Do you sometimes find it hard to wake up in the morning? Maybe your mum has to shake you a few times and say, “Wake up, wake up.” The apostle Paul tells the readers of the letter to the Romans to wake up as well. Here Paul is speaking about something different than waking up like you need to do every morning. Paul is telling the readers that they need to wake up spiritually. They can’t keep living a sinful life like they had been in the past. And this is important, this is urgent. They need to wake up now. They need to look at their lives and change the way that they are living now.

When you wake up in the morning, you take off your pajamas and put on your nice clean clothes. In the same way, we have to put off our works of darkness. This means you have to stop saying nasty things, stop being selfish, stop lying, stop cheating, stop disobeying, stop gossiping…and you can finish the list. These are the works of darkness that we have to cast off, to get rid of.

Paul also tells us to put on the armor of light, or put on the Lord Jesus Christ. This means we have to show works of obedience, love, care, honesty, and kindness in our life. These are works of light.

And, through the Spirit, we can put on these works of light because Christ has come, and he has died for us. We must go to him with our daily fight against sin. We must go to him for forgiveness. Because of God’s great love for us, he reaches out to us and says, “Yes my son, my daughter, you are broken and sinful and you have broken all my commandments and done many works of darkness, but I have put your sins on my Son Jesus Christ. I poured all of my anger at your sins on him. He has paid for your sins so that you can be forgiven. Now go in my power, and live as children of the light.”

Reflection with your child:

What does Paul mean when he tells the readers to “wake up”?