The Slumber of Christianity: Awakening a Passion for Heaven on Earth

The Slumber of Christianity:
Awakening a Passion for Heaven on Earth

By Ted Dekker


Structure of the Book:

The Slumber of Christianity opens with the forward written by Randy Alcorn. The book is divided into two parts: Our Descent into Slumber and Shaking Off Our Slumber. Chapters one through seven are in part one, and chapters eight through eleven are in part two. The total number of pages is two hundred.

Synopsis of the Book:

This book is an analytical discussion with some fictional story lines. “‘Are you desperately longing for heaven?’ It’s a question that begs answering. Peter says, ‘We are looking forward to the new heavens and the new earth’(2 Peter 3:13). But, in fact, as Christians today are we? Are we actually looking forward to and longing for our eternal home?”(forward page V). Ted Dekker says, “The church today has little passion for the coming life” (forward page V). Ted gives an in-depth look of how we, as Christians and heirs of the promise, have fallen into a deep slumber. He also explains what we can do to get out of the deep slumber that we’ve allowed ourselves to slip into. “Rise up from slumber. Set your mind and heart on an inheritance that will blow your mind. Feel your heart flutter and find a new passion for life here and now. This is the call from Ted Dekker, who writes with passion and insight on the search for happiness and heaven” (forward page V). “The Carpenter from Nazareth is preparing a place for us. He knows how to build. He’s constructed entire worlds, billions of them. He’s going to strip the damaged paint off the old Earth, sand and refinish it, then present it magnificent and pristine. He says it will one day be our home... and His, for He will dwell there with His people, forever bringing heaven to earth(Revelation 21:3)” (forward page V). “So listen to Ted Dekker’s wake-up call. You’ll never regret the world you’ll wake up to...not in a billion years” (forward page V).

Nature of the Book:

This book is also a theological discussion with analysis of the Scripture. It also contains many allegories upon the truth of the Scripture. Ted writes, “The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die” (page 15). Ted writes that one of his favorite quotes is found in The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis. Lewis writes, “Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (page 15). Ted says that our passion is not on the holiday by the sea (page 15). Ted grew up in the jungles of Indonesia with his missionary parents. There in those hot and humid jungles, Ted started his lifelong quest to discover happiness (page 18). He writes, “Later I would characterize that quest with three questions:
1. Who am I?
2. Where do I belong?
3. Am I happy?” (page 18)


Ted uses two whole chapters to describe that quest in vivid detail. He explains how he, too, fell into a slumber and what it took to wake him up out of that deep sleep. He continually, throughout his life, asks himself those three questions. Ted writes, “Let’s return to King Solomon’s simple conclusion on man’s search for happiness. It’s true, as he stated, that there is nothing better for men to do than be happy while they live and do good, for this is God’s gift to them. But we must also consider his most critical comments that lead up to this conclusion. Here in the space of one verse, the wisest man who ever lived gave us a secret that must precede any attempt by man to enjoy the gifts of God. Read: ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end’ (Eccl. 3:11)” (page 42).


After the death of his brother, Danny, Ted has discovered an answer for those three questions. He writes, “Meaning and happiness in this life are subject to meaning and happiness in the next. This was Danny’s final lesson to me. My search for happiness was and is futile unless I have the bright light of eternity to show the way. Who am I? A person destined for bliss beyond this life. Where do I belong? There, diving deep into my Creator’s lake of inexhaustible pleasures. Am I happy? Only when I embrace hope in a glorious mansion of many rooms prepared for me. For now the Comforter will ease the pain of the Fall and offer many good blessings as foretastes of my inheritance. The blessings and the gifts of this life aren’t the good news of the gospel. Our hope for life everlasting, swamped by a never-ending bliss, is the good news” (page 60-61). “My search for happiness has led me to the secret I now share with you. Life is about heaven. It is about ecstasy and great pleasure, for God is both of these. They can’t truly be found here, on earth” (page 61).

Content of the Book:

Ted uses a parable about a machine in the desert that no one knows how to work. Then one day someone discovers a great pearl and places it in the designed slot on the machine, the machine roars life. The point is this: “The machine is the heart of happiness, placed in every man and woman and child by God himself. Though it once was full of life, it has slipped into a slumber and sits in darkness. The pearl is the hope of eternity, which fuels the machine and brings it to life. No matter how man will find pleasure within its gears and contrive usefulness from its gadgets, the machine of life is destined to lie in darkness unless fueled by the pearl of great hope. But powered by that fuel, the great machine will awaken with a thunder and fill the heart with an inexhaustible awe. Happy is the man who finds a pearl of great price” (pages 77-78).

Ted also brings up a topic that a lot of people don’t like to talk about: death. Ted writes, “There is one thing in your life that will necessarily lead to death. Living” (page 82). He says we can add or shave a few years to our lives, but ultimately, we have eighty or so years to do our thing, and then we’re gone (page 82). Ted says, “In its obsession with happiness and life, our culture has locked death in a closet and tried desperately to lose the key” (page 82). He writes, “We certainly don’t treat death as the doorway into bliss” (page 82). I Corinthians 15: 54-55 says, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Jesus and His dying and being raised up again defeated death forever. Why is it that we don’t look at death in that light? To live is to die, but to die is to gain Christ.

