Sermon preached on Sunday, September 29, 2013 at Garden Valley Chapel during our morning worship service based on Romans 13:14.

Take your Bible if you will and open it to the book of Romans, Romans chapter thirteen.

As believers we know that anyone of us can succumb to spiritual slumber where we lack both the activity and responsiveness to the things of God. We see it in the pages of Scripture.

For example the Apostle Paul writes to the believers in Ephesus in Eph 5:14 saying -

14 ...“Awake, sleeper, And arise from the dead, And Christ will shine on you.”

You see those believers at Ephesus had become co-participants with the unfruitful works of darkness and needed to be awakened from spiritual lethargy and indifference.

As a believer you must realize that we are not delivered out of all sin. We have been delivered from the power of sin but not the presence of sin. Paul himself said, “not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect” (Phil 3:12).

We are all in the process of being sanctified by the truth of God’s Word and thus we “like newborn babies, [must] long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it [we] may grow in respect to salvation” (1 Pet 2:2).

Praise God that He enables us to walk in obedience and to grow, but it is a hard reality that believers succumb to temptation and grow weary in doing good and fall to spiritual laziness and thus sleep.

And so he says, “Wake up from your spiritual laziness!”

They had gone down that slippery slope of “partaking” with unbelievers in wickedness.

Does it surprise you that Paul addresses believers in his letters and yet discusses the topic of sin, and in some cases “immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among Gentiles” (1 Cor 5:1)?

Notice how Paul speaks of Ephesian believers, as “children of light” (Eph 5:8). “You were formerly darkness, but now you are Light in the Lord.” There is no gray or shades of gray here, just darkness and light.

In the words of Paul to the Corinthians, “what fellowship has light with darkness” (2 Cor 6:14).

Perhaps in wanting to be liked by the world or not to stir up trouble or highlight the difference between Light and darkness, Christians in Ephesus joined the world in its evil.

You have to realize that there is a slipping and a lowering of standards that take place even among Christians and they start making compromises in their practices and very soon in beliefs.

And so Paul tells the Ephesians, “do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness” (Eph 5:11), but rather “expose them.”

That is not liberty to become some holier-than-thou person, but to bring the unbeliever’s life and practice to the light of the Gospel and the glory of Christ.

Show them their need for a Savior. Preach the Gospel to them, both its bad news and goods news.

Another reason I believe Christians fall to spiritual laziness is that they never seem to examine themselves and thus they are in grave danger of falling into spiritual slumber. They never seem to ask the hard questions of themselves like: “to what extent am I really being governed in my life and living by my Christian faith?”

They presume to be alright in their faith never realizing that they have become like a ship gradually drifting away.

Modern Christianity frowns down at self-examination because it assumes that it casts doubt in a believer’s life when in reality it is protecting the believer from becoming stagnant and from spiritual slumber.

That is why it was necessary to tell the believers at Rome that they are strangers and pilgrims in this world, fighting the world and the flesh and the devil.

Do not forget what you are and whose you are. You are light in the Lord and belong to Him.

Do not act as if there is no spiritual life in you!

My beloved, we are about to pick up the text of Scripture and read powerful words that will cut and penetrate the heart.

So powerful is this text of Scripture that for a 31 year old man, named Augustine, who struggled with “a hissing cauldron of lust” a man who was given over to sexual pleasures, taking up two concubines in his lifetime, and though he was exposed to the preaching of the great bishop Ambrose for some time, he plunged into the things of the world, and yet it was in late August, 386, when he heard a voice of child saying, “Tolle lege” - take up and read.

And so he did. He writes in his Confessions -

“So, restraining the torrent of my tears, I rose up, interpreting it no other way than as a command to me from Heaven to open the book, and to read the first chapter I should light upon...I grasped, opened, and in silence read that paragraph on which my eyes first fell.”1

My beloved, I invite you to stand in the reading of God’s Word as we shall read that text of Scripture that for Augustine was the great turning-point in his life.

Read Romans 13:11-14.

As we have said in times past, Paul begins with a general appeal (i.e. Awaken from Sleep). Having done that, he goes on to particular exhortations (i.e. Lay Aside the Deeds of Darkness). Finally he winds it all up with a final exhortation (i.e. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ).

Awaken from Sleep (vv. 11-12a)
Lay Aside the Deeds of Darkness (vv. 12b-13)
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ (v. 14)