The Spiritual Discipline of Watchfulness

Watchfulness as a Spiritual Discipline

Well, it is a blessing and privilege to be able to bring God's Word to all of you here this afternoon. I bring warm greetings from the church in Morgan Hill, Sovereign Grace Baptist Church of Silicon Valley.

For those of you that do know me and know a little bit of my history and background here, even with this church, I was born and raised here in this church in this congregation years ago, right before the early 2000s.

My parents were members of this church for many years and it is a full-circle experience now, and I remember sitting in the pews just as my children are here today and and seeing this church now and being able to stand behind this pulpit as a recipient of God's grace, of His redeeming grace, and seeing how God shapes and transforms our lives to serve Him.

So it is a blessing and privilege and honor to to fill the pulpit here this afternoon, and I'm thankful for the fellowship of this church and our church, especially recently, and the friendship that has been built along with Brother Conley and Brother Brian and the work that is going on here in this church.

We are thankful for you all and pray for you as we remember and pray that God will bless our time together in His Word. If you would take your Bibles and turn with me to two passages of scripture, the first is found in the Old Testament in Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23.

Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23, and then the passage is, the second passage is in the New Testament, Matthew chapter 26, verse 41. First, Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23. Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.

Matthew chapter 26, verse 41. Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The Spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. Let us go to our Lord now in prayer to ask His blessing upon our time together.

Our gracious Heavenly Father, we come now to your throne of grace asking for your blessing upon the ministry of your Word. This time together as we look to you to hear from your Word, that your Word would nourish us, that your Word would feed us, that your Word would sanctify your people, that the truth would go forth in power, that you would open hearts and minds and ears to receive your truth.

Help us to guard against the distractions and hindrances to the ministry of your Word, to worshiping you in spirit and in truth, even now, that we would be enriched and blessed by the truth of your Word as it goes forth.

We ask and pray these things through Christ's name. Amen. It was the Puritan John Flavell or Flavel from the 17th century Puritan that is quoted as saying this, the greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God and the greatest difficulty after conversion is to keep the heart with God.

The question that I want to ask each one of you today, especially you that are believers, followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, is are you keeping your heart with all diligence? Are you watchful in your Christian life?

The passages just read in your hearing reveal that it is incumbent upon every believer to exercise great care over his soul on the battlefield that is the Christian life. One of the most essential yet often neglected spiritual disciplines that is directly related to prayer is that of watchfulness.

Although watchfulness is not as familiar as spiritual disciplines like meditation and prayer and fasting, it is just as necessary for a healthy spiritual life. Scripture exhorts all Christians to be watchful at all times regardless of their station and season of life.

The discipline or duty of watchfulness is the subject that I'd like for all of us to consider in this study this afternoon. You may be familiar with the name Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu was a Chinese military general who lived during the period of 771 to 256 BC.

He was also a writer and author of one of the most ancient and most esteemed military manuals in all of human history. It is entitled The Art of War. In it, he detailed what he believed to be the essentials to military victory.

He wrote this, If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. In a similar approach, when it came to the subject of spiritual warfare, many of the 17th century Puritans also emphasize the importance of knowing the enemy and his tactics, of knowing one's self and one's heart in the spiritual life, in our Christian walk, to know that our weaknesses, our struggles, how they affect us, and also the keys to victory.

For example, in his work Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, the Puritan Thomas Brooks highlighted the essentials, what is needed for our spiritual warfare. He wrote, Christ, the scripture, your own hearts, and Satan's devices are the four prime things that should be first and most studied and searched.

If any cast off the study of these, they cannot be safe here, nor happy hereafter. On this side of heaven, the believer, if you have been a Christian for any length of time, you know that the believer is beset with trouble and temptations on every side.

That unholy Trinity, that triple threat, the world, the flesh, and the devil, are cunning and devious enemies which often attack us in many ways, either by lulling us to sleep in our sins or tempting us in adopting an attitude of slothfulness or indifference in our devotion to God.

If we have fallen prey to either one, we must, by God's Spirit and grace, shake off our drowsiness, repent, and take action by redeeming the time because the days are evil, as the Apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians chapter 5, verse 16, to redeem the time that you and I are living in in such a day and age that we are.

