by Alistair Matheson
Over the past year an enormous amount has been said and written about ‘reset’ …
Could it be that our spiritual clocks are still out by half a day?
The catalogue of fallen Christian leaders is too painful to read. The more recent the tragedy, the greater the shock still felt. Having never written of the virtues of most of them in their hay day, I feel thankfully disqualified from mentioning their names now.
However, one of the mighty whose praises I have sung on many occasions, but whose heartbreaking failure the Scriptures are most certainly not silent about, is our champion shepherd, warrior, psalmist and king, David. Lions and bears were just part of the job for our hero. Goliath merely another day’s work. Even the onslaught of the anointed King Saul, ‘head and shoulders’ above all Israel, couldn’t defeat him.
David didn’t meet his mortal enemy until one Spring day when it came time to ‘turn in’.
Having conquered the world, David didn’t meet his mortal enemy until one Spring day when it came time to ‘turn in’.
It took me far too many years as a Christian to process the biblical fact, with some of its implications, that the day does not actually start in the morning but in the evening. This was remiss of me as the clear order is repeated six times in the very first chapter of the Bible!
In Genesis chapter 1 verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23 and 31, we read:
“… There was evening and there was morning, the first/second/third/fourth/fifth/sixth day.”
I had been long aware, for example, that the Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday rather than sunrise on Saturday, but I failed to process this too, not once stopping to ask, Why? I’m afraid I never went any deeper than, They do it differently from us.
When Western evangelicals teach the practice of the Quiet Time, the unquestioned assumption is that we are talking about as near as possible to first thing in the morning – the morning being the beginning of the day, right?
Wrong!, says the Book of Beginnings. Evening comes first, then the morning.
This isn’t to undermine the ‘morning watch’, simply to underpin it with the ‘evening watch’.
I write this piece because I believe the mistake may have been costly.
Evening comes first, then the morning; getting the order wrong may have been costly.
Sunrise is far too late to start preparing for a new day, especially if we have taken a battering during the late-night and through-the-night hours. The hours of darkness are far more likely to be the time of greatest battle and struggle. If we stumble or are ambushed in the night, then the rug may have been pulled out from under the new day, ‘quiet time’ included, even before it has begun.
The medically proven effects of sleep-loss, for example, are huge: mood change, memory issues, concentration difficulties, weakened immunity, high blood pressure, weight gain, risk of diabetes and heart disease, poor balance and accidents, and more!
The roots of so many spiritual, mental, emotional, physical and relational problems are found not in the daylight but the night hours, the later ones especially.
How are we spending our evenings? There are some seemingly contradictory stats out there: apparently, we are busier and more work-stressed than ever; and yet, at the same time, we are also spending mind blowing numbers of hours surfing the internet and watching TV. Is escaping to entertainment simply a coping mechanism that sucks us in without ever doing itself out of a job by improving the hours in between?
Perhaps more than ever, Christians need to know how to find rest in the night hours.
Christians need to know how to find rest in the night hours.
It is probably the case that many who stress themselves through overwork, or impossible work, or even wrong work, will also tend to look for rest in the wrong places. David’s sin with Bathsheba may well have been the moral switch-off of a tired man fleeing to the wrong place to escape stress …
“Then it happened in the spring, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel … But David stayed in Jerusalem.
“Now at evening time David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the king’s house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful in appearance …” II Samuel 11:1-2
II Samuel 11:1-2 (Emphases added)
The rest is horrible history. That night was the beginning of a downward descent from which neither David nor Israel ever recovered. Oh, David found repentance and grace, to be sure, but the sword would never depart from his house and the string of awful consequences set in motion that night could never be reversed.
What was going on inside David as he lay on his bed? Was he fatigued after years of flight, threat and battle, thinking, ‘Surely now, at last, I can rest!’? Wearied and longing to escape the fray, did he lie there, ambushed in his thoughts, exhausted yet unable to sleep? It seems he just couldn’t unwind. Was it that he hadn’t yet learned how to find true rest in the night hours (- we’ll get to that shortly)? How long did he toss and turn, until he had to get up? …
When he did get up, mind wide awake, there she was. His pacifier for the night. Looking down from his roof, unable to settle, here was a new adventure to distract him, an all-absorbing pleasure that would transport him to another place of escape.
It’s in the night hours, when guards are down, when people disable their behavioural trip switches, when they think they cannot be seen, when they follow the urge to reward their stressful labours with ‘pleasures’, that they often look in all the wrong places … the fridge, the drinks cabinet, the screen … If they don’t know how to find rest in the Lord, comfort must be found somewhere.
It’s in the night hours, when guards are down, when people de-activate their behavioural trip switches, when they think they cannot be seen, when they follow the urge to reward their stressful labours with ‘pleasures’, that they often look in all the wrong places.
Thank God that we, His children, know where to find rest! … Or do we …?
The Apostle Paul zeroed in on the night hours:
“… You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness, so that the day would overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; so then, let’s not sleep as others do, but let’s be alert and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who are drunk, get drunk at night.”
I Timothy 5:4-7
Drunkenness is obviously induced by alcohol, but is it not also a metaphor for over-indulgence of any kind, the pursuit of pleasures and self-gratification, either for their own sake or as an anaesthetising escape from realities or imaginations too heavy to bear? God invented pleasures, of course, but when these become coping mechanisms, sedatives or stimulants in the night hours, they rob us of real rest and leave body, mind and spirit dulled, tired and spent before the morning dawns, in time to sabotage what should be our freshest, most productive hours.
The sins of the night may not be obvious evils such as substance dependency, gluttony or pornography, but harmless entertainment and pleasures consumed in compulsively copious quantities that become a crutch in our lives. For King David and many another fallen leader, it was seriously immoral activity. But thankfully, God answered David’s prayer of Psalm 51, to purify and restore him within. And by the time he wrote Psalm 63, David appears to have learned, long after his most bitter failure, how to find rest in the night hours, as he fled from his wicked son Absalom …
“God, You are my God; I shall be watching for You; my soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, in a dry and exhausted land where there is no water …
“When I remember You on my bed, I meditate on You in the night watches, for You have been my help, and in the shadow of Your wings I sing for joy. My soul clings to You; Your right hand takes hold of me.”
Psalm 63:1, 6-8
How different from that night with Bathsheba!
For those who long for security in wealth and power, it may be worth considering that the same David who couldn’t find rest in the royal villa – and oh, the cost of that! – was later to find it in worship and meditation as a fugitive under a night sky in the wilderness of Judah.
The same David who couldn’t find rest in the royal villa was later to find it in worship and meditation as a fugitive under a night sky in the wilderness of Judah.
There will never be a better time than now for wearied Christian leaders to reclaim the night hours; to rediscover the evening-time practice of telling their precious Jesus how much they love Him; worshipping Him for all He is; praising Him for His great works; thanking Him for his undeserved blessings upon their lives; getting back to memorising the Scriptures; pondering God’s words and murmuring them to themselves on their beds; allowing His truth, His instructions and His promises to sink and percolate within as they sleep, only to waken and refresh them, later on in the day, after peaceful rest, at first light?
There will never be a better time than now for wearied Christian leaders to reclaim the night hours.
If David could do this under the threat of death, after a child of the dysfunctional family he had raised turned against him, when he was a homeless fugitive, can we not all find such rest too, even in the most unsettling or traumatic seasons of life?
So, let’s not start with the morning; let’s begin by reclaiming the night. Let’s get the day back the right way up by resetting our spiritual clock to zero at the beginning of the night hours.
And there is evening and there is morning, your day.
And there is evening and there is morning, your day.
Ascension Forum 