Sleep Solutions | Psalm 4
Brian Hedges | August 13, 2017
Good morning! It’s wonderful to see all of you today.
Three things before we open up God’s word together: I just want to emphasize, underscore again, the financial need that the Tanners have. Virgil referenced that, but I would like for us to do something about that. So if you would like to make a special gift to the Tanners, you make a check out to Fulkerson Park and just earmark it for the Tanners; we will get it to them, and I believe that if we do that within the next couple of weeks that there is a matching donor that will match those funds. So let me encourage you to do that, if you have an thousand or 5,000 dollars lying around, or even 50 bucks; it will make a difference for them, so please do that.
Secondly, this fall kick-off volunteer training on the 26th, it’s not only for people who are actively volunteers, but if you’re a regular attender at Fulkerson Park we’d love for you to be here for at least a portion of that. So at eleven o’ clock that morning we’re going to do some vision casting, kind of a family chat, then follow that by a catered meal. So please come to that if at all possible. This is an important time for our church family; first time we’ve ever done anything quite like this, and I think it will be a crucial time for us together, so please come August 26th; sign up in the back.
And then next week we begin our study of the book of Galatians. So be praying, and read through the book of Galatians this week so that you’re ready to dig into that study, which will take us through most of the fall.
This morning we’re going to continue our summer series in the Psalms, and we’re going to be in Psalm 4, if you want to turn in your Bibles or you can read on the screen here in just a moment. I wonder how many of you have ever heard a sermon on sleep? Let me see your hand. I don’t see any hands up. I’ve heard one sermon on sleep, and this morning I want to preach a sermon on sleep.
It’s interesting; we spend something like ¼ to about ⅓ of our lives in sleep, and you would think that if we spend that much time sleeping that, number one, it’s important, and number two, that God might have something to say about it. And I believe he does, and Psalm 4 is a psalm that I think will help us with our sleep.
So I want to read this psalm together. Psalm 4 just has eight verses; I’m going to read it through, and then we’re going to talk about this issue of sleep this morning.
Psalm 4, beginning in verse 1:
“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness!
You have given me relief when I was in distress.
Be gracious to me and hear my prayer!
“O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?
How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? Selah
But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself;
the Lord hears when I call to him.
“Be angry [or perhaps better, tremble], and do not sin;
ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.
Offer right sacrifices,
and put your trust in the Lord.
“There are many who say, ‘Who will show us some good?
Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord!’
You have put more joy in my heart
than they have when their grain and wine abound.
“In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”
This is God’s word.
One of my more recent discoveries in reading and studying Puritan literature is how much time and attention the Puritans of the 17th century gave to spending the whole day with God. They were of course concerned about doctrine, they were concerned about holiness, but they wrote a lot about spending the day with God; how to rise with the Lord and how to walk with God when in solitude and in company and in prosperity and in adversity, and then how to end the day with God.
Sometimes we fail to give attention to those kinds of things, but the Puritans were in good company, because this psalm is really a psalm that helps us to end the day well with God. The psalm ends, as you saw in verse 8, with this focus on lying down and sleeping in peace and in safety and security because his trust is in the Lord.
So Psalm 4 has been known for years as an evening psalm, which is then followed by Psalm 5, which is a morning psalm. These two psalms kind of frame for us our nights and our days, showing us how to end the day with God, how to begin the day with God as well.
My goal in this sermon is both practical and theological. Practically, the main takeaway is very simple: I want you to get more sleep. Now how is that for an application point in a sermon? I want you to get more sleep than you probably are, and I’m not kidding at all. The main reason for this is my own dawning realization of the need for more sleep in my own life and seeing that in the lives of my family, and I just think this is a current problem in our day, and I’m going to talk about some of the reasons for that.
There’s also a theological goal here, for our sleep patterns actually say a lot about our beliefs. Our sleep reflects our theology. We have a theology of sleep, whether we realize it or not. The way we sleep indicates something about what we believe.
Much of what I’m going to say this morning I’m drawing from this book by David Murray, who is a professor, an Old Testament professor at a seminary in Grand Rapids, and this is a wonderful book. I read this a month or six weeks ago; it was really helpful for me, and it’s what got me thinking about this. The book is called Reset.
