Stay Awake, Stay Alert, Be Watchful

[00:00:01] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:08] Our epistle reading this morning began this. But you beloved, build yourselves up in your most holy faith. Pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. [00:00:28] So build yourselves up in your most holy faith. [00:00:32] Well, that's quite active. [00:00:35] It's like, okay, build yourselves up so we have somewhere to grow. [00:00:40] We have something more to attain to build yourselves up. [00:00:50] If you let a house just kind of sit and you don't do any maintenance over the years, you know, the more you let it go, the more is going to need to be done to it. It's going to become decrepit and old and you're going to have to redo a bunch of things. The same thing with a car, you know, as soon as you buy a car, it starts getting old. And then the older it gets, the more needs to be done to it. And, well, if you take something that's old or so maybe an old house or an old car, or pick your item and you want to build it up, you're going to have to. [00:01:31] Well, you're going to have to really pay attention. You're going to have to have a plan. [00:01:35] If you build anything up, you're going to have to have a plan for how to build it up. [00:01:42] Let's say you're rebuilding an old car. [00:01:48] So you're rebuilding an old car, and I don't really know cars, but let's say you've got a car from the 60s and you're building that thing. And if you start getting too excited about one of the parts or one of the. You could focus in on one thing and forget about the rest, or forget about important things and it's not going to work. [00:02:09] You really have to pay attention to that car. And the better you pay attention and plan, the better it's going to turn out. I mean, that could also apply to like a gingerbread house, right? It's like building anything. You have to pay attention. You need somebody paying attention to all of its parts too, right? The big picture, holding all of it together. [00:02:34] It takes attention to build something. Build yourselves up in your most holy faith. Pray in the Holy Spirit. [00:02:44] Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. [00:02:51] Sleep is also about attention. [00:02:56] Sleep is like the loss of your attention. [00:02:59] I remember all kinds of times growing up when I wanted to stay awake but couldn't you know, maybe it's like New Year's Eve and we're all staying up and I just can't, you know, can't stay awake. And then. And then I missed the dropping of the ball in New York City, you know, for. By 10 minutes or whatever. That's not such a big deal. But I also remember some movies, watching movies, and I just wanted so badly to stay awake and I couldn't. And I remember half seeing, you know, the end of. I actually specifically remember this with. What is it? North by Northwest. Anybody seen that? That's an oldie. [00:03:38] Anyway, you know, you just want to stay awake, but you can't. What's happening is you're losing attention. And if you fall asleep for the end of the movie, you don't get it. You miss the movie, and so you want to pay attention so that you get the movie. [00:03:56] Well, I guess you could also say that if you were rebuilding a car and you got lost in one part of it, and let's say you're doing it for a customer or something like that, well, then that's not going to be good. It's like I fell asleep. [00:04:11] I was so focused on this one thing that I completely ignored the rest of it. You could kind of describe that as a kind of falling asleep, right? You lose your attention to it. [00:04:23] We've heard about people falling asleep on the job, and that might literally mean they fell asleep, but it also might mean they stopped paying attention to what they needed to pay attention to, and then something failed. [00:04:37] So Jesus says, stay awake. [00:04:43] Stay awake. [00:04:46] Concerning that day or hour, no one knows. [00:04:49] Be on guard. [00:04:51] Stay awake. [00:04:53] For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come in the evening, or at midnight, or when the cock crows, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep now. Okay, so the danger is falling asleep. Here he's warning us against falling asleep. Stay awake. [00:05:33] I think we can see this as, let's say, build yourselves up in faith. Because the alternative is to fall asleep and fall apart, which can happen. We can make shipwreck of our faith. [00:05:48] So if we think of ourselves as something to be built, to be built up, like a car or a house or a gingerbread house or like anything else that you would make, you know, okay, so we are to be built up, well, what does that look like? [00:06:06] Well, let's just look at the prayer we prayed today. Lord Jesus so govern our hearts and minds by your Holy Spirit that ever mindful of your glorious return. Right. Keeping attention, we may persevere in both faith and holiness of living. [00:06:23] So let's take those two things as maybe the shape of our building ourselves up in faith. Okay? Faith and holy living, these are related. Holy living is not just like an add on to faith. Holy living is, is connected to faith in the same way that physical things, our physical life is connected to attention. So I remember lots of times. Well, I half remember them in seminary when I would go to class after lunch. You know those professors who get a class at 1:00 in the afternoon. It's really unfortunate, you know, they're fighting an uphill battle because we students, we go in after lunch to that 1:00 class. And I wanted so badly to stay awake. It's not that I actually fell asleep, but I'm sitting there doing everything I can. I'm moving my mouth and repositioning myself and I don't know, biting my. I don't know what I did to try and stay awake, but it's that agonizing feeling of having just eaten. And now my body is, is wanting to sleep. Eating affects our attention. [00:07:35] Sometimes it happens in the evening, like if we have spaghetti and I eat too much of it and then the kids have to get to bed and we got other things to do and