The Mattress Gospel
Bible Study
A Psalm for Every Sigh
Finding Your Song in God's Word
Object:
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.
-- Psalm 127:2
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." The King of England cannot sleep. He struts and frets upon the stage and complains, "How many thousand of my poorest subjects are at this hour asleep! Oh, sleep, gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness?" That's Act 3, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 2. But this act, this sleepless scene, is dramatized over and over again each night in thousands of bedrooms around the world. Uneasy lies the head of twenty-first-century man.
A news reporter asked a German pastor visiting Williamsburg what impressed him most about Americans. He replied, "You are a tired people. Shopkeepers, waitresses, mechanics, teachers, housewives -- you look like a people desperately seeking rest, but afraid of it like a little child is afraid of naptime." As unflattering as his remark may be, it seems to have a good deal of truth in it. If you do not believe people have problems with sleep, watch television in the evening. Drug companies buy expensive prime time to commercialize sleeping pills like Lunesta, Nytol, and Ambien. According to recent figures, it takes more than 21 million sleeping pills to lull the United States to sleep on medicine designed to help them doze off. An estimated fifty million Americans suffer from sleep disorders.
What does the Bible have to say about sleep? Is it silent about something that we spend one-third of our lives doing? The average person will spend 122 days sleeping in the next year. What does the gospel teach about those days? Is there a gospel for the land of Nod?
The text says that God "gives to his beloved sleep." This is just one of the many places where the Lord intimates his concern for our slumber. If we follow this theme throughout the Bible, we can easily build a wholesome view of Christian sleep.
The Mental Dimensions Of Sleep
First, let us examine the dimensions of mental sleep. Have you ever heard this complaint? "I get out of bed more tired than when I went to bed, and I am so ill lately. I keep thinking I've been getting up on the wrong side of the bed, but left or right side, it makes no difference. I am grumpy just the same." Probably the reason for morning fatigue is not due to which side of the bed we get out of but what we do, we are in bed. Too often we go to sleep and our minds work from midnight until dawn. There is a sign on a hotel in battlefield park in Vicksburg, Mississippi, that says, "Stay with us tonight and sleep on the battleground." That's it for many people today, isn't it? They go to sleep with a civil war raging inside them. Their mattress becomes a battleground. They toss and turn all night, kick the blankets on the floor, grind their teeth until their jaws ache, and pummel their pillow like a boxer. In the morning, the entire bed is a wreck and so is the sleepless soldier of misfortune.
The scripture gives us a lifestyle that brings us to bed without such mental conflicts. God has a way of ending our inner civil wars so we can go to sleep in peace. The Lord's technique is called confession and forgiveness. It is called a clear conscience.
Each night before retiring, we should take time to make peace with the creator and the creation. It is a good time to confess your sins to the Lord, asking him to take away your guilt. You see, a guilty conscience can ravish you all night long. Our consciences are like a big bully when it comes to guilt. They get us down and twist our arms until we give in and cry, "Uncle!" The Bible says, "Agree with God, and be at peace" (Job 22:21). Each night as we prepare for slumber, we should get rid of the bully guilt by crying out, "Father, forgive!" Then the bully of guilt will leave us alone. There will be no sin for him to twist our arms over. Thus, we can slumber at peace with ourselves.
Another interesting and helpful tonic for sleep is the biblical injunction, "Let not the sun go down on your anger" (Ephesians 4:26). The principle here is for us to get things straight with our neighbors on a daily basis. If we allow hate and injustice to accumulate over a period of time, the amassed, bitter prejudices will cause our sleep to become fitful. This is why the Lord's Prayer encourages us to forgive as we have been forgiven. This is why we must deal with our neighbors justly on a day-to-day basis.
Not only is our sleep affected by our mental attitude toward ourselves and our neighbors, it is also affected by our attitude toward things. A businessman went to his doctor complaining of insomnia. The doctor gave his some pills and told him to try counting sheep. The patient returned in two weeks still complaining of sleepless nights. "Did you try counting sheep?" The physician asked. "Yes," replied the businessman, "but that only made matters worse. I counted sheep until I got to 1,500. Then I began to figure so many ounces of wool per sheep could make 800 sweaters to be sold this fall. Now, who could sleep with an inventory like that?" How often that businessman's mental state is our own. We just can't turn it off at night!