I want to read to you something that David Murray says in this book. “Few things are as theological sleep. Show me your sleep patterns and I’ll show you your theology, because we all preach a sermon in and by our sleep. For example, if we pride ourselves in sleeping only five hours a night, we preach the following truths:
I don’t trust God with my work, my church, or my family. Sure, I believe God is sovereign, but he needs all the help I can give him. If I don’t do the work, who will?
I don’t respect how my Creator has made me. I’m strong enough to cope without God’s gift of sufficient daily sleep.I refuse to accept my creaturely limitations and bodily needs. I see myself more as a machine than as a human being.
I don’t believe that the soul and body are linked. I can neglect my body and my soul will not suffer. I can weaken my body and not weaken my mind, conscience, and will.
I don’t need to demonstrate my rest in Christ. Although the Bible repeatedly portrays salvation as rest, I’ll let others do the resting. I want people to know how busy, important, and zealous I am.
I worship idols. What I do instead of sleep shines a spotlight on my idols, whether it be late-night football, surfing the Internet, ministry success, or promotion.”
You see, our sleep patterns actually show a lot about what we believe, what our priorities are, what we think is important, and what we think about ourselves and the way that God has made us.
And Psalm 4 is a psalm that gives us a theology of sleep. Again, look at verse 8: “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”
My goal is for you to be able to say the same thing, to be able to lie down, go to sleep, get a good night’s rest. But you only get there if you get through the psalm and work through the problems, the obstacles to our sleep. There’s a theological foundation for everything that the psalmist says in verse 8, and that foundation is laid in the first seven verses of the psalm.
So here’s what I want to do this morning. I want to kind of frontload the sermon with application, I want to talk about our need for sleep and just share some material, most of it from this book, from David Murray, some thoughts on our need for sleep and different reasons why we need it.
Then I want us to look at the obstacles to sleep, and let’s try to identify what are some of the problems that keep us from sleeping or from sleeping well. And then, finally, I want to dig into the psalm for a few minutes and talk about the truth or the theology that will help you sleep. When we get there I’m going to show you four things that this psalm teaches us, four truths that this psalm shows us that I think will help us sleep if we actually believe these truths, seek to put them into practice in our lives. Okay?
I. The Need for Sleep
So, number one, the need for sleep. The need for sleep. You can see the need for sleep when you consider the consequences of sleep deprivation. Now what is sleep deprivation? Sleep deprivation has been defined as when you average less than six hours of sleep a night. If you average less than six hours of sleep a night, then you’re sleep deprived.
Here are some signs of sleep deprivation, this is from Health.com:
You’re always hungry.
You gained weight.
You’re more impulsive.
Your memory is shot.
You’re having trouble in decision-making.
Your motor skills are off.
Your emotions are out of control, all over the place.
You get sick often.
You have trouble with vision, trouble seeing.
Your skin isn’t looking good.
You think you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel.
Or you find yourself nodding off in a sermon.
(Okay, I actually added the last one.)
So maybe you find some of those signs of sleep deprivation in your life, but more seriously, let’s consider the consequences. What are some of the things that actually happen when we get sleep-deprived?
(1) First of all, there are some physical consequences. Did you know that just one week of sleep deprivation (that is, one week of averaging less than six hours of sleep a night) results in damaging changes to more than 700 genes, results in coronary narrowing? There also can be signs of brain tissue loss. The brain, evidently, when we sleep works something like a garbage system or a laundry system, where your mind and your memories are actually cleansed and toxins from the brain are washed out when you sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, those toxins build up.
Sleep deprivation has been associated with increased risk of infection, with stroke, with cancer, with high blood pressure, with heart disease, with diabetes, with infertility. Sleep loss increases hunger, so that when you’re sleep deprived you have a desire for larger portion sizes and a preference for high-calorie, high-carb foods, with the resulting risk of obesity.
There are very obvious physical consequences to sleep deprivation. You don’t have to look long online, you don’t have to read far to see this; there are all kinds of reports, all kinds of stats about this.
(2) Maybe a little more surprising are the mental or the intellectual consequences to sleep deprivation. Studies have shown that students perform better when they sleep more, and since the 1960s, when the school schedule changed and schools began classes earlier in the morning we’ve seen declining performance in students in their GPAs and testing and so on.
Sleep deprivation has a damaging effect on memory, on decision-making skills, and on productivity.
