Awake, Thou That Sleepest – Sermon 3

This is part of a larger project on “John Wesley’s Sermons for Today.”

Preached on Sunday April 4, 1742, before the University of Oxford, by Charles Wesley, M.A., Student of Christ Church.

“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” Ephesians 5:14 (KJV)

In preaching on these words, I will, with the help of God:

First, describe the sleepers, to whom these words are spoken;

Secondly, enforce the exhortation, “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead;”

And thirdly, explain the promise made to those who do wake up and rise: “Christ will shine on you.”

I.

1. First, about the sleepers being spoken to here… Sleep signifies the natural state of people, that deep sleep of the soul that Adam’s sin has cast all of his descenants into, that lying down, laziness, and ignorance, that lack of awareness of their real condition — the condition of all people when they come into the world and that continues until the voice of God wakes them.

2. Now “those who sleep, sleep at night.”[1] The natural state is a state of total darkness, a state where “darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples.”[2] These poor unawakened sinners, regardless of how much knowledge they may have about other things, have no knowledge of themselves. In this respect, “they do not yet know as they ought to know.”[3] They do not know that they are fallen spirits, whose only business in the present world is to recover from their fall, to regain the image of God they were created in. They have no compulsion for the one thing needed,^[4] that inward universal change, that “birth from above,” worked out by baptism, which is the beginning of the total renovation, the sanctification of spirit, soul, and body “without which no one will see the Lord.”^[5]

3. Full of all diseases as they are, they consider themselves in perfect health. Bound up in misery and iron, they imagine they are free. They say, “Peace! Peace!”[6] while the devil, as “a strong man, fully armed,”[7] is in full possession of their souls. They keep on sleeping and take their rest, though the realm of the dead below is all astir to meet them,^[8] though the pit from which there is no return has opened its mouth to swallow them up. A fire is kindled around them,^[9] yet they don’t know it. It burns them, yet they don’t take it to heart.

4. When we talk about those who sleep, we are, therefore, to understand it to mean (and help us God, that we might all understand it!) sinners satisfied in their sins; content to remain in their fallen state, to live and die without the image of God; those who are ignorant both of their disease, and of the only remedy for it; those who never were warned, or never regarded the warning voice of God, “to flee from the coming wrath;”^[10] those that never yet saw they were in danger of the fire of hell,^[11] or cried out earnestly, “What must I do to be saved?”[12]

5. If these sleepers are not outwardly vicious, their sleep is usually the deepest of all. They may be of the Laodicean spirit, “neither cold nor hot”[13] – perhaps someone like a quiet, rational, inoffensive, good-natured professor of the religion of his fathers. Or they may be zealous and orthodox, “conformed to the strictest sect of our religion, living as a Pharisee;”[14] that is, according to the account in Scripture, people that justify themselves, people that work hard to establish their own righteousness as the foundation of their acceptance with God.

6. These are the ones who, “having a form of godliness, deny its power.”[15]  In fact, they probably mock it, wherever it is found, as mere extravagance and delusion. Meanwhile, the wretched self-deceivers thank God that they are “not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers.”[16] No, they do no wrong to anyone. They “fast twice a week,”[17] use all the means of grace, are consistent at church and the Lord’s Supper, and even “give a tenth of all they get.”[18] They do all the good they can; “as for righteousness based on the law,” they are “faultless.”[19] They want nothing of godliness but the power; nothing of religion but the spirit; nothing of Christianity but the truth and the life.

7. But don’t you know that however highly esteemed among people such Christians as this may be, they are detestable in the sight of God, and heirs of every woe which the Son of God, yesterday, today, and forever, declares against “teachers of the law and Pharisees – hypocrites”[20]? They have “cleaned the outside of the cup and dish,”[21] but inside they are full of all moral filth. “A vile disease has afflicted them, so that their heart is filled with malice.”[22] Our Lord rightly compares them to “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside;” but, nevertheless, are “full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”[23] The bones indeed are no longer dry; tendons and flesh appear on them and skin covers them, but there is no breath in them,^[24] no Spirit of the living God. And, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.”[25] “You are of Christ, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you.”[26] But if not, God knows that you remain in death.

