Matt Chandler - Wide Awake

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. I want you to see this passage while you’re turning there. This isn’t a prophetic word; it’s just a statement that I know you drive a black Honda sedan and parked it at the Chick-fil-A parking lot. In that Honda sedan, you turned the lights on and off because you needed them on for the drive here, but you have not turned them off now. So, either a friend is going to give you a jump or a ride home, or I can provide some prayer cover while you sneak out and turn off your lights. Let me say a quick prayer, and it’s going to be quick. So if you’re in the middle of it, let’s do this. Father, we love you; we love gathering as your people. The truth is, we need you. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. We thank you for our intellect; we thank you for deep thinking and the historically rooted nature of our faith. But we ask now, Holy Spirit, that you would penetrate our defenses, that you would quicken our spirits and awaken our hearts to your beauty and grace. As we read your Word, may it read us. We need your help. If you leave us on our own, we might leave and join ourselves, but we won’t leave different. Our hearts desire that you would change us from one degree of glory to the next over the next 35 to 40 minutes. Help us; it’s in your beautiful name I pray. Amen.

It was three in the morning; I know exactly what time it was—three in the morning—and I had my little sister pinned to the couch. She was screaming the kind of scream that invokes pure terror in everyone else in the house. In fact, I wanted to scream alongside her, but my system was flooded with adrenaline. I don’t know if you’ve been there; the best I could come up with was a noise that sounded like, «Oh!» All the hair on my body stood up, and unable to snap her out of her terror, I just pinned her to the couch. When you and I sleep, our minds are moving back and forth repeatedly throughout the night between REM sleep and non-REM sleep, and during that transition, weird things can happen. You—anybody married to a talker? On my honeymoon, Lauren sat straight up in bed and said, «Wake up, Patty! It’s Christmas!» and then laid back down. Sorry, I should have cleared that one first; I apologize. And some people walk—anybody married to a walker? I mean people just get up and walk around the house, maybe make themselves a sandwich or something. They’ll just get up and walk around. As for my sister, whether it was some dark force, some repressed memory, or just a natural occurrence in that space between being awake and asleep, she was filled with terror—the kind of terror that made her believe we were all about to die. It felt as real as possible to her. She moved her body and screamed bloody murder while I had her pinned to the couch.

That space between sleep and wakefulness is what I want to talk to you about starting this morning for the next ten weeks. The Apostle Paul has some concerns about the church at Ephesus. His concern is that Christians—not non-Christians, but Christians—have somehow, despite all they watched God do 12 to 15 years earlier, become so asleep that they almost look dead. He writes these words; this is what we just read: Ephesians 5:13–14: «But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. For anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,» and he quotes Isaiah 62: «Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.»

Now, let me share the context of Ephesians 5. We’re not just pulling these verses out of their context; in Ephesians 5, we’re reading Paul’s encouragement to the church at Ephesus about how to live as Christians in an extremely perverse and idolatrous city. Ephesus was one of the ancient wonders of the world; they were ground zero for finances in all of Asia and for the worship of Artemis—or, if you prefer the Roman name, Diana. Her temple was unlike anything you can imagine; if you’ve heard of the Parthenon, it was twice its size. The worship of Artemis/Diana involved hundreds, if not thousands, of eunuchs, virgin priestesses, and temple prostitutes. Worship was unbelievably erotic and perverse. By the way, that temple was the main bank in the ancient world; it was the center of economic power and the hub of cult worship in Ephesus. The gospel slammed into Ephesus 12 to 15 years before this was written. Why that’s important is that the gospel hit so hard in this community that a riot broke out.

What happened in this really perverse, wicked, and broken city is that when the gospel showed up, it spread fast. As it spread, Christians began to distance themselves from the economic activities that would have been necessary; they stopped the temple stuff, burned witchcraft, and walked away from cultic sexual perversion. They pulled back so much that the idol makers of the day felt it.