In an article in the New Yorker that was aptly called “The Walking Dead” Maria Konnikova says this: “If you sleep six hours a night for 12 days, and that’s about how much many Americans sleep all year round, your cognitive and physical performance becomes virtually indistinguishable from that of someone who’s been awake for 24 hours straight. And the performance of someone who’s been awake for 24 hours straight is similar to that of someone with a blood alcohol level of .1 per cent. In other words, normal amounts of sleep deprivation have us acting like we’re drunk.”
Did you know that one in five automobile accidents are related to sleep deprivation, or people falling asleep at the wheel? Did you know that the disasters of Chernobyl, the explosion of the spaceship Challenger, the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill, and then the 1979 nuclear meltdown on Three Mile Island; all of those disasters were related in some way to sleep deprivation? There are serious consequences to not getting enough sleep.
(3) There are also emotional consequences. Sleep loss, according to one person, disrupts the brain’s flow of epinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin; these are chemicals that are closely associated with mood and behavior, so that people with insomnia are 10 times more likely to develop depression, and 17 times as likely to have significant anxiety. We don’t do as well emotionally when we don’t get enough sleep.
(4) And of course, if all this is true then you could easily see that the consequences will play out, then, in our moral and spiritual lives. So there are moral consequences as well to sleep deprivation.
Here’s David Murray again: “Studies show that a lack of sleep depletes and weakens the brain’s self control center, leading to higher levels of unethical behavior. In one study of whether people would cheat or not given identical temptations, those in the group that did not cheat were found to have slept, on average, about 22 minutes more than those who cheated. The difference between moral and immoral actions was only 22 minutes of sleep.”
Did you know that President Bill Clinton, former president Bill Clinton, one time said that every major mistake he ever made was a decision that coincided with sleep deprivation? You can really mess up in your life if you don’t get enough sleep.
(5) And then there are spiritual consequences. Now the Puritans understood this. This is an interesting thing I had never noticed before: the Puritan catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, which is a series of questions and answers, kind of about Christian doctrine and life and practice, in the question on the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” it talks about the importance of sleep in the answer. Here it is.
“What are the duties required in the sixth commandment?” What does the sixth commandment require of us, this commandment that you shall not kill? Listen to what they said.
“The duties required in the sixth commandment are all careful studies and lawful endeavors to preserve the life of ourselves and others by resisting all thoughts and purposes, subduing all passions, and avoiding all occasions, temptations, and practices which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any; by just defense thereof against violence, patient bearing of the hand of God, quietness of mind, cheerfulness of heart, a sober use of meat, drink, physic [that’s medicine], sleep, labor and recreations; by charitable thoughts, love, compassion, meekness, gentleness; peaceable, mild, and courteous speeches and behavior; forbearance, readiness to be reconciled, patient, bearing, and forgiving of injuries; and requiting good for evil, comforting and succoring the distressed and protecting and defending the innocent.”
Now you can take a breath. That’s typical Puritan prose for you; they pack a lot into a little bit of space.
But just notice that one of the things they said that you have to do in order to not kill somebody is get enough sleep. Get enough sleep!
Now I haven’t researched this, but I just wonder if anyone has ever done the research of what the statistics would show if we consider things like school shootings and mall shootings and the reckless violence of our world today. I wonder if there’s any way to determine this. I just wonder what the sleep patterns of the perpetrators of those crimes were, and how much the lack of sleep or the loss of sleep plays into these mental health issues that result in violence.
One more quotation here on this, the moral and spiritual consequences of sleep. D.A. Carson, respected evangelical scholar and theologian, says, “If you are among those who become nasty, cynical, or even full of doubt when you’re missing your sleep, you are morally obligated to try to get the sleep you need. We are whole, complicated beings; our physical existence is tied to our spiritual well-being, to our mental outlook, to our relationships with others, including our relationship with God. Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night’s sleep; not pray all night, but sleep. I’m certainly not denying that there may be a place for praying all night; I’m merely insisting that in the normal course of things spiritual discipline obligates that you get the sleep your body needs.”
That’s a lot of reasons why you and I need more than six hours of sleep a night. Now, all of us are different, some of us need seven or eight, some of us maybe need nine or ten; you can determine that as you observe yourself.
II. The Obstacles to Sleep
Let’s think now about what are some of the obstacles to sleep; what are the things that get in away? You might think of these as sleep thieves; what are things that steal sleep from us? And then we’re going to look at several truths that will help us to sleep.
So, obstacles to sleep, the sleep thieves. Let me just say at the outset that there are, of course, sometimes medical, physical reasons that keep people from sleeping, such as sleep apnea. If that’s a problem you’re facing, you need to get medical attention; you need to see a doctor.
