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The sermon presents spiritual sleep as ignorance of divine realities, enslavement to sin, worldly excess, and failure to serve God. Christians, as children of light, are called to watch, live soberly, resist temptation, serve the church and needy, and proclaim the gospel personally. Spurgeon gives strong weight to eternal judgment and hell for those who remain unconverted. The closing gospel appeal is that those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved and enter joyful glory.
Theological center: Human sin produces spiritual ignorance, moral bondage, and inactivity, but the gospel of Jesus Christ offers salvation and summons both believers and unbelievers to awaken.
Applications: Watch against spiritual danger · Live soberly and moderately · Look for opportunities to serve · Work for God’s glory
Primary texts: 1 Thessalonians 5:6 · 1 Thessalonians 5:8 · Mark 16:16
“Therefore let us not sleep as do others; but let us watch and be sober.” 1 Thessalonians 5:6 WHAT sad things sin has done. This fair world of ours was once a glorious temple, every pillar of which reflected the goodness of God and every part of which was a symbol of good, but sin has spoiled and marred all the metaphors and figures that might be drawn from earth. It has so deranged the divine economy of nature that those things which were matchless pictures of virtue, goodness, and divine plenitude of blessing have now become the figures and representatives of sin. ’Tis strange to say, but it is strangely true, that the very best gifts of God have by the sin of man become the worst pictures of man’s guilt. Behold the flood! breaking forth from its fountains—it rushes across the fields, bearing plenty on its bosom. It covers them awhile and soon it does subside and leaves upon the plain a fertile deposit into which the farmer shall cast his seed and reap an abundant harvest. One would have called the breaking forth of water a fine picture of the plenitude of providence, the magnificence of God’s goodness to the human race—but we find that sin has appropriated that figure to itself. The beginning of sin is like the breaking forth of waters. See the fire! how kindly God has bestowed upon us that element to cheer us in the midst of winter’s frosts. Fresh from the snow and from the cold we rush to our household fire and there by our hearth we warm our hands and glad are we. Fire is a rich picture of the divine influences of the Spirit, a holy emblem of the zeal of the Christian. But alas! sin has touched this, and the tongue is called “a fire.” “It is set on fire of hell,” we are told, and it is evidently so when it utters blasphemy and slanders. And Jude lifts up his hand and exclaims, when he looks upon the evils caused by sin, “Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.” And then there is sleep, one of the sweetest of God’s gifts, fair sleep— “Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.” Sleep God has selected as the very figure for the repose of the blessed. “They that sleep in Jesus,” says the Scripture. David puts it amongst the peculiar gifts of grace—“So he giveth his beloved sleep.” But alas! sin could not let even this alone. Sin did override even this celestial metaphor, and though God Himself had employed sleep to express the excellence of the state of the blessed, yet sin must have even this profaned, ere itself can be expressed. Sleep is employed in our text as a picture of a sinful condition—“Therefore let us not sleep as do others; bu…