Welcome to “Wednesday Words,” a weekly quote or insight I hope will encourage you in the midst of this chaotic world and provide you with a thought or illustration for preaching or teaching this week. Today’s quote is from Kevin DeYoung:
“We tend to assume it’s always godlier to forgo sleep for more important activity, but God made us physical beings. We can’t go without sleep very long without doing our bodies and souls great damage. That’s the way God made us—finite and fragile. He made us to spend almost a third of our lives not doing anything except depending on him. Going to sleep is our way of saying, ‘I trust you, God. You’ll be okay without me.’ We regale each other with stories of great saints who got up at four or five o’clock in the morning to pray, forgetting that in the days before electricity most people went to bed soon after dark and woke up earlier in the morning. Most of our heroes from bygone ages probably slept much more than we do. Very few of us can survive, let alone thrive, on four or five hours a night.”
Kevin DeYoung, Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem. Crossway. Kindle Edition, location 1049-1055.