Our work, our desire for achievement and financial gain drains us all night long. It robs us of sleep. The Bible says, "Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will not let him sleep" (Ecclesiastes 5:12). It is so true! If you do not have anything, then you do not worry about losing it. But if you own a lot, then you can worry about holding onto it. You can go to bed with financial figures in your mind, clutch at things all night long, and ruin your health. There has to be a better way! The Bible suggests it. Remember Job? He was rich, yet when he lost everything in a disastrous storm, he could say, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1:21). What an attitude toward things! "It came from God. It's going back to God, and it is his right now." If we, too, could learn to see our material possessions as gifts from the Lord, instead of things we feel we deserve, we'd worry a lot less, and sleep more soundly.
This leads us to another attitude that induces mental sleep. We are not only concerned with our relationship to ourselves, others, and things. We are helped or hindered with sleep by our relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Are you faithless or faithful? Do you distrust your heavenly Father or do you love him? Have you ever noticed how a little child can fall asleep on the floor in his own home? That child's sleep is so sound that his father can pick him up and take him to bed without awakening him. You see, in that little child's heart is love and faith. He knows he is at home. He trusts his father and his sleep is sound and undisturbed. Now, when we can match that child's trust of his earthly father with our own trust in our heavenly Father's care, then we have all the makings of sound mental sleep.
The Bible says, "He who keeps you will not slumber" (Psalm 121:3). Like the psalmist, do you believe God is alert to your affairs? Do you believe he is capable of taking care of you? If you do, you can curl up like a little child at your heavenly Father's feet each night and sleep like a baby!
Physical Slumber
Let us pass on now from mental sleep and examine the dimension of physical sleep. Here the Bible tells us to use our common sense. Psalm 32:9 says, "Be not like the horse or mule, without understanding." "Don't be a jackass," the scripture is saying. Use the head the good Lord gave you!
If you use your head, it will become obvious that the mattress you sleep on is important. If you are awakening at daybreak feeling tired all over, it could be due to your mattress. If it is too soft or worn out, your body fights to stay asleep all night long. It's no wonder you're exhausted by morning.
Few people realize just how important a mattress is. You will spend at least 122 days on your mattress next year. That's more time than you'll spend in your car seat, in your kitchen chair, and in the bathtub. The mattress is simply the place where you'll spend about one-third of your life.
Common sense, then, should tell you to buy a good mattress tailored to your needs. Don't buy a $4,000 bedroom suite, and then get cheap on the mattress and box springs. That's like putting recapped tires on a Cadillac. You don't sleep on that good-looking chest of drawers! You sleep on the mattresses; so make sure it's a good one.
It may also interest you to know that mattresses are like shoes and cars and overcoats. They do wear out and need replacing. You might check your mattress carefully and see if it has lost its firmness. See if it sags in the middle and if it is losing its shape around the edges. If so, replace it. A worn-out mattress is a thief. It pilfers sleep. And it is as torturing to your physical body as an Arabian bed of nails.
Not only does common sense tell us to check our mattresses, it also asks us to examine our eating and drinking habits. We all know that if you eat a pepperoni pizza before bedtime, you will be staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. Anyone who guzzles a gallon of his favorite beverage before bedtime will be trotting back and forth to the restroom all night. Nutritional experts say that a person should eat like a king for breakfast, eat like a merchant for lunch, and eat like a pauper for supper. This aids the digestive processes, releases energy when it is most needed, and encourages the best sleep.
Physical education instructors also encourage us to get plenty of regular exercise. Nothing relieves tension like a good jog around the block, a game of tennis, or walk down the sidewalk. Ecclesiastes 5:12 mentions the sweet sleep of a common laborer. Good hard physical exercise has been known for a long time to induce sleep. There is passage in Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina, where a wealthy nobleman cannot sleep. He is full of tension and anxiety over the affairs of his estate. In desperation, he grabs a sickle and goes into the fields with the peasants to harvest grain. All day long he toils. The work is strenuous, but he finds it exhilarating. Come nightfall, he falls fast asleep. It will be the same for you. When you feel tense and full of mental anguish, go out and exhaust yourself physically. Then you will sleep soundly.
