The Revealed Duties While Awaiting Christ’s Return

In this part of the sermon: Martin elaborates on 'wakefulness' as actively chasing away spiritual sleep, and 'prayerfulness' as the language of dependence, essential for discernment, stability, and strength…

Martin recounts driving through the night to get home to his family, actively fighting sleep, to illustrate the spiritual effort required for 'wakefulness' – doing everything possible to drive away spiritual slumber.

This particular word is a compound word which comes from two words which mean to chase sleep. And it's the picture of what a man does who's been away on a business trip. And he's missed his wife and his kids, and he could have stayed over another night and driven back the next day, but he's so excited that his business is over and he longs to get back home. And I can remember doing this when I was in the itinerant ministry, that I would set out and say, well, I'll just drive until I feel sleepy and then put up in a motel and make the rest of the trip in the morning.

23:48 - 24:22 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin elaborates on 'wakefulness' as actively chasing away spiritual sleep, and 'prayerfulness' as the language of dependence, essential for discernment, stability, and strength…

The example of a soldier pulling a horrible watch, marshalling all faculties to stay awake to avoid being shot, illustrates the intense, life-or-death effort required for spiritual wakefulness.

You must do whatever you must do to keep yourself in a state of wakefulness. What the soldier must do when he's pulled that horrible watch from perhaps 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., knowing that in a time of battle he would be shot, where he found asleep at his post and he does all that he must do, marshalling all of his faculties to keep himself in a state of wakefulness.

25:30 - 26:03 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin elaborates on 'wakefulness' as actively chasing away spiritual sleep, and 'prayerfulness' as the language of dependence, essential for discernment, stability, and strength…

Sleep's power to cut a person off from reality (unpaid bills, nagging wife, unappreciative kids) is used to illustrate how spiritual sleep disconnects believers from the great realities of Christ's return and spiritual life.

Well, for the simple reason that under the imagery of wakefulness as opposed to sleepiness, which is constantly in the picture when it comes to the second coming, you see, sleep, among other things, has the wonderful power of cutting us off totally from the world of reality in which we're living. A man may have a string of unpaid bills as long as his arm. He may have a nagging, oppressive, ugly wife, and a bunch of kids that don't appreciate him, and he may have all kinds of problems pressing in upon him, but the moment he drifts off into sleep, he is consciously separated from all those probl...

26:22 - 27:09 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin expounds the parable of the householder and the gatekeeper, illustrating the central duty of 'watchfulness' as intense, unflagging alertness, enforced by the indefinite…

Martin vividly describes the householder's return to find his loyal gatekeeper asleep, conveying the shame, grief, disgust, and anger that would result, to illustrate the horror of Christ finding His people spiritually sleeping.

Can you imagine what it would be like? Here is a man who pledges his loyalty to the householder. He's about to make his trip into a long country. He's taken care of the servants and all of their responsibilities.

40:39 - 40:54 Read in full sermon

Driving home: There is wisdom, infinite wisdom, in cloaking the time of His return in mystery that every generation from that generation till now should have its whole religious life shaped by the expectation of the certain return of …

Martin quotes Edersheim's description of the church's 'peculiar attitude' of loyal expectation, with loins girt for work and heart full of loving expectancy, to emphasize the wisdom of Christ concealing the time of His return.

which in turn will make the doctrine of the Lord's return not something about which we debate, nor something to which we occasionally point a finger as a tenet we believe, but it will make it to be to us what it is to every healthy soul, the blessed hope of the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. The spirit which should mark the people of God in every generation is that of loyal expectation of the absent one who is sure to return. Edersheim in commenting on the Olivet Discourse

47:36 - 48:24 Read in full sermon

The point: Beware lest your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, drunkenness, and the cares of this life, causing the day of the Lord to take you unawares.

The example of saving 50% of Montville's population still being a minority in the broader area is used to counter the idea that the gospel will become a popular majority before Christ's return.

No! If God were to save 50% of the population of Montville in the next week, we'd still be the minority, my friends. 20 million, 25 million people in a 35-mile radius in this area.

59:07 - 59:20 Read in full sermon