This week the blog is sponsored by Zondervan Reflective. This is an excerpt from The Wisdom of Sleep by Brett McCracken. Copyright © by Brett McCracken. Used by permission of Zondervan. The Wisdom of Sleep offers eye-opening revelations from Scripture and science about why we sleep, dream, and rest—and why they are such gifts.
God’s sovereignty is displayed not only in what he’s doing in the world while we sleep but also in what he’s doing in us through our sleep. Sleep is your nightly invitation to practice the posture of surrendered trust.
The Bible is full of examples of God working through sleep and communicating to people in their dreams while they sleep. Sometimes God even works through our lack of sleep, as when he kept Asaph awake (Ps. 77:4) or when he used the Persian king’s sleeplessness (Esth. 6:1) to set things in motion that saved Mordecai and his people. As annoying as can’t- sleep moments are, maybe we should pay attention to them. Perhaps God is trying to get our attention.
God’s sovereign work doesn’t depend on our being awake or aware. This can be a frustrating part of faith. We want to know, see, understand the things God is doing in us and through us, let alone in the world. But we’re only ever aware of an infinitesimal part of them.
God’s sovereign work doesn’t depend on our being awake or aware. This can be a frustrating part of faith. We want to know, see, understand the things God is doing in us and through us, let alone in the world.
As we lie down to sleep, we give our mental anxieties and physical exhaustions to God, trusting him to tend to our burdens and restore us in the death of night, reviving us every morning. Every lying down to sleep is an enactment of the death and resurrection cycle of our salvation. We give up any notion of saving ourselves as we drift off to sleep. We can only trust that God will preserve us through the night, as he did the Israelites behind the bloodstained doors in Egypt through that terrifying night of wailing (Ex. 12:1–30). And we must trust not only that God will get us through night’s death but also that he will deliver us to new life in the morning, as he did for the Israelites in their exodus out of Egypt and eventually to the promised land. “The Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt” (Ex. 12:42), and he keeps vigil every night, the sovereign author and perfecter of our faith.
Do we sleep well and rest easy as an outgrowth of our trust in God, calmed by the internalized, embodied knowledge that God reigns and keeps watch over our every breath?
Maybe we should strive to be more like a sleeping baby at peace in a parent’s arms. This was all of us once. We didn’t know at the time just how much might go wrong in the night. We had no concept of the frailty of it all.
All we knew as sleeping babies was dependence on and trust in the parents who gave us life and who were with us through the night, every night. That’s the simple knowledge we can practice as adults too, until the day we die: resting, sleeping, surrendering to the sovereignty of God and the saving grace of a loving Father. His strong arms cradle us in merciful safety. They are mighty to save. They rock us to sleep and raise us to new life.
