Napping by faith alone
Culture & Arts
by Flynn Evans
Post Date:
August 4, 2026
Napping by faith alone
BOOKS | Developing a theology of sleep
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We don’t usually give much thought to sleep, but in his new book, Brett McCracken, a senior editor at The Gospel Coalition, persuades us there is much more to sleep than what meets the back of our eyelids. In The Wisdom of Sleep: How Rest Reveals God’s Truth and Revives Weary Souls (Zondervan, 208 pp.), he suggests, “The mysterious realm of sleep is a place where God shakes us out of time and pulls us toward eternity.” Rest and sleep point us toward the ultimate truths of the gospel in which we gladly receive a rest we never earned and are simply called to trust in Christ’s eternal, comforting embrace. In the whole of Scripture, one cannot overlook how “rest is a theme God chooses to emphasize.” McCracken encourages us to dig into this aspect of our bodily existence and what it means for Christian spirituality.
The science of sleep McCracken reviews is enlightening. While sleep scientists remain unable to explain why we sleep, the holistic and healing benefits are manifold. Evolutionary theory struggles to account for sleep’s place in human physiology, and the utilitarian approach to sleep it encourages gives no consideration to what it means for us spiritually. A thoroughly biblical view acknowledges sleep as “a theological mirror that nightly gives us a valuable image of our mortal frame,” not just a matter of biological imperatives. In this respect, valuing sleep is itself an apologetic. Being human is more than producing and consuming. Resting demonstrates that there are ends beyond earthly toil.
God’s institution of the Sabbath in particular reflects the divine intentionality behind sleep and rest in the structure of the cosmos. Christening the completion of creation with Sabbath proves beyond any doubt that we are built for such a “practical, rhythmic tether” in order to keep us bound closely to a right and intimate relationship with our Creator. Christ Himself modeled sleep as a spiritual discipline, and He supplies the rest of God through His provision of salvation. Yet worship, not indolence, is the beating heart of the Sabbath principle. Through regular commitment to acts of individual and corporate worship, we remind ourselves of our perpetual need for relief from world-weariness in greater communion with our Lord.
McCracken stretches his analogies and typologies far in his attempt to learn from sleep, insisting throughout that the “sleep-wake cycle … enact[s] nothing less than the gospel arc itself.” The longing that it awakens, however, for rest that never ends is undeniable. How good it is to remember that the God we serve has promised to one day give us that very thing.
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Flynn Evans is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Mississippi. His writing has appeared in Providence Magazine, Ad Fontes, and Mere Orthodoxy.