More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 5 - June 8, 2024
corporate worship trains us, over time, to cease striving to make our own way and our own righteousness and to receive God’s means of grace.
A decent indicator of what we love is that for which we willingly give up sleep.
The truth is, I’m far more likely to give up sleep for entertainment than I am for prayer.
In the Book of Common Prayer, Anglicans have four short times of daily prayer—morning, noon, evening (known as Vespers), and night.
“Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.”
Our need for sleep reveals that we have limits.
many of us resist sleep for other reasons. We’ve developed routines of restlessness in our daily lives. We are out of step with the reality of our needs and limits.
Christian spirituality calls us, in the words of Saint Benedict, to keep “the prospect of death before your eyes every day.”9 Each Ash Wednesday we remember together that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
“I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the LORD sustains me” (Ps 3:5 NIV).
We are worn-out ministers, worn-out parents, worn-out business people, worn-out believers. This affects our worship together. We are prone to embrace a faith that is full of adrenaline, excitement, and activity. But we have to learn together to approach a Savior who invites the weary to come to him for rest.
Rest is not simply a physical need—it is not only our brains and muscles and eyelids that must learn habits of rest. We need holistic rest—physical, psychological, and spiritual.
In Jewish culture, days begin in the evening with the setting of the sun. (We see this in Genesis 1 with the repetition of “And there was evening and there was morning.”) The day begins with rest. We start by settling down and going to sleep.
Though the day begins in darkness, God is still at work, growing crops, healing wounds, giving rest, protecting, guarding, mending, redeeming.15 We drop out of consciousness, but the Holy Spirit remains at work.
What if Christians were known as a countercultural community of the well-rested—people who embrace our limits with zest and even joy?
We learn to rest by practice, by routine, over time. This is true of our bodies, our minds, and our souls, which are always intertwined.
Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care for us. For Christians, the act of ceasing and relaxing into sleep is an act of reliance on God.
As believers we can relish sleep as not only necessary but as an embodied response to the truth of Scripture: we are finite, weak creatures who are abundantly cared for by our strong and loving Creator.
God wants to give us not just lives of holiness and prayer but also of sufficient rest. And perhaps a key step toward a life of prayer and holiness is simply receiving the gift of a good night’s sleep.
