Straight to the Heart

You’ve got to admit that it’s a pretty strange design. Think about it. Why would God create humans to need to spend a third of their lives asleep? 

If this doesn’t strike you as a little bit odd, then remember that he made us to reflect what he is like (Genesis 1:27), and Psalm 121 tells us that “The Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth … will neither slumber nor sleep.”What could possibly have motivated God to make humans so different from himself? Why squander a third of their short lives on sleep? I want to suggest three important reasons why he did so, and to encourage you to thank God whenever you feel sleepy.

First, he did it to remind us we’re not God. I know this sounds obvious, but in practice it isn’t. He knew that Mesopotamians would worship the moon, so he made daytime to show them how weak their idol was. He knew that Egyptians would worship the sun, so he made nighttime and eclipses to show them the same. He knew that twenty-first-century Westerners would worship themselves, so he gave us sleep to remind us how foolish this is. In case this wasn’t enough, he also filled our waking hours with similar clues, making us need to take lunch breaks, dinner breaks, bathroom breaks, and breaks for relaxation. When Gordon Gekko boasts in the movie “Wall Street” that “Lunch is for wimps!”, he is simply confessing that he is his own idol. Every time you feel hungry, tired or sleepy, the Almighty God reminds you that next to him you are rather wimpy. 

Second, he did it to cause us to lift our eyes to God. We all know how it feels to carry stresses and problems to bed with us at night, only to wake up in the morning with a different perspective. The author John Steinbeck observed that “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it”. God made us to know sleep so that each act of our lives has a curtain fall, an interval, and a refreshing change of scenery before the next act begins. When David’s life was full of worries, he wrote in Psalm 59 that “They return at evening, snarling like dogs … but I will sing of your strength in the morning”. Sleep is God’s deliberate punctuation mark in our lives which forces us to be still and let him rearrange our perspective. When we open up our eyes to each new morning, he calls us to fix them afresh on himself and to recalibrate our gaze from the lost focus of the day before.

Third, he did it to teach us to put our faith in him. One of my friends is intelligent, wealthy and very successful. But he also has a real problem trusting anybody. My small children, on the other hand, have no money and no property, but have no problem trusting their mum and dad every day. God has deliberately made us to need regular sleep in order to make faith an indispensable part of our days. We have to close our eyes, turn off our senses, trust anyone else in the house not to harm us, and put our life in God’s hands every time we go to sleep. We have to leave to-do lists undone, tasks uncompleted, problems unsolved, and avenues unexplored. We have to admit that we have done all we can, and that the Lord must work alone for a few hours without us. That’s a very important lesson for us to learn, because it forms the very basis of our salvation. Romans 4:5 promises us that “to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.”

 So don’t be like the author Virginia Woolf, who complained about “Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.” Thank God that you feel sleepy and when you go to bed tonight, take it as a reminder to confess that he is God and you are not. Tell him that you trust him to carry on working without you, and when you wake up in the morning, make the most of the opportunity to fix your eyes on him afresh. Thank God for his great gift of sleep, the gracious punctuation mark he has put into our lives.

“This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.” (Isaiah 30:15).