But there are other problems as well, problems that have more of a psychological or spiritual component to them, problems that we have more direct control over, and I want us to think about those. So here are four obstacles to sleep.
(1) First of all, busyness. The pace of life. I mean, it’s just almost a mantra, right? We say this all the time: “I’m so busy.” “How are you?” “I’m good, I’m just busy.” And then we rattle off the things we do. I’m as guilty as anybody. I mean, we do this all the time.
And we are busy, and the older you get the more responsibility you assume, and so most of us have work responsibilities and marriage responsibilities and children responsibilities, and then maintenance of property, home, and cars, and then involvement in church and extracurricular activities like sports and hobbies, and all of these things eat away at our time. Now these are all good things; I mean, life would be really boring without those things in our lives. I mean, this is what our life is. Our life is made up of these things. But sometimes we get so overloaded, we take on so much, that the quality of our life diminishes, and one of the key ways we will see that happen is in lack of sleep.
Now here are the facts, folks: you and I have the same amount of time, every one of us. We have 168 hours a week; that’s what we have, and if we fill those 168 hours a week with more than about 110 or 112 hours of activity, so that it eats into our sleep, our quality of life will diminish, and we are setting ourselves up for all of these negative consequences.
Now if that’s where you are, and the main reason you’re not getting enough sleep is because you’re too busy, then here is perhaps the first step in application for this message this morning. Just stop and think, take inventory of your life. Think through what are you doing? What are your commitments? What are your basic responsibilities? And then prioritize.
Some of those responsibilities you should have, you will have, they’re unavoidable, it would be a sin to try to shirk those responsibilities. But there may be things that you have taken on that are optional, that are extracurricular, that are unnecessary. There may be things that you’ve taken on that are just wrong for this season in life, there may be limits that you need to place on what you or your family do. There may be limits even on the volunteer kind of things that you do with church or with volunteer organizations. I tremble to say that as a pastor. I don’t want people quitting on things. But, I would rather you be a healthy person getting enough sleep than overloading yourself with responsibilities at church or elsewhere, burning out and finding yourself in deep mental, physical, moral, emotional, spiritual problems.
So take inventory. God’s will for your life is that you get enough sleep, and that you not take on more than he has given you the physical, mental, emotional stamina to be able to do. So that’s the first thing: take inventory.
My guess is that most of us aren’t actually quite as busy as we think we are. I really think we’re probably not as busy as we think we are, when we look at actual work hours, actual family responsibilities, the things that actually require time, it’s probably far less than what we think, which is why it’s worth taking inventory, actually writing down, how many hours you spend doing this.
(2) The second thief for sleep, I think, is much more of a concern, and that is technology. Technology. The proliferation of distractions in our lives. You know this. We have more technology and thus more distractions than any generation in history.
We have round-the-clock, 24-hour cable TV, we have Internet, we have smartphones, we have social media, and on and on you can go. You can literally spend 24 hours a day plugged in, and some of us do, or close to that. We sleep with our phones, our phones always at our side, we are engaged in media until the very end of the day, which leaves our minds overstimulated that last hour or two before we go to sleep, making it harder to sleep at night, and then we’re checking email and texts and the news and things like that first thing when we get up in the morning.
We’re overly distracted, and I think one of the things we have to do is actually trim down those distractions. You’ll remember that a few months ago Del Fehsenfeld preach a very helpful sermon for us on spiritual formation, and one of his points was, “You own the phone.” You own the phone. You have control over it, you need to take control over it so that it doesn’t control you.
I discovered a new word this week: the word FOMO. Anybody ever heard of this word? F-O-M-O. FOMO. It’s actually an acronym for the “fear of missing out.” FOMO: the fear of missing out. It’s been defined as “the anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website.” This is actually a word that people use. It was in an email. I got an email that said something about FOMO. I was like, “What is FOMO?” Well, that’s what it is: it’s the fear of missing out.
And you know what? I think we’re afflicted by this. We read the Facebook feed, we hear about the new show on Netflix, we hear about something that somebody is doing, some activity that they’re involved in, and we think, “Oh, I don’t want to miss out; I want to do that too.” So we add one more thing to our schedule. We add distraction upon distraction upon distraction, we overload our lives so that we cut into our sleep, and then the overall quality of life goes down.
(3) Number three, here’s another obstacle to sleep: stress, or the problem of anxiety.
