What is a spiritual awakening?

Therefore is the believer to awake if sleeping, and arise from among the dead. Sorrowful condition for a saint to slip into! Of what value as a witness to God and the truth is a sleeper? Thanks be to God, such are not dead: the spark of divine life is there, and can never be extinguished; but they have sunk into a state of spiritual torpor, having thus lost their enjoyment of heavenly grace, and their usefulness in testimony. The Spirit also arouses in Rom. 13, but there reminds us of the nearness of our salvation, the night being far spent, and the day at hand. Here such sleepers among the dead are exhorted to arise; and, as the apostle adds, "Christ shall shine upon thee." Only thus can the believer reflect anything of God to a hostile world.

(V. 14). The unbeliever is dead to God. The true believer, if not heeding these exhortations, may fall into a condition of sleep in which he is like a dead man. In such a condition he will not profit by the light from Christ. The exhortation to such an one is, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” It has been well said, “It is Christ Himself who is the source, the expression, and the measure of light for the soul that is awake.”

As long as a man is asleep he can receive no communications. He may have the greatest capacity of any man upon earth, but if he is to receive instruction he must first be awakened; “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Eph. 5:14). To be awake spiritually is to have the affections in healthy activity, and in this state we will get plenty of light. It is true He has given us the Spirit, that we may know what He has for us, but let us not think that it is sufficient to have the Spirit. If we had not the Spirit we would be utterly unable to touch the unseen things, but we have received the Spirit that we might be in the blessed sense of the love of God, apart from the activity of the will of the flesh, and thus be made fit to receive the things that God has prepared for them that love Him. He has not given to us the Spirit of the world. We do not need to know so much about it. What we really need to know is the Father’s world, so as to be able to set our minds on things above. We readily enough get acquainted with the things of this world, but heavenly things seem difficult for us to grasp. This, my friends, should not be. God never intended the things He has prepared for us to be hidden from us, or difficult for us to understand. I believe He meant them to be very simple to us. But no one but the spiritual man knows anything about them. I do not say this to discourage the feeblest saint, but to point out in what power the things of God are apprehended, and also to try and set forth how we may be in that power. The way is open. I believe everything heavenly is known by love, and I believe also that every service for Christ done upon earth must, to be of value, be done in the power of love, and if you and I will only go to Him, who alone can make the love of God a great reality to us, we will greatly please Him, and give unspeakable joy to our own hearts.

And the spiritual life of the time has come more and more to manifest itself in "revivals," which, so far as they are really such, are the protests of the Spirit of God against prevailing death continually creeping over everything, and oftentimes connected with fresh statements of truth when the old have lost their power. The Lord's warning to Sardis points out this constant tendency to death: "Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain, which are ready to die." "Remember, therefore, how thou halt received and heard, and hold fast and repent."

Verse 14. "Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest," etc. These words, although given in the usual form of a scriptural quotation, are not strictly such. We should perhaps regard them rather as a condensation of spiritual sentiment, expressive of the contrariety of the old and new natures, and of the contrast which subsists not only really and intrinsically, but morally, also, and practically, between the believer and the unbeliever. It is the difference between death and life, as well as between light and darkness. Christ is Light, and gives light. Until He is known, all is darkness — the deep sleep of death. Hence the voice of the Spirit (He saith), as the power of Gospel testimony, calls upon the sleeper to awake. It is a summons intelligible only to the ear on which it strikes (by special grace) with an awakening effect. To such an ear it is a sound of warning, indeed, but yet of hopeful promise. Disclosing to the hitherto insensible sinner the real nature of his condition, it makes him know that he is still in the congregation of the dead. But it invites him forth from thence into the light and power of the risen Christ. If the Son of God now wakes the dead, it is that they which hear may also live (John 5:25).

