TRANSCRIPT 🔗
WEBVTT
00:00.424 --> 00:07.128
[SPEAKER_01]: a good reminder from Genesis chapter 1 verse 3 is, God always pierces the darkness, always.
00:07.888 --> 00:09.869
[SPEAKER_01]: And the darkness doesn't last.
00:10.810 --> 00:23.257
[SPEAKER_02]: In the high priest, the great high priest who is Jesus Christ, he puts his hands on your life and you take your hands off and you say, my life is surrendered for your purposes.
00:25.748 --> 00:28.510
[SPEAKER_01]: And everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Dalam podcast.
00:28.530 --> 00:30.771
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is Jamie Trustle of the Proge of Hosing This.
00:31.012 --> 00:36.495
[SPEAKER_01]: For Dalam Ministries and serving as a lead pastor of Redeemer, dripping springs in the Texas Hill Country.
00:36.515 --> 00:41.739
[SPEAKER_01]: We hope this podcast helps you facely walk with Jesus while pouring your life into others.
00:41.879 --> 00:47.623
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are joined again, a regular in every season so far by Brett McCrack and Brett.
00:47.643 --> 00:48.644
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for coming back on.
00:49.584 --> 00:50.345
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Jamie.
00:50.405 --> 00:51.546
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to be back.
00:52.272 --> 00:59.438
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, most of our listeners, which we do have a growing listener ship, if that's a word, which I'm really think of as a word, yeah, yeah, there we go.
00:59.938 --> 01:02.120
[SPEAKER_01]: Even a guy from Alabama can compile that.
01:04.181 --> 01:05.823
[SPEAKER_01]: Some are going to be familiar with you most.
01:05.843 --> 01:16.111
[SPEAKER_01]: For those that aren't husband, data for author, speaker, gospel coalition, give everybody just a little bit of a flyover of your background.
01:17.553 --> 01:19.094
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, you caught the big points.
01:19.154 --> 01:22.495
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, I'm a senior editor for the gospel coalition.
01:22.515 --> 01:23.775
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been there for nine years.
01:23.895 --> 01:27.816
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's my day job on an editor, right, writer for them.
01:27.836 --> 01:29.137
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love it.
01:29.617 --> 01:33.218
[SPEAKER_00]: And I kind of oversee the arts and culture content that we produce.
01:33.478 --> 01:42.341
[SPEAKER_00]: So anything in the realm of pop culture, big picture trends in culture technology is a lot of what I write about these days.
01:42.461 --> 01:43.702
[SPEAKER_00]: AI, things like that.
01:44.562 --> 01:54.490
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and then I write books kind of as a side thing, um, separate track from TGC, but, um, I written five, six books now.
01:54.710 --> 01:55.971
[SPEAKER_00]: I, yeah, something like that.
01:56.591 --> 01:58.993
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and the wisdom will sleep as my most recent one.
01:59.153 --> 02:00.994
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, yeah, family life is great.
02:01.014 --> 02:01.215
[SPEAKER_00]: We,
02:02.100 --> 02:03.881
[SPEAKER_00]: We were talking before we started recording.
02:03.901 --> 02:31.422
[SPEAKER_00]: We just had our fourth baby so life is just beautifully chaotic as we adjust to four kids under the age of eight and including a baby and then two working two working parents so it's a lot but it's a lot of wonderful stuff so it's either it's either God's irony or confirming care for you that you wrote a book about sleep when you probably weren't getting any
02:32.888 --> 02:40.973
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think there is a connection to be made between like my life stage as a weary dad of four and writing about sleep.
02:41.233 --> 02:42.434
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably not a coincidence.
02:42.834 --> 02:43.955
[SPEAKER_01]: That's for sure.
02:44.095 --> 02:45.816
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so I'm going to jump in on that.
02:46.056 --> 02:47.337
[SPEAKER_01]: You've written on a topic.
02:48.037 --> 02:53.418
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so a lot of people have written on rest and Sabbath and certainly sleep can get worked into that.
02:53.458 --> 03:02.680
[SPEAKER_01]: But as far as like the focal point and even a theological treatment of sleep, it's not something I've ever seen treated in the way that you've done.
03:02.800 --> 03:06.261
[SPEAKER_01]: So let me start by saying, why?
03:06.361 --> 03:08.962
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, where did this project originate?
03:10.587 --> 03:21.691
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like what you just said, like I've seen so many books out in the Christian market on Sabbath and rest and ruthlessly eliminating hurry, you know, and that's great.
