It's Time to Wake Up

And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. Romans 13.11

Advent is a wake up call. 

It’s a time of year where we take stock of the lives we lead, and prepare ourselves to live for what matters.

Because often we live for things that don’t. We live for creature comforts. We live for pleasures. We live in a way that conveniently helps us forget that we’re in a world that is hurting and in need of salvation.

Which is why we need this Advent time to shake off the cobwebs of complacency, and remember what we’re about: the salvation found for all humanity in the coming of Jesus.

If Jesus is real, then that changes everything. If Jesus is real, if he has come and will come again, then a few crucial things are true:

• The present darkness in this world, war, hunger, political unrest, has started to come to an end in the birth of Jesus in the manger, and will end when he returns.
• The coming of God in Jesus is intensely personal because the problem is personal: each one of us is presently caught in a darkness that needs the personal healing hand of Jesus.
• Death is not the end, so whatever hurts us, whatever haunts us, is a passing thing, and the light and love of God in Jesus is forever.

These three facts give contour of our existential dread. And our modern solution is to distract ourselves with busy lives and numb the pain by amassing money that buys pleasure. But that ain’t the wave y’all. 

And like Frank the Rabbit calling to Donnie, Jesus says: Wake up. 

The rabbit's voice disturbs Donnie, and is meant to disturb us. Because the Voice of the Real, the Voice of God comes to us in frightening and disturbing tones. The God Man Jesus, an ancient Palestinian prophet and the embodiment of the Desert God of ancient Israel who is a consuming fire, now come to humanity as a lamb to live a life that redefines what it means to be a human being living in the light of the Creator. And his coming is our salvation. Like a tall rabbit in the dark, it disturbs and frightens. And we don’t want it.

We want a technological solution. We want a political solution. We want a philosophical/spiritual τέχνη, ης, ἡ (techné ) that grants us the future we want, purchased only by offering what we’re comfortable giving. 

But Jesus says that true healing is the surgeon's cut that heals. It’s the confession that we don’t like, that pains our self-made modern identity, the truth that we don’t want to say. It’s to confess that our deepest problems don’t have human solutions. And to wake up to Jesus is to acknowledge gladly that our deepest desires can’t be realized by human means. We need help from the outside.

This One from the outside is who we long for.

Most are aware of the longing but know not whom they long for. And they turn to the pleasures of the day and the comfortable ideas of the age of darkness. But they don't save, they just enslave.

So wake up. Wake up! For God’s sake and for your own.

Join us as we sing of the coming of the One, the Lord Jesus, the fire of God in an innocent child. For He has come and will come again one day to heal our world, destroy that ancient darkness that binds us, and only the children of light will remain.

Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.