God in my Waking, God in my Sleeping

A new friend reminded me this afternoon the importance and brilliance of starting your day in prayer and communication with “the sweet guy up there.” I’m willing to bet he had no idea what he was igniting by choosing to share his thoughts with me today. What if all our relationships were marked by an un-filtered desire to share about Jesus?

Simple encouragements like this get my mind going for hours. Someone mentions something they’re learning, or how God’s working in their lives, and it just makes me want to dive head first into scripture and teach myself the same lesson.

So today I started thinking about the beauty and humility of beginning each day professing a need for God. When we wake up, our thoughts come back to life, and it is up to us to decide who will control our thoughts for the day. Are our thoughts from Satan, or are they from God? And more often than not, if our first thoughts of the day are not focused on God, we’ve already allowed Satan a foothold to control our mind the rest of the day.

We believe so many lies on a daily, even hourly basis. Isn’t it about time we stop listening to lies and start speaking truth to ourselves? Psychologically, thoughts are a HUGE part of who we are and they’re incredibly difficult to change. We can spend months treating a client with cognitive therapy, redefining the way they think. And while I am a therapist, I don’t believe we all need therapy, I just think we need to make war on our own minds. Our thoughts are deeply engrained, that’s why we should start fighting the moment we wake up.

But what about when we go to sleep? Lots of people have adopted the philosophy of starting one’s day with quiet time or in prayer, but is it any less important to glorify God at the end of the day?

Yes, in the morning we can start our day off on a good, positive, armed note, but the end of the day blesses us with an amazing opportunity to reflect and give glory to God for the grace we experienced.

And, at the end of the day we get to experience the gift of sleep! As college students, most of us constantly express a love for sleep, but I’d be willing to bet most of us don’t think about how to glorify God in it, or that He is with us, even in this catatonic state.

God created sleep, and that means sleep is good, and has a purpose.

We spend about one-third of our lives sleeping. One-third! That means if we live to be ninety, we’ll have slept for thirty years. It makes you think twice about your bed doesn’t it? Most of us love beds because that is where we may one day become one flesh with another person. We fail to recognize we’ll spend far more time engaging in the gift of God’s rest in our beds, than delighting in the gift of sexual intimacy (sorry boys).

God could have created us without a need for sleep, but in doing so, we’re reminded daily that we are not self-sufficient. God is the only one who “will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4).

So, the next time you’re tired (which happens to most of us daily), don’t curse God and life for exhausting you to the core, pray to God you can view tiredness as a reminder that we are just creatures, not the Creator. And thank God for such a humbling gift.

That being said, don’t take God’s gift of sleep for granted by abusing it, or by trying to do without it.

“Whether we eat or drink, do all things for the glory of God.” 1 Cor. 10:31

Most of us do all waking things for the glory of God, but consider sleep a whole separate category… we like to shirk responsibility for our unconscious thoughts. Our impure dreams are still our responsibility, which makes it all the more important for God to be on our hearts and minds before we drift off.

Like controlling our thoughts during the day, this isn’t an easy task. But it is possible. How crazy and amazing that we can glorify God in our sleep?! In the way we view sleep, and prepare for sleep.

It seems the older and more mature we get, the more we value sleep. I would argue the same should be true in our spiritual life. Except we’ll value sleep less for what it does for us, and more for what it does for our relationship with God.

If we don’t view sleep and the benefits of sleep differently than non-believers, something is wrong. Sleep is more than restoring us for a new day; sleep is an opportunity to be humbled. Our need for sleep is an amazing reminder that we need Christ every day, that we truly can’t do it on our own.