03:21.871 --> 03:27.093
[SPEAKER_00]: And those are all helpful, but I haven't seen much on sleep.
03:27.233 --> 03:33.236
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it's only one little book that I have ever seen that's like specifically a Christian treatment of sleep.
03:33.576 --> 03:34.116
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
03:34.536 --> 03:37.937
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I just felt like it's an understudied under.
03:39.978 --> 03:46.302
[SPEAKER_00]: just under thought about topic in the Christian life and yet it's something we do a third of our lives.
03:46.382 --> 03:48.543
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes up a big chunk of our existence.
03:49.083 --> 03:53.986
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you live to 90, you will have slept 30 years of your life.
03:54.567 --> 03:55.427
[SPEAKER_00]: It's unbelievable.
03:55.587 --> 04:01.411
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just seems to me like something so big that looms so large in our life.
04:02.371 --> 04:15.286
[SPEAKER_00]: is worth thinking about Christianly, and it feels like it's something that we should use as an opportunity to grow spiritually and in our appreciation and our worship of the one who created it.
04:15.386 --> 04:22.233
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, and I wanted to write about it also because I'm kind of a geek for topics where
04:23.347 --> 04:43.187
[SPEAKER_00]: I can take like science and like the two books, you know, the book of Scripture and the book of creation and see how they both kind of paint a picture of something beautiful that can lead us to
Load full transcript
worship God and sleep was just a perfect topic for that approach.
04:43.507 --> 04:43.728
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
04:43.788 --> 04:45.730
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really, I had so much fun like,
04:46.730 --> 04:53.095
[SPEAKER_00]: doing a ton of research, reading all the latest science of sleep, books, science of dreams, and it's fascinating.
04:53.355 --> 05:02.942
[SPEAKER_00]: And I tried to distill that, like what is scientific study about this topic, say, but then adding the layer of
05:03.522 --> 05:05.823
[SPEAKER_00]: as a Christian, what do we make?
05:05.943 --> 05:07.543
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we make sense of that?
05:08.384 --> 05:17.507
[SPEAKER_00]: This kind of miracle, if you will, of what sleep is doing for our health, which is what the science is basically becoming more clear about.
05:17.527 --> 05:26.549
[SPEAKER_00]: The sleep is like this overnight, like restorative miracle that scientists can't actually call a miracle because they're scientists.
05:26.609 --> 05:28.630
[SPEAKER_00]: But I can call it a miracle as a Christian
05:31.711 --> 05:36.453
[SPEAKER_00]: almost like enchant readers like re-enchant readers to the wonder of sleep.
05:36.674 --> 05:44.738
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not something we give two thoughts to most of our lives aside from how do I sleep when I'm shortling to sleep?
05:45.078 --> 05:45.578
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what?
05:45.638 --> 05:45.858
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
05:46.358 --> 05:47.819
[SPEAKER_00]: What tips and tricks can I learn from?
05:49.520 --> 05:56.323
[SPEAKER_00]: But like beyond that level, like there's deeper things to contemplate with sleep, and there's a wisdom there.
05:57.764 --> 05:58.884
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where the title is all about.
05:58.904 --> 06:02.185
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's a wisdom to sleep.
06:02.566 --> 06:05.227
[SPEAKER_00]: It can teach us things that are healthy for our wisdom.
06:05.647 --> 06:05.767
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
06:06.400 --> 06:25.806
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, well, you've already touched on a couple of things I wanted to talk about in a little more depth, especially the dreams and the just why got even created us to need to sleep up before we get there in the scientific side of things, which I found some of these statistics you cite pretty start on even as it relates to life expectancy, right, like what we're.
06:26.406 --> 06:36.335
[SPEAKER_01]: In your research, did you stumble on some maybe previously unknown realities that you'd never connected to just how important sleep is, just like physically concerned?
06:37.258 --> 06:39.700
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think I always like kind of new.
06:39.760 --> 07:01.699
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this is a really important thing for health, but the research is showing like so many connections with like basically, you know, it's a long list, almost seems like almost every like disease or type of kind of cancer or, you know, heart disease, et cetera, like all of it.
07:01.939 --> 07:05.062
[SPEAKER_00]: Studies are showing that you're risk of those things reduces.
07:05.763 --> 07:09.684
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have like regular good sleep, there's something about sleep that
07:11.140 --> 07:23.508
[SPEAKER_00]: just calibrate your body in such a good way in a way God designed beautifully as like this overnight recalibration that it just it helps prevent a lot of bad things from happening.