We could go on here and examine other areas pertaining to physical sleep. We could look at things like noise levels, room temperatures, fresh air, and types of pajamas. We could even discuss some ailments that ward off sleep and require a doctor's attention. But you have enough common sense to evaluate those things. I will leave you in the hands of your own good sense.
Spiritual Sleep
Moving on, it becomes necessary to discuss one final dimension of the mechanics of good sleep, and that is spiritual sleep.
Some things in the home never cut off. The refrigerator runs constantly. So does your clock. There are parts of your body that work continuously, as well. Your heart pumps all your life. According to the scriptures, your soul, your spirit, works around the clock, also. In the Song of Solomon, the author confesses, "I slept, but my heart was awake" (5:2). Here, the Bible is teaching that our spiritual hearts are active even while we are sleeping.
A faithful Christian will want to take advantage of this fact. You ladies can put a turkey in the oven, let it bake while you sleep, and have a cooked meal upon rising. In like manner, you can swallow a piece of bread at bedtime, your stomach will work at digesting it all night, and by morning, the bread will be in your bloodstream. We can do the same thing with our hearts and God's word. We can go to bed with a promise of God on our minds, meditate on it all night long in our subconscious, and awaken with that truth built into our very souls.
The psalmist encourages this kind of meditative sleep. He says of himself, "I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit" (77:6). And he encourages us, saying, "Commune with your own hearts on your beds" (4:4). If you take the psalm writer's advice and meditate on God's word throughout the night, you will find your whole thought-life being reorganized. The Christian life begins with repentance, literally "a change of mind." It continues when we meditate, an act of thinking God's thoughts after him. This process of mental reorganization continues until we have left our old mind behind and taken on the mind of Christ. Our old thought patterns, attitudes, and values are kicked out and the very mind of Christ is brought in. This is what Saint Paul was talking about in Ephesians 4:22-24 when he wrote, "Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God."
This putting off one mind and putting on another can take place in sleep. Our minds and our hearts simply work all night. It is up to us to determine how they work. We can go to bed relishing a lustful thought, fantasize sexually all night long, and awaken with adultery and fornication more strongly reinforced as a habit in our minds. But if we go to sleep thinking of the Lord, if we commune with his promises all night long, we will wake up with godly character built more solidly into our lives. The principle is quite simple here. The thoughts you carry into bed will increase and magnify during sleep. If you go to bed with lust, you will wake up with a bent toward fornication. It's like going to bed with a coat hanger in your mouth. You wake up with a smile on your face! Likewise, if you go to bed and think of God, you'll wake up more like him in the morning.
Yes, God can use slumber to give us his mind. He can also use sleep to communicate his will to us. The Bible is full of episodes where the Lord speaks to people in dreams and visions during slumber. God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Pharaoh in dreams. In the New Testament, it is recorded that the Lord spoke to Jesus' own father, Joseph, at least twice in dreams. Perhaps the first time God used sleep to communicate to man was in Genesis where the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall over Adam. Then God made Eve, awakened Adam, and gave him Eve for a wife. What a dream! (There's a cartoon that shows Adam sitting on a rock looking very tired and sleepless. God is standing by, saying, "Adam, why can't you sleep?" Adam replies, "The last time I went to sleep you brought that woman and left her here. I'm afraid to go to sleep again. I don't know what I'd do with two!")
Perhaps God uses the nighttime to speak with us because that is the only time he can slow us down enough to get our attention. At any rate, God has historically used dreams and visions to communicate with us. This does not mean every dream or vision is from God. Some are -- some aren't -- but when we have them, we should heed them and evaluate them strictly in terms of scripture.