What Watchfulness Means

Watchfulness. Watchfulness is an essential spiritual discipline, as we see in both texts just read in your hearing. It goes hand in hand with prayer. How can we overcome temptation or the weakness of the flesh or body that would keep us from performing and exercising those spiritual disciplines in our life?

Our Lord has the answer. Watch and pray, but what is watchfulness? If you read and if you are familiar with the Puritans and their writings, you will find that they refer to this as one of the essential disciplines of the Christian life, but today in our contemporary age, it is the spiritual discipline that has gone unnoticed or has gone untaught.

Watchfulness, then, definition that is given by Isaac Ambrose, another 17th century English Puritan, wrote, Watchfulness is a continual, careful observing of our ways in all the passages and turnings of our life that we still keep close to the written Word of God.

The word watch in both of our texts this afternoon in the Greek literally means stay awake, or as it is figuratively in our text, be on the alert, be vigilant. Be on your guard. When our Lord spoke to His disciples, He literally meant for them to stay awake, to be alert, while He went and prayed and get the Garden of Gethsemane.

But there is also a spiritual aspect to this as well. To be vigilant, be on your guard. It is a spiritual watching. In other words, He is saying give strict attention to, take heed. He is calling us to a sober-mindedness, about the reality and the power of the schemes of that unholy Trinity, the world, the flesh, and the devil.

We must be watchful of the subtlety of our own hearts, the deceptiveness of the influences around us, including this world and our great enemy, the devil, and the influence that each one has upon our hearts, so as not to be swept away by its evil influences or to be led to a false sense of security.

This is exactly how our Lord used it with His disciples as the hours grew dark in the days leading up to His crucifixion and death, but it also became the very watchword of the Apostles themselves. Listen to me as I read some of the other passages in the New Testament that call our attention to watchfulness as a spiritual discipline.

1 Corinthians chapter 16 verse 13 Watch ye, the Apostle Paul writes to the church at Corinth, continually be on the alert, in other words, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be courageous, be strong.

He's speaking especially in light of the challenging or trying circumstances that they face in that culture in Corinth and even in the church at that time. Watch ye, continually be on the alert. Colossians chapter 4 and verse 2, the Apostle Paul again writing to the church at Colossae says continue in or devote yourselves to prayer.

Connected with that and watch in the same. We are to stay alert even in our prayers and our times of prayer, and I'll explain that more in just a moment. Watch in the same with Thanksgiving. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 verse 6.

Therefore let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch. Again, staying alert and cautious and be sober. Exercise self-control, sound judgment in the Christian life and that famous or common familiar verse in 1st Peter chapter 5 verse 8 from the Apostle Peter.

Be sober or disciplined is the meaning there of the word. Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour. Prayer is often an area of weakness in the believer's life.

So we must understand if we are vulnerable, if we are inconsistent in our prayer life as Christians, it is that vulnerability that the enemy will attack at this very point. This is what watchfulness is from Scripture.

Watching Before, In, and After Prayer

What are some basic principles of watchfulness that we are to give our attention to or to be or to understand especially in regards to prayer? The first principle is that there is a watching before prayer, before we pray.

Positively speaking, it is a watching being on the alert for all opportunities that are most suitable for praying. These can be such times as evangelism. God has given you that desire to reach the lost with the gospel, the lost in your family, the lost in your neighborhood, the lost in the workplace.

You desire and seek that they would be saved. What are we to do? Watch and pray. Pray for those times of evangelism. Pray for those opportunities. Pray that you would be ready to give a defense of the truth of God's Word.

We are to be watching before prayer in times of intercession. When we are in the fellowship of believers, especially, and we have a conversation with a fellow brother or sister in Christ and we hear of their struggles spiritually, of those things that may be bothering them, troubling them in the Christian life, even their besetting sins.

We are to be watching and hearing those things so that not only we are to encourage and help them there in our words, but also to watch and to pray for them. Negatively speaking, there is a watching before prayer in this sense.

A watching for instances or circumstances that would try our faith, which call for prayer, such as the temptations of the world, the flesh, the devil, that we would not give in to the sinful desires of the flesh.

Do you know if you're going into a situation or a circumstance, may it be a gathering with your family, where you know there will be immorality, there will be the temptations that are going to be present there.

