Six Hours of Sleep and a Verdict

The alarm goes at four fifty and he is up before it finishes, because he has been up before it finishes for nineteen years.

Plant hire yard, four men on the books, first machine off at half six. He puts the kettle on, and while it goes he kneels at the end of the sofa in the dark front room, elbows on the cushion, the way his father in law showed him the winter he came back to church.

Some mornings that ten minutes is the best thing in his week. The words come up out of him with a kind of heat, he prays for his lads by name, he gets off the floor and he could take on the day and half the next one. He has told people, quietly, that it is the only reason the business survived the bad year.

And some mornings he kneels there and there is nothing. Same cushion, same dark, same words, and it is like talking into a shed. He gets up feeling like a man going through a motion, and he drives to the yard turning it over: something has gone wrong. Something is between us. He runs through the week looking for what he did.

This has been the shape of it for years. Good mornings and shed mornings. He has never told anyone about the shed mornings.

Then his daughter puts an app on his phone at Christmas, one of those sleep things, because she worries about him. He does not care about it. He ignores it for a month. Then in February, laid up with a bad back and bored, he scrolls it, and out of nothing but idleness he starts putting a small mark on the calendar for the mornings that go well and the mornings that go flat.

Six weeks later he sits in the cab at lunchtime and looks at the two rows side by side, and his ears go hot.

They match. Not roughly. Almost exactly. Six and a half hours or better, and God is close and the prayers have fire in them. Under five and a half, and the shed. Every time. It does not track with sin. It does not track with Sunday. It does not track with anything he had been searching himself over for nineteen years.

It tracks with sleep.

He sits there with a sandwich going soft in his hand and he does not know whether he has just been handed the most freeing thing he has ever seen or had the bottom taken out of the whole business. Because if the closeness was sleep, then what was any of it? And if the distance was sleep, then what has he been apologizing for since 2006?

You have sat in that cab. Maybe it is not sleep for you. Maybe it is the second coffee, or the state of the house, or whether the weekend went well, but you know the feeling of getting up off the floor and reading your own flatness as a message from God.

The man who kept moving the hill

There is a scene in Numbers that reads like a comedy until you notice yourself in it.

A king called Balak wants Israel cursed, and he hires a man to do it, and the man opens his mouth and out comes a blessing instead. So Balak does the most human thing in the Bible. He moves him. Come to another place, he says, where you can see them from a different angle, and curse them from there. So they go up a hill and build altars and try again, and out comes the blessing again. And they do it a third time.

Change the view, change the word. That is the whole strategy. And in the middle of it, this comes out:

God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good?Numbers 23:19

Sit with that a moment, because it is not a sentiment, it is a legal statement about the nature of the One who swore. He is not a man. He does not change His mind the way we change ours, He does not have a bad night, He is not talked round, and He does not wake up on the wrong side of anything. What He said stands at four fifty in the morning on five hours of sleep exactly as it stands at ten o'clock on a Sunday with the room singing.

And you are standing on that and not on your own reading of the room. Right now, as you read, Numbers 23:19 is a wall under your feet and not a nice thought, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to feel something before He will hold it there.

What is a mood, and what is a verdict

Here is the distinction that would have saved that man nineteen years of quiet self examination.

A mood is a report on you. It comes up out of your body, your night, your blood sugar, your back, the argument you did not finish, the thing at the yard that is waiting for you. It is real information and it is honest information. It is a report on the man.

A verdict is a report from the bench. It comes down. It says what has been settled about you by someone with the standing to settle it.

We spend our lives reading the first as the second. The flat morning comes up out of a short night, and by the time it reaches us it has put on a robe and started announcing what God thinks. And a good man who loves God will then go looking for the cause in himself, which is the most sincere and most exhausting mistake in the Christian life.

Look at how gently God handled this in one of His own prophets. Elijah had just seen fire fall and then ran a day into the wilderness and asked to die, and heaven's first move was not a rebuke and not a sermon. An angel touched him and told him to eat, and he slept, and was touched again and fed again, and only then, days later, came the word. Sleep, bread, sleep, bread, then the still small voice.

Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you.1 Kings 19:7

God has never once been surprised by a tired man. He made the body that gets tired. So hear it as spoken over you: you are not under judgement for your energy levels, and I am not saying that to be nice to you. Scripture shows heaven feeding a worn out prophet before it says a word to him, and the Spirit who did that is the one at your sofa on the short nights, doing what He does whether or not your chest is warm.

What to do with a morning that gives you nothing

So the man in the cab has two choices with what he found out, and only one of them is any good.

He can decide it was all chemistry, in which case he has traded a shed morning for a permanent one. Or he can move his feet off the mood and onto the oath, which is the only ground that was ever holding him anyway. The heat on the good mornings was not the covenant. It was a good night's sleep meeting a real God, and there is nothing wrong with it, but it was never the thing keeping him.

And here is the practical piece, which is very old. An oath is a thing that gets said out loud and heard. That is what makes it an oath and not an intention. So on a morning that hands you nothing, you do not manufacture a feeling. You read the promise out loud, in the second person, so it is being said to you and not thought about by you, and then you say the word sworn after it, out loud, in your own voice, in your own kitchen.

Not as a technique, and not as a formula that produces anything. Simply because a man who cannot feel can still hear, and God chose words for exactly this reason.

You have an oath over you this morning and it did not come out of your chest. Numbers 23:19 says the One who spoke it is not a man who changes His mind, and His Spirit carried those words down to you across three thousand years so they would be in the room on the flat days.