07:23.688 --> 07:36.355
[SPEAKER_00]: But the opposite is true, you know, if you have regular poor sleep, your your risk of all these diseases goes up and your life expectancy shortens and maybe that's that life expectancy thing.
07:37.396 --> 07:43.180
[SPEAKER_00]: I forget what it is, but it's like four-year, like you live just four-for-guys, like two-and-a-half, women or something.
07:43.560 --> 08:02.952
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so you live longer, like, you know, if you have good sleep, and I think for Christians, like, we talk a lot about stewardship of our bodies and the body is a temple, and, you know, we're pro-life, and I think all of that, if that's really our posture, you know, we need to look at sleep as
08:03.772 --> 08:05.933
[SPEAKER_00]: a way to practice what we preach about that.
08:06.013 --> 08:14.616
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if we want to steward our body as well, honor this gift of this body, good sleep has to be a part of that equation for us.
08:15.256 --> 08:17.637
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you mentioned a good sleep a couple times.
08:17.737 --> 08:18.157
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
08:18.477 --> 08:19.238
[SPEAKER_01]: Define that.
08:19.298 --> 08:20.038
[SPEAKER_01]: What's good sleep?
08:20.058 --> 08:20.858
[SPEAKER_01]: What's bad sleep?
08:21.399 --> 08:21.719
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
08:22.699 --> 08:29.882
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, I think there's the length of like the recommended length, I think is currently like six points.
08:31.463 --> 08:33.985
[SPEAKER_00]: for to 7.8 hours of sleep.
08:34.126 --> 08:43.736
[SPEAKER_00]: It changes, but that something like that is like the ideal zone of the amount of sleep you should be getting every day.
08:43.916 --> 08:44.897
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting is...
08:45.878 --> 08:52.841
[SPEAKER_00]: if you get less than that, or if you get a lot more than that, the health benefits start to diminish.
08:52.961 --> 09:04.506
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's fascinating to me that God kind of created this like magical zone of like the optimal benefits from sleep are not too much and not too little.
09:04.886 --> 09:05.467
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
09:05.607 --> 09:05.787
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
09:06.347 --> 09:27.954
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so it's the amount of sleep, but it's also like how interrupted is your sleep, you know, because you can sleep like a cumulative amount of like eight, eight or nine hours, but if you're like up, you know, for like 30 minutes, segments multiple times during that sleep, it's not going to be as restorative as it could be.
09:28.194 --> 09:32.436
[SPEAKER_01]: So why, okay, why in your study,
09:36.217 --> 09:44.500
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the big question I was asking when I sat down to read this book, why did God create us to sleep a third of our lives?
09:44.940 --> 09:45.640
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't have to.
09:45.660 --> 09:51.062
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have easily created us to be always on, always producing, always working.
09:51.962 --> 10:10.048
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and and even the way he created us to sleep didn't have to be the way that it is like, he could have Some animals, for example, sleep with their eyes open and like, you know, sitting up like he could have created humans that way like we're just like sitting up, you know, they're eyes open, but somehow we're sleeping.
10:10.688 --> 10:16.350
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he created us to have this death like Pomposture of like laid out flat.
10:17.390 --> 10:21.172
[SPEAKER_00]: eyes closed, basically paralyzed dead to the world.
10:21.352 --> 10:23.713
[SPEAKER_00]: We call it, it's an image of death.
10:24.274 --> 10:31.317
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that is a clue, perhaps, to one of the reasons why God created us to see everything about that.
10:31.357 --> 10:31.918
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
10:32.018 --> 10:33.738
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a nightly momentum, morey.
10:33.819 --> 10:35.900
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a nightly reminder of death.
10:36.320 --> 10:37.280
[SPEAKER_00]: We will die.
10:38.181 --> 10:39.782
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's good for our wisdom.
10:39.982 --> 10:43.303
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Psalm 90, teach us to number our days so that we may have a
10:47.439 --> 10:54.245
[SPEAKER_00]: in the Bible between awareness of our fragility and mortality and our wisdom.
10:54.805 --> 11:08.836
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think I suspect that like he created us to have this nightly kind of laid-out flat dead to the world posture in part to just remind us to humble us, to remind us that you are a creature.
11:09.677 --> 11:24.126
[SPEAKER_00]: you are not limitless like I am, you are not infinite, like I am, you are finite, you are fragile, you can't do a lot of things, your body will stop functioning if you don't stop to sleep.
11:24.686 --> 11:36.133
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's this really beautiful kind of like check against our pride that that humbles us and really good way reminds us who we are and who we are not.
