This morning’s word is While We Sleep.
The anchor verses are Psalm 46:10 and Matthew 11:28-29.
More than a third of adults regularly experience poor sleep. Studies link it to increased risks of heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, and motor vehicle accidents. Sleep itself has been proven essential for survival. Both humans and animals suffer severe consequences without it, including cognitive decline, emotional instability, and eventual death.
What the brain actually does while we are unconscious is the striking part. During sleep, it consolidates short-term memories into long-term storage. It prepares neurons for learning the following day. It repairs tissues throughout the body. It boosts the immune system. The most important work the brain does is the work it does while we are still.
This is the architecture GOD wrote into bodies long before any of us were born. Every night of our lives, the body has been teaching us something about how rest works. None of the healing, the memory consolidation, the cellular repair, or the immune renewal happens while we are striving for it. All of it happens after we have stopped.
Today is the Sabbath. The readings this morning have been working toward exactly this.
Katie Hauck, a Bible teacher who writes on the life of faith, says today that GOD does not just promise strength for the journey. HE promises rest at the end of striving. Two different things, she says, and both of them are ours. She walks through Exodus 33:14, where GOD tells Israel, “My presence will go with you and I will give you rest.” She names the generation of Israelites who never received it. They had character defects, she writes. A grip on control. A demand for justice. A need to understand. They could not let go. So they did not enter the rest.
Then she turns to the next generation. Their first instruction was to silently march around Jericho. They wanted to fight. They wanted to be angry. They wanted to control how the battle went. GOD asked them to close their mouths and trust. The walls came down without their swords.
Psalm 46:10 is the verse that anchors the whole reading. “Be still and know that I am God.” Knowing HE is GOD, sovereign and just and all-knowing, is what releases the grip. Not because everything is resolved, Hauck writes, but because the One who holds all things is with you.
Matthew 11:28-29 sits underneath everything Jesus ever said about this. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me. For I am meek and lowly in heart. And ye shall find rest unto your souls.
Soul-rest. That is the phrase that names what we are actually looking for.
Ignatius writes this morning about the modesty of spirit that makes this rest possible. He writes from prison and says he is not worthy to be compared to those who are at liberty. He names Abraham and Job, who called themselves dust and ashes before GOD. He names Moses, who said, “I am of a feeble voice, and of a slow tongue.” The teaching is that the people who can receive the rest are the people who have stopped trying to be GOD-sized. We carry exhaustion because we keep inflating ourselves. The rest lives at human-size with GOD-size company.
Pastor Segun Oduyebo, a pastor who writes on living sent into the world, speaks this morning about being sent. “As the Father has sent Me, so I am sending you.” The work we are sent into the world to do flows from rest rather than from striving. The settled life is the sent life. The well that is full pours out. The well that is empty performs.
So this Sabbath morning, the picture is clear. The body has been teaching us about Sabbath every night of our lives. The brain does its most important work while we are unconscious of it. The Sabbath is the soul’s version of the same architecture GOD wrote into creation itself. We stop. HE works. The consolidation, the healing, the preparation, the renewal happen because we have finally let go of trying to do them ourselves.
The rest GOD promised is real. It is not earned. It is not manufactured. It is received by those who are small enough to receive it and still enough to know what is coming.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
This Sunday’s Marc My Sabbath homily, The Rest He Promised, carries this word further. Read it here.