‘HE GRANTS SLEEP TO THOSE HE LOVES’
Dear Friends,
January and February can often be difficult months.
The festive excitement of Christmas and New Year is now a distant memory, fading by the moment. It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s windy, wet and miserable. Storms run through their litany of letters at great speed, as if intent on setting up a new ‘frenetic’ alphabet, leaving in their wake a trail of devastation. The news is bad. The bills are big. The bugs are rife.
It’s winter. Maybe all the hedgehogs, bats and dormice – perhaps they’ve got the right idea: for hibernation has its winter-time attractions! Shut the whole show down until the storms are past. Which is what, I suppose, some try to do, heading off, so they hope, to some warmer, sunnier climes.
It’s not just the physical storms, of course, we’d rather avoid: it’s the storms and struggles of the soul as well, which can buffet and batter our hearts. Seasons of great darkness. Times when our fervour grows cold. Times when the clouds of our sorrows are heavy with tears of distress, and it never rains but it pours. Times when our world gets turned on its head, and it’s all spinning out of control.
Maybe Rip Van Winkle got it right. Why not simply sleep right through the revolution, and wake up when the dirt and dust has settled?
Sleep has it attractions, that’s for sure! And it’s sleep I want to write about – prompted not least by a series of different folk for whom in recent weeks sleep has been an issue, and for whom, in consequence, I’ve been engaging in some very specific prayer.
For a number (a sizeable number it is) – for a number their problem has been the trouble they have in getting or staying asleep, the effect of which leaves them shattered, exhausted and done for: less able to give of their best, less able to handle the challenges every new day always brings, and less able to cope with temptation and trials, and more prone to a spiraling darkness, depression, despair.
For some, it’s not that they can’t seem to get to their sleep or can’t get the sleep that they need: no, for some the great challenge is getting that sleep through the night. It’s as if their whole internal body-clock has ‘emigrated’ right across the globe, to see them simply sleeping through the day – and then, of course, being wide awake at night. A mould they find hard to break.
And for some others, their problem is no matter how much sleep they get, they still feel tired and, even after good, long sleep, they still just want to .. sleep.
So, sleep. The Scriptures have much to say about sleep and one very basic starting point is this verse from one of the psalms – “He grants sleep to those He loves” (as the NIV of Ps.127.2 puts it). It’s easy, of course, to pull out a handy one-liner without taking note of the context from which it’s being pulled: but the context of Psalm 127 is itself a reminder of how our lives as the people of God are intended by Him to be lived.
We are only at best co-workers with God, never running the show ourselves. Remember the parables Jesus told about farmers sowing their seed: this one in particular – “This is what the kingdom of God is like [a picture, that is, to show you God’s way of working]: a man scatters seed on the ground. [So there’s certainly work to be done, we’re not just idle spectators: but it doesn’t all depend on us and on our toil, anything but]. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up [there’s a rhythm of work and rest and then more work – but sleep is part of the package], the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how” (Mk.4.26f).
Sleep is a physical necessity, certainly for our earthly bodies: and it mirrors a pattern that’s there in the Lord Himself – which is what you’d expect, given we’re made in His likeness. For although it’s true as the good psalm says, that the Lord neither slumbers nor sleeps, there is nonetheless in God Himself a cycle of rest and work: indeed, so basic a rhythm or ‘cycle’ this is that it’s there in the Lord’s first introduction of Himself. Genesis 1. The cycle of evening and morning, of night and day. The cycle of changing seasons. The cycle of water, from the seas to the clouds to the rain to the streams to the seas. All alike, in their own small way, reflecting the nature of God the great Creator and the steady rhythmic pulsing of His holy ‘heart’ in the endless, joy-filled cycle of His rest and work.
That’s why Jesus bids us all to come to Him. All who are weary and laden with heavy burdens – weighed down as we are by our own fruitless labour and toil. ‘Come to Me, and I will give you rest,’ He says. His rest. Not in the sense of our ceasing to work, no – anything but: ‘take My yoke upon you,’ He goes on in the very next breath, for there’s work to be done. His work. But there’s rest as well.
In the world of the kingdom of God, there’s this regular rhythm of rest and work: you sleep, you get up, and the seed that you’ve sown does its own bit of work, and it sprouts and it grows, whatever.
When, therefore, the psalmist declares that “He grants sleep to those He loves’ he’s pointing to a truth, indeed a principle, which runs throughout the Bible from its opening chords to its rich climactic close. Sleep is a gift from the Lord, reflecting His ways, expressing His love. We’ve every right to ask Him for good sleep: but we’ve also the need to pattern our lives after His. Rest and work.
Sleep, though, is not the same as sloth! The farmer who’s sown his seed in the fields will sleep: but he’ll also get up, for there’s day-by-day work to be done in the kingdom of God. Hard work. Energy-sapping work. Difficult; demanding; draining. And costly too.
There are battles which need to be fought in the work of the kingdom of God. There are conflicts which have to be faced as we share in the work of sowing the seed and growing the gospel of Christ. The ‘ground’ we’ve been given to work for the Lord can be obdurate, hard and unyielding; the cultural climate and ‘weather’ may often be raw, inclement and cold; and the fruit of our labours will most times not be immediately obvious or clear.