The Lord does not use dreams as much today as he used to, it seems. After all, he has spoken his final word to us in Christ Jesus. But sometimes the Lord may choose to communicate to us by a dream or a nocturnal vision. My grandmother lost her mother to death back in 1963. For some months after the funeral, Grandmother wrestled with her grief. She could not seem to settle it in her mind that her loved one was safe with the Lord. One night, however, she had a beautifully vivid dream. She saw her mother standing before her, looking as healthy, alert, and happy as ever before. In the dream, her mother said, "Now, Marion, see! I am fine. Stop your worrying about me because I am with the Lord." And after that, my grandmother quit fretting and slept soundly.
Conclusion
So now we've taken a quick look at some of the things the Christian faith teaches about sleep. We have looked at mental sleep, physical sleep, and spiritual sleep. Some of you are thinking that if you tried all this, your sleep would become so structured it would seem a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape! But this is not necessarily so! All of these principles can be incorporated into your lifestyle over a period of time. These principles can become habits that are second nature to you. You will not have to think to do them. They will become automatic and so will your sleep.
A famous mattress company advertises its products with the slogan, "For the rest of your life!" Today the church would like to advertise the Lord the same way. Perhaps you've never thought of the Lord as a sleep merchant. But that is at least part of who he is. He can, if you will allow him, give you the rest of your life. Jesus said, "Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).
In case you have not noticed it yet, the gospel of sound sleep is summed up in the "Great Commandment." When you love God, your neighbor, yourself, and the creation, you are freed from the fears, the frustrations, and the attitudes that ward off sleep. When you learn to come to Jesus with faith, love him with all your mind, heart, body, and soul, he gives you rest. Isn't that something you both need and want? Then come to him! Take his yoke and learn from him! Learn to love God mind, heart, body, and soul. Learn to love yourself and your neighbor. Thereby, you will learn sleep. You'll get your fifty winks. You'll saw your ZZZZZZ's. You'll snore away in the best tradition of the sandman. Rip Van Winkle and Sleeping Beauty have nothing on you! "For he giveth his beloved sleep."
Suggested Prayer
I come to you, O Father. Forgive my sins. Give me your promised rest. Take from my neck this yoke of sin and give to me the yoke of Christ. Let me learn from him -- love for God, self, people, world -- let me learn it all from him. And come evening, Lord, let my rest be sound, my sleep childlike. In Jesus' name. Amen.
-- Psalm 127:2
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." The King of England cannot sleep. He struts and frets upon the stage and complains, "How many thousand of my poorest subjects are at this hour asleep! Oh, sleep, gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness?" That's Act 3, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 2. But this act, this sleepless scene, is dramatized over and over again each night in thousands of bedrooms around the world. Uneasy lies the head of twenty-first-century man.
A news reporter asked a German pastor visiting Williamsburg what impressed him most about Americans. He replied, "You are a tired people. Shopkeepers, waitresses, mechanics, teachers, housewives -- you look like a people desperately seeking rest, but afraid of it like a little child is afraid of naptime." As unflattering as his remark may be, it seems to have a good deal of truth in it. If you do not believe people have problems with sleep, watch television in the evening. Drug companies buy expensive prime time to commercialize sleeping pills like Lunesta, Nytol, and Ambien. According to recent figures, it takes more than 21 million sleeping pills to lull the United States to sleep on medicine designed to help them doze off. An estimated fifty million Americans suffer from sleep disorders.
What does the Bible have to say about sleep? Is it silent about something that we spend one-third of our lives doing? The average person will spend 122 days sleeping in the next year. What does the gospel teach about those days? Is there a gospel for the land of Nod?
The text says that God "gives to his beloved sleep." This is just one of the many places where the Lord intimates his concern for our slumber. If we follow this theme throughout the Bible, we can easily build a wholesome view of Christian sleep.
The Mental Dimensions Of Sleep
First, let us examine the dimensions of mental sleep. Have you ever heard this complaint? "I get out of bed more tired than when I went to bed, and I am so ill lately. I keep thinking I've been getting up on the wrong side of the bed, but left or right side, it makes no difference. I am grumpy just the same." Probably the reason for morning fatigue is not due to which side of the bed we get out of but what we do, we are in bed. Too often we go to sleep and our minds work from midnight until dawn. There is a sign on a hotel in battlefield park in Vicksburg, Mississippi, that says, "Stay with us tonight and sleep on the battleground." That's it for many people today, isn't it? They go to sleep with a civil war raging inside them. Their mattress becomes a battleground. They toss and turn all night, kick the blankets on the floor, grind their teeth until their jaws ache, and pummel their pillow like a boxer. In the morning, the entire bed is a wreck and so is the sleepless soldier of misfortune.
