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Sermon: Pleasure in Moderation: Sleep in Moderation Date: October 25, 2026, Afternoon Text: Proverbs 24:33-34 Series: N/A Preacher: Conley Owens Audio: https://storage.googleapis.com/pbc-ca-sermons/2026/261025-PleasureinModeration_SleepinModeration.aac
Please turn your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 24, Proverbs chapter 24, we'll be reading verses 30 through 34. When you have that, please stand. I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense.
And behold, it was overgrown with thorns, the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered it, I looked and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you this day for your word. We ask that you would help us to understand sleep, that we would be a people who sleep peacefully, trusting in Jesus Christ.
That we would be a people who do not sleep in excess. In Jesus' name. Amen. Well, continuing on in our series on pleasure in moderation, we are now looking at sleep in moderation. I mentioned last time the Westminster Larger Catechism, question number 135, talking about the duties required in the Sixth Commandment.
It includes a sober, sober meaning moderate, a sober use of meat, drink, physic, and then sleep comes after that. Last week we looked at physic, which is medicine. Moderate use of medicine this week, we'll be looking at moderate use of sleep.
This passage speaks of excess sleep. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man. This is how it happens.
Just a little bit of extra sleep doesn't seem to be so much of a big deal, but that leads to a pattern, and before you know it, you have missed years of progress that could have been attained. Years of productivity.
Those people who should be doing things, who have certain duties, to take care of a vineyard or whatever it may be, all those things go to ruin with excess sleep. There's a parallel passage in Proverbs 6, verses 9 -11 that says,.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
Once again, very similar, but asking the question of the sluggard, when will you arise from your sleep? How long will you lie there? How long will it go on? Obviously, with all of these, we are addressing two extremes.
One is the excess of sleep, and the other is too little sleep. So first, sleep is good. It is good to sleep and not to have too little sleep. There are different things that go to war with someone's sleep.
Different anxieties. Anxiety being the underlying thing that wars with people getting enough sleep. One is the anxiety of ambition. Psalm 127, verse 2 says,. There are many people who so think that it is by their own strength that they will have a rightly ordered home, that they will have excellent wealth, that they will have good things, that they labor in excess and sleep very little.
But, if ultimately all results from productivity come from God, this is unnecessary. So that anxiety over ambition leads to too little sleep. Then there's also guilt. Anxiety that comes from sin and guilt leads to too little sleep.
Psalm 102, verse 7 says,. Later on, in verses 9 and 10, it makes it clear that this is about the anger of the Lord that makes the psalmist anxious. Those who do not have pardon from the Lord, who have not sought Him for pardon and received it, they are an anxious people who do not get the sleep that they would otherwise get.
There's also the anxiety of spiritual affliction. It might come from other sources. Psalm 77, verse 4 says, in the context of various spiritual afflictions. This might be temptations or other things that are after you where you have not gotten victory from the Lord by not having sufficiently sought Him in prayer.
Maybe you were in a season that God has you in where spiritual afflictions are assigned to you. Job 7, 3 -4 talks about seasons where physical affliction might be assigned to a person. Clearly, some of these are not people's faults.
Job was not in control of the affliction that was on him. Yet, others of these things are people's own fault. It is people's own fault if they have sinned against the Lord and do not have His pardon because they have not sought Him.
There's a problem if people, out of their own anxious ambition, are trying to be productive apart from the blessings of the Lord and so labor in vain. Now, sleep. Good sleep is a gift from God. It is something that He gives.
Psalm 3, verse 5 says, God blesses His people with sleep. Here, it's talking about the security of sleep. The psalmist can say that he lay down and slept and woke again because he was not troubled. Nothing came and attacked him.
This is God's goodness to him. But then elsewhere, we see that not just the love of God gives sleep in it being given, but also the love of God gives sleep in that as one recognizes that love, they can sleep securely.
