Last time we looked at how non-Christians fight for faith. We Christians also fight for faith. We fight for faith because the world and the flesh and the devil conspire to spiritually deaden us. They come at us with sleeping pills, with tranquilizers of relaxation, with the offer of a life filled by the hypnotic trance of digital amusements.

And what Jesus wants us to see is that faith and hope and love are the antidotes to the soporific effects of the world always trying to get you to go to sleep. So how do we stay awake? And how do we fight to stay awake in the entertainment age that we live in?

Here's Pastor John preaching in 2005 at an outdoor venue, a conference maybe, I'm not sure of the context, but you will hear the wind noise at times. Here now is Pastor John to explain. Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Today is the 80th birthday of Dan Fuller, which doesn't mean anything to most of you, but means a great deal to me.

Because Dan Fuller was for me in 1968, 69, 70, and 71, God's instrument for turning my world upside down and opening my eyes to the scriptures and the glory of God. So I got on the email yesterday and I wrote him a long letter of appreciation and gratitude, and among the other things that I said, I said, "Dan, salvation is closer to you now than it was the day you believed.

And every groan of your 80-year-old body is groaning closer to Jesus. Every heartbeat in your fragile old body is a heartbeat closer to the glory of Jesus Christ." And I hope he takes heart in his 80-year-old frame. And I hope you take heart from your salvation that is the completion of your redemption with a new body, and no more battle with sin is closer today than it was yesterday, and every groaning of your aching body means someone groaned closer to the glory that is arriving.

And then the third thing he says, verse 11, first half of the verse, "The hour has come for you to awake from sleep." And you remember what we said about that. Most of the world that is not treasuring Jesus Christ as its supreme treasure is sleepwalking. Even though their life is very glitzy, it's just bombarded every day with advertisements to say, "Do this and you will live," when in fact it's the devil wringing his hand saying, "Do this and you will go sound asleep." Sound asleep to what that son is really saying today.

How many people in Mount Zio hear the glory of God being declared from the heavens? Why? Because they spent all night watching television. They've saturated their lives with an entertainment mentality, and the spiritual eyes have grown smaller and smaller and smaller until most people without Christ can't see anything glorious in spiritual reality.

And Paul says, "The day has come. This is not a time for sleeping. This is not a time for sleepwalking. It's not a time for being like skydivers who, this is like a parable of the world without Christ. The skydivers are leaping out of their planes and they are watching the air go at 120 miles an hour through their fingers and feeling, "This is the apex of the thrill of life!" But there's just one problem.

They have no parachutes. And the gravity that is pulling them inexorably towards what will happen in about a minute or two is called the wrath of God. Because Jesus said in John 3:36, "Those who believe on the sun have eternal life, and those who do not believe on the sun will not taste life, but the wrath of God rests on them." And they think they're so alive.

One of our great tasks is to so let the light of the gospel shine that by the power of the Holy Spirit, eyes will wake up to the fact, "Day has come! Christ has come! The Son of Righteousness has risen over Moundsview and over the Twin Cities!" Wake up to the glory of your Savior and believe Him and enjoy Him.

Don't be a sleepwalker. Don't be a sleep skydiver. It's time to wake up. It's time to get dressed. That's what this text is about today. Get dressed! Take off your pajamas! Stop going to work in your pajamas! That's what this text is about today for us and for Moundsview.

So, we start now at verse 12. And what we're finding here is that we're being told what to wear as the light has come and what to do in this clothing. Verse 12, "The night is far gone, the day is at hand, so then..." You see the logic. "Because it is day, so then cast off the works of darkness." Pajamas!

These are pajamas! "Cast off the works of pajamas." One way to define sin is pajamas. You should be embarrassed to go around sinning. I mean, who would go to work in his pajamas? But people go to work in the works of darkness every day. It's day! It's day! Wake up!

It's day! The King of Kings has come. So, cast off, take off the works of darkness and put on... And then he chooses a word that is surprising. I didn't expect him to choose this word. It's a word that signals that the Christian life is not just wakeful, it's war.

You see that word? "The day is at hand, so then, take off your pajamas," that is the works of darkness, "and put on the armor of light." I mean, I would expect him to say put on a shirt or a cloak or dress well for work or something. And he says, "Put on the armor of light." So, out of the blue comes...

I mean, we don't just go from pajamas to clothes to armor. We go straight from pajamas to armor. What does that say about life? It says life is war. The Christian life is a battle. Though today, oh my, the God has been so merciful to give us a foretaste of heaven today, we wonder how could we even think in terms of life as being war and a battle and darkness to be overcome.

So, put off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Now, here's my question. What is the armor of light and what does putting it on mean? But let's make the question a little broader. Verse 12 and verse 14 both use the word "put on." Notice verse 14.

"Put on the Lord Jesus Christ." So, now you've got two put-ons. Put on the armor of light when you take off your pajamas of sin and put on the Lord Jesus Christ. So, my question really is, what's the relationship between putting on the armor of light and putting on the Lord Jesus Christ?

What do those two things mean? And I think the answer is given in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 verses 7 and 8. So, if you want to go there with me, you can or you can just listen. I read this two weeks ago because 1 Thessalonians 5, 7 and 8 are the closest comparison in all of Paul's writings to what we have here in chapter 13 verses 12 to 14.

When I read it, you'll hear the relationship. So, listen carefully. 1 Thessalonians 5, 7 "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, having put on" - now there it is - "put on having put on the breastplate" - so now we got armor - "put on armor so we know we're in the same sphere of thought put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation." So, Paul mentions two pieces of armor breastplate and helmet.

We know there are more from Ephesians 6, but that's all he's dealing with here. We got a breastplate, cover your heart and your will and we got a helmet, cover your brain because that's the only two, three things the devil is interested in. He wants your heart, he wants your will, he wants your brain, so get yourself covered good here and get yourself covered good here and he says there are three things that this armor stands for - faith, love, hope.

Sound familiar? These three are the great ones. Faith, hope and love. So now I come back to Romans 13, verse 12 and see if this will help us. "So then, let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light." That is, let us put on faith and let us put on hope and let us put on love.

In this world of sleepwalking, the message is coming at you all day long, every day, from television and from advertising and from all other kinds of things to say go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep with regard to God, with regard to Christ, with regard to the Bible.

And the less you want the Bible, the less you want Jesus, the less you want God, the more effective you know the sleeping pills of the world have been in your life. And what he's saying here now is faith and hope and love are the antidotes to the soporific effects of the world, always trying to get you to go to sleep.

So combat that sleep-producing effect of the world by putting on faith and putting on hope and putting on love. Yes, faith and hope and love are the antidotes to the soporific effects of the world, always trying to get you to go to sleep. Powerful. This clip was from an outdoor sermon titled "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ Part 2," preached on August 28, 2005.

If you have a sermon clip to share, email me. Give me your name, hometown, the sermon title, the timestamp of where the clip happens in the audio, and make a note of what stands out to you. Put the word "clip" in the subject line of an email and send it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

That's an email address. askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Well, are my eternal rewards and my eternal inheritance the same thing? One seems to imply that we can get more, our rewards. The other seems to imply a more static thing that's out of our hands, our inheritance. So are these rewards and our inheritance different things or are they the same thing?

I'm your host, Tony Rehnke, and we are rejoined in studio with Pastor John when we return on Friday for that, and we hope to see you then.