What Paul means when he says Christians are not people of the night – 1 Thessalonians 5:6–8, Part 2

Nighttime is for drinking and sleeping. At least that is when those two activities frequently occur. Let me explain.

Nighttime is for sleeping. Unless you’re like me and sometimes can’t sleep at night.  Insomnia is no joke.  When my brain starts racing, thinking about all kinds of thoughts, especially if I’m anxious about something, I can have a hard time turning my brain off.  But for the most part, nighttime is for sleeping, and when we are asleep, we are oblivious to the world. 

Nighttime is also often when people go drinking. 

Growing up I was pretty sheltered when it came to alcohol consumption, so I did not observe a drunk person until I was about 20 years old.  I think my first encounter with someone who was drunk was in Guyana, South America.  I was in that country the summer between my junior and senior year of college on a missionary internship. Guyana is a major producer of sugar cane, and what you can make out of sugar cane in addition to sugar and molasses?  Rum!

In the community I was staying in that summer, there was a problem with alcohol abuse because of the easy access to rum. One day I was looking out the window of the missionary’s home, and stumbling down the street comes a man, very disheveled, staggering, mumbling, carrying a bottle of rum.  That was during the middle of the day.  Sun shining.  When you see a person stumbling drunk at high noon, you know there is something very concerning happening in that person’s life. 

What Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:6–8, is what is much more typical. People sleep at night. People, if they get drunk, typically do so at night, “So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober.”

Whether you are sleeping or drunk, you have no idea of what is happening in the world.  It is why we use the word “dead” to describe both of those situations.  When a person is in a deep sleep, they are dead to the world.  When a person is intoxicated, we say that are drop-dead drunk.  The brain is not conscious of what is happening in the world around it. 

Paul’s point is that when it comes to the return of Jesus, we Christians are people of the day, not of the night.  We are awake, we are sober, we are watching, waiting, aware, conscious, focused, ready, prepared.  We are on mission for Jesus.  The mission of Jesus is our passion, what our lives are about, as we go about all we regularly do.  We do not just turn Jesus or his mission off.  We are always on the ready.  God’s ways are what we filter all our decisions through.

We work and remain alert on mission.  We raise our children and remain alert on mission. We go to coffee with friends and remain alert on mission.  We interact with neighbors and we are on mission. We are relaxing in our homes on mission.  We are always on mission.  We are never not on mission.  We live our lives leaning on God.  We think about his heart and his ways, seeking to align our lives with his heart and his ways through every event of our lives.

Because we are sober and awake, Paul describes how we live, and we’ll find out what he says in the next post.

Photo by Aleksey Kuzmichev on Unsplash