Ted says that we have lost hope. We have taken hope and forgotten about it. He takes several passages and summarizes them into the following: “Our hope is for what is stored up for us in heaven, and in our salvation from God’s wrath, and in being like him when he appears. If our hope is for only the things our faith can give us in this life, we are to be pitied more than all men! True hope purifies us and is the source of our joy through the power of the Spirit. Love and faith spring from this hope. Departing to be with Christ is better by far than living for him on earth. Therefore, let us hold unswervingly to the hope of the afterlife lest we fall into a slumber. This is the heart of the gospel” (page94). Hebrews 6:19 says, “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure...”

Ted writes about how he believes we’re created to obsess and how that reflects the emotions of God. “To best understand the rightful place of our minds and affections, we must look at the affections of our Creator, because we know that we were created in his image (Gen. 1:27). This isn’t to say that he made us with two arms and two legs and one nose because he had the same, but that we were fashioned in the image of his Spirit and his mind and his heart. And the image of his emotions” (page 108-109). Ted says that hope is the greatest emotion. He writes on how we should be obsessed with God just as God is with us. Ted gives us the definition of obsession, which is a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling; broadly: compelling motivation. He uses two parables from Jesus to illustrate this point which I will elaborate later. He explains how Paul, John the Baptist, and David were all obsessed. He asks, “Is God obsessed? If you say no, either you haven’t read his story or you’ve not understood it. The only difference between his compelling motivation to live as a human and die on the cross and our own motivation is the his required no faith. But his passion far exceeded any we are even capable of in this life. God is obsessive...He is preoccupied with you. He is determined to save you from his own wrath. He has wiped out many cities to protect his own...” (page115). “Yes, God is obsessive. Many frown on that term, but our faith in part depends on it. God is obsessed, and now we, too, can be obsessed. We can preoccupy our minds with an unreasonable treasure and enamor our hearts with the hope of glory” (page115). We should be obsessed with heaven, a treasure worthy of our obsession, which I’ll explain later. Our faith is not based on reason but on hope. Basing our faith on reason has brought about our slumber (page 117-119). Colossians 1:5 says, “The faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel...” “Hope, that gift God has given us to motivate our faith, is impossible to see if the eyes of your heart are closed” (page 129).


Ted also speaks about how powerful the imagination is. He claims it is a gift from God to help us. Eugene Petersen writes in his book A Long Obedience, “Hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain...It [hope] is imagination put in the harness of faith.” Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” “Eugene Petersen... said it best in a speech he made at the 2003 Christy Awards banquet: ‘Words amputated from stories lose accuracy, lose color and energy, congeal into god talk. They are flowers that fade and grow limp. For every theologian, we need five novelists to keep the language personally relational; for every biblical scholar we need another five novelists to keep the language participatory; for every church historian the church needs another five novelists to keep us aware that we are in the story’” (pages 141-142). Jesus used stories, which were fiction to the best of our knowledge, to get His point across. Imagination is good. (I’ve included with my report an excerpt from this book, containing an excerpt from Dekker’s novel Black. Please read that to get an idea of how imagination is used to bring understanding. It is in the back of the folder.)


Evaluation:

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “[Heaven] is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over; it will be morning.” This book is about awakening a passion or obsession for God and for heaven. I can sum this book up with an excerpt from Dekker’s novel Obsessed: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. A certain man learned that the treasure existed and he developed a terrible obsession to possess it. He wasted all of his wealth and secretly sold everything he had to purchase the field so that he could own the treasure. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl of great price. When a man found it, he sold all that he had and purchased the pearl. Unless you, too, obsess after God’s kingdom, like this man did over his treasure, you will not find it. Knock and keep on knocking. Seek and keep on seeking. When they send you away again and again, come back and seek still again. Then you will find the treasure you seek. Parables of Jesus. Paraphrased and expanded. Found in the book of Saint Matthew.”

This book is very easy to read and further more understand.

Recommendation:

I wish I had enough money to buy this book by the bulk and pass it out to people. I really enjoyed this book, and it opened the eyes of my heart to things I’d never considered. I strongly urge all to read this book by Ted Dekker or any book written by him. This book opened my eyes and got me thinking about why I lack passion in my life at times. It made me think more about the life to come and to be thankful for it. Now I know that you’re under the impression that Christian music today lacks meaning, but I disagree with you. Here is the song Everything by Jeremy Camp, which shows the book’s point: “I tried to find anything I could to fill the void that I felt inside/ I tried to hide because I never could release the very guilt that was in my mind/ but every time that I’d trace these lines/ I’d feel like I had been so blind cause/ You are everything I hope for, everything that I breath for, everything that this heart will need. Everything that I hope for, everything that I crave/ Sometimes I feel a fight to release the grip and trust that everything will be alright/ It’s been so real to feel the peace that you give start unfolding when I let things go/ every weight that I build inside/ When I lay it down I realize that/ You are everything I hope for, everything that I breath for, everything that this heart will need. Everything that I hope for, everything that I crave/ All these pointless ties to endless lies that this temporal life will satisfy/ I hide my life in You.” I believe that song aids in getting the point across. Notice the word he uses to describe his desire for God: Crave. Desire. Passion. OBSESSION! He craves God and is obsessed with Him. He is in love with God just as God is madly, deeply, passionately, and obsessively in love with us. I think the colloquialism, “You snooze, you lose” holds true for us Christians who have fallen into a slumber. By writing this paper, “I join with all of the other voices crying in this sleepy wilderness:


Wake. Wake O Sleeper.
Open the eyes of your heart to the bliss set before you
Run your race with your eyes fixed on the goal
Embrace God; embrace love; embrace hope
Preoccupy your mind and heart with Christ in Glory
Wake, Bride of Christ, wake. The wedding feast is coming soon” (page 200).