We are to watch and pray even before praying. At the first sign of temptation, our response is to flee with great urgency from that temptation, but flee where? Where do we find refuge in such times? We are beset by temptations all around us.

We are to run to God with seeking his help. Proverbs chapter 18 and verse 10, we read, the name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous man runs into it and is safe. When you're faced with that temptation in your life, we are not simply to flee from it into some neutral place.

We are to flee to the living God himself, to find refuge in the Lord Jesus Christ, in his word, to find refuge in prayer and communion with him, to find refuge with God's people. At the first sign of weakness, to carry out our spiritual duties, our response must be to watch, to this duty of watchfulness, to come boldly into the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace in the time of need, Hebrews 4 16.

Listen closely. We can only withstand the trials of the Christian life. We can only remain faithful to Christ, faithfully serve Christ by his power and prayer, which unlocks that strength that we need.

It is only when we are full of pride, when we think that we can live out the Christian life by ourselves with our own strength and determination, and we know all too well the result, oftentimes, when we attempt to live out the Christian life in our strength, it is one where we fall into that sin and are yielding to that temptation.

But more than just a watching before prayer, there is a watching in our prayers over what issues, those issues that flow out of our souls, as Proverbs says in chapter 4 of 23, these issues of our souls such as our thoughts and words and actions.

Listen to the words of the psalmist in Psalm 39 verse 1. I said I will take heed to my ways that I sin not with my tongue. I will keep my mouth with a bridle. Psalm 119 verse 59. I thought on my ways and turned my feet into thy testimonies.

I have chosen the way of truth. Thy judgments have I laid before me. When we are praying, in those times of praying, there is a watching, a watching over our own mouths, a watching over our own hearts in prayer.

We are praying for us, for God to help us set a watch before our mouths, before the doors of our lips, that we would not utter anything that is dishonoring to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Again in Psalm 19 verse 14.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord. We are also to be watching in our prayers for those things that enter into our souls. Not only the things that issue out of our heart and issue out of our souls, but those things that enter into our hearts.

And we think of Job 31 verse 1, and Job making a covenant with his eyes that he would not look lustfully upon a virgin. Are we doing those things? Are we keeping watch over our souls, knowing the vulnerabilities, knowing the weaknesses of our hearts and souls when it comes to the Christian life?

And are we going to God in prayer for them? And thirdly, there should be a watching after prayer. For answers to prayer. Anticipating God's answer to help us in such times of need and waiting and expecting an answer for him to deliver us from such trials.

To give us the strength to endure, to withstand the eschemes and the attacks of the evil one. To withstand our own heart's deceitfulness. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

Who can know it? Are we watching and setting a watch over our own hearts even after prayer and seeking and anticipating God's answer to prayer? The exhortation for you today, for me today, is to cultivate this discipline of watchfulness in our daily life.

The word to keep our hearts and to watch and pray are in the present imperatives. They are in the present tense. They are to be the very habit of our lives. Not to be picked up when we come to such times as this afternoon, when you pray together as congregation together, but they are to be part of our lives each and every day of our Christian lives.

To continually watch over or pay close attention to our hearts and our desires. To root out and to cut off and to cut out those things, those idols in our lives that may be demanding our worship. Are there things in your life such as the temptations to possessions and money and influence and status and so on?

How far have you yielded to those temptations even in your own life? Are we watching our own hearts and seeing how far we can wander from God's path? I am often reminded of John Bunyan's work, The Pilgrim's Progress, and how you see Christian or pilgrim on that narrow path, that straight path, and evangelist keeps coming and telling them, stay on the straight path.

And oftentimes, just like every Christian here today, if we are honest, we find ourselves straying from that path. It's too hard sometimes. It's too difficult. It's too trying. There is a better path.

And then you find Christian wandering in to doubting castle and facing giant despair. We know that all too well, do we not? So we must watch over our own souls and to pray. This is the duty that God gives to us.

Can we do it in our own power? Absolutely not. We can do it in God's strength, in his grace. We must abide in him. I am the vine. You are the branches. Abide in me, he says. Apart from you, from me, you can do some things?

Nothing. Are we abiding in Christ? Do you find yourself weak in your Christian life? Whatever that area may be. Then the direct relation to that is that we are not abiding in Christ and watching over our souls as we are called to.