8. Another character of the sleepers being spoken to: they live in death, though they do not know it. They are dead to God, “dead in transgressions and sins.”[27] For “the mind governed by the flesh is death.”[28] Even as it is written, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people;”[29] not only bodily death, but also spiritual and eternal. “When you eat from it,” said God to Adam, “you will certainly die;”[30] not bodily (unless in the way he then became mortal), but spiritually. You will lose the life of your soul; you will die to God – will be separated from him, your essential life and happiness.

9. In this way the vital union of our souls with God was first destroyed, so that “in the midst of” natural “life, we are” now in spiritual “death.”^[31] And we remain there until the Second Adam becomes a life-giving spirit to us;^[32] until he raises the dead – the dead in sin, in pleasure, riches or honors. But before any dead souls can live, they “hear” (listen to) “the voice of the Son of God.”[33] They are made aware of their lost position before God and receive the sentence of death. They know they are “dead even while they live;”[34] dead to God, and all the things of God, having no more power to do the actions of a living Christian than a dead body has power to do the functions of a living person.

10. And it is certain that those dead in sin have not “trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”[35] “Having eyes, they fail to see; they have ears but fail to hear.”[36] They do not “taste and see that the Lord is good.”[37] They “have never seen God,”[38] nor “heard his voice,”[39] nor “touched the Word of life.”[40] The name of Jesus is “like perfume poured out, and all his robes are fragrant with myrrh, aloes and cassia,”[41] but only in vain. Souls that sleep in death have no perception of any objects like this. Their hearts have “lost all sensitivity”[42] and understand none of these things.

11. And for this reason, having no spiritual senses, no openings for spiritual knowledge, the person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. These people are so far from accepting them that whatever is discerned only through the Spirit is mere foolishness to them.^[43] They are not content with being completely ignorant of spiritual realities; they go on to deny the very existence of them. And spiritual feelings are themselves foolishness and folly. “How,” they ask, “can this be? How can anyone know that they are alive to God?” Just as you know that your body is now alive. Faith is the life of the soul, and if you have this life dwelling in you, you need no marks to confirm it to yourself, but elegchos pneumatos,^[44] that divine awareness, that witness of God, which is more and greater than ten thousand human witnesses.

12. If he does not now testify with your spirit that you are God’s child,^[45] if only he would convince you, you poor unawakened sinner, by his demonstration and power,^[46] that you are a child of the devil!^[47] If only as I prophesy, there might now be “a noise and a rattling sound” and may “the bones come together, bone to bone!”[48] Then “come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live!”[49] And do not harden your hearts and resist the Holy Spirit, who even now comes to convince you of sin, “because you have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”[50]

II.

1. For this reason, “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead.”[51] God calls you now from my lips;^[52] and tells you, “know thyself, you fallen spirit” – your true condition and only concern on earth. “How can you sleep? Get up and call on your God! Maybe he will take notice of you so that you will not perish.”[53] A mighty storm is stirred up around you, and you are sinking into the depths of destruction, the chasm of God’s judgments. If you will escape them, throw yourself into them. “Judge yourself, and you will not be judged by the Lord.”

2. Awake, awake! Rise up this moment, or you will “drink from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath.”[54] Rise to take hold of the Lord, the Lord your Righteousness, mighty to save! “Shake off your dust.”[55] At least let the earthquake of God’s threats shake you. Awake, and cry out with the trembling jailer, “What must I do to be saved?”[56] And never rest until you believe in the Lord Jesus, with a faith which is his gift, by the work of his Spirit.

3. If I speak to any one of you, more than to another, it is to you who find yourself indifferent to this appeal. “I have a message from God for you.”[57] In his name, I warn you “to flee from the coming wrath.”[58] You unholy soul, see your picture in condemned Peter, lying in the dark dungeon, between the soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries standing guard at the entrance.^[59] The night is almost gone, the morning is near, when you are to be brought in for execution. And in these dreadful circumstances, you are fast asleep; you are fast asleep in the devil’s arms, on the brink of the pit, in the jaws of everlasting destruction!

4. May the Angel of the Lord come upon you, and the light shine into your prison! And may you feel the stroke of an Almighty Hand, raising you, with, “Quick, get up! Put on your clothes and sandals. Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.”[60]

5. Awake, you everlasting spirit, out of your dream of worldly happiness! Did God not create you for himself? Then you cannot rest until you rest in him. Return, you wanderer! Fly back to your ark. This is not your home. Do not think of building tabernacles here. You are only a foreigner, a stranger upon earth; a temporary creature of a day, but just launching into a permanent state. Quick! Eternity is at hand. Eternity depends on this moment. An eternity of happiness, or an eternity of misery!

