A Spiritual Awakening
“How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.” Proverbs 6:9-11
I like to go online and read quotes and beliefs by famous people and some not so famous and have found many profound statements by those who are either speaking from experience or who understand truth apart from all the lies and deceptive ideas of people who haven’t a clue about how the world really works. One I ran across while going through some notes that I had written several years ago. This particular one is from General Douglass MacArthur, the great military leader in World War II who commanded the Allied forces in the southwest Pacific.
General MacArthur emphasized “the need of spiritual awakening to keep a nation’s government in tune with its real source of strength. He observed that nowhere in history can we find the record of a nation that experienced political and economic decay that did not first go through moral and spiritual decline. Either one of two things has always occurred when decay set in–spiritual awakening or further deterioration that resulted in national breakdown and the ultimate fall of the nation. God created orderly rule, but He does not allow a corrupt one to continue endlessly.”
General MacArthur’s statement reminds me of Psalm 33:12(a): “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord”. Anyone who has been on this earth for over 50 years learned in American history class that our nation was founded on godly principles by men and women seeking to worship and serve God without any interference from the secular government, but now we find that the government seeks to greatly interfere with the faith of men and women in the Lord and has been doing so for quite some time. The road to godlessness has been creeping slowly but now seems to be increasing exponentially with the many policies that have been enacted over the last few years that attempt to put a limit on our freedoms, particularly the freedom to worship. I think that one of the main turning points in going from a Christian nation to a godless, secular nation was the elimination of prayer and Bible reading in schools which occurred in the 1960’s. Then a law was passed to allow the killing of the unborn as a means of birth control in 1973 and has expanded, in some cases, to infanticide. The Ten Commandments were removed from the courthouses, and nativity scenes are no longer permitted in city parks. People have become more fearful of government and offending the unbelievers than they are of offending the Lord.
Something has to change. We can’t go on like this, as General MacArthur stated. I don’t know where the general stood in his relationship to the Lord, but he certainly had his finger on the pulse of our nation even back then. Today, people would mock him for telling the truth. People seem to be easily led to believe lies and shun the truth because it doesn’t fit their narrative. What is their narrative? Whatever it is, it is certainly not in keeping with God’s standard for how His creation should live. In the above passage from Proverbs, Solomon used an ant as an example of one who is prepared and is alert and aware of his or her surroundings. However, the sluggard, the one who is not concerned nor prepared for what lies ahead, which in the case of all people is eternity, is like the one who is fast asleep and doesn’t know what hit them when danger or tragedy strikes. It is funny how the current generation of unconcerned and unprepared people call themselves “woke”. The dictionary defines “woke” as the past tense of “wake”. These folks are anything but awake to the truth. Like many other words, the definition of “woke” has been changed from its original meaning.
I had rather be awake to the truth of God’s word than “woke” and filled with lies, corruption, and eventual misery. Of course, none of this takes God by surprise. He knew all of this was going to take place when He created the world. We have seen major changes in our society over our lifetime but imagine what God has seen since He created Adam and Eve. It must sadden Him greatly to see how mankind has polluted and perverted the world that He created. I know that it saddens me. Will we have a spiritual awakening? We can only hope and pray.