Psalm 4, verse 8 says,. For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. Knowing that God is in control, knowing that you have the love of God, is something that gives much sleep. So those who sleep too little, it may be that they have a portion to them, some affliction for a season, but often people sleep too little because they have all kinds of anxieties that they ought not have and they have not brought to the Lord.
Those anxieties need to be taken to the Lord. He will deal with them, reassure you that you might have sufficient sleep. Okay, now on the other end of it, excess sleep is bad. Excess sleep is sinful even.
What is the result of excess sleep? It explains here, a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber and want like an armed man. What comes upon a person?
Poverty. Proverbs 20 verse 13 says, Love not sleep lest you come to poverty. Open your eyes and you will have plenty of bread. Now, when you think of poverty, you might only be thinking of material wealth, actual currency that you would carry, but there's all kinds of poverty that comes to a person if they oversleep, if they spend too much time just being lazy, sleeping in, not working.
It might be poverty in your bank account as you do not advance. And if you think about the way these things compound, it's not just, you know, most people are salaried these days. It's not like in those times where the more that you worked, literally that very much directly went to the amount of money that you had.
But now as people are salaried, it might not seem like so much of an issue. However, if you advance in your career early, these things compound and then before you know it, the loss of productivity is great.
There are all kinds of advancement opportunities that you could have had that you would have missed, all sorts of things. But beyond just material things, think about how this affects relationships. Think about how this affects your own home.
If you are lazy in the nature of trying to build up your home, trying to keep it well-ordered, if you are a husband and a father or even a mother looking over her children, all kinds of ways you might invest in their education, few say, well, you know what?
This is not something I need to be too anxious about right now. And that may be very well true. In fact, that is often very good advice for young parents is not to borrow trouble from tomorrow, to simply take it one day at a time.
But if you are so negligent in this that you think that, well, we can kind of just not really try that hard because it's not a big deal to take a day off one day, and then you look and five years later, there's been five years where you've barely been trying in your role in your home, as a husband, as a father, as a mother, whatever the case may be, and you will see that your home has rafter sagging, as it says elsewhere in the Proverbs.
These are not things where you want to neglect them. Your spiritual life, you can have spiritual poverty. The Bible talks frequently about rising early in the morning as being something that people who are excellent in prayer do.
If you sleep in, you do not rise early in the morning, you will sleep in until you absolutely have to, until you absolutely have to wake up in order to go about your duties, and then you do not end up praying, well, that might not seem like a big deal for one day, but then you do it the next day and the next day and the next day, and then you look back five years later, ten years later, and you are bereft of all kinds of spiritual productivity, of all kinds of spiritual maturity and growth that you would have otherwise had, had you not developed that habit, had you instead persisted in rising at the time you ought to rise in order to pray.
What is the sin that causes people to sleep in, that causes people to sleep in excess? The answer is laziness. Proverbs 19 .15 says, Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger.
Now, you may think that this is just about what I've mentioned already, sleeping in when someone ought to rise and they choose not to rise, rather they choose to just sit in bed, hit the snooze a bunch of times.
That's not the only thing that this is talking about. There's all kinds of slothfulness that leads to less sleep. There's a slothfulness in the evening. We face all kinds of temptations today, previous generations did not face.
You can stay up very late in ways that did not make sense before electricity. You have all kinds of opportunities for entertainment that did not exist until very recently. There are all kinds of temptations, and all that laziness leads to a lack of sleep.
Then there's the laziness earlier in the day. A lot of people will tell themselves that they're night owls, things like that, and so because they have developed such an identity around their patterns and around their habits, they will justify all kinds of procrastination in the morning after they have risen, and they are going about their day, and they don't do their duties until a certain time, late in the day, or maybe they're in the workplace, and half the day goes before they really start their duties in earnest, and then they start their duties, but because they have started late, that means that it eats into time in which they would otherwise have been able to sleep at the appropriate time, and instead they end up sleeping more because everything is all out of order.
