The Day Got Here While You Were Asleep

There are eleven crayons on the floor and the box is under the table on its side, and the smallest one in the room is entirely unbothered about it and so, honestly, is she.

Sunday morning. High windows, the good kind, so the light comes in at an angle and you can see the whole room in it. Low tables, small chairs, a chart on the wall with everybody's name and a sticker beside it. She has been doing this a long while and she is good at it, and she prepared this week the way she prepares every week, on Thursday evening, properly.

And this morning while she was setting out the paper she had a thought that has not left her alone since, which is that she could not tell you what last week was about. Not the theme, not the story, nothing. She taught it. There are eleven children who could probably tell you. She could not.

Now here is the part that matters, and it is not the forgetting.

Her stomach went tight. Because she knows, in the place where you keep the things you have not examined, exactly what tone God is going to take with her about this. Brisk. That is the word. Not furious. Brisk, the way a supervisor is brisk. Right. Well. Let us have a look at where we are.

She has been avoiding that tone for a while by staying busy and preparing well and not sitting still in front of God for longer than a prayer takes.

Sister, sit down on one of these small chairs with me a minute. Because there is a verse people use for exactly the brisk conversation you are dreading, and it does not say what they think it says.

The verse everybody uses as an alarm is actually a weather report

Romans 13. Paul is coming to the end of a long stretch of teaching, and he says this.

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand.Romans 13:11

People read the first clause and hear a whistle. Wake up. Get moving. Sort yourself out. And then the reason clause gets skipped entirely, and the reason clause is the whole of it.

Why awake? Because the night is far spent, the day is at hand.

That is not a command with a threat behind it. That is somebody pulling a curtain and saying look, it is morning. The reason to wake up is that daylight has arrived. Not that you are late. Not that you have wasted the dark. The reason is that there is now light out there to wake up into.

You are being woken because the day arrived, and the day arriving had nothing at all to do with your performance. That is not me softening Romans to spare your feelings; Romans 13:11 gives the reason in the same breath as the command and the reason is the daylight, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an apostle's sentence and lays it over a Sunday classroom with crayons on the floor. The morning did not wait to see whether you deserved it.

Now let me get at the tone you were expecting, because that is the actual problem and not the crayons.

You have assigned God a voice. Everybody does. And the voice you have given Him is a competent one, mildly impatient, primarily interested in whether things are on track. It is not a monstrous voice, which is why you have never questioned it. It is just a voice with no warmth in it, and you have been keeping your distance from it for a long time in the only way available to you, which is by staying too busy to be sat down.

Watch what the same apostle does two verses later. He does not hand out a schedule. He says put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 13:14). The instruction for a person who has just woken up is to get dressed in Somebody, and the Somebody is the one whose whole record is gentleness toward the tired.

You have been dressing yourself in a voice that was never His, and the garment He actually holds out is a Person. Romans 13:14 says put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes putting on a Person a real event in a woman rather than a figure of speech in a letter. The brisk supervisor you have been bracing for does not exist. He was assembled out of other people.

What the daylight does that a scolding cannot

One more thing about that verse, because it is practical and it will change your Thursday evening.

A scolding produces effort. It works, briefly. Anybody who has been shouted at knows that you can run on it for about eleven days.

Daylight does something else entirely. It does not produce effort, it produces sight. You wake into a lit room and you can see where things are, and moving around becomes possible not because you were told off but because you can see the floor.

That is what Paul is describing, and it is what has actually been happening to you this morning. You noticed the forgetting. That noticing is not the beginning of a case against you. That noticing is light.

You are seeing this clearly because it is already light in the room, and the seeing itself is a gift rather than an accusation. Ephesians 5:13 says whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the light do its own work in a person without a single word of reproach attached to it. You are not being caught. You are being shown.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than teach eleven children.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed on the shelf. Not the quality of your preparation. Not how present you were last Sunday. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.