I love sleeping! It is one of my favorite activities. I don't sleep enough and that is a problem for me physically, mentally, and emotionally. The sleep that I want to talk about today though, is not the closing your eyes and go to bed kind of sleep. It is a kind of falling asleep with our habits and the church. In my new testament class this last week we read Acts 20. In this chapter we read about a man named Eutychus who was sitting in a window and fell into a deep sleep and fell down from the loft where he was sitting and died.
My teacher gave us a way to interpret this story. One is with the lens of the plan of salvation. He talked about how Eutychus could stand for Adam and falling down from the window would be the fall. His death would be like the spiritual death that we are all prone to, and Paul raising him is a symbol of the Savior. This is great and all, but we also need to apply it to ourselves. We are like Eutychus. We sometimes fall asleep to the things of the gospel.
This begs us all to ask the question, what things have I fallen asleep to? Are there certain things that we each don't really pay attention to? Are some things just habits that we don't really need to pay attention to? I know there are certain things in my life that are that way. One thing that was brought up in my reading for the research paper for my new testament class was faith and works. In some respects we all fall asleep to the fact that we have faith. We say "yeah, I believe in Christ and his teachings." But we forget that faith is not passive. Faith begets action. We need to wake up to the gospel again. Let our faith guide our actions so that we can come closer to the Savior and not be asleep to the things that we are doing in our lives.
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