Sweet Sleep

 Greetings to you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Proverbs 3: 24 says, “ When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid: yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet.”

     Certain things in life tend to affect the way you sleep at night.  I usually don’t have too much trouble going to sleep, but lately, some things that have taken place in my life have caused me to lie there at night thinking so much that sleep seems to flee from me.  Pastor Flint Foster was my mentor years ago when I was saved and as I went to Washington Bible College and then to our first ministry in Virginia.  Quite often, Pastor Foster would close our Sunday services with   a request to God that our sleep would be sweet.  I have never  forgotten his prayers in regard to our sleep and often think about it and often pray the same thing when closing out a service near the evening hours.

     The book of Proverbs contains a lot of separated thoughts and not too much seems to run together.  In the opening chapters however, much is said in regard to wisdom and it seems that a comparison goes between wisdom and ignorance.  James reminds us that wisdom comes from God and is something to be sought  after.  The man who is smart pursues wisdom rather than ignorance and at times seems to be compared to refraining from the harlot.  It seems to be quite easy to follow after ignorance.  All you have to do is nothing.  Just go with the flow of society and you will avoid wisdom and find yourself to end up being ignorant.  You can have vast knowledge in many areas and still not have the common sense to get in out of the rain.  What seems to be comfortable in the world is usually going to be the wrong road to take and you should take heed to the warning to avoid it.  While pastor Foster was in the hospit al, I was visiting him  and he introduced me to a woman who was one of  his nurses.  As he introduced me, she put her hand on my shoulder.  After she left, pastor Foster looked at me with one eye and said, “See, when she found out you were going  to be a pastor, she wanted to touch you.”  I had never thought  about it until that moment but the danger became more obvious as years went on.  We all need to be aware of the pitfalls that are so often in the path of the believer.  Satan’s coworkers are forever planting those pitfalls to both men and women in order to ruin their Christian walk and to keep them from “sweet sleep.”  I have found that the book of Psalms expresses our relationship to God and the Book of Proverbs expresses our relationship to our fellow man.  Both books are extremely practical.  Our question for today is “How is your sleep?”  Is it sweet or is it bitter and full of tears?  Pursue wisdom in all of your life, your relationship to God, your relationship to men and women and children, your business, your thought life and virtually every manner of your life. Praise God today for His wisdom that is made available to ech and everyone of us.