11:36.454 --> 11:38.255
[SPEAKER_00]: We are the creature who he is the creator.
11:38.755 --> 11:42.317
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's like one of the big, big benefits for us.
11:42.497 --> 11:48.220
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one of the big kind of aspects of the wisdom of sleep that I'm trying to get out in the book.
11:48.880 --> 11:51.321
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so, I mean, this is a card to me.
11:51.341 --> 12:01.046
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to ask you, it would an antagonistic posture towards sleep, meaning I want as little as possible because I'm going to produce as much as possible.
12:01.326 --> 12:04.467
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, sleep when I'm dead, you know, all the things we've heard
12:06.489
--> 12:08.851
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you connect that to kind of a rebellious act?
12:10.273 --> 12:17.740
[SPEAKER_00]: For sure, I think in our flesh, in our pride, that's our natural inclination.
12:17.800 --> 12:21.683
[SPEAKER_00]: We resist, we resist, and we resist.
12:22.504 --> 12:29.530
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything from Sabbath, taking a Sabbath day to just kind of rhythms of rest and nightly sleep.
12:30.151 --> 12:40.182
[SPEAKER_00]: We resist that, I think, out of inherent pride in an overestimation of our, the importance of us being awake more, right?
12:40.382 --> 12:42.545
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes from a belief that
12:43.685 --> 12:57.093
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more important for the world, for my family, for me, to be awake more, and to be doing, and to be checking things off my list, to be like hustling and grinding it out.
12:57.573 --> 13:06.699
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more important for me to be doing that than it could possibly be for me to sleep eight hours of my day, like, surely in the world needs,
13:07.359 --> 13:09.180
[SPEAKER_00]: needs me to be awake more.
13:09.801 --> 13:10.941
[SPEAKER_00]: That's pride, right?
13:11.021 --> 13:12.783
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a rebellious spirit.
13:13.323 --> 13:18.987
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also rebellious because it's a refusal to accept a good gift of God.
13:19.607 --> 13:26.651
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, sleep above all is a gracious gift from God, Psalm 127, and even frames it that way.
13:26.711 --> 13:28.793
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he gives to his beloved sleep.
13:29.773 --> 13:51.675
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a gift from God and I think it doesn't honor God when we don't gladly receive that gift and kind of choosing to get the bare minimum of sleep and having a low view of sleep as like a necessary evil or like kind of a battery recharge that you know we get what we need from it and then we leave.
13:52.235 --> 14:11.223
[SPEAKER_00]: And wake up, I think that dishonors the gift and the giver, and I think part of why I'm like celebrating sleep as much as I am in this book is because I see it as such a profound gift and again the science of sleep coming from a secular perspective is reinforcing that.
14:12.310 --> 14:36.167
[SPEAKER_00]: research the science is basically saying this is a gift like that we have every night and yet science secular science has no one to thank for that gift like you know all all they can do is like observe it and maybe thank evolution like thank you evolution for you know giving us this gift but that doesn't like that's not a satisfying response like
14:40.260 --> 14:48.428
[SPEAKER_00]: have a God who we can name and thank for designing us with his capability and thanking him for that.
14:48.928 --> 14:56.636
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it would be a different podcast for another day, but to me, it would be hard to think evolution and call anything a gift because you only get what you need to survive.
14:56.796 --> 14:58.598
[SPEAKER_01]: Thus, it's not a gift to enjoy.
14:58.618 --> 15:01.340
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not a separate podcast, separate day.
15:01.381 --> 15:02.462
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me ask you a second.
15:02.662 --> 15:02.922
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
15:04.063 --> 15:27.416
[SPEAKER_01]: we fall asleep and then sometimes these things happen more for some than others and we dream or you know even like our little girl lately you have nightmares and stuff happens when we sleep and we don't control it or pass it in it maybe we do by what we put in our minds it comes back with you did research right in this area there's scientific views of that there's right you know god appears to people in
15:34.325 --> 15:37.027
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this could also be a whole other podcast.
15:37.047 --> 15:37.487
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
15:37.527 --> 15:47.252
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's a huge fascinating topic, but I'll try to be as brief as I can and summarizing those two chapters in my book Underemdes.
15:47.733 --> 15:54.757
[SPEAKER_00]: One is like the scientific underemdes, and then the second one is like the Christian approach to dreams based on what we see in the scripture.
15:55.739 --> 15:59.500
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the science of dreams is mind-blowing.
16:00.100 --> 16:09.482
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we just had the science of dreams, it would be enough to worship God and thank him for creating this insane capability.
