Unless Jehovah builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless Jehovah guards the city,
The watchman keeps watch in vain.
It is vain for you to rise up early,
To lie down late,
To eat the bread of toil;
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.
— Psalm 127:1-2
The Lord loves us and gives us sleep. This doesn’t mean that we should be lazy. We will see in the next psalm that there is a time to rise up and work. But this psalm firstly tells us not to run around so much and work so hard. Especially when we are young and lacking maturity, we should learn to rest.
This follows the realization in the previous psalm that we are good for nothing but death. We have seen our self and want to be delivered, and we have realized that the only way is to be sown as a seed into the ground to die. What is it to die? In this psalm it means to stop working so hard, and rest.
Adapted from The Journey of Life, page 67.
Tomorrow: “Stopping Ourselves and Being Transformed”