DAY 62 - Are you sleeping?

Today’s Reading: Mark 13

(Please read Mark 13: 1 – 37 and listen to what the Lord Jesus Christ would like to tell you before reading my Spiritual Journal below. If you would like to learn a simple and good way of Daily Devotion method please read my “Count Down 5” from this blog. You may click this link directly for the method: Subject Shifting Devotion.pdf . (You may begin with a song to praise the Lord and complete you devotion by singing another praise song.)

Please click the links below to Mark 13:
ESV: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2013&version=ESV
NIV: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2013&version=NIV
Message: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2013&version=MSG

“If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: Watch! “ Mark 12: 41

Jesus told me this morning one warning and two critical duties:

The warning: Are you sleeping?

The two critical duties:
1. Do you know what kind of “assigned task” do you have from Jesus?
2. Are you those who are assigned to “keep watch” at the door?

I think a very large number Christians have been sleeping for a long time! I should be one of those for many years until these three to four years. I still want to sleep but the Lord Jesus Christ uses all kinds of method to wake me up and remind me of my “assigned task”. I know that I am one of those who need to “keep watch” at the door as a prayer warrior and I try my best to keep my soul and “eye” open to keep watch.

I wish there are more to understand and live out these two critical duties. You know how devastating it can be when those soldiers who are assigned to keep watch slept?! Do you know how destructive it can be when the soldiers in a warfare are not performing their “assigned duties”?! But, the worst thing is this:

WE DO NOT KNOW THAT WE ARE IN A SEVERE SPIRITUAL WARFARE!!!

George Hunter in his book , To spread the Power: Church Growth in the Wesleyan Spirit, clearly states Charles Wesley's four-stage process for the nuturing of Christians:
1. Awaken people
2. Enroll awakened people in a class(three months)
3. Teach awakened enrolled people to expect to experience their justification.
4. Teach justified people to expect to experience their sanctification in this life.

This is a system established early in the 18th century and just been discovered by leaders in the past twenty years as a solid small group system. Hunter says Wesley observed that awakening people without folding them into redemptive cells does more harm than good. In a journal entry of 1743 he declares,

The devil himself desires nothing more than this, that the people of any place should be half-awakened and then left to themselves to fall asleep again. Therefore, I determine by the grace of God not to strike one stroke in any place where I cannot follow the blow.”

Twenty years later, the principle had become even more resolute in his Journal, August 25, 1763:

I was more convinced than ever that the preaching like an apostle without joining together those that are awakened and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer…How much preaching has there been for these twenty years all over Pembrokeshire. But no regular societies, no discipline, no order or connection; and the consequence is that nine in ten of the once awakened are now faster asleep than ever.


Dear Lord Jesus,
Help me to keep watch and call others to wake up! In Jesus name I pray. Amen.


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