Asleep In the Light" Keith Green (1978)

I have always loved Keith Green’s music, not just for its energy and artistry, but for its prophetic message. He never sang to entertain. He sang to awaken. His lyrics cut through the comfort and complacency that so easily settle into the church, calling believers to repent of empty religion and return to a costly, obedient faith. In that, he reminds me of another hero of mine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose The Cost of Discipleship issued a similar warning. Grace without obedience is cheap, and that the call of Christ is still a call to come and die.

“Asleep in the Light” might be Green’s clearest sermon in song. It’s a rebuke to a church that has grown comfortable while the world around it suffers and perishes. He cries out, “Do you see, do you see all the people sinking down? Don’t you care, don’t you care, are you gonna let them drown?” The tragedy, he says, is not that the world is lost in darkness. It’s that the church, which carries the light, has fallen asleep. The image is piercing: Jesus has risen from the dead, and we “can’t even get out of bed.”

When Green sang this, it was 1978, and American Christianity was already struggling with what Bonhoeffer had warned about four decades earlier: the temptation to trade discipleship for comfort, and mission for maintenance. The danger has only grown since. Too much of the modern church, particularly in America, has been lulled into an “us against them” mentality. We see the world not as a field to harvest, but as an enemy to defeat. Instead of reaching out in compassion, many have chosen to hunker down behind walls of cultural fear and political outrage, hoping to preserve what little comfort they still control.

Green’s message feels more urgent than ever: the Gospel cannot be advanced by power or protection. It advances through love, through humility, through a willingness to suffer. The church’s witness has always shone brightest when it has embraced the cross, not when it has tried to wield it like a weapon. Green’s fiery rebuke was meant to drive us back to that truth. Faith without costly love is dead.

I hear “Asleep in the Light” today and I still feel that sting. It isn’t an easy song to listen to, and it shouldn’t be. Green didn’t write to soothe our consciences; he wrote to shake them. His voice, like Bonhoeffer’s, calls us to wake up, to remember what it means to follow Jesus, and to live as if we really believe that the world can still be changed by love.