ned soporifics upon us--and be
conscious of the things that are, and have our dormant faculties roused,
and be quickened into intense vigilance against our enemies, and brace
ourselves for our tasks, and be ever looking forward to that joyful
hope, to that coming which shall bring the fulness of waking and of
life. So, you professing Christians, do you take the lessons of this
text? A sleeping Christian is on the high road to cease to be a
Christian at all. If there be one thing more comprehensively imperative
upon us than another, it is this, that, belonging, as we do by our very
profession, to the day, and being the children of the light, we shall
neither sleep nor be drunken, but be sober, watching as they who expect
their Lord. You walk amidst realities that will hide themselves unless
you gaze for them; therefore, watch. You walk amidst enemies that will
steal subtly upon you, like some gliding serpent through the grass, or
some painted savage in the forest; therefore, watch. You expect a Lord
to come from heaven with a relieving army that is to raise the siege
and free the hard-beset garrison from its fears and its toilsome work;
therefore, watch. 'They that sleep, sleep in the night.' They who are
Christ's should be like the living creatures in the Revelation, all eyes
round about, and every eye gazing on things unseen and looking for the
Master when He comes.

On the other hand, the death of Christ will soften our deaths into
slumber. The Apostle will not call what the senses call death, by that
dread name, which was warranted when applied to the facts of Christ's
death. The physical fact remaining the same, all that is included under
the complex whole called death which makes its terrors, goes, for a man
who keeps fast hold of Christ who died and lives. For what makes the
sting of death? Two or three things. It is like some poisonous insect's
sting, it is a complex weapon. One side of it is the fear of
retribution. Another side of it is the shrinking from loneliness.
Another side of it is the dread of the dim darkness of an unknown
future. And all these are taken clean away. Is it guilt, dread of
retribution? 'Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.' Is it loneliness? In the
valley of darkness 'I will be with thee. My rod and My staff will
comfort thee.' Is it a shrinking from the dim unknown and all the
familiar habitudes and occupations of the warm corner where we have
lived? 'Jesus Christ has brought immortality to