Are You Asleep?--by J.C. Ryle
No doubt this is what the church today needs to hear. The church needs to wake up but it will happen with individuals ONE BY ONE. Community has its advantages but it also has some draw backs. When we stand before the Holy One on the day of Judgement we will not give an account of our lives to God as a community. The only one who could speak on our behalf is the Son of God––Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb. At times we do fall asleep. We become comfortable with sin. We kinda like it. We have no desire to read the Word and no desire to pray. How sad is this? This should never be the case.
Pray that God will deliver us from this sin.
~~~
"Heaven itself would be no happiness to you if you got there, for the Lord of heaven is not your friend: what pleases Him does not please you; what He dislikes gives you no pain. His word is not your counsellor; His day is not your delight; His law is not your guide. You care little for hearing of Him: you know nothing of speaking with Him. To be forever in His company would be a thing you could not endure; and the society of saints and angels would he a weariness, and not a joy. At the rate you live at, the Bible might never have been written, and Christ might never have died, the Apostles were foolish, the New Testament Christians madmen, and the salvation of the Gospel a needless thing. Oh, awake! and sleep no more.
Think not to say you are a member of Christ's Church, and therefore feel no doubt you are as good a Christian as others. I answer,—this will only make your case worse, if you have nothing else to plead. You may he written down and registered among God's people: you may be reckoned in the number of saints; you may sit for years under the sound of the Gospel; you may use holy forms and even come to the Lord's table at regular seasons; and still, with all this, unless sin be hateful, and Christ precious, and your heart a temple of the Holy Ghost, you will prove in the end no better than a lost soul. A holy calling will never save an unholy man. Reader, awake: awake!"....READ ENTIRE.
posted by kennyo at 7:56 PM
3 Comments:
this is very good. Christians need to wake up and repent
I have posted about the sleeping church before... the emergent church is telling everyone that it must sleep so that it can process the information it gets.
I will quote:
This kind of information processing is simple for a music system such as iTunes, dealing as it does with perhaps 12 tags per song. For the brain, on-line for hours each day, constantly importing and dealing with huge amounts of complex visual, sound, emotional and sensual information, it is impossible to ‘complexify’ it - make appropriate horizontal links between things - in real time. So it does it at night. And we call it dreaming.
This is why dreams can appear such a mish-mash of random images and thoughts. It is also why so many ‘eureka’ moments come during or just after sleep, rather than in the hours of sitting ‘thinking’(…)Like a brain, we will see centralised knowledge devolved into networked intelligence. Like a city, we will see strong, centralised leadership become less visible and less powerful, exerting less control but existing simply to resource those involved in communities, economic activity and industry on the ground. And like every one of us, we will see the body of Christ accepting its need to sleep, to wait for things, to dream. As Descartes proposed, if we are to be, we must think. But more than just existing, if we are to evolve, we must dream.
This is from emergingchurch.info
I am not sure if I can post the url here, because your settings may consider it spam.
But If you want I can comment again with all the website details... or you could visit my web-site and go to the search box in the top right corner and type in "Wake up Church"... that will bring you my post will all the details and web-sites.
I hope you don't mind me promoting just one of my posts... but I thought it would be relevant to this post :)
V
Oh and I just wanted to give you this scripture which I think is important:
Mar 14:37 And He came and found them sleeping. And He said to Peter, Simon, do you sleep? Were you not strong enough to watch one hour?
Mar 14:38 Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit truly is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Falling asleep and not watching is akin to entering into temptation. We must always be alert and watchful!
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