16:10.863 --> 16:16.784
[SPEAKER_00]: This unconscious thing that happens without our will, without our control, as we sleep.
16:17.744 --> 16:23.165
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, to summarize kind of what science thinks dreaming is for.
16:26.471 --> 16:28.343
[SPEAKER_00]: is it's basically an overnight like
16:29.267 --> 16:33.008
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of they call it a sleek, dependent memory processing system.
16:33.088 --> 16:46.573
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, you know, when you go through your waking life, your experience in experiencing a lot of new things, you're having conversations with people, you're doing work, you're encountering the world.
16:47.014 --> 16:49.514
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot of input that is coming into your brain.
16:50.175 --> 16:57.177
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, your brain needs space and time to process and kind of categorize it and start to make connections
16:59.198 --> 17:03.441
[SPEAKER_00]: How did that recent conversation that Brett had with Jamie on a podcast today?
17:03.501 --> 17:08.024
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that connect with other conversations he's had with other people?
17:08.224 --> 17:09.745
[SPEAKER_00]: And where do I categorize that?
17:10.145 --> 17:12.767
[SPEAKER_00]: So our brain is doing that work as we're dreaming.
17:13.087 --> 17:20.952
[SPEAKER_00]: What we perceive as dreams, you know, when we remember a dream, and it's like a wild connection between things that are
17:23.334 --> 17:30.256
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what's actually happening there is our brain is like trying to make connections and sometimes those connections are loose and wild.
17:30.716 --> 17:41.279
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes they're a bit more logical, but your dreams are your brain trying to figure out how to categorize information and where to store and do memories.
17:42.159 --> 17:45.980
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's just amazing that God created this cognitive
17:51.710 --> 17:58.856
[SPEAKER_00]: allow us to just take in the world when we're awake and then kind of your brain figures out what to do with that information.
17:58.876 --> 18:00.897
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, while you're sleeping.
18:01.258 --> 18:13.387
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the second chapter on dreaming in my book kind of goes through like all the biblical examples of dreaming and I make the argument that like clearly as a Christian, if we believe the Bible is true,
18:14.168 --> 18:18.109
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to have a category for dreaming as divine communication.
18:18.309 --> 18:39.314
[SPEAKER_00]: It's obviously a realm where God has a track record of advancing his purposes in the world, by prompting someone in a dream, warning someone about something, you know, think about Jesus, you know, Joseph, Mary and Joseph, and the warning about Herod and, you know,
18:40.892 --> 18:42.272
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's lots of other examples.
18:42.973 --> 18:50.755
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that the hard part for a lot of Christians today is the question of like does that still happen?
18:50.875 --> 18:54.377
[SPEAKER_00]: Does God still speak to us in our dreams?
18:54.397 --> 19:01.459
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we have to tread carefully there because certain Christian traditions do read too much into dreams.
19:01.719 --> 19:06.901
[SPEAKER_00]: Like every dream is something, but I also think the other extreme
19:10.122 --> 19:16.403
[SPEAKER_00]: Christian traditions today that believe like no like that if you think if you think God is speaking to you in a dream It's not him.
19:16.583 --> 19:17.084
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not him.
19:17.324 --> 19:19.984
[SPEAKER_00]: Right really like I think from my point of view.
19:20.004 --> 19:36.728
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like God is God He did this before we don't want to put him in a box and say he can't get a hold of our attention through a dream and in fact in the Muslim world today God is very active and dreams that 25% of of Muslims who convert
19:37.368 --> 19:45.793
[SPEAKER_00]: to Christianity, say it was a dream, so I don't think it's just the Middle East where this happens.
19:46.213 --> 19:59.421
[SPEAKER_00]: I know plenty of people and have heard stories of people and Western cultures today who have a dream that they can't shake and it's something that they feel like God is prompting them in some directions.
20:00.736 --> 20:15.289
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so so there's that aspect of dreaming that I think as Christians we need to be open to that and then the other big topic that I talk about in that chapter is Dreaming is a really active realm of spiritual warfare
20:16.009 --> 20:17.790
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know,
I was about to ask you about that.
20:18.351 --> 20:18.731
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
20:18.931 --> 20:33.141
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, and all of us experientially kind of know that right all of us have had like night terrors or nightmares where we felt like an oppressive spirit trying to get it foothold in our dreams.
20:33.962 --> 20:40.967
[SPEAKER_00]: So not only can God kind of be in our dreams trying to get our attention, but I think the devil can as well and there's a, you know,
20:41.697 --> 20:45.779
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a whole tradition in Christian writing about dreams that talks about that.