6. In what condition is your soul? If God, while I am still speaking, demanded your life from you,^[61] are you ready to meet death and judgment? Can you stand in his sight, who has “eyes too pure to look on evil”[62]? Are you “qualified to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light”[63]? Have you “fought the good fight, and kept the faith”[64]? Have you secured the one thing needed? Have you recovered the image of God: true righteousness and holiness?^[65] Have you taken off your old self, and put on the new?^[66] Are you clothed instead with Christ?

7. Do you have oil in your lamp? Grace in your heart? Do you “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”[67]? Do you have the same mindset as Christ Jesus?^[68] Are you really a Christian, that is, a new creation? Has the old gone? Is the new here?[69]

8. Do you “participate in the divine nature”[70]? Do you not realize that “Christ is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?”[71] Do you know that God “lives in you, and you in God, by his Spirit, which he has given you”[72]? Don’t you know that “your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, whom you have received from God”[73]? Do you have the witness in yourself? The deposit guaranteeing your inheritance? Have you “received the Holy Spirit”? Or do you flinch at the question, not knowing “that there is a Holy Spirit”[74]?

9. If it offends you, be assured that you neither are a Christian, nor desire to be one. Rather, your genuine prayer is turned into sin, and you have solemnly mocked God this very day, by praying for the inspiration of his Holy Spirit, when you did not believe there was any such thing to be received.

10. Yet, on the authority of God’s Word, and our own Church, I must repeat the question, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”[75] If you have not, you are not yet a Christian. For a Christian is a person that is “anointed with the Holy Spirit and power.”[76] You have not yet received a share in pure and faultless religion. Do you know what religion is? That it is a participation in the divine nature – the life of God in the soul of a person, Christ formed in the heart, “Christ in you, the hope of glory,”[77] happiness and holiness, heaven begun on earth, “a kingdom of God in your midst; not a matter of eating and drinking,”^[78] no outward thing, “but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” [79] an everlasting kingdom brought into your soul; a “peace of God, which transcends all understanding;”[80] an “inexpressible and glorious joy”[81]?

11. Don’t you know that “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love,” the new creation?^[82] Don’t you see the need for that inward change, that spiritual birth, that life from the dead, that holiness? And are you throughly convinced that without it no one will see the Lord?^[83] Are you making every effort for it? “Making every effort to confirm your calling and election”^[84]? “Working out your salvation with fear and trembling?”^[85] “Agonizing to enter through the narrow door”^[86]? Are you serious about your soul? And can you tell the Searcher of hearts, “You, O God, are what I long for! Lord, you know all things; you know that I would love you!”^[87]

12. You hope to be saved, but what reason can you give for the hope that you have?^[88] Is it because you have done no harm? Or because you have done much good? Or because you are not like others – but wise, or educated, or honest, and morally good – respected by people, and with a good reputation? Alas! All this will never bring you to God. It is by his account only a breath.^[89] Do you know Jesus Christ, whom he has sent?^[90] Has he taught you that “by grace we have been saved, through faith–and this is not from ourselves, it is the gift of God–not by works, so that no one can boast”?^[91] Have you received the trustworthy saying as the whole foundation of your hope: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”?^[92] Have you learned what this means: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance? I was sent only to the lost sheep”?^[93] Are you (let whoever hears understand!) lost, dead, condemned already? Do you know the just rewards or punishments for your actions? Do you feel your needs? Are you “poor in spirit”?^[94] Mourning for God and refusing to be comforted? Is the prodigal “come to his senses,”^[95] and content to be thought “out of his mind”^[96] by those who are still feeding on the pods which he has left? Do you want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus? And are you therefore persecuted? ^[97] Do people falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of the Son of Man?^[98]

13. If only in all these questions you might hear the voice that wakes the dead and feel that hammer of the Word that breaks a rock in pieces!^[99] “If you hear his voice today, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ do not harden your hearts.”^[100] Now, “wake up, sleeper” in spiritual death, so that you will not sleep in   v bf, death eternal! Feel your lost position and “rise from the dead.” Leave your old companions in sin and death. You follow Jesus, and let the dead bury their own dead.^[101] “Save yourself from this corrupt generation.”^[102] “Come out from them and be separate. Touch no unclean thing, and the Lord will receive you.”^[103] “Christ will shine on you.”^[104]

III.

