TRANSFORMED: Circumcision of the Heart (Romans 2:17-3:8)

Are You Awake?

by Lisa Coleman

In the ongoing battle against oversleeping, humanity has devised some clever alarm clocks. But for all their clever designs, most alarm clocks still suffer from a common drawback: the fact that they’re not designed for multiple users. When one person’s alarm goes off, other people in the room or throughout the house have to wake up too. Most alarm clocks have no way to selectively wake up one person and leave the other person undisturbed. Until now, that is.

Freshly launched on Kickstarter, Wake is a new breed of alarm that targets individual users and wakes up one sleeper without rousing others. Here’s how it works. After it’s mounted to the wall above the bed, the device uses an infrared temperature sensor and special body-tracking software to discern where each person is lying (without a camera). When it’s time to wake one person up, Wake silently takes aim, rotates into position, and then directs a tight burst of light and sound at their face.

To keep from rousing other sleepers, the device uses a set of parametric speakers capable of focusing sound into a narrow beam. Think of it as a spotlight for noise. If Wake is pointed straight at your head, you’ll hear it loud and clear, but if you’re outside of the beam’s small radius, the sound will be extremely faint.  [Drew Prindle, Awesome Alarm Clock Uses Parametric Speakers to Wake You Up Without Disturbing Your Partner, DigitalTrends.Com (4-2-15)]

 

In his letter, Paul opens chapter three assuring the recipients of this letter that there is an advantage in being Jewish (v. 2) even if he had to squelch their erroneous spirit of superiority in relation to the Gentiles and pagans. Paul says the Jews have much advantage in every way. The first is they are entrusted with the very spoken Word of God.

The Word of God is for us as individuals. It is personal, specific, life-changing for us and for those we share it with. It is our light in the darkness, a great gift of highest value. A blessing, a promise, and truly transforming. It is our very own ‘Awake’ alarm – aimed at us, to us and for us.

Join us tomorrow as we look at the end of Chapter 2 and you can decide for yourself whether God’s spotlight alarm was focused solely on the Jews or not.

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You can download the Bible study materials for this session for your personal use and watch the Zoom video of the in-class session by following the links below:

PowerPoint Slides
PDF File
Video

Follow this link to find other studies in this series: TRANSFORMED: Knowing & Doing God’s Will.