20:45.799 --> 20:54.362
[SPEAKER_00]: And I quote a few of the really church fathers who talk about that, but what can we do in the face of that reality?
20:54.442 --> 20:57.384
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I do think there's some things we can control.
20:57.404 --> 21:05.127
[SPEAKER_00]: And this gets to the point about your daughter that you said had, oh yeah, my son has nightmares on my middle son.
21:06.354 --> 21:15.701
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there is a lot of wisdom to kind of being a good steward of your inputs, especially kind of later in the day or I prefer bed.
21:16.691 --> 21:29.681
[SPEAKER_00]: because if you're like watching scary movies or dooms scrolling on your phone right before a bed, that's, you know, you're kind of setting yourself up for some darkness and your dreams.
21:30.161 --> 21:37.067
[SPEAKER_00]: You shouldn't be too surprised if your dreams are kind of become this area, this arena of spiritual darkness.
21:37.827 --> 21:42.269
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so to the extent that you can control your inputs and you can't always, right?
21:42.909 --> 21:52.392
[SPEAKER_00]: And that breaks my heart as a dad when there's things that are out of our control, like, you know, like our kids, there was like a fire in our neighborhood where like a bus was on fire.
21:52.492 --> 22:02.355
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was like a scary thing that stuck in their little imaginations for like weeks, even years, like it happened like a year ago and my son still talks about it.
22:02.996 --> 22:06.477
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can't help that, like that's in their mind, that's in their subconscious.
22:08.268 --> 22:10.390
[SPEAKER_00]: Try to control what you can control with inputs.
22:11.150 --> 22:18.817
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when you do have a nightmare, and you wake up, and you're very troubled, and if you're a parent, you're dealing with that with a kid.
22:19.277 --> 22:26.964
[SPEAKER_00]: Just pray a peel to the Lord, the Prince of Peace, like bring peace into my mind, call my soul.
22:28.345 --> 22:34.030
[SPEAKER_00]: Every parent has those experiences where you have to come for your child, when they wake up from a nightmare.
22:34.250 --> 22:45.680
[SPEAKER_00]: And because it's a realm of spiritual warfare, I think it's so appropriate to pray over your dreams, both before you go to bed, when you wake up in the night, and you've had a nightmare.
22:46.981 --> 22:48.842
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a battleground.
22:48.882 --> 22:53.046
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a spiritual battleground, and we should come armed with prayer.
22:53.586 --> 23:06.109
[SPEAKER_00]: And even scripture, I think a good habit before bed for all of us, kids, adults, just like read scripture, like go to bed with the word of God as one of the last things in your mind.
23:07.029 --> 23:13.731
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a good practice that can help a lot of us, maybe have less interrupted sleep and dreams.
23:13.811 --> 23:16.031
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that's a really good, not a really good word.
23:16.091 --> 23:16.731
[SPEAKER_01]: Did anything
23:20.112 --> 23:24.787
[SPEAKER_01]: When you were digging into this and starting to write and starting to reflect, yeah.
23:26.170 --> 23:52.427
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think I didn't realize the extent of kind of parallels to the gospel in like in like sleeping and waking up like and I admit that I kind of like I milk that parallel for all that it's worth in the book, but I think there is a lot there and I didn't go into the book thinking that that would be a huge part of the book, but yeah.
23:52.868 --> 23:58.259
[SPEAKER_00]: It ends up being a big theme, you know, the idea that, like, sleep is an image of death.
23:58.680 --> 24:00.705
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a nightly reminder that we are dead.
24:01.306 --> 24:02.088
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um,
24:02.748 --> 24:04.890
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, we're spiritually dead.
24:04.930 --> 24:07.613
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't wake ourselves up spiritually.
24:08.113 --> 24:09.275
[SPEAKER_00]: We are dead in our sin.
24:09.975 --> 24:18.024
[SPEAKER_00]: And we rely on external grace to raise us out of our death to new life.
24:18.484 --> 24:23.369
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when we wake up in the morning, when we rise again as the sun rises,
24:24.585 --> 24:42.443
[SPEAKER_00]: We are waking up from the death of sleep, and it should remind us, it should point us to the gospel hope of we have a hope of resurrection, like having a life after death out of the spiritual death by the grace of God.
24:43.552 --> 24:44.632
[SPEAKER_00]: we are rescued from that.
24:45.072 --> 24:46.493
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have eternal life.
24:46.553 --> 24:50.894
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's another thing that I, you know, I can't speak for God.
24:50.914 --> 24:52.134
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't get inside his mind.