It is quite evident, however, that this verse has a practical bearing, not only on the case of the unconverted sinner, but on that also of the slumbering saint. If we do not watch with Jesus, we are soon lulled to spiritual listlessness by the influence of present things. The Lord forsakes not His saints, and, though they slumber, He does not forget them. But the arousing of a believer from a state of spiritual deadness may be accompanied by very painful experiences. The eyes of the Lord are as a flame of fire; and when re-awakened by His voice to find ourselves in all our conscious faultiness in the presence of that searching light, death, and not life, may be the first thought of our heart. But when our eyes are fairly open, we perceive that it is Jesus still who speaks to us. A consciousness that we have slumbered when we should have watched, may well fill us with confusion; but we are sustained in our fainting, and re-animated with fresh strength, when we remember, that He who rebukes and chastens, does so in His love; and that we are kept for salvation in the hands of One who died for us, that, whether sleeping or waking, we might live with Him (1 Thess. 5:10).

Verse 15. "See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise." Wisdom, as well as light, is a distinctive attribute of the new man. What the Greek vainly seeks for has been brought, unsought, to the awakened sinner. Christ, who is the wisdom of God in the eyes of our faith, has, also, been made of God our wisdom. By the counsels of that wisdom we are taught to walk. If we follow it, our way will be above (Prov. 15:24; Col. 3:1, seq.). Hell is beneath us, and snares of destruction are around us in the world. Our. safety is in setting our faces towards heaven. Moreover, we want wisdom to use rightly what we know. Circumspection is a constant attendant of true wisdom; and such a quality is needed by those whose passage to the kingdom lies through manifold temptations. In a land of danger, we must walk with measured steps.9 Now it is the eye of his father that is the guide of a wise child (Ps. 32:8). We are in the path of folly the moment we begin to walk at our own discretion. The main force of this warning seems to be directed against the Antinomian deception, which would make exactness of conduct an indifferent thing so long as doctrinal soundness be maintained. This basest of fallacies is not so gross as to be without danger to us, if we are not keptnear to God in the spirit of our minds.

There was, however, a spirit of revival, clearly at work among the people, and since their place and standing before God was on the basis of the law of Moses, some fresh resolution to reverence and obey it was the appropriate thing they had to offer. There have been moments of revival in the history of the church, graciously granted by God, but what has marked them has been some fresh recovery, not of what we ought to do for God, but of what He has done for us – some fresh understanding and realization of the fulness of the grace into which we have been brought by the Gospel, and to the place of favour and heavenly relationship which is the church's portion, according to the eternal counsels and purposes of God.

It is so here in this psalm. The psalmist says, O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and known me. We have the awakening of the soul here. There are two momentous occasions in the history of every soul who is brought out of darkness into light, and from the power of Satan unto God. One is when he wakes up to find himself a sinner, and under the eye of God, who is taking account of him, and who will see that he takes his place as a sinner without the least hope of betterment. The other is when he abandons his own thoughts for the thoughts of God. If the sinner does not see himself as he really is in this life, what he is must be taken up at the great white throne, where he finds he is forever lost.

Well for God's people if every gracious revival among them were made the occasion for confession and mourning, remembering that there will be no full and final deliverance until Christ comes. In every true revival the people of God, if led by the Spirit, will be marked by prayer and confession, rather than by shouting and exultation. The more noise and display the less there is of God in any movement among His people.

But we speak above of one truly born again. God is God, and we are men. God never makes mistakes; we often, too often, do. "The Lord knoweth them that are His" — this is Scripture. We sometimes think that people are His — but our thinking is not Scripture. I may see tears, I may hear groans and cries, I may even see a fairly long-continued profession of acceptance of Christ, and think that a man is born again. But my thoughts are — let me repeat — not Scripture. The Word of God itself teaches me that good seed may drop into stony ground, and gives as its own explanation that some may hear the Word and anon with joy receive it. We may be deceived into counting these promising "cases of blessing," only to discover with bitterness the "afterward" of Mark 4:16-17, and that they had no root in themselves. A sailor in a storm, a soldier on a battlefield, a civilian in sudden peril, may all cry and appear in earnest; and one may add, an impressionable nature in a "revival," or under the influence of a touching or thrilling song, may appear to us to be converted to God, yet be a mere flash in the pan. The reality of new birth is proved by its continuance (Heb. 3, 6, 10; Col. 1:23; Jude 4, 12, 13). We may be deceived by appearances; God never is. New birth is God's own work, and will eventuate in the accomplishment of God's purpose.