We love sleep, and it is important. We need it. The way God created us requires it for our health and strength. Don’t neglect it. We must also not let it be a ruler in our lives that takes away from the necessity of prayer. I know the time that I need to crash at night to get a good night’s rest and get up early enough for devotional time. Of course there are days when I’m up later or over sleep in the morning that throw my schedule off track. If needed, I’ll just catch up on sleep–ignoring the need of adequate rest is the action of fool.
More important to me than sleep is my private time of prayer and Scripture. As necessary as rest is, private time in the presence of the Lord trumps sleep. I can make up for sleep missed, but I cannot make up time lost in communion with my God. Let me put it another way. One hour in communion with God gives me more strength–physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, than one hour of sleep. Time spent with the Lord goes far beyond the day that you were in devotions. That time reaches others and feeds you beyond a 24-hour period. That raises its value, wouldn’t you say?
If I lose one hour of rest because I have to get up earlier to meet an obligation, or because I didn’t get to bed as early as I planned, should this steal time from what I know that I need most for my day? I need my daily bread; my daily manna that feeds into every aspect of my life. That manna from the hand of God, I find it waiting for me in that secret place. I ask for it and He graciously gives. Do I get all that I need from one hour of sleep? Not everything, but what I get from one hour in the presence of my God goes deeper and further.
Trust me, I enjoy rest, as I am sure that you do. We know its importance, but we know that we can make it up later when we don’t have a pressing schedule later in the week. The bottom line is, we all need to get sufficient rest for ourselves, but we must even more so guard that secret time with the Holy Trinity, whether it be morning, middle of the day, or evening. Nothing, nothing is more needed for your day and future than one-on-one time with the Savior and God.
Let Thomas Brooks help you with this issue:
That servants should rather redeem time from their sleep, their recreations, their daily meals, than neglect closet-duty a day. And certainly those servants that, out of conscience towards God, and out of a due regard to the internal and eternal welfare of their own souls, shall every day redeem an hour’s time from their sleep, or sports, or feedings, to spend with God in secret, they shall find by experience that the Lord will make a few hours’ sleep sweeter and better than many hours’ sleep to them; and their outward sports shall be made up with inward delights; and for their common bread, God will feed them with that bread that came down from heaven.
Sirs, was not Christ his Father’s servant?1 Isa. 42:1. ‘Behold my servant, whom I uphold, mine elect’ (or choice one), ‘in whom my soul delighteth’ (or is well pleased)! ‘I have put my Spirit upon him; he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.’ And did not he redeem time from his natural rest, rather than he would omit private prayer? Mark 1:35, ‘And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.’ Christ spent the day in preaching, in healing the sick, in working of miracles; and rather than these noble works should shut out private prayer, he rises a great while before day, that he might have some time to wrestle with his Father in secret. So Luke 6:12, ‘And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.’
O sirs! did Christ spend whole nights in private prayer for the salvation of your souls; and will you think it much to redeem an hour’s time from your natural rest to seek and to serve him in a corner, and to make sure the things of your everlasting peace? The redeeming of time for private prayer is the redeeming of a precious treasure, which, if once lost, can never fully be recovered again. If riches should make themselves wings, and fly away, they may return again, as they did to Job; or if credit, and honour, and worldly greatness and renown, should fly away, they may return again, as they did to Nebuchadnezzar; if success, and famous victories and conquests, should make themselves wings, and fly away, they may return again, as they did to many of the Roman conquerors and others; but if time, whom the poets paint with wings, to shew the volubility and swiftness of it, fly from us, it will never more return unto us.
A great lady [Queen Elizabeth] of this land, on her dying bed cried out, ‘Call time again, call time again; a world of wealth for an inch of time!’ but time past was never, nor could never be recalled.
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Brooks, T. (1866). The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks. (A. B. Grosart, Ed.) (Vol. 2, pp. 215–216). Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; G. Herbert.
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