Get Dressed (Friday Devotional)

“Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

- Romans 13:11-12

As best I can tell, groomsmen and bridesmaids have very different experiences in the hours leading up to a wedding. For bridesmaids, the wedding day is a flurry of activity—hair appointments, makeup carefully applied, nails painted, photographs taken. If you walk into the bridesmaids’ dressing room an hour before the wedding, you’re likely to see a dozen different things happening at once.

In the groomsmen’s dressing room…not so much. I remember at my brother’s wedding, a mere 45 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, all of us were still sitting in our undershirts and gym shorts, with so little to do that we spent half an hour playing catch with a Nerf ball we found lying around. Our dressing room was a picture of laziness and boredom until about 20 minutes before the ceremony began. It was then and only then that we all finally snapped to attention, speedily got dressed, and shifted into wedding mode.

In the early days of the church, believers’ approach to the mission Christ had given them—to make disciples of all nations and to be his witnesses everywhere they went—resembled the feverish activity of the bridesmaids’ dressing room. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the apostles were always on the move, always preaching and teaching and healing in Jesus’s name. And they worked so frenetically with good reason—they fervently believed that Jesus would return at any moment to consummate the kingdom his ministry had ushered in.

But as time went by, feverish anticipation turned to impatience and then to resignation—perhaps Jesus wasn’t going to return as soon as they’d expected after all. Their former singlemindedness about the mission gave way to a duller, compromised sense of obligation. Before long, the church started to look much more like the groomsmen’s room than the bridesmaids’—sluggishly biding time, unwilling to kick into high gear until the big moment drew a little closer.

Today the church remains trapped in that second mindset, giving lip service to Christ’s imminent return but silently assuming we won’t see it anytime soon. And just like for the church at the end of the first century, that assumption hurts our ministry by sapping it of its urgency and passion. What we need is to recapture the spirit of expectation that gave the early church its earnestness. Scripture tells us Christ’s return is near, and in the meantime we are called to wake from our sleep and set to our task, to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

In this season of Advent, we do two important things: we remember Christ coming for the first time and offering us the hope of salvation, and we look forward to the day when he will come again to fulfill the hope of that salvation. So as you draw hope both from Christ’s past arrival and his future return, may you also be a witness to that hope in the present, eagerly sharing the gospel with your words and your works. At Christ’s return, Scripture speaks of a great wedding between Christ and his bride, the church—so no more sitting around, let’s get dressed!