We are not only designed with a need to sleep. Sleeping points to our reliance of God and to our infinite rest.

Source: Australian Presbyterian, 1999. 2 pages.

And So to Bed: Reflections on the Blessings of Sleep

God has constituted us in a strange way. Think of memory, for example as Augustine did in his Confessions. Where would we be without it, yet who can understand it? The same goes for sleep. Why do we have it? What purpose does it serve? It is necessary for us to carry on with life, but it resembles death in some ways.

It can come upon us at inappropriate times. I once hopped off the bus at Central Station at 6.30am, made my way to the Presbyterian Theological Centre at Burwood, and soon began holding forth on the English Reformation. By about 11am I was terribly weary, and made the mistake of sitting down while continuing to teach. Before long I had fallen asleep during one of my own lectures! The students have for­gotten most of what I said that day, but they have never forgotten what I did.

Some surprising things can happen during sleep. When Adam slept, God made him a wife (Gen. 2:21-22). When Jacob slept, God gave him a vision of a ladder reaching to heaven with the angels of God ascending and descending on it (Gen. 28:10-22). As Jesus explained to Nathaniel, this pointed to the work of Christ on the cross (John 1:51). Joseph too dreamed a dream which came from God, which told him of his future exaltation (Gen. 37:1-11). One of the ways in which God spoke to His prophets of old was through dreams (Num. 12:6). These incidents remind us that whenever God creates something or reveals Himself, it is always an act of grace in which he takes the initiative.

God Himself never sleeps (Ps. 121:4), but gives His beloved sleep (Ps. 127:2). The Christian who trusts in the sovereign care of his heavenly Father can sleep well. When David was on the run from his rebellious son, Absalom, he rested in God: “I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustained me.” (Ps. 3:5) Worry is a draining and pointless activity which is actually an assault on faith. Instead, we are to “rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him” (Ps. 37:7). It is necessary for us at times to rest, as Jesus Himself acknowledges (Mark 6:31). Indeed, Christ Himself shares in our humanity to the point where He too became weary (John 4:6) and fell asleep (Mark 4:38).

Yet we are told not to be sluggards, but to work hard (Prov. 6:6-11). The sluggard switches off his alarm, sleeps in, and is gen­erally reluctant to get to work, and so slips into self-inflicted poverty. Sleep at the wrong time can thus be not only inappropriate but wrong. Another example is found when the disciples fell asleep while Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:37, 40, 41).

Sleep is a recognition that we are finite and that we rely utterly upon God for daily strength, spiritual insight and grace to overcome our sin. In the parable of the growing seed, the farmer sleeps at night, and the seed sprouts and grows, yet the farmer does not know how (Mark 4:26-29). It is the same with the growth of the gospel. We can plant, we can water, but it is God who gives the increase (1 Cor. 3:6). W. C. Burns preached in Scotland from 1839 to 1846, and saw remarkable revivals. Yet after he went to China, he laboured there without much success until his death in 1868. Our task is not to do God’s work for Him. We cannot. I have been in the ministry long enough to have gone through the frustra­tion of trying to entice someone to think seriously about the gospel, only to find that my efforts come to nothing. But the com­pensation is often that someone with whom I have had nothing to do begins to seek a right relationship with God.

We must adopt the view of the puritan giant, John Owen:

Our duty is to apply ourselves unto his commands and his work is to enable us to perform them.

Indeed, it is a surprising fact which ought not to be misused that James Robert at Kilsyth in 1742 reported that prayer for revival had actually declined before the Cambuslang revival broke out. Evangelism is our task; revival is in God’s hands. Is this not a spir­itual lesson from sleep?

Yet sleep also points us to the reality of the infinite. The image of “sleep” is used in the New Testament to point to the Christian’s death. The Christian who dies is really, as it were, only asleep (see e.g. Luke 8:52; John 11:11-13; 1 Cor. 15:51; 1 Thess. 4:13, 15). Christ will raise His people as if their bodies had only been sleeping. Again, sleep reminds us that the power and the initiative always lie with God.

In both the temporal and eternal sense, the Christian says with the Psalmist:

I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. Ps. 4:8

Physically, we are to sleep and also to work hard, in the appropriate propor­tions. Spiritually, we are to rest on Christ (Matt. 11:28), but also to press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:12-14).             

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