24:52.194 --> 25:00.976
[SPEAKER_00]: But I suspect that's part of why he created us to have this circadian rhythm of sleeping, which is kind of an image of death.
25:01.116 --> 25:04.517
[SPEAKER_00]: And then waking up every day, which is an image of resurrection.
25:05.097 --> 25:05.677
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of this.
25:06.697 --> 25:15.527
[SPEAKER_00]: gospel picture that can point us if we let ourselves be reminded of this theological truth.
25:16.027 --> 25:22.895
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a great opportunity to just daily rehearse to ourselves, the gift and the grace of
the gospel.
25:23.876 --> 25:37.679
[SPEAKER_00]: I was dead in my sin, but by the grace of God, I wake to new life and the nightly rhythm of lying down to the death of sleep, waking up in the morning to new life is a reminder of that in a beautiful way.
25:38.760 --> 25:40.581
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, an occurred to me too.
25:40.621 --> 25:50.247
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you'd affirmed this, but even in reading your stuff is going like, if I think if they're a parent, I know how important bedtime is for the four trussle kids.
25:50.927 --> 26:01.574
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, now it's psychotic during the school year and you practice till nine and you get everything's thrown, but in the ideal world, where we have a rhythm and a routine and predictable sleep patterns.
26:02.074 --> 26:07.057
[SPEAKER_01]: But it occurred to me, you know, through talking to you and you're riding, like spiritual formation,
26:08.788 --> 26:15.655
[SPEAKER_01]: Bedtime as a component of discipleship is maybe something even as adults we should work in more intentionally.
26:16.856 --> 26:17.637
[SPEAKER_00]: No, for sure.
26:17.737 --> 26:22.581
[SPEAKER_00]: I think sleep is a spiritual discipline and in the sense that.
26:23.681 --> 26:26.183
[SPEAKER_00]: It is practicing faith in God.
26:26.803 --> 26:45.396
[SPEAKER_00]: It's practicing that surrender that comes when you truly trust in God's provision and His sovereignty and you're able to kind of put aside your to-do list, you're able to stop working and just kind of ease into His sovereign provision and accept that gift asleep.
26:45.896 --> 26:46.456
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a real,
26:47.915 --> 26:54.636
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a real practice of faith, it's a discipline that I think can grow us in our trust in God.
26:54.756 --> 26:58.417
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's something that for our kids, we can make that connection for them.
26:58.497 --> 27:07.499
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, just like mommy and daddy, go to bed with things that are burdens and were anxious about things that we wish we would have had time to accomplish.
27:08.079 --> 27:09.599
[SPEAKER_00]: You have that too, no doubt.
27:10.200 --> 27:15.081
[SPEAKER_00]: You have things in your mind that are troubling you, maybe worries about tomorrow and the
27:17.382 --> 27:26.069
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we go to sleep, it's an invitation to be reminded that God watches over you, right?
27:26.169 --> 27:28.571
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Psalm 121 versus three and four.
27:29.311 --> 27:31.233
[SPEAKER_00]: He who keeps you does not slumber.
27:31.313 --> 27:34.455
[SPEAKER_00]: He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.
27:35.216 --> 27:35.716
[SPEAKER_00]: That's good.
27:36.056 --> 27:43.362
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he is awake and he doesn't sleep and he keeps watch, that reality should free us up.
27:43.402 --> 27:45.384
[SPEAKER_00]: It should liberate us to sleep easier,
27:47.265 --> 28:05.386
[SPEAKER_00]: I am not ultimately like it's it's not as important for me to kind of be alert all the time and be be watchful all the time it's my provision is not ultimately the most important thing in the world it's God's provision it's God's watchfulness
28:06.416 --> 28:25.752
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that is such a beautiful reminder of his sovereignty and I think there's so much potential there for our spiritual discipline and growth to see nightly sleep as not just a gift for our physical health but a real gift for our spiritual vitality as well.
28:26.853 --> 28:36.995
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and I know we only got a few more minutes, but I'm doing some other study and reading just for me personally on the hurried nature of my pace of life.
28:37.295 --> 28:43.736
[SPEAKER_01]: So you, for example, when I go to the gym, I've made myself and it is torturous.
28:44.036 --> 28:48.877
[SPEAKER_01]: I no longer let myself listen to podcasts at two times speed.
28:49.177 --> 28:51.838
[SPEAKER_01]: I do it at one because, yeah.
28:52.198 --> 28:57.361
[SPEAKER_01]: But because here's what I've noticed, there's a frenetic pace to everything that I do, totally.