It’s sometimes very tempting just to hunker down and hibernate. To do our Rip Van Winkle and sleep through the stress and struggles of the painful ‘revolution’ which the work of Christian ministry entails.
Sometimes that’s what happens when the tough times come. Those storms which leave us battered, bruised and hurt. Sorrows, griefs, bereavements which have cut us to the quick. Toxic disagreements. Bitter disappointments. Creeping disillusionment. Adversity and hostility, the double-barreled ‘shotgun’ of the gates of hell by which they seek to frighten off the workforce of the kingdom of the Lord.
It’s tempting to take a ‘rain check’ when the cloudbursts come, to opt out of the work of the kingdom (for a while, we will plead) ‘til conditions improve and it’s not quite so costly and hard to be following Christ. It’s the ‘sleep’ of a spiritual hibernation where we shrink away from the cost of true discipleship. But prickly though we may well often be, believers are not hedgehogs and the ‘rest’ of which the Scriptures speak is not some sort of licence to go AWOL in the storms. AWOL? No, it’s “AWAKE, O sleeper!” – the call of the Lord to those who’ve ducked right down behind the parapets and tucked themselves under the duvet.
There’s a similar ‘sleep’ to which believers can also succumb, the result not so much of adversity, battles and pain, as of simple inactivity.
Sit back at your desk and don’t touch the keys of your laptop – and before very long it will drift of itself into ‘sleep’. Live our lives as believers like that, and the same sort of thing can result: often without being aware of it all, we switch into an ‘auto-pilot’ mode.
When we just pitch up to the services week by week; when we just keep reading our Bibles and saying our prayers in a ritual rather than relational way; when we’ve grown so familiar with all that we do in the work of the Lord that we barely will give it a thought; when there hasn’t been anything to stretch us or daunt us; when we’ve plateaued out in our service and haven’t been growing in grace – the chances are we’ve drifted into ‘auto-pilot’ mode, and gone to sleep. Our walk with the Lord has become little more than a careless and comfortable ‘sleepwalk’.
That isn’t the ‘sleep’ which God kindly gives His beloved. That isn’t the ‘rest’ the Lord Jesus enjoins us to know. It’s a spiritual torpor from which Jesus shakes us awake. “AWAKE, O sleeper!” He thunders – there are things to be done, it’s time to get up, time to get on with the work of the kingdom of God.
It may be that you recognize yourself in that. The tell-tale signs of early ‘hibernation’: or the drift towards an ‘auto-pilot’ walk with Christ. From that sort of ‘sleep’ the Lord is intent on waking us up!
But there’s another ‘sleep’ to which the Scriptures refer: another ‘sleep’ which the Lord will grant those He loves: the ‘sleep’ involved in what we otherwise know as death.
It’s striking how careful the Lord Himself is in the language that He used. Take the case of Lazarus, where clearly the man was long since dead and buried – four days in the tomb. But the perspective in which Jesus viewed that fact saw Him use the language of ‘sleep’. “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep,” He declared: “but I am going there to wake him up.” It’s ‘picture language’ He’s using to underline a glorious gospel truth: death has been defeated, and however final death may seem to us to be, its sting has been lost, and it’s not now the end of the story.
He grants sleep to those He loves: instead of the terminal point of death. Maybe that’s the reason why, from our very earliest days, the way God’s designed our physical frame is such that we’re familiar with the rhythms of our sleep. Children sometimes understand this best of all: the days seem long, there’s so much they’ll pack into each day – people, pleasures, fun and games; learning, running, food and drink; excitement, adventure, discovery, awe – they wish sometimes a day could go on forever. But they get tired by the end of the day: they need their sleep. They snuggle down beneath the cosy duvet, and the hours of the night (timeless to the child) give the rest that they need ‘til they wake to a brand-new day: refreshed, renewed, and raring to go with a bursting, boundless energy and zest.
It’s the routine of the farmer in the story Jesus told. He sleeps, he gets up. It’s the up-and-down heartbeat of the kingdom. Rest and work continually. And we’ve grown from our earliest childhood to be familiar with the language Jesus used. We do no more than ‘sleep in death’. Like weary but wondering children, we go to our sleep in the knowledge that not only will we wake again to another day, but we’ll wake refreshed; renewed, restored, invigorated through and through – and another great day of discovery and fun will await us in the morn.
Death could not hold our Lord Jesus. Its power was broken, its sting is now lost. And thus in Christ we do no more than ‘sleep’ in death, our last and final ‘sleep’ within this present physical frame. For we will indeed wake from that sleep – and we wake not only to a fine new day, but to a whole new world as well which makes the countless beauties, joys and blessings of this present world seem dull and mediocre by comparison. Renewed, restored, transformed, made whole – and able at last to share with our Maker and King in that endless cycle of rest and work in which we’ll never grow tired or bored: the ’Great Story’, as C S Lewis described it, ‘which goes on forever and in which every chapter is better than the one before.’
Sleep is God’s gift to His people. And it’s that ‘sleep’ too which He gives!
Whatever your present circumstances may you know His gracious hand upon you, affording you daily His comfort and strength, and giving you always His rest.
I remain truly yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,
Jeremy Middleton