A woman told me she had prayed every night for eleven years and had never once prayed about the thing that happened immediately afterward.
She prayed in bed. That was her habit and it was a good one. She would go through her list, which was long and faithful and included people I did not know she carried, and then she would say amen and lie there for two hours.
Two hours, most nights, for a period of about three years.
And I asked her, mostly out of curiosity, whether sleep was on the list.
She said no. She said it in a slightly surprised way, the way people do when a question uncovers something rather than asking about it. And then she said: I do not think I have ever thought of it as something you could ask for.
I have asked that question of a lot of people since and I have almost never had a different answer. People pray about their children and their work and their health, and sleep, which is a third of a person's life and the thing that most determines whether they can do any of the rest, is somehow not a subject.
The word both is doing work
The verse people put on cards is the last line of the fourth psalm, and the psalm around it is not restful at all.
It is a man under pressure, asking how long his honor will be turned into shame, telling God there are many that say who will show us any good. It is a complaint psalm with a sleep line at the end of it.
I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:8, King James Version)
Both. Lay me down, and sleep. Two separate things.
Anybody who has lain awake knows exactly why that word is in there. Lying down is one act and it is the one a person can perform. Sleeping is a different act and it cannot be performed at all. Nobody has ever fallen asleep on purpose.
That is why sleep belongs in a prayer and almost nothing else in a person's day does quite so obviously. It is the one thing they are required to receive.
You have been given something you cannot manufacture, and the impossibility of manufacturing it is what makes it a thing to ask for, and Psalm 4 separates the lying down from the sleeping with the word both, and it is the Spirit who is present in the gap between those two.
And the reason the psalmist gives is not that he has settled his circumstances. Read it again. For thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. The word only is doing as much work as the word both.
He is still surrounded by whatever he was complaining about eight verses earlier. Nothing in the psalm resolves. The safety he names is not a report on his situation, it is a statement about who is holding it.
You have a safety that is not a description of your circumstances, and Psalm 4 names it while the trouble in that psalm is still running, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a thing a person can lie down on rather than a sentence they agree with.
Why it is not on anybody's list
There are a few reasons and none of them are faithlessness.
The first is that sleep feels like a bodily function rather than a subject, in the same category as digestion, and nobody prays about digestion.
The second is that a person who is not sleeping is usually not sleeping because of something else, and they pray about the something else, which is reasonable, and the sleep itself never gets named.
And the third is quieter. A person lying awake at night frequently feels that they have brought it on themselves, by what they looked at or how they scheduled the day or how they cannot stop thinking, and a person who feels responsible for a problem does not bring it to God, they try to fix it.
You are not being asked to fix this before you mention it, and no verse anywhere makes competence the entry to prayer (Proverbs 3:24). The Spirit is the one who receives a thing a person has been quietly blaming themselves for.
I will say one plain thing here. If the sleeplessness has gone on long enough to be affecting your body, a doctor is a good and sensible place to take it, and going to one is not a failure of faith and never has been.
He slept in the boat
There is a detail in the Gospels that I have never been able to get past.
There is a storm. The boat is filling with water. Experienced fishermen are frightened, which tells you what kind of storm it was, because those men had seen weather.
And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? (Mark 4:38)
Asleep on a pillow. In that.
I am not going to turn that into an instruction, because telling a person who cannot sleep that Jesus slept in a storm is a way of making them feel worse rather than better, and I have watched it done.
What I take from it is smaller and gentler. Rest of that kind exists. It is not a myth and it is not only for people with easy lives, because the man in the boat did not have one.
You are not looking at something impossible, and the rest in that boat was real rather than symbolic (Mark 4:38), and it is His Spirit who gives that kind of sleep as a gift rather than a person achieving it by settling their circumstances first.
So ask for it. Out loud. Before you lie down.
You have a God who is named as the one who makes a person dwell in safety, and the psalm puts the word only in front of it (Psalm 4:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives rest to somebody who has been trying to produce it themselves.
Now the counterfeit, and at night it is at its strongest, so learn its shape. It says: you are not sleeping because of what you have not dealt with, and until you sort yourself out this is what nights are. That is vague, it names you rather than an act, and its only instruction is to lie there feeling responsible. Conviction from the Holy Spirit names one specific thing and hands you a door in the same breath.
You are not being kept awake as a correction, and there is not one verse anywhere that treats a sleepless night as a verdict (Psalm 127:2), and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a person at two in the morning rather than waiting for them to be well rested.
Nothing on this page promises tonight is different. It may not be, and the woman with the list slept the same for a month. What is settled is that sleep is a gift rather than an achievement, that the psalm separates lying down from sleeping on purpose, and that a night handed over is a different night even when the hours are identical.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, quietly, standing beside the bed. You speak here as somebody in Christ, so the standing behind it belongs to you and was handed over rather than assumed. God separated lying down from sleeping in the psalm and named Himself as the one who makes a person dwell in safety, so speak to the list that has never had rest on it. An ambassador speaks the King's word and never his own, and the outcome is His to decide.
- List I keep that has no rest on it, you are not devotion and you are not the whole of what He offers. The Word of God says I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, and the word both is in there because they are two different things.
- Verdict that the nights are my own fault, you are finished in the name of Jesus. Scripture says thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety, and the word only puts it entirely on His side.
- Father, Proverbs 3:24 says when thou liest down thou shalt not be afraid and thy sleep shall be sweet. I ask You for sleep out loud tonight before I lie down, and I thank You that Your Spirit is with me in the hours if it does not come.
Psalm 4:8
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