The scripture gives us a lifestyle that brings us to bed without such mental conflicts. God has a way of ending our inner civil wars so we can go to sleep in peace. The Lord's technique is called confession and forgiveness. It is called a clear conscience.
Each night before retiring, we should take time to make peace with the creator and the creation. It is a good time to confess your sins to the Lord, asking him to take away your guilt. You see, a guilty conscience can ravish you all night long. Our consciences are like a big bully when it comes to guilt. They get us down and twist our arms until we give in and cry, "Uncle!" The Bible says, "Agree with God, and be at peace" (Job 22:21). Each night as we prepare for slumber, we should get rid of the bully guilt by crying out, "Father, forgive!" Then the bully of guilt will leave us alone. There will be no sin for him to twist our arms over. Thus, we can slumber at peace with ourselves.
Another interesting and helpful tonic for sleep is the biblical injunction, "Let not the sun go down on your anger" (Ephesians 4:26). The principle here is for us to get things straight with our neighbors on a daily basis. If we allow hate and injustice to accumulate over a period of time, the amassed, bitter prejudices will cause our sleep to become fitful. This is why the Lord's Prayer encourages us to forgive as we have been forgiven. This is why we must deal with our neighbors justly on a day-to-day basis.
Not only is our sleep affected by our mental attitude toward ourselves and our neighbors, it is also affected by our attitude toward things. A businessman went to his doctor complaining of insomnia. The doctor gave his some pills and told him to try counting sheep. The patient returned in two weeks still complaining of sleepless nights. "Did you try counting sheep?" The physician asked. "Yes," replied the businessman, "but that only made matters worse. I counted sheep until I got to 1,500. Then I began to figure so many ounces of wool per sheep could make 800 sweaters to be sold this fall. Now, who could sleep with an inventory like that?" How often that businessman's mental state is our own. We just can't turn it off at night!
Our work, our desire for achievement and financial gain drains us all night long. It robs us of sleep. The Bible says, "Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will not let him sleep" (Ecclesiastes 5:12). It is so true! If you do not have anything, then you do not worry about losing it. But if you own a lot, then you can worry about holding onto it. You can go to bed with financial figures in your mind, clutch at things all night long, and ruin your health. There has to be a better way! The Bible suggests it. Remember Job? He was rich, yet when he lost everything in a disastrous storm, he could say, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1:21). What an attitude toward things! "It came from God. It's going back to God, and it is his right now." If we, too, could learn to see our material possessions as gifts from the Lord, instead of things we feel we deserve, we'd worry a lot less, and sleep more soundly.
This leads us to another attitude that induces mental sleep. We are not only concerned with our relationship to ourselves, others, and things. We are helped or hindered with sleep by our relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Are you faithless or faithful? Do you distrust your heavenly Father or do you love him? Have you ever noticed how a little child can fall asleep on the floor in his own home? That child's sleep is so sound that his father can pick him up and take him to bed without awakening him. You see, in that little child's heart is love and faith. He knows he is at home. He trusts his father and his sleep is sound and undisturbed. Now, when we can match that child's trust of his earthly father with our own trust in our heavenly Father's care, then we have all the makings of sound mental sleep.
The Bible says, "He who keeps you will not slumber" (Psalm 121:3). Like the psalmist, do you believe God is alert to your affairs? Do you believe he is capable of taking care of you? If you do, you can curl up like a little child at your heavenly Father's feet each night and sleep like a baby!
Physical Slumber
Let us pass on now from mental sleep and examine the dimension of physical sleep. Here the Bible tells us to use our common sense. Psalm 32:9 says, "Be not like the horse or mule, without understanding." "Don't be a jackass," the scripture is saying. Use the head the good Lord gave you!
