Sleeping in Serenity

Psalm 4:8 – “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.”

Despite the danger that surrounded him, the psalmist determined to exercise his faith and draw upon spiritual resources in order to enjoy a night of sweet peace and rest. He rested peacefully knowing that the Lord was standing guard over him. Many dear saints have manifested this same confidence in God’s watchcare, like the imprisoned Peter who slept calmly “between two soldiers” the night before he expected to be executed.

A medical doctor was on duty with our boys in the Pacific during World War II when he discovered he had leukemia. He refused to leave the men who so desperately needed his service in the bloody jungle campaigns. Unselfishly he continued to minister to them until the dread disease rendered him blind and almost helpless. In one of his last letters he said, “I still am not ashamed to pray confidently each night as I was taught at my mother’s knee – ‘now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’ “

Though stricken with a fatal illness and beset by trouble on all sides, this heroic Christian doctor knew the serenity of the psalmist. With an unshaken faith in the overruling goodness of God, he could find no better medium of summarizing that perfect trust than those words of his childhood memory. With the unknown poet he could say, “Een when I lay me down to sleep in the last rest, mystic and deep, I shall not fear the dark of night when my saved soul must take its flight.”

With a firm trust in the loving Savior, you too can find such peace of mind each night as you consign your soul to the keeping of Him who never slumbers or sleeps.