Sometimes it’s the result of things that are outside of our control, where we are distressed, we are stressed because of external circumstances. You can see that in Psalm 4, in verse 1, where the psalmist talks about how God gave him relief when he was in distress. Interesting that the Hebrew word there carries the idea of being in a tight corner. It’s the idea of being pressured, of being constricted, of being pressed in upon.
David’s distress in this psalm was caused by external factors; his enemies, his foes, those who were rising up against him, as you can see in verse two, turning his honor into shame.
But you don’t have to be suffering persecution to feel stressed and anxious. We all feel this, and we feel this because of the things going on in our lives. You can see this also in another psalm, 127, another psalm that speaks of sleep. Psalm 127, verse 2 says, “It is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he [that is, God] gives his beloved sleep.”
Do you eat the bread of anxious toil? Are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed so that your mind is churning at night with anxiety, robbing you of sleep?
Three times in my life, in the course of ministry, three times I’ve gone to a doctor because of chest pains. I started having chest pains, started feeling kind of worried about that, or palpitations or things like that. Three times. Every time my heart has checked out fine and the doctor has basically said, “Less caffeine, more exercise, more sleep.” Too much stress and not managing it well enough. Maybe that’s where today finds you.
(4) And then one more obstacle, number four, and that’s sin, the burden of guilt. Sometimes a guilty conscience is what robs us of sleep. We are like Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, we carry a heavy load on our back, and that keeps us from resting quietly at night.
III. The Truths That Will Help You Sleep
So, finally, what are the truths that will help us sleep well? What are the things we need to believe? And I recognize the clock is ticking and time is running out, so I’ll be brief here.
What I want to do is just give you four things from this psalm, four things, and these are truths that you need more than just to see it on the screen and read a verse; these are truths you need to live in. These are truths you need to dig into, you need to dwell in. These would be good things to meditate on, maybe even as you lie down to go to sleep at night. Four truths.
(1) Number one, the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God; look at verse one. David says, “Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness. You have given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.”
Now this psalm is a prayer, and prayer presupposes that God hears us when we pray and that he is able and willing to respond to us when we pray. Prayer presupposes that God is sovereign, that God is able, that he’s wise, that he’s good, that he’s willing to answer us.
Charles Spurgeon said, “The sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which the child of God rests his head at night, giving perfect peace.”
Let me just ask you, Christian: do you know that God is on his throne? I know it looks like the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I know that your life is overwhelmed with many burdens. But did you know that in the midst of all those burdens, in the midst of all the chaos in the world, that the Lord reigns? He’s on his throne. He’s working out his plan, he’s working out his sovereign purposes, He has promised to do you good and not evil. He has promised that all things, including our sufferings, will work out together for our good. He is making us into the image of Christ, conforming us to his glorious image, Romans chapter eight.
If we believe that in our heart of hearts, we can rest. We can rest! We can trust that God has it under control. When we go to sleep we preach a sermon, and the sermon that we’re preaching is this: “God is God, and I am not. God has the ability and the responsibility to handle this world; I do not.” So trust in the sovereignty of God.
(2) Number two, the grace of God. Look at verses 3 through 5. David here seems to be addressing his antagonist, but what he says I think is relevant to us. He says, “Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. The Lord hears when I call him. The Lord has set apart the godly for himself;” that’s a saving act. God sets us apart for himself. That’s sanctification; that’s what sanctification means. God sets us apart.
Then he says, “Tremble, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your bed, and be silent.” Verse 5, “Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord.”
I think right here you can see the answer to the problem of guilt. If anxiety eats away at us because of our lack of trust in God, guilt eats away at our lack of sleep because we have a conscience that is not clean. We feel the burden of our sins.
The answer in Scripture to a guilty conscience is always twofold. It is, number one, trust in the sacrifice that washes away the guilt of your sin. You can see this in the book of Hebrews, where the writer there talks about how Christ, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without blemish to God to purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
We get a clean conscience through the sacrifice of Christ! There’s a reference to sacrifice right here, in verse 5, but every Old Testament sacrifice points to THE sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ. If you have a burdened, guilty conscience, the answer is simple. It’s good news, it’s almost too good to be true, but it is true: if you will confess your sins, God is faithful and just to cleanse you from your sins, to wash them away, to wash and cleanse your conscience, to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. That’s first: you get a clear conscience, a clean conscience through the cross, the resurrection of Christ.