1. Lastly, I come to explain that promise. And what an encouraging thought: that whomever you are that obeys his call, you cannot seek his face in vain! If you even now “wake up, and rise from the dead,” he has pledged himself to “shine on you.” “The Lord bestows on you favor and honor;”^[105] the light of his favor here, and the light of his honor when you receive the crown that will never fade away.^[106] “Your light will break forth like the morning, and your night will become like the noonday.”^[107] “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ will make his light shine in our hears to give us the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”^[108] On those who revere the Lord, “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays.”^[109] And on that day it will be said to you, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.”^[110] For Christ will reveal himself in you, and he is the true light.^[111]

2. God is light, and will give himself to every awakened sinner that waits for him, and you will be a temple of the living God, and Christ will “dwell in your heart through faith,”^[112] and “being rooted and established in love, you will have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.”^[113]

3. Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called.^[114] We are called to become “a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit,”^[115] and through his Spirit dwelling in us, to be his holy people here,^[116] and to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.^[117] So very great are the promises he has given us,^[118] actually given us who believe! For by faith “we receive not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God” — the entirety of all the promises — “so that we may understand what God has freely given us.”^[119]

4. The Spirit of Christ is the great gift of God, which he has promised to mankind at many times and in various ways,^[120] and has fully granted since the time that Christ was glorified. Those promises, made previously to our ancestors, he has now fulfilled: “I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees” (Ezek 36:27). “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants” (Isa 44:3).

5. You may all be living witnesses of these things: of forgiveness of your sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.^[121] “Everything is possible for one who believes.”^[122] “Who among you fears the Lord and” yet continues walking “in the dark and has no light?”^[123] May I ask you, in the name of Jesus, Don’t you believe the arm of the Lord is not too short to save?^[124] That he is still mighty to save?^[125] That he is the same yesterday, today and forever?^[126] That he now has authority on earth to forgive sins?^[127] “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”^[128] In Christ God has forgiven you.^[129] Receive this, “not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God,”^[130] and you are justified freely through faith. You will also be sanctified through faith in Jesus, and will certify that “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.”^[131]

6. Brothers and sisters, I can tell you confidently,^[132] and bear with my word of exhortation,^[133] even from one whose way of life is scorned in the church.^[134] Your conscience confirms through the Holy Spirit that these things are true,^[135] now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.^[136] “This is eternal life: to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent.”^[137] This experiential knowledge, and this alone, is true Christianity. People are Christians if they have received the Spirit of Christ. They are not Christians if they have not received him. And it is not possible to have received him and not know it. “For on that day” (when he comes, says our Lord), “you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”^[138] This is the “Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:17).

7. The world cannot accept him. They completely reject the Promise of the Father, contradicting what he says and heaping abuse on him.^[139] But every spirit that does not acknowledge this is not from God. In fact, “this is the spirit of antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.”^[140] The antichrist is anyone who denies the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or that the Spirit’s indwelling is the common right of all believers – the blessing of Christ,^[141] the indescribable gift,^[142] the universal promise, the gauge of a real Christian.

8. It does not help them at all to say, “We don’t deny the assistance of God’s Spirit; but only the idea of inspiration, this idea of receiving the Holy Spirit; and being aware of it. It is only the idea of experiencing the Spirit, the idea of being moved by the Spirit, or filled with it, which we believe has no place in sound religion.” But in only rejecting this, you reject the whole Bible; the whole truth, and promise, and testimony of God.

9. Our own excellent Church [the Anglican Church] hasn’t heard of this devilish distinction. It speaks plainly about “feeling the Spirit of Christ” [Article 17], about being “moved by the Holy Spirit” [Office of consecrating Priests] and knowing and “feeling there is no other name than that of Jesus,” [Visitation of the Sick] by which we can receive life and salvation. She teaches us all to pray for the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit” [Collect before Holy Communion], and in fact, that we may be “filled with the Holy Spirit” [Order of Confirmation]. And every one of her Elders professes to receive the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands. Therefore, to deny any of these, is, in effect, to renounce the Church of England, as well as the whole Christian revelation.