If you use your head, it will become obvious that the mattress you sleep on is important. If you are awakening at daybreak feeling tired all over, it could be due to your mattress. If it is too soft or worn out, your body fights to stay asleep all night long. It's no wonder you're exhausted by morning.
Few people realize just how important a mattress is. You will spend at least 122 days on your mattress next year. That's more time than you'll spend in your car seat, in your kitchen chair, and in the bathtub. The mattress is simply the place where you'll spend about one-third of your life.
Common sense, then, should tell you to buy a good mattress tailored to your needs. Don't buy a $4,000 bedroom suite, and then get cheap on the mattress and box springs. That's like putting recapped tires on a Cadillac. You don't sleep on that good-looking chest of drawers! You sleep on the mattresses; so make sure it's a good one.
It may also interest you to know that mattresses are like shoes and cars and overcoats. They do wear out and need replacing. You might check your mattress carefully and see if it has lost its firmness. See if it sags in the middle and if it is losing its shape around the edges. If so, replace it. A worn-out mattress is a thief. It pilfers sleep. And it is as torturing to your physical body as an Arabian bed of nails.
Not only does common sense tell us to check our mattresses, it also asks us to examine our eating and drinking habits. We all know that if you eat a pepperoni pizza before bedtime, you will be staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. Anyone who guzzles a gallon of his favorite beverage before bedtime will be trotting back and forth to the restroom all night. Nutritional experts say that a person should eat like a king for breakfast, eat like a merchant for lunch, and eat like a pauper for supper. This aids the digestive processes, releases energy when it is most needed, and encourages the best sleep.
Physical education instructors also encourage us to get plenty of regular exercise. Nothing relieves tension like a good jog around the block, a game of tennis, or walk down the sidewalk. Ecclesiastes 5:12 mentions the sweet sleep of a common laborer. Good hard physical exercise has been known for a long time to induce sleep. There is passage in Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina, where a wealthy nobleman cannot sleep. He is full of tension and anxiety over the affairs of his estate. In desperation, he grabs a sickle and goes into the fields with the peasants to harvest grain. All day long he toils. The work is strenuous, but he finds it exhilarating. Come nightfall, he falls fast asleep. It will be the same for you. When you feel tense and full of mental anguish, go out and exhaust yourself physically. Then you will sleep soundly.
We could go on here and examine other areas pertaining to physical sleep. We could look at things like noise levels, room temperatures, fresh air, and types of pajamas. We could even discuss some ailments that ward off sleep and require a doctor's attention. But you have enough common sense to evaluate those things. I will leave you in the hands of your own good sense.
Spiritual Sleep
Moving on, it becomes necessary to discuss one final dimension of the mechanics of good sleep, and that is spiritual sleep.
Some things in the home never cut off. The refrigerator runs constantly. So does your clock. There are parts of your body that work continuously, as well. Your heart pumps all your life. According to the scriptures, your soul, your spirit, works around the clock, also. In the Song of Solomon, the author confesses, "I slept, but my heart was awake" (5:2). Here, the Bible is teaching that our spiritual hearts are active even while we are sleeping.
A faithful Christian will want to take advantage of this fact. You ladies can put a turkey in the oven, let it bake while you sleep, and have a cooked meal upon rising. In like manner, you can swallow a piece of bread at bedtime, your stomach will work at digesting it all night, and by morning, the bread will be in your bloodstream. We can do the same thing with our hearts and God's word. We can go to bed with a promise of God on our minds, meditate on it all night long in our subconscious, and awaken with that truth built into our very souls.
The psalmist encourages this kind of meditative sleep. He says of himself, "I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit" (77:6). And he encourages us, saying, "Commune with your own hearts on your beds" (4:4). If you take the psalm writer's advice and meditate on God's word throughout the night, you will find your whole thought-life being reorganized. The Christian life begins with repentance, literally "a change of mind." It continues when we meditate, an act of thinking God's thoughts after him. This process of mental reorganization continues until we have left our old mind behind and taken on the mind of Christ. Our old thought patterns, attitudes, and values are kicked out and the very mind of Christ is brought in. This is what Saint Paul was talking about in Ephesians 4:22-24 when he wrote, "Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God."
