There are different routes to awakening.
Moses did not live under the law, but he gave the law to the Israelites in hopes that they would understand what God desires of them and become awakened.
The law was to school them till the coming of Christ. The law wouldn’t have been used if they were righteous already, and if they knew and understood sin.
The law was to awaken them to the consciousness of sin and show them a way out.
But did you know that the law didn’t altogether fulfil its purpose?
The Bible says, the law was weak, and rather than showing them Christ, it further blinded their hearts.
The law was supposed to trigger a level of awakeness in their hearts, a hollow feeling, a feeling of helplessness, and thus point them to a saviour.
But at the time Jesus came, the law had not sufficiently brought them to the level of faith needed to receive him, so they killed him.
The law was God’s attempt to awaken them after they feared at Sinai and would not come close to him.
Saul was a zealot.
He was so passionate about the law that he spent his time eliminating anyone who preached against it.
And even after Jesus died and resurrected, Saul wasn’t convicted yet. He still went around killing those of The Way. What changed him was a direct encounter from the Lord.
I have come to see that HOW men become awakened is often diverse.
You can have someone saved and in a sound local church, hearing God’s word, and for years he doesn’t even understand what is going on.
I had always thought pain could crack someone’s soul and help them become awakened to the reality of life, but I’ve seen people go through immense pain and suffering, and they don’t even know that they needed to be awakened.
Some people need to walk through fire and actually be burnt. Some need to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and experience a torrential amount of evil, because they need it to jolt them back to reality.
Who would have gotten Saul to sit down and listen to a nobody like Ananias preach to him?
For some others, they needed to see blood and water gush out of the saviour’s side for them to believe. Some needed to see mighty signs and wonders. Some simply heard him speak and called him Lord; others needed to feel his wounds and touch the holes in his hands.
Some will even leave this world before they believe. While for others it is the simple preaching and consistent teaching of the word that would get them saved and discipled.
Due to the different damage the fall did to our souls, not everyone is on the same level of depravity. You have ALL these kinds of people in the local church.
I think of the woman at the well,
Who wasn’t awakened by a sermon or a law, but by someone naming, plainly and without shame, the exact thing she had spent years avoiding.
She didn’t come to that well looking for God. She came at an odd hour, alone, trying to avoid people. But Jesus met her precisely where her defences were down, and that was enough to send her running into the same town she had been hiding from.
Then there’s Nicodemus,
A teacher of Israel who came at night, still cautious, still hedging, and didn’t get awakened in that one conversation at all.
He simply carried the seed of it. It wasn’t until much later, at the foot of a cross, that we see him show up again, this time openly, this time unafraid, bringing spices for a body everyone else had abandoned. Some awakenings take that long. Years between the seed and the harvest.
Zacchaeus needed nothing but curiosity and a tree.
He wasn’t chasing conviction. He was chasing a glimpse. And Jesus turned that glimpse into a dinner invitation that undid a man’s entire way of making a living.
And then there’s the son in the parable who had to run out of money, out of friends, and out of food before he “came to himself” in a pig pen far from home. Nobody preached him into that awakening. Hunger did. Sometimes the mercy of God looks like letting a person run completely out of road, because that’s the only place some hearts finally stop and look up.
Even the rich man in Luke 16, in torment after death, begged that someone be sent to warn his brothers before it was too late for them too, and was told, plainly, that if they wouldn’t be persuaded by Moses and the prophets, they wouldn’t be persuaded even if someone rose from the dead. Which tells you something sobering:
Some people can watch a miracle happen right in front of them and still walk away unmoved, while someone else needs nothing more than one honest sentence spoken directly to them at the right moment.
Awakening and consciousness of the gospel message and growth in God will meet people at different stages and phases of their lives.
So, don’t be discouraged when that loved one isn’t yielding or understanding the seriousness of life.
You don’t get to choose what wakes another person up. Neither do I. Some will be awakened by a sermon, others by silence. Some by blessing, others by ashes. Some by a stranger’s one sentence, others only by their own ruin. That’s not evidence that God has forgotten them. It’s evidence that God knows exactly what kind of key fits that particular lock, even when we don’t.
The Lord is the one who owns all sheep, and in his way, he will lighten upon them and lead them to the path, for he’s the one who never leaves the ONE behind.
Keep loving them. Keep praying. Keep speaking the truth when you get the chance. But hold the timeline loosely, because it was never yours to control in the first place.
It was always his.
As I end this piece, I must stress this caveat: being truly awakened is not the same thing as being born again or saved.
A lot of Christians think they are awakened because they said the sinner’s prayers, but this is far from the truth. Being awakened is being intentionally conscious of WHO you are. You can be born again but unconscious of your actual identity as Christ.
We have a lot of believers who are saved because they have put their faith in Jesus, but are yet to begin living intentional lives from the reality of their Godlife. They may work miracles, preach good sermons, but they do not yet know themselves intentionally.
This is what has given rise to traditional Christianity that has peddled the errors of hell, heaven, suffering, God, etc., for years. The unawakened Christian does not want to KNOW God, understand life, or realities beyond earth. Rather, they simply want to live normal lives, try to avoid going to hell, get married, have kids, and die.
The realities in the Father’s kingdom do not necessarily matter to them, for they think and feel that esotericism is not the believer’s calling.
They feel that the study of the world around us, the skies, plants, plains of existence, possibilities, origins of concepts, science, etc., are not things the believer needs to bother themselves with, and thus they have limited their sights to the transient things of earth. Forgetting that ALL things were made by Him, and there is nothing that exists that God didn’t create.
This type of Christian is not awakened.
It is fit only for the earth, so it is not truth.
And with the passage of time, it will fade away and be forgotten.
Read my “Musings about science, spirituality, and the future of A.I.” to understand where true spirituality is headed.