28:57.401 --> 29:08.266
[SPEAKER_01]: Which to me implies I've bought into this maximization of productivity, which means I don't actually, I'm not calibrated to slow down in other areas of life.
29:09.247 --> 29:09.967
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that make sense?
29:10.387 --> 29:10.748
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
29:10.828 --> 29:12.589
[SPEAKER_01]: And that includes sleep.
29:12.869 --> 29:20.052
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm not programming myself, they're my own patterns, to think it's actually okay to rest.
29:21.897 --> 29:38.813
[SPEAKER_01]: and this bigger picture of sleep I think is crucial to that conversation because if my pace of life is frenetic up until and now I've got to get my six hours yeah I've brought that same posture to the table and I'm making sense with that yeah yeah and I think it's all connected like if
29:39.434 --> 29:48.148
[SPEAKER_00]: like you're saying, if you go through life in every other aspect of your waking life, you have no value for margin or slowing down.
29:48.208 --> 29:54.177
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just kind of this maximization mindset of like cram as much in every single moment.
29:54.197 --> 29:54.418
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:54.898 --> 30:18.343
[SPEAKER_00]: it's not going to vote well for your sleep because up until the point of hitting the pillow you're going to be like frantically doing things on your phone and you know cramming in another Netflix show right before bed and we need I think we need to kind of practice restfulness and kind of a non-angious pace through all of our lives and I think in this is one of the connections I
30:20.063 --> 30:31.849
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, the idea of Sabbath, the idea of rest, including God's resting on the seventh day in Genesis, and the idea of the biological reality that he created for sleep is all connected.
30:31.909 --> 30:40.233
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it all comes from the same emphasis that he has, which is what I think it boils down to.
30:41.253 --> 30:51.098
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all kind of bearing witness to God's abundance and his spirit of overflowing abundance and grace.
30:51.138 --> 31:02.763
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not a, he is not a God of brute efficiency, where like, what matters, what matters most is just like, do, do, do accomplish, accomplish, strive, you know, work harder.
31:03.344 --> 31:04.764
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not a slave driver.
31:04.824 --> 31:05.705
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, when he
31:06.998 --> 31:09.400
[SPEAKER_00]: freeze the Israelites from bondage and Egypt.
31:09.460 --> 31:16.946
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a stark contrast because they're coming out of a culture that is, work, work, work, work, work, work, no rest, you know.
31:17.006 --> 31:17.486
[SPEAKER_00]: Right point.
31:17.666 --> 31:18.087
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
31:18.207 --> 31:19.688
[SPEAKER_00]: And what do they come into?
31:20.148 --> 31:22.110
[SPEAKER_00]: They come into his rest, and he that's...
31:23.290 --> 31:33.015
[SPEAKER_00]: He establishes the Sabbath and asks them to keep it holy as a way to be set apart from the Egyptian culture they're coming out of.
31:33.595 --> 31:38.658
[SPEAKER_00]: The Israelites are people who do rest, who don't work work work all the time.
31:39.378 --> 31:50.444
[SPEAKER_00]: And so as Christians, I think we need to be set apart in that way, in a culture that is so oriented around relentless pace, hectic pace, never stopping, never pausing.
31:50.704 --> 31:53.625
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to be a people who have a different kind of pace of life.
31:54.706 --> 31:59.268
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the wisdom of sleep, you get anywhere you get books, Brad, so thank you for you.
31:59.589 --> 32:05.432
[SPEAKER_01]: And this work, I will say, my moment of greatest connection is in your introduction.
32:06.693 --> 32:09.776
[SPEAKER_01]: and you reference dosing all to the masters.
32:10.196 --> 32:20.624
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sitting here and going, I never known for all of these years that the melodious voice of Jim Nance, washing over me on a Sunday afternoon was from the Lord.
32:21.665 --> 32:25.468
[SPEAKER_00]: That is one of life's best common grays gifts, I think, absolutely.
32:25.749 --> 32:26.629
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm with you.
32:26.649 --> 32:29.652
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, hey, well, let's do it again, and thanks for your time.
32:30.372 --> 32:31.133
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks, Jamie.
32:35.242 --> 32:38.345
[SPEAKER_01]: We thank you for listening to this episode of The Downline Podcast.
32:38.765 --> 32:48.673
[SPEAKER_01]: Please subscribe, give us five stars, help us to get this content out as many people as possible as we continue to partner with men and women in the great commission as we see them.
32:48.953 --> 32:51.856
[SPEAKER_01]: To make disciples as a lifestyle for a lifetime.