The Watch

It is one word, and the Lord gives it to everyone. He had been speaking to a few of his disciples in private, on the Mount of Olives, of the things that were to come and of his own return, and lest anyone should think the counsel belonged only to those four men on that one evening, he widened it to the whole world and the whole age. What I say unto you I say unto all. And what he says is a single command, plain enough for a child and deep enough to occupy a soul for a lifetime. Watch. Stay awake. Keep the watch of your heart, for you do not know the hour.

A few nights later he showed them what the failure to watch looks like. In the garden, with his soul exceeding sorrowful unto death, he asked only that they stay awake with him and pray, and he came and found them sleeping. Could ye not watch with me one hour? he asked Peter, the same Peter who had sworn he would die before he denied him. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. There is the whole of it. The willing spirit and the weak flesh, and between them the thin discipline of watchfulness that keeps the one from being overrun by the other. Peter did not keep the watch that night, and before the cock crew he had denied his Lord three times, exactly as he had been warned.

THE SLEEP OF THE SOUL

We must be clear about the kind of sleep the Lord warns against, for it is not the gross and obvious sin that undoes most souls. It is drowsiness. It is the slow settling of a film over the eyes of the heart, so gradual that a man does not notice he has stopped watching until something has already crept past his gate. The disciples in the garden were not carousing. They were tired, and the hour was late, and their eyes were heavy, and it seemed a small thing to rest them. So it always seems. Spiritual sleep never announces itself as rebellion. It comes as reasonableness, as fatigue, as the sensible lowering of a guard that surely does not need to be kept quite so strictly all the time. Let us not sleep, as do others, the apostle wrote, but let us watch and be sober. He knew that the many are asleep, and that the sleep feels entirely normal because nearly everyone is in it.

The enemy of our souls vastly prefers a sleeping sentry to a fighting one, for the sleeper surrenders the wall without a blow. He need not be defeated in open battle if he can simply be lulled. And so the whole strategy against a watchful soul is not frontal assault but the patient encouragement of drowsiness, the endless small invitations to relax the attention, to assume that this hour at least is safe, to put off the vigilance until a more dangerous time that never seems to arrive until it has arrived too late. The watch is hardest to keep precisely when nothing appears to be happening, and that is exactly when it is most needed.

WHAT THE WATCHMAN GUARDS

But what is it that we watch? The old fathers who took this command most seriously answered without hesitation. We watch the heart, and specifically we watch the gate of the heart, where the thoughts come in. Keep thy heart with all diligence, the proverb says, for out of it are the issues of life. Every deed that ever destroyed a man began as a thought that was allowed to loiter at the threshold, and was not challenged, and was let in, and given a chair, and made welcome, until it was no longer a visitor but a master of the house. The watchful soul meets the intruder at the door, while it is still small and still outside, and does not let it in. This is the whole art of watchfulness, to catch the thing at its beginning, when it is a suggestion and not yet a sin, a spark and not yet a fire.

For there is a great difference between a thought that passes through and a thought that is entertained, and much of the peace of a soul depends on knowing it. No one is condemned for the temptation that merely presents itself, for even our Lord was tempted in all points as we are. We are undone by the temptation we take up, turn over, argue with on its own terms, and secretly begin to enjoy. The watchman does not pretend the intruder is not there. He sees it clearly, names it for what it is, and refuses it entry, again and again, without drama and without despair. This is not the anxious, exhausting scrutiny of a scrupulous mind forever taking its own spiritual temperature. It is sober, steady attention, the calm alertness of a man who knows his post and keeps it.

WATCH AND PRAY

Notice that the Lord never said watch alone. He said watch and pray, and the two words must not be separated, for each without the other fails. To watch without praying is to trust in your own vigilance, and the man who trusts in his own vigilance will discover, as Peter did, that the willing spirit cannot hold the weak flesh by its own strength for even one hour. Watchfulness that leans on itself hardens into a grim and joyless self-reliance, and then breaks. But to pray without watching is to ask God for protection while leaving every gate of the soul standing open, and such prayer is a kind of mockery, as though we would have him guard a house we ourselves refuse to lock. Watch, and so take your post seriously. Pray, and so confess that the post cannot be held without him. The two together are the sober life.

SOBER AND AWAKE

The Lord who commands the watch kept it himself, and keeps it still. In the garden, while his friends slept, he watched and prayed with such agony that his sweat was as great drops of blood falling to the ground, and he did not once let the watch fall. He is our pattern in this, the one Watchman who never slept at his post. And he is more than a pattern, for the Scripture says he ever liveth to make intercession for us. Even now, while we doze, he watches and prays for his own. When we take up the watch we are not beginning a lonely vigil. We are joining a watch he has kept all along, and being carried in it.

Know the particular thoughts that come to the gate, for the enemy does not send only one kind. There is the thought that flatters, that whispers how well you are doing and how much further along than others, and it is more dangerous than open filth because it wears the face of virtue. There is the thought that accuses, that drags up old and forgiven sins to crush you into despair, and it too must be refused, for God convicts to heal and the enemy accuses to destroy. And there is the thought that merely distracts, the endless idle wandering that seems harmless and yet carries the mind off its watch as surely as any temptation. Learn their faces. Meet each at the door.

This is what the Scriptures call sobriety, and it is more than the avoidance of wine. Take heed to yourselves, the Lord warned, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. Notice that he names the cares of this life in the same breath as drunkenness, for a soul can be made just as heavy and dull and unwatchful by worry and busyness and the weight of many concerns as by any cup. The sober soul is the light and wakeful one, not overcharged with anything, neither with pleasures nor with anxieties, kept free and alert so that nothing takes it unawares.

THE SERVANT FOUND WATCHING

Keep the watch over the small gates as well as the great, over the tongue and the eyes and the ear, for these are the doors through which most of what troubles the heart first entered. The unwatched eye gathers what the heart will later have to fight. The unwatched tongue runs ahead of the mind and scatters what can never be gathered back. A man who will not keep watch over what he looks at and what he says has left the widest gates of his soul standing open while he frets over the narrow ones. Guard the senses as a watchman guards the wall, not from fear of the world, but because the heart within is worth defending.

For the watch is not kept in dread but in hope, and it ends not in exhaustion but in joy. Blessed are those servants, the Lord promised, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching. And then he said a thing almost too good to believe, that the master himself shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them. The one who kept us waiting will wait upon us. The Master we watched for will become our servant at his own table. This is the end of the long vigil, and it is worth every dark and drowsy hour, to be found awake when he comes, and welcomed, and seated, and served by the very Lord we watched for.

And all of it is done in expectation, which is the deepest reason for the watch. The Lord told his servants that the master of the house is coming, but they know not when, whether at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning, lest coming suddenly he find them sleeping. We watch because he is coming, and because the hour is hidden from us on purpose, so that no season may be treated as safe to sleep in. To watch is simply to live at every hour as one who expects his Lord, to keep the lamp trimmed and the door ready, so that whenever he comes, whether at the end of the world or at the end of your own small life, he finds you awake at your post and glad to see him. What I say unto you, he says still, I say unto all. Watch.