In Sleep, Practice Surrender
My newest son in my arms on his five month birthday
In my childhood Baptist church, during the invitation time we often sang “I Surrender All.” It’s an appropriate hymn as people make decisions to follow Jesus. Salvation involves our surrender to a posture of trust and humble receptivity: “May thy Holy Spirit fill me / May I know thy power divine.” Sleep is a nightly image of this.
It’s an invitation to practice the posture of surrendered trust. As A. J. Swoboda puts it, “Sometimes to do nothing, to sleep, requires the most active trust in God.”
As we lie down to sleep, we give our mental anxieties and physical exhaustions to God, trusting him to tend to our burdens and restore us in the death of night, reviving us every morning. Every lying down to sleep is an enactment of the death and resurrection cycle of our salvation. We give up any notion of saving ourselves as we drift off to sleep. We can only trust that God will preserve us through the night, as he did the Israelites behind the bloodstained doors in Egypt through that terrifying night of wailing (Ex. 12:1–30). And we must trust not only that God will get us through night’s death but also that he will deliver us to new life in the morning, as he did for the Israelites in their exodus out of Egypt and eventually to the promised land. “The Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt” (Ex. 12:42), and he keeps vigil every night, the sovereign author and perfecter of our faith.
Do we sleep well and rest easy as an outgrowth of our trust in God, calmed by the internalized, embodied knowledge that God reigns and keeps watch over our every breath?
Maybe we should strive to be more like a sleeping baby at peace in a parent’s arms. This was all of us once. We didn’t know at the time just how much might go wrong in the night. We had no concept of the frailty of it all—our little lungs, life’s litany of diseases and dangers, the precarious ecosystem of our cribs and the equally tenuous cosmos.
All we knew as sleeping babies was dependence on and trust in the parents who gave us life and who were with us through the night, every night. That’s the simple knowledge we can practice as adults too, until the day we die: resting, sleeping, surrendering to the sovereignty of God and the saving grace of a loving Father. His strong arms cradle us in merciful safety. They are mighty to save. They rock us to sleep and raise us to new life.
This is an excerpt from my book, ‘The Wisdom of Sleep: How Rest Reveals God’s Truth and Revives Weary Souls’ (Zondervan Reflective, 2026)