This putting off one mind and putting on another can take place in sleep. Our minds and our hearts simply work all night. It is up to us to determine how they work. We can go to bed relishing a lustful thought, fantasize sexually all night long, and awaken with adultery and fornication more strongly reinforced as a habit in our minds. But if we go to sleep thinking of the Lord, if we commune with his promises all night long, we will wake up with godly character built more solidly into our lives. The principle is quite simple here. The thoughts you carry into bed will increase and magnify during sleep. If you go to bed with lust, you will wake up with a bent toward fornication. It's like going to bed with a coat hanger in your mouth. You wake up with a smile on your face! Likewise, if you go to bed and think of God, you'll wake up more like him in the morning.
Yes, God can use slumber to give us his mind. He can also use sleep to communicate his will to us. The Bible is full of episodes where the Lord speaks to people in dreams and visions during slumber. God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Pharaoh in dreams. In the New Testament, it is recorded that the Lord spoke to Jesus' own father, Joseph, at least twice in dreams. Perhaps the first time God used sleep to communicate to man was in Genesis where the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall over Adam. Then God made Eve, awakened Adam, and gave him Eve for a wife. What a dream! (There's a cartoon that shows Adam sitting on a rock looking very tired and sleepless. God is standing by, saying, "Adam, why can't you sleep?" Adam replies, "The last time I went to sleep you brought that woman and left her here. I'm afraid to go to sleep again. I don't know what I'd do with two!")
Perhaps God uses the nighttime to speak with us because that is the only time he can slow us down enough to get our attention. At any rate, God has historically used dreams and visions to communicate with us. This does not mean every dream or vision is from God. Some are -- some aren't -- but when we have them, we should heed them and evaluate them strictly in terms of scripture.
The Lord does not use dreams as much today as he used to, it seems. After all, he has spoken his final word to us in Christ Jesus. But sometimes the Lord may choose to communicate to us by a dream or a nocturnal vision. My grandmother lost her mother to death back in 1963. For some months after the funeral, Grandmother wrestled with her grief. She could not seem to settle it in her mind that her loved one was safe with the Lord. One night, however, she had a beautifully vivid dream. She saw her mother standing before her, looking as healthy, alert, and happy as ever before. In the dream, her mother said, "Now, Marion, see! I am fine. Stop your worrying about me because I am with the Lord." And after that, my grandmother quit fretting and slept soundly.
Conclusion
So now we've taken a quick look at some of the things the Christian faith teaches about sleep. We have looked at mental sleep, physical sleep, and spiritual sleep. Some of you are thinking that if you tried all this, your sleep would become so structured it would seem a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape! But this is not necessarily so! All of these principles can be incorporated into your lifestyle over a period of time. These principles can become habits that are second nature to you. You will not have to think to do them. They will become automatic and so will your sleep.
A famous mattress company advertises its products with the slogan, "For the rest of your life!" Today the church would like to advertise the Lord the same way. Perhaps you've never thought of the Lord as a sleep merchant. But that is at least part of who he is. He can, if you will allow him, give you the rest of your life. Jesus said, "Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).
In case you have not noticed it yet, the gospel of sound sleep is summed up in the "Great Commandment." When you love God, your neighbor, yourself, and the creation, you are freed from the fears, the frustrations, and the attitudes that ward off sleep. When you learn to come to Jesus with faith, love him with all your mind, heart, body, and soul, he gives you rest. Isn't that something you both need and want? Then come to him! Take his yoke and learn from him! Learn to love God mind, heart, body, and soul. Learn to love yourself and your neighbor. Thereby, you will learn sleep. You'll get your fifty winks. You'll saw your ZZZZZZ's. You'll snore away in the best tradition of the sandman. Rip Van Winkle and Sleeping Beauty have nothing on you! "For he giveth his beloved sleep."
Suggested Prayer
I come to you, O Father. Forgive my sins. Give me your promised rest. Take from my neck this yoke of sin and give to me the yoke of Christ. Let me learn from him -- love for God, self, people, world -- let me learn it all from him. And come evening, Lord, let my rest be sound, my sleep childlike. In Jesus' name. Amen.
