Why Trusting God's Sovereignty Helps You Sleep

Sleep is a daily reminder that God is sovereign over our salvation, both temporally and eternally. We wake physically— and spiritually— only because of God’s merciful initiative. He holds the world together. Every life and death. Every step and breath.

Every coming and going, waking and sleeping.

Psalm 121 comforts us with the truth that the God “who watches over you will not slumber” (v. 3), “nor sleep” (v. 4). He watches over you such that “the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night” (v. 6). He “will keep you from all harm” (v. 7), keeping watch “over your coming and going both now and forevermore” (v. 8).

Our never- sleeping, ever- present God stands in stark contrast to the false gods and idols, whose comforts are nonexistent. Elijah famously mocks the prophets of Baal when their god doesn’t show up on Mount Carmel: “Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened,” he taunts (1 Kings 18:27).

This reassurance that God is active, in control, keeping watch while we sleep is a truth that can actually help us sleep. As one writer puts it, “We can sleep because he doesn’t.”7 This is the God who has eyes on every step we take (Prov. 5:21). This is the God “who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night” (Amos 5:8 ESV).

This is not a detached, deistic God who created the world but lets it run itself. Rather it’s a God who created and maintains the universe: hands on, dialed in, fully aware of all things, 24-7-365. Bavinck puts it well: “His maintenance, his sustaining power, extends to all creatures: to the lilies of the field (Matt. 6:28), the birds of the sky (Matt. 6:26), and to even the hairs of the head (Matt. 10:30). Every creature exists according to its nature— as it exists and so long as it exists— through the power of God. Even as it is of him, so it is through him (Rom. 11:36).”

The same God who created the phenomenon of sleep keeps watch over all sleepers. He is sovereign over everything that happens while we sleep. So as we lie awake at night, anxious about some unfinished task or ongoing burden, we join the sleepless psalmist of Psalm 102 (v. 7) in taking comfort in the God who is “enthroned forever” (v. 12), “laid the foundations of the earth” (v. 25), and will “remain the same” (v. 27).

We rest easier because we can rest assured: God’s got this. He’s got everything. “If we don’t believe in God, sleep can terrify us because it means that no one is looking out for us,” Kelly Kapic observes. Yet for believers, sleep is a reminder “that we don’t sustain the world, but that God does.”

Any illusions that we are omnipotent dissipate as the skies darken, our eyelids droop, and we fade away into a sleeping state of disengagement and passivity. We can get some things done while we’re on. Yet the planet keeps spinning and is highly productive while we are off. As Wendell Berry once put it in a poem, “By work of ours; the field is tilled / And left to grace. That we may reap, / Great work is done while we’re asleep.”

Charles Spurgeon once said, “God gave us sleep to remind us we aren’t him.” John Piper compares sleep to “a broken record that comes around with the same message every day: Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign.”

I remember being in the audience at Together for the Gospel 2010 when John MacArthur delivered a memorable sermon titled “The Theology of Sleep.” Commenting on the parable of the growing seed (Mark 4:26–29), MacArthur explained how the seed’s sprouting while the farmer sleeps demonstrates God’s sovereignty over salvation:

The wonder of the gospel is this: You sow the gospel and you go
to sleep and it grows. We have no control over that. We don’t
know how that happens any more than the farmer knows how
that seed, which is dead, or dormant in the ground, produces
abundant life. The most erudite botanist and biologist and agriculturalist
cannot explain the forces of life. The only human
act, our Lord is saying, is to sow and go to sleep while the crop
mysteriously grows.

While we sleep, God carries on in his mission. It’s a mission that graciously involves us but doesn’t depend on us. We can fall asleep on the job. God never does. Psalm 127:2 is one of Scripture’s most famous sleep verses. It follows verse 1, which reminds us that builders labor in vain and guards stand watch in vain unless the Lord builds the house and watches over the city. It’s his sovereignty, not our capability, that matters most. The psalmist then connects this idea to sleep (v. 2):

In vain you rise early
and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat—
for he grants sleep to those he loves.

Commenting on Psalm 127, Scottish theologian John Baíllíe says, “The point the psalmist is making is that we should not carry our cares and anxieties to bed with us. Beds were made for sleeping, not for worrying.” Baíllíe says those who go to bed fretful are forgetting that “when they are asleep, God is wide awake.” He goes on to say, How blessed a thing it is, then, that we are not expected to retain the conscious control of our lives by night as well as by day, but that we are allowed to lay the reins in God’s hands, entrusting ourselves to his care when we are least able to care for ourselves. . . . Sleep comes best to those who most put their trust in God. That is what the psalmist means by saying “He giveth his beloved sleep.” His beloved are those who trust him.

Does every person who fully trusts God have perfect sleep all the time? No. Are there people who don’t trust God yet manage to have great sleep? I’m sure. But Scripture makes an important connection between our ability to rest and the orientation of our trust. Trusting in fragile things— money, health, human leaders— tends to lead to restless unease. Trusting in a rock- solid, sovereign God makes it easier to rest in peace.

Why Trusting God’s Sovereignty Helps You Sleep

Brett McCracken