SWEET SLEEP

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep – Psalm 127:2

“Solomon wrote, “In vain you rise up early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat – for [God] grants sleep to those He loves” (Psalm 127:2).

There’s something wonderfully significant about this psalm, something easily missed unless we understand that the Sabbath for Israel began, not on Saturday morning, but on Friday evening at bedtime.

The Hebrew evening and morning sequence says something significant to us. God puts His children to sleep so He can get His work done. “Sleep is God’s contrivance for giving us the help He cannot get into us when we are awake,” said George MacDonald.

In the evening, fatigue overtakes us and we have to stop working. We lay ourselves down to sleep and drift off into blessed oblivion for the next six to eight hours, a state in which we are totally non-productive. But nothing essential stops. Though we may leave many things undone, many projects unfinished, God is still at work. “He grants sleep to those He loves.” The next morning, His eyes sweep over us and He awakens us to enjoy the benefits of all that He has done.

Most of us, however, hit the floor running… We have to be up and doing, getting things started and getting a world of things done. That’s because we don’t yet understand that God has been working for us all along. We have awakened into a world in which everything was started centuries ago. God has been preparing the good works in which we find ourselves walking each day (Ephesians 2:10).

F. B. Meyey says, “We must remember to maintain within our hearts the spirit of Sabbath calm and peace, not fussy, not anxious, nor fretful nor impetuous; refraining our feet from our own paths, our hand from our own devices, refusing to make our own joy and do our own works. It is only when we are fully resolved to act thus, allowing God to originate His own plans and to work in us for their accomplishment that we enter rest.”

And what keeps us from entering into God’s rest? UNBELIEF. Underlying all our worry and compulsive self-effort is the thought that God cannot and will not come through. That’s why the people of Israel wouldn’t lay their burdens down in Jeremiah’s day and that’s why we can’t let up. That’s why we have to keep hustling and hoping to do more. That’s why we get so weary and worn out. That’s why we get so worried. And that’s why we need to find rest.

“Can we do it? …We can keep the Sabbath inwardly and carry no burdens through the gates of our minds. The necessary is always possible. God never commands without giving us the means to comply.

Here’s what we must do: we must greet anxiety at the door with one short, strong answer – “GOD.” We must say to ourselves, as Abraham said to Isaac in his moment of greatest worry, “God will provide” (Genesis 22:8). And then we must leave the matter with Him. That’s how we enter into His rest.”