10. But “the wisdom of God” was always “foolishness with men.” No wonder, then, that the great mystery of the gospel is is now also “hidden from the wise and learned,”^[143] as well as in times past; that it would be almost universally denied, ridiculed, and discredited as delirium; and that anyone who would dare affirm it now is branded a lunatic and fanatic! This is “that rebellion”^[144] that was to come–that general apostasy of all types and classes of people, which we even now see has spread over the whole earth. “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem and see if you can find but one person,”^[145] one person who loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and serves him with all his strength.^[146] How our own land mourns (we need look no further) at the torrents of ungodliness! What outrageous things of every kind are committed day by day – and too often without punishment – by those who sin defiantly, and glory in their shame! Who can count the unholy allegiances, curses, ungodliness, blasphemies; the lying, slandering, evil-speaking; the Sabbath-breaking, gluttony, drunkenness, revenge; the prostitutions, adulteries, and various impurities; the frauds, injustice, oppression, and greed which spread across our land like a flood?

11. And even among those who have kept themselves pure from those more detestable things, how much anger and pride, how much laziness and idleness, how much laxness and weakness, how much luxury and self-indulgence, how much greed and ambition, how much desire for praise, how much love of the world, how much fear of others, is to be found! Meanwhile, how little of true religion! For where is the one that loves either God or their neighbor, as he has instructed us? On the one hand are people who don’t have even the form of godliness; on the other, those who have only the form — those who are open and whitewashed tombs.^[147] So that if anyone were to intently watch any public gathering of the people (I fear those in our churches are no exception), they could easily know “that some of them were Sadducees and the other Pharisees,”^[148] the one having as little concern about religion as if there were “no resurrection, and neither angels nor spirits,”^[149] and the other making it an insignificant lifeless form, a dull sequence of external performances, without either true faith, or the love of God, or joy in the Holy Spirit!

12. If only I could exclude us from this condition! “Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for you is that you may be saved”^[150] from this overflowing of ungodliness; and that here is where its proud waves will halt!^[151] But is that the case? God knows – and indeed our own consciences know – it is not. You have not kept yourselves pure. We also are corrupt and vile,^[152] and there are few that understand anymore, few that worship God in the Spirit and in truth.^[153] We, too, are “a rebellious generation, whose hearts are not loyal to God, whose spirits are not faithful to him.”^[154] He has called us to be “the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, it is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”^[155]

13. And “’Should I not punish them for this?’ declares the Lord. ‘Should I not avenge myself on such a nation as this?’”^[156] Indeed, we do not know how soon he may say, “Let the sword pass throughout the land!”^[157] He has given us a long time to repent.^[158] He leaves us alone for one more year,^[159] but he warns and wakes us with thunder. His judgments are scattered over the countryside, and we have every reason to expect the heaviest judgment of all: that he “would come to us and remove our lampstand from its place, unless we repent and do the things we did at first,”^[160] unless we return to the principles of the Reformation, the truth and simplicity of the gospel. Perhaps we are now resisting the last effort of divine grace to save us. Perhaps we have almost “filled up the measure of our sins”^[161] by rejecting God’s purpose for ourselves,^[162] and driving out his messengers.

14. O God, “in the midst of wrath, remember mercy!”^[163] Be glorified in our reformation, not in our destruction! Let us “heed the rod and the One who appointed it!”^[164] Now that your “judgments have come upon the earth,” let the people of the world “learn righteousness!”^[165]

15. My brothers and sisters, the hour has already come for us to wake from our slumber^[166] before the “great trumpet of the Lord sounds”^[167] and our land becomes a field of blood. O may we quickly see what leads to peace,^[168] before it is hidden from our eyes! “Restore us, good Lord,^[169] and put away your displeasure toward us.^[170] O Lord, look down from heaven and see! Watch over this vine,”^[171] and make us recognize “the time of your coming to us.”^[172] “Help us, God our Savior, for the glory of your name! Deliver us and forgive our sins for your name’s sake!^[173] And then we will not turn away from you. Revive us, and we will call on your name. Restore us, Lord God Almighty! Make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.”^[174]

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”^[175]