I'm just ready to fall asleep, you know, what we do with our bodies actually affects our ability to pay attention. [00:07:55] Faith and life are related. [00:07:59] So that's kind of an obvious one. [00:08:02] Eating a lot can make you want to fall asleep. Just make a side note, that's what fasting is all about. Fasting. The goal of fasting and fasting is a good practice for Advent coming up here for any time. [00:08:15] Fasting is about attention. It's about keeping attention. [00:08:22] We'll just leave it there for now. [00:08:24] So what we do with our bodies can affect our ability to pay attention. But that's true just in general. If you invest your heart and your mind and then your action in something. Let's say you really like old cars and so you're restoring an old car. [00:08:44] You could start to make that like the only thing, right? The highest thing, the highest priority and the love of your life, you know, and you could start ignoring your family. Or it could become everything. [00:09:05] And it could, like you might be restoring an old car and half listening to this sermon because you're thinking about what you're going to do next on the old car, you know, because I know, because that's how I work, too. If I get too invested in something, I'm just going to think about that all the time. [00:09:27] And then I have to. [00:09:29] Maybe I'm talking with my wife and she's trying to talk something through with me, and I have to decide, do I need to hold on to what I'm thinking about and say, just a minute, I have to figure this out, or do I need to set this aside so that I can actually pay attention and listen? [00:09:49] Right, you can't. We just can't actually pay attention to lots of things at once. And so what we do with our life on a daily basis, like the practices that we have and the things that we pour our attention into, our hearts and minds into, it matters. [00:10:09] And it's going to shape us. And so if we spend time alone or as a family or with brothers and sisters in Christ, praying and studying scripture or talking about things from the perspective of faith, that's going to shape us. [00:10:26] That's going to shape what we desire and what we love and what we think is most important and how often we pay attention to God. [00:10:34] And if we throw our love and invest our energy, our time, our lives into other things, that's going to shape how much we think about God and such, right? And like, you can think about God while you're doing other things, and you can remember, oh, I'm doing this task right now, taking care of my children or whatever it is, taking care of my spouse. [00:10:58] You can do that and remember God and remember why you're doing this. You can pray without ceasing as you go about life, or you can invest your attention elsewhere. [00:11:13] So build yourselves up in the faith. [00:11:20] There's something to be built. [00:11:22] See, that's the thing, all right? We've got somewhere to grow, right? We've got some way to be built up in the faith. [00:11:33] There's movement there and there's purpose. There's something to be doing, and that requires attention, which again is why we're all here. It's to pay attention to God and to his Word and to be shaped by it. We're here to pay attention to Jesus Christ. [00:11:50] And here's the real deal, okay? Jesus says heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. [00:12:00] My words will not pass away. [00:12:04] So, well, that's all about attention. What do we do with Jesus words? We pay attention to them. It's that simple. We pay Attention to Jesus words. [00:12:16] That's the real goal of attention. [00:12:18] If we want to build ourselves up in faith, well, how do we do it? [00:12:23] If you're building the car? Well, first of all, you better know how a car works and what the end product should look like and how it should function. And then you've got your plan for it. Well, how do we work? How should we build ourselves up in faith? It's not always clear to us what we should be doing. In fact, we spend a lot of the time confused. [00:12:45] And then that confusion manifests itself in. In relational problems or arguments or despair or getting puffed up with pride. [00:12:56] Things like that. [00:13:01] O Lord, make me know my end. You could say my purpose, make me know my end. I guess it's actually talking about the end. [00:13:13] Make me know my end. And what is the measure of my days? Let me know how fleeting I am. [00:13:20] So pride would fall asleep to that reality and start to think that, well, I'm not finite, I have no end, I can manage myself. [00:13:32] But the prayer is to God, make me know. [00:13:36] Give me understanding, give me the right way of, like, the right perspective on my life. It's like if I'm the car that needs to be built, well, then God knows the design and God can guide me in that and no other. [00:13:54] So how do we build ourselves up in faith? Looking to God in faith, looking to His Son, Jesus Christ, who's really like the. He's the archetype of humanity. He's the one in whom we're. Well, he's the blueprint. He's the one in whom we're restored, to whom we're being conformed by the Holy Spirit as He transforms us into the image of Christ. [00:14:20] And again, this matters because the alternative is to fall apart, to not pay attention and to be built the wrong way. [00:14:29] To fall apart. [00:14:33] Behold, you have made my days. A few hand breaths and my lifetime is as nothing before you. And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. [00:14:44] Here at the end of the church year, here at the end of the world, like heaven and earth are passing away. [00:14:52] We don't know when, nobody knows the hour, but we know what to pay attention to and what to invest in. [00:15:00] That is to funnel our attention to gather our attention and focus it on Jesus Christ, because his words don't pass away. [00:15:12] Plus that's the way that we don't pass away. [00:15:16] Jesus promises us with his words that don't pass away. He promises us life and everything through faith in him, through attention. In Jesus name amen.