When I am out of town sometimes my responsibility will be to speak at a breakfast type event early in the morning. Recently I was on the east coast on Eastern Time and had to speak at an event at 7:00 a.m. That is 6:00 a.m. my time. I needed a wake-up call to get up about 4:30 my time.
One of the difficult things about traveling is learning how to operate the clocks in hotels that have an alarm that you set. I am not very technological and have not done well in that area.
I called the front desk to ask for a wake-up call. The person told me they had a new computer system which had software to allow me to plug in my own wake-up call on the phone. I told him I would rather not do that. His simple statement was, “anybody can do it.” I told him he did not understand the “anybody” that he was speaking to. He told me to give it a try.
I tried and put in the time. I inadvertently put in 3:30 rather than 4:30. I called the front desk to see if they could erase that wake-up time and allow me to reset it. The man said they had never had anybody make that request. He called his manager.
When the manager arrived on the phone, he said he wasn’t sure that the new computer software would allow erasing a wake-up call that had been entered. He told me I would just need to leave it as it was. I got up at 3:30 the next morning! I now set an additional wake-up call on my iPhone.
We all need wake-up calls. Paul was writing to the church at Rome. In Romans 13:11, he was talking about life and the signs of the times and he said, “It is time for you to wake-up.”
A wake-up call is designed to bring us out of our sleep and make us alert for the responsibilities before us.
I have a friend who went to the doctor some time ago and he got a report that he didn’t expect. His statement to me was “Boy, I got a wake-up call from the doctor about my health and I have got some things I must change.”
I have a friend who gained some extra weight. He said he stepped on the scale the other day and said, “I got a wake-up call.” More of us need to get that wake-up call.
A father went in with his little boy to listen to his prayers. He was going to pray that little prayer that all of us learned as children that says, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
The little boy got a little confused because his daddy was listening and he prayed, “If I should wake before I die.” The little boy stopped and looked up and said, “Oh Daddy I messed up didn’t I?” The daddy looked at him and said, “No son you didn’t mess up. You said it right. We all need to wake before we die.”
In what area of life is God saying to us that we need to wake-up?
The sad thing is that sometimes we can stay in a hotel and receive a wake-up call but sleep through it or not respond to it. That is dangerous. The purpose of the wake-up call is to bring us to our senses and make us alert to the responsibilities we have before us.
Wake-up!
