Sooner or later most people experience a sleepless night or two.<\/p>\n
In the middle of the night they are awake, thinking about problems in their lives that rob them of their sleep.<\/p>\n
When it comes to sleeplessness, Christians are no exception. In Psalm 77 we learn that even Israels king David had his sleepless nights because of his concerns: "In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord; My hand was stretched out in the night without ceasing; My soul refused to be comforted" (Psalm 77:2).<\/p>\n
The issues that bothered David appear to have been quite weighty: "You hold my eyelids open; I am so troubled that I cannot speak . . . I call to remembrance my song in the night; I meditate within my heart, And my spirit makes diligent search" (Psalm 77:4, 6).<\/p>\n
In his discouragement David even wondered whether his situation had anything to do with God having changed His approach regarding mercy and grace (verses 8-9).<\/p>\n
What do people do to "overcome" sleeplessness? All kinds of suggestions are available. Among them are start counting the sheep in your mind’s eye, read a boring book, drink a glass of warm milk.<\/p>\n
What did David do? He meditated on God’s great works: "I will remember the works of the LORD; Surely I will remember Your wonders of old. I will also meditate on all Your work, And talk of Your deeds . . . You are the God who does wonders; You have declared Your strength among the peoples" (Psalm 77:11-12, 14).<\/p>\n
Sleepless nights don’t always have to be a waste of time. We can follow David’s example and read the word of God and meditate on God’s great works. We will be encouraged, and most likely after a while we will be sleepy again and ready to go back to bed.<\/p>\n
With these thoughts I wish us all a rewarding Sabbath!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sooner or later most people experience a sleepless night or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sabbath-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}