yawning to left of him, gaping from gallery to floor, and from floor to gallery; watches fumbled out on all sides to see when this weary plish-plash harangue would come to a close. This the only response to the pulpit, and as the vessel's thermometer suddenly sinks to zero before that polar iceberg swept along on the ocean way, so suddenly sink to despair did this poor preacher's heart before the arctic heartlessness of his flock. Just as he is closing one moving appeal to be reconciled unto God, and to come to Christ in that day of fleeting grace, the door of the church opens, and a stranger walks up the aisle, and seats himself right in front of the pulpit, and listens to it all. Every eye is turned upon him as he slowly rises. Hush! he addresses the heart-broken preacher! "Oh, sir, come you to hell with that offer of mercy, and you'll not have an unmoved congregation!" And the minister stops and looks at the stranger and he is the devil! That the dream, but this the fact. Ah! if I could go down to the black mouth of the, bottomless pit with this gospel of Christ, if I could take this offer of mercy, and make the gloomy caverns echo with this call to the Saviour, all hell would arise in. delirious joy; the very devil would leap from his throne, and come to be saved! II. THE SLEEPER IS INACTIVE. There is no increase to the wealth of the world from a sleeper. The work is done by active hands fingering along the looms and the distaffs of production, by busy feet erranding the goes and comes of the market's fluctuations, by broad brows throbbing hot with the fling-off of swarming thought, the mental electricity that is to pulse through humanity and gird the very ends of the earth together. But the sleeper there lies his lazy length; nothing he takes, nothing he makes, an inert useless log of unconscious flesh. Some time ago, at Falkirk Station, I read this notice of the railway company: "Wanted to dispose of thirty thousand old sleepers!" No longer can they uphold the rattling rails of the country's rolling traffic, outlived their usefulness, their day done, sell them for firewood for what they will bring! As I read that, I thought, "Well, I know some congregations very like that railway company, surplus stocked with a lot of 'old sleepers' they'd better dispose of!" If you are unconverted, the whole of your keen activity, dear organising worker for the Church, is just the galvanised twitching of a ghastly corpse. It has no value at all in God's sight; nay, unconverted labour has been rated by the Master at the minus figure of His complete disallowing and disapproval. "The ploughing of the wicked," God says, "is sin." There is a certain kind of congregational activity very much in vogue, in which all vagaries of outward commotion and hop-step-and-leap exercises are gone through in the most genteelly pious fashion. But you may visit till your legs bend, you may sew till your Dorcas needle evaporate through ceaseless friction, you may spend and be spent, give and be given till you melt with fatigue, and all the time it is just for self; it is that "zeal of God's house that hath eaten up" the Christ. You are asleep in nature's sleep; and, worker, till you come to Jesus and give Him your heart all your labour is but beating the air. It is like the child's rocking horse, motion indeed, but no progress. You remember Luther's parable about this? A council is held in hell, the devil presides, and the fiends are competing for a prize for the best infernal service. "I," says one — "I saw a caravan of human beings crossing the desert. I called on the sirocco with its hot, foul breath, I whirled the sandy masses to the blotted-out heavens, and I buried them all, and their bones lie whitening on the surface flats." "Well done," says the devil, "but a greater work than this can be done." "I," speaks another competitor — "I beheld a gallant life-laden vessel skimming the surface of the glassy sea. I hissed afar for the roaring tempest; I piled the mountains of foaming surge on the deck, and the ship went down with a sullen plunge, and the ooze and the tangle of the deep are their unburying grave." "Well done," says the devil, "but a greater work than this can be done." "I," and this last demon voice has the grim chuckle of conscious triumph in it — "I witnessed a congregation in a gracious revival. Souls were flocking to Christ, and our kingdom of hell was suffering defeat. For spiritual fervour I substituted material good; I multiplied the funds and collections; I filled the pews to overflowing; I flung enchantment round the voice in the pulpit — outward prosperity I brought with a rush to everything, ease, and comfort, and success, and along with it I soothed them all to slumber; and now, minister and members they are all asleep!" "The prize is thine, for this is the greatest work!" shouts the Infernal Arbiter, and hell's rafters rang with approving applause! III. THE SLEEPER IS IN DANGER. Here is a sleeper. The couch is enveloped in a mass of flimsy inflammable gauze curtains. A table stands ready to topple, and right on the edge of the table a naked candle is burning to its socket. Danger, is it not here? Ay, it is, and the red flames roaring out at yon windows will summon in desperate haste the rush and rattle of the fire engines in the dead of night. A matter of life or death it is; danger is here indeed. Unconverted soul, you are the sleeper. The curtains of a delusive dreamland have wrapped your couch in an inflammable cloud, and the candle of time, alit with eternity, is spluttering in its holding bracket before the final flare-up and the never-ending, conflagration of the awful "Too late! too late! — die! damned!" The sleeper is in danger because entirely defenceless. Yonder the whole armed camp has succumbed to slumber, the picket has fallen asleep at his post. Hist! a low, soft, rustling noise out there in the forest, the momentary gleam of the moonlight on a glistening tomahawk! Silently, like tigers crouching and crawling for their mesmerised prey, dark forms are wriggling and gliding through the bush to that camp of doom. Still they slumber within half a minute of their destruction. A war-whoop that brings the double echoes back from the far-off Rocky Mountains! Yells on yells rending the midnight lift! The work of blood has begun, and in a few minutes all the reeking scalps are dangling at the chuckling redskin's girdles! To a man that slumbering regiment has been annihilated. Sleep has done its fateful work. It always does. In sleep there is, too, the danger of all dangers, destruction incipient, death actually begun. It is a wild night on this Highland moor. Masses of powdery, feathery snow are whirled and hurled in continuous gusts from mountain tops to every nook of the glens. And that poor, faithful shepherd, with the icicles hanging at his shaggy beard, wearily wandering after his strayed sheep, is beginning to feel drowsy and dazed with that ceaseless beat of the icy avalanche from the frowning sky. It will be only for a moment or two and he will start up from his slumber refreshed for the search. Here is the very shelter, the bield side of a crag! Asleep! Ay, forever! "The Ice Maiden," as they say in Danish song, "has kissed him," and the press of that kiss on the cheek pledges to him the never awaking! Sleeper, sleep on, but the sleep slips into a frozen death! To sleep is to die, and he is asleep, and he is dead, and the other shepherds will tenderly lift him up in the clear calm of the fury-spent morning, a glazed corpse, a lump of lifeless ice! So, unconverted soul, sleeper in the Kirk of God, in this sleep of yours death has already begun. You have been kissed by the Ice Maiden of a lost eternity. You have given way to spiritual drowsiness, and you are already in the grip of the grave, and that cursed burial yours, of them who "have come and gone from the place of the holy." O gospel tampering, temporising soul, fear this and flee. If you refuse Christ now, will your dead heart be moved to accept Him at your any time nod, at your mere wish? I trow not. Recently in an extreme case of comatose sleep, of stupor "trance," when everything else failed, a famous doctor managed to awake the sleeper by focussing a beam of light into the upturned eyeball. Yours is this extreme case of trance, you Christ-rejector for years, your heart hardened with the crust of misused gospel privilege, you are dead. Yet here, blessed be God, is the famous Physician, the Lord. "Wherefore He saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." (John Robertson.) Parallel Verses KJV: And we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them to Troas in five days; where we abode seven days. |
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