Full Text of Asleep in the Boat
Years ago at Niagara Falls, a young man was employed as a guide. Having nothing to do one day, he moored his boat well above the falls and lay down in it to rest. Rocked by the current, he fell asleep. Swaying in the current, his boat finally worked loose and began to drift downstream. Spectators on the shore, seeing his great danger, shouted loudly to wake him up. Still asleep, he was rapidly swept toward the falls.
The Last Chance
At one point the boat came to rest against a rock that protruded in midstream. Seeing their chance, the bystanders redoubled their efforts to awaken the sleeping man by shouting loudly, “Get on the rock! Get on the rock!”
In the swirling water, the boat with its sleeping passenger soon cleared the rock and headed for the Falls. At last the guide, wakened by the thundering roar of the great cataract, plunged helplessly over the falls to his death.
How terrible! Asleep in the boat! Calmly and unconsciously drifting into the very jaws of death!
Who Else Is Asleep?
Yet how precisely this illustrates the indifference of people today — many unconcerned as to their fatal course, fast asleep in their sins, perhaps lulled by temporary pleasures, soothed into false confidence by their dependence on a blameless life or religious profession.
All Asleep in the Boat!
“The god of this world [Satan] hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
Safe in Christ
Are you safely moored to the Rock, or are you drifting with the current? Do you have Christ as your Saviour, or are you swept along by a world that is rapidly approaching destruction? If you are still unsaved, won’t you wake up to the danger of going on without Christ? If you keep putting off being saved, you may suddenly wake up too late and find yourself taking the last, fatal plunge into death and the agony of a lost eternity.
“Awake thou that sleepest” (Ephesians 5:14).
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31).