1 Thessalonians 5:5-11

⁵ You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. ⁶ So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. ⁷ For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. ⁸ But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. ⁹ For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. ¹⁰ He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. ¹¹ Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing. ^[1]

“We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.” Have you noticed that those who have a mind to do wrong tend to do their dirt at night under the cover of darkness? Several years ago while my wife and I were in New Orleans we visited Bourbon Street, which is notorious for all kinds of illicit and immoral behavior. Apart from the pictures on the doors of the clubs advertising the activities that took place on the inside, Bourbon Street appeared to be a quiet laid-back idyllic street. But as day gave way to dusk all sorts of people came out of the woodwork and things began to get suddenly very strange, and it was time to leave.

Paul writes that we are children of the light and the day, therefore we are to be alert and self-control, “putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet,” not being “like others who are asleep.” In most places Paul uses sleep as a euphemism for the death of believers, but here sleep refers to those who are unconscious to the necessary distinction between what it means to live in the light and day instead of darkness and the night. In the same way there are many among us who can be said to be asleep. They do not see how the one is incompatible with the other. They think that they can “have their cake and eat it too,” living in the dark but perpetrating in the daylight.

What is our responsibility toward our sisters and brothers and the household of faith? As has been the theme of much of this book thus far, Paul says that we should encourage one another. But this encouragement is a little different from encouraging one to hang on despite persecution. It is encouragement to live and walk in the light, and as such it does not happen often in the modern church because of a false sense of propriety. We believe it is not our job to get into another’s business and it is not. But when we see a sister or brother walking in darkness we have an obligation to encourage them to walk in the light, to live in the day. Let us resolve today to leave no one behind.

Dear Father, a false sense of propriety and gentility causes us to wink at the danger of emerging sin in our brother and sister’s life. Where we could have and should have encouraged another to righteousness we held our peace and let brother or sister fall. Forgive us for being too timid to risk relationship to lift up another of your children. Forgive us for being too self-absorbed to show concern for and encourage one another. Give us a passion to rescue the perishing and to reach the lost at all cost. Amen.