Awake or Awoke: Does It Matter?

Awakened or awoke. Which is it? Does it matter? I have noticed in past decades that awoke is getting the most usage, surpassing awakened. Is there any difference? Perhaps, not, but enough to bother me. I don’t always speak grammatically correctly, but having taught grammar and composition for years, I generally know what is correct. Enough to find wrong usage an irritant. For example, I heard this week a renowned philosopher speaking of people who are lazily “laying around on beds.” Of course, they are not laying on beds. Unless he was referring to chickens who lay eggs. They were lying on beds. Awakened and awoke are like lay and lie. Each pair consists of two different words. There is a dissimilarity: Lay and lie have distinctly different meanings: To lay is to set or put down. To lie is to recline, assume a horizontal position, etc. Awakened and awoke developed as two different words, but they have almost the same meaning. Almost. There is a nuance of difference. Awakened often was used transitively. Bill awakened his children. Awoke was more intransitive. Bill awoke. Awakened and awoke should be easier than lay and lie to distinguish while using. In order of present, past, and past participle forms, lay’s are lay, laid, laid. Lie’s are lie, lay, lain. And there’s the confusion. The past form of lie is lay just like the present form of lay. There is a similar difficulty with awakened and awoke. Their forms are awaken, awakened, awakened and awake, awoke, awoken. Each’s present form is the same. Awakened or awoke? We may have trouble distinguishing between those two like we do with lay and lie. There may not be enough difference that it matters that we do. But there is a difference that does matter. The difference between the Great Awakening in America and the Great Awokening in America. OF those, we must know the difference. Their impacts are drastically different. Great Awakening or Great Awokening? Does it matter? In the 1730’s – 1740’s. America was in spiritual decline. Christians had little fervor. Churches were dead. Society was becoming debauched. God sent a Great Awakening. Dead churches came alive. The youth turned to the church, were born again, and became spiritually enthusiastic. The Word of God was spread with a passion and power that was infectious to all. Society was mightily impacted, prepared for the rigors of the Revolutionary Way. The Great Awakening was the first of several awakenings that God has graciously sent the people of America throughout the years since. These have arrested and slowed America’s slide into ruin and decay. They have brought her people back from the brink. The Great Awokening is something else. Although its seeds and shoots had been present for years, the Great Awokening has burgeoned and boomed since the turn of this century. It was doused with satanic miracle growth during the COVID years. Whereas the Great Awakening was birthed from the promulgation of Truth, the Great Awokening was birthed from the promotion of lies. It begins with the lie is that there exists only one binary—the oppressed and oppressor. The oppressed is always right and the oppressor is always wrong. This interface is overlaid upon every circumstance, issue, situation, and facet of human existence. Applied with prevailing lies that there is no absolute truth, no objective truth, that each has his own truth, the Great Awokening has brought us the craziness of an unlimited number of genders, the idiocy of not knowing what a woman is, the tragedy of children being allowed to be mutilated in an impossible attempt to become a gender opposite of what they are born, the imagination of implicit racism in any not a minority, the hatred of ever-splintering tribalism, the perversion of sexual expression, the travesty of calling terrorists the good guys and the good guys terrorists—and on and on goes the deterioration, destruction, division, and debauchery that the Great Awokening has awakened. Awakened or awoke? Probably using the wrong one is inconsequential. Great Awakening or Great Awokening? Which we have is exponentially consequential. To America. To society. To family. To souls. Enough of this Great Awokening. We need another Great Awakening. We need the Truth proclaimed, the people of God to be passionate about their faith, and the Church to be revived not just politicized. We need prayer meetings not protests. We need the transformation of souls not the transitioning of bodies. We need to fight the spiritual battle and not just rail about the social one. Great Awakening or Great Awokening? Does it matter? Absolutely. Completely. May we believers cry out, “Give us a Great Awakening.” Oh, how we need it. We must have it. If we have not awoken on our own to our need, we need to be awakened by God. It matters! --Pastor Clifford Hurst