We must be reminded of the reality that this world is not our home. Remember, again, Pilgrim's Progress, if you are familiar with it. Christian and faithful enter into vanity fair, the world and all its pleasures and all its vanity.

Each Christian is called to pass through such a world, but it is not our home. They're asking them to buy the things of the world, indulge in the things that will so-called satisfy your faith. They put their fingers in their ears and they say, we only buy the truth and life, life, eternal life.

They look forward to the celestial city, watching over their own souls when they are faced with the greatest temptations in this world. You are not to find friendship in this evil world and in the ways of this world and those who seek after its goods, riches, honors, or pleasure are not to be our objects of pursuit as Christians in this world.

You are walking in the midst of snares and traps all around you. Ignorance will not do. Ignorance is not bliss in this case. We are walking on a battlefield. There are mines everywhere. We are just like I recently showing my children the Memorial Day and D-Day behind us recently, especially those beaches of Normandy when those soldiers were issued off of those ships onto that beach in Normandy knowing their very lives were at stake.

It is no different for us in the spiritual sense as Christians in this evil world. Be watchful, prayerful, depending on Jesus and cultivating fellowship with him and those that belong to him, the local church, your fellowship with other believers.

They are to have your back and you are to have their back, spiritually speaking. That is when we are at our strongest. God does not leave us in this world to be isolated in our Christian lives, to live a monastic Christian life.

He has called us to the local church. Submit ourselves to the authority of the local church. Submit ourselves humbly under the leadership of the pastors. And we are to serve one another on this battlefield.

Never leave the Lord's ways to join the world's pleasures or to please your own sinful desires. Keep close to Jesus and follow on to know the Lord more intimately. There is that old hymn that you are, I'm sure, familiar with that in such times has been a balm and a help to my own soul when faced with the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. You find yourself straying or wandering from the fold and flock of God, you can attend here each week faithfully as a member of this church or as a part of this church, but you could be far from its fellowship in your own heart, in your own life.

Look to Christ. Seek Christ. Listen to his word and continue to follow him. Finally, during our pilgrimage here, we will be subject to an onslaught of attacks both from without and from within. We must take up the whole armor of God.

We must abide in God's word and keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the very captain of our salvation. We must study the tactics of the enemy and know our own hearts. We must remember the greatest point of attack from the evil one, the devil himself, will be upon the authority of God's word.

Has God really said what he said to Eve is what he says in tempting each one of us. He wants to take away that trust and devotion we have to God and his word by faith. Finally, we must long for the coming of Christ.

When we are beset by trials of various kinds in this Christian life, when we feel ourselves overwhelmed, challenged to live out consistent Christian lives faithfully, when we seek after God, we feel the trials of our own flesh and the affliction of our physical bodies, should not call us to give up and to surrender and say, I can't do it anymore.

It should call us to cry out, come quickly, Lord Jesus. Are we looking for that blessed hope, that blessed return of the Lord Jesus Christ? I finish with a quote from Thomas Brooks again, as he reminds his readers in that book, Satan's Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices.

He writes, until you are taken up into the bosom of Christ, your comforts will not be full, pure and constant. Until then, Satan will still be thumping on you and spreading snares to entangle you. Therefore, you should always be crying out with the church, come, Lord Jesus.

Revelation 22, verse 20. Let's go to the Lord now, closing in prayer. Our gracious Heavenly Father, again, we thank you for this time in your word. We pray that you would take the words of your truth in the Bible and inscribe them now upon our hearts as your people.

Help us to take upon this great duty and discipline of watchfulness over our own hearts, that we would continually watch and be vigilant to stay alert in this Christian life, to not let down our armor, to not let down that shield of faith, but to always look to you and follow after you, our captain of our salvation.

I pray for the strength and fellowship and unity of this church here. We pray, O God, that you would continue to grow it by your grace, that you would continue to grow them in love towards one another, that distinguishing mark of Christians, especially in the church.

The world will know them by your love for one another. We pray that that love would abound here in this place, that there would be unity, the unity that tells the world that we are a people transformed and a people that are devoted and united together for the gospel.

I pray, O God, that you would keep them from the schemes and attacks of the evil one to divide and rip apart and ravage churches, that they would continue to be a bright and shining light in this community for your glory.

We pray all these things through Christ's name. Amen.