2) Elijah was a great prophet of God. We saw in 1 Kings 18 - he'd called fire down from heaven, he challenged the prophets of Baal. There'd been a mighty slaughter of the prophets of Baal. The old religion of Baal was beginning to be challenged and shake. The Fire of God fell out of heaven!
Then Jezebel came against him, sent messengers against him. He became afraid, he ran away. Fear opened his life for this oppression to come around him; he isolated; then he sat down under a tree and just wanted to die. The Bible says “he fell asleep”.
When you come under, and yield, to spiritual oppression because of fear - you go into a state of sleep. You don't really see what's going on - what it costs you to give way to fear, what it costs you to give way to sin. Neither Elijah nor Samson realised what it was costing them.
For Elijah, he lost the momentum of revival. God had to reposition him back again; and entrust revival to the next generation. “A little bit of sleep, a little bit of slumber, a little bit of folding of the hands to the rest - and then poverty comes upon us like an armed man”. Through laziness, spiritual laziness - sleep comes (Proverbs tells us).
If we don't keep ourselves vibrant, alive, energised, vitally connected to God - listening to Him, responding to Him, flowing with Him; then we slumber - can't be bothered, tired, weary.
3) The disciples, in Luke 22. Jesus was facing one of the greatest challenges of His life. He knew He was about to go to the cross; all the powers of death and hell were pushing against Him, and He said to His friends: I am sorrowful - exceedingly sorrowful under death. Please come and pray with me in the garden.
They came into the garden, and that power and that pressure came on Jesus - and He stood firmly in the place of prayer. He broke through, yielding to the will of God. He brought salvation for you and for me; but the disciples fell asleep for sorrow, under the same spiritual pressure. They yielded, and fell asleep. They were unable to be a part of what Jesus was doing, because they fell asleep.
Sin - sexual sin in the case of Samson; fear on the case of Elijah; sorrows and hurts and grief in the case of the disciples - all of them allowed that spiritual power to shut them down and put them to sleep, where they could not be of any use.
It cost them something. Fortunately, Jesus came and restored them. The mighty Holy Ghost came upon them - they woke up; and when they woke up - my, what a difference it made! Timid, fearful men became bold men!
[Main Message]
Peter came back under a spiritual influence again. He didn't literally ‘fall asleep’; he became ‘unaware of what was happening’. He lost something God had given to him.
Galatians 2:11 (Paul opposes Peter) – “Now Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed.”
Galatians 2:12-13 - “For before ‘certain men’ came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles; but when they came - he withdrew. He separated himself. He feared those who were ‘of the circumcision’. And the rest of the Jews, also played the hypocrite with him - and even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy” (taken in by it, came under the influence of it).
Galatians 2:14-15 - But when I saw they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all...” (He confronts Peter).
Peter was raised in the Jewish culture. They had a paradigm, a mindset, that the Jewish people were ‘the people’ - God has entrusted everything to us. Wisdom starts and ends with us - we're the people of God. They had a mindset: we're the people of God. It was an exclusive mindset, it excluded the Gentiles. They considered the Gentiles to be unclean.