But there’s another aspect to a clear conscience, and that is sanctification. God sets apart the godly for himself, and when he does that he begins to change us. He begins to change us, so that we cease to do the behaviors that defile the conscience, and that’s part of the solution. If you have a guilty conscience you need both to confess your sins and you need to repent, turn from the sins that are defiling your conscience, trusting God’s forgiveness, and then begin to walk in holiness with God. You will rest better at night.
(3) Number three, the goodness of God. You see this in verses 6 and 7. “There are many who say, ‘Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O Lord.’” You can see a reference there to the Aaronic blessing from Numbers chapter 6, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and lift up his face upon you.”
Look at verse 7; he says, “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.” Here’s the answer to the problem of FOMO, the fear of missing out. That fear is rooted in a lack of trust in the goodness of God. God can give us more joy in himself than we ever get through worldly recreations, entertainments, amusements. Some of those things can be innocent and can actually add to the quality of our lives, but the fretting we do, the frenetic activity of trying to experience everything that we can, it’s a lack of trust in the goodness of God, who gives us joy that satisfies our hearts.
We talked about that last week, didn’t we? Psalm 73: “Whom have I in heaven but you, and there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” We have to learn to find our joy in God, to trust his goodness, and as we do that find rest for our hearts and souls.
(4) And finally, number four, the protection of God. Verse 8, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”
Here’s the answer to fear and worry, those anxious cares that steal our sleep. We can rest because the Lord, and he alone, protects us. He gives us safety, he gives us peace.
Psalm 55: “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you.” Psalm 121: “I will lift up my eyes to the hills; from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber; behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
You can sleep, because God never does. He’s watching over you. He is protecting you. He cares for you.
I want to conclude by just reminding you of one more thing, and that is this: the true source of our rest is found in the gospel in the promise of Christ himself. You know, the deepest reason that we do not rest, physically, the deepest reason why we do not sleep; whatever these obstacles are that we’ve talked about this morning, whichever ones of those are playing out in your life, the deep reason, the deep root behind our obsessive use of technology and our obsessive fear and worry and our guilt and so on is a lack of soul rest, a lack of rest of heart. And the answer is the answer of the gospel.
Listen to the words of Jesus: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
There’s the answer. If you want rest of body, you have to first get rest of soul. Cast your cares on Jesus, come to him, trust in him for his forgiveness, for his grace, for his protection, for his sustaining mercy. Trust in him, cast your burden upon him; he’ll give you rest of soul, and then you can find rest of body as well.
Let me end with these words from an old hymn:
“Weary, working, burdened one,
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing, all was done
Long, long ago.
“Cast your deadly doing down,
Down at Jesus’ feet.
Stand in him, in him alone,
Gloriously complete.”
Let’s pray.
So Father, we come to you now to cast down our deadly doing, to not trust in ourselves or our works or our performance, and to not seek to secure for ourselves joy and rest and satisfaction, but rather to trust in you, to cast our cares on you, to trust you for your sustaining grace, to come to you for rest of mind and heart and body and soul.
Father, I don’t know exactly where everyone is this morning in hearing these words, but I pray that for everyone who is weary in mind and heart, for everyone who is wrestling with sleepless nights, I pray that the gospel, first of all, would be a balm to their souls, and then I pray that you would give us the grace and the mental and emotional and spiritual capacities to take inventory of our lives and to bring needed correction, to lay down things that are robbing us of sleep, and to trust in you.
Lord, how important this is as we enter this next season. For many, school starts tomorrow, work responsibilities often ramping up in this time of the year. Even our responsibilities in church increase during this time of year. Lord, we need the energy, we need the rest, we need the grace to be able to meet these responsibilities you’ve given to us so that we will love you with heart, soul, mind, and strength; so that we will love our neighbors as ourselves. We can’t do that unless we find rest in you. So give us that this morning, and give us wisdom for seeking to apply these things to our lives.
As we come now to the Lord’s Table, we pray that you would nourish us with the broken body and the shed blood of our Lord Jesus. As we take the bread, as we take the juice, may we by faith commune with Jesus. May we take from Jesus, may we lean into Jesus and trust in him. May we say as we take these elements, “Lord Jesus, I receive you, I take you and all that you have done for me. I trust in it now with all of my heart; I rest in you and your forgiveness, in your grace, in your compassion, in your mercy.”
So draw near to us at the Table and as we continue in worship. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
