Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
The hour has already come for you to wake up from your sleep. Now our salvation is nearer than when we first had faith.
I don’t have the best memory for films and actually rarely watch them. But there are certain memories which become embedded. The epic Lord of the Rings is one such example, standing out among a very few others. In the story, a certain king is in a stupor, as if in a deep sleep, or actually more like sleepwalking, half awake and half asleep so that he’s not aware and rather oblivious and as my memory has it rather complicit with the evil around him until he wakes up. Once awakened it’s like he’s an entirely different person, the same person actually, but now seeing the evil in his presence, seeing through it, and actively in opposition to it. Like a conversion. *
This idea or picture is something like what Paul was getting at. We can be in a stupor over all kinds of things, struggling to separate ourselves from evil, finding ourselves succumbing to fears and desires which are not worthy at all of those who name the name of Christ. More or less asleep at the switch, hardly able to do what we need to do and not at all in a good, right way.
But then comes God’s call to us in Christ. Wake up! Night is gone! The Day is here! Quit living in a kind of gray, colorless, empty, purposeless existence. Danger comes with that. Live fully in the Light, in the new Day that has dawned and is present in Christ. And do that together, yes individually, but Paul is addressing the church as a whole here, it’s to believers in their commitment together. We’re to awaken, be awake, together.
We’re to live as those in the Day, not of the Night. Many implications from that can be drawn from Scripture, especially from the four gospels. And there’s plain teaching here as to what this means in application. We don’t settle into “the flesh,” the ways of this world, but we put on the Lord Jesus Christ and seek to live fully in him, in the Way.
This post is written with the idea that conversion is not only a onetime event, evident in Paul’s words in the text, but ongoing. We have conversions and are being converted during our lifetimes, in our following of Christ.
Jesus community 