Ecclesiastes 5 .12 says,. Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep. This is an interesting statement. You would think that the one who is rich would have easy sleep.
It would be easy for him to sleep because he has everything he needs, he doesn't have anxieties, but one who works hard is going to get full sleep. The one who sits around and doesn't do anything ends up not enjoying sleep that much.
This is a surprising, counterintuitive truth. I've pointed this out a number of times before when it comes to the Sabbath. I believe that the reason why so many people struggle to enjoy the rest of the Lord's Day is because they are resting on all the other days in ways that they're not supposed to, in ways that they're supposed to be productive.
And so when it comes to more rest, that doesn't sound like fun at that point. Same thing is true with sleep. The one who sits around all day and does not work hard and rests just by the very nature of his activity throughout the day, he will not find the rest of sleep good.
It will escape him. Proverbs 26, 14 says, This is describing the one who, because of his laziness, does not get good sleep. And then on top of that, imagine the person in the morning just turning over, turning over because they're trying to go back to sleep because they don't want to wake up.
That is the picture that is given here. Now there's all kinds of temptations that lead to this laziness. It's not really, there are many sins where there is one category of sin, but then there are different temptations behind the sin.
I find this as I counsel people. There'll be very substantial sins that you would think would all be kind of the same. Maybe it's sexual sin. But you find that every individual, the reason that they end up going to that same sin, whether it be sexual sin or whatever it is, is often very different.
Often very different kinds of temptations. So to give you a few temptations that you could consider in your own life for why it might be like this, there may be an idolatry of comfort. You believe that comfort is what you need in order to be happy in life.
And so the comfort of sleep is something that you must have that you don't want to compromise on. And then there are also times when people do not grieve the way that they ought to grieve, and so instead of grieving for the period of time that God has set, grieve for much longer, engage in a lot of self-pity, do not end up sleeping in, subject themselves to all sorts of things that lead to depression.
They do not give gratitude to the Lord, and so they are not happy. They are not thankful. They are instead sad and depressed, end up sleeping in. There are all kinds of things, but at the end of the day, whether it be an escapism to try to get away from work because you don't like the things that are facing you, whether it be any other kind of laziness, ultimately all these things are different forms of pride, believing that you deserve something that you do not deserve.
On the one hand, if you notice, what is the anxious person doing? He is not trusting that the Lord's purposes for him are good. What is the person who is oversleeping and struggling with laziness doing?
They are not trusting that the means the Lord has provided are good, the means being that he wake and do the difficult task that is before him. So in either of these cases, it is someone not trusting the purpose of the Lord or the means of the Lord.
It is a lack of trust in the Lord. It is a trust in the Lord that gives proper sleep, whether it be keeping you from too little or too much. And it is trust in Jesus Christ that leads to the right trust in God that gives a proper sleep.
If you think about Jesus and what we see about him in sleep, you'll notice several things. One, he is excellent at being awake, and he is excellent at sleeping. Consider these verses. Mark 4, 38. But he was in the stern asleep on the cushion, and they woke him and said to him, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
He so trusted in his God that it didn't matter how much the ocean was raging. He was perfectly sound asleep. This is a man who had not any kind of sinful anxiety. He was sleeping perfectly in the boat.
Now, count that different to others. Others might sleep deeply, but not as they ought, but not for the reasons that they ought. Jonah 1, 5 -6. Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had laid down and was fast asleep.
So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your God. Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish. Now, why was the ocean raging for Jonah?
The ocean was raging for Jonah because of Jonah's sin. And Jonah is trying to escape the difficulties that are in front of him. And so he is sleeping, oversleeping, because of all kinds of anxieties that he has, all kinds of things that he does not trust the means that God has before him.
But Jesus, when he sleeps sweetly, it's not because of any sin. It is because he's trusting perfectly in his God and because he is free of any guilt. And then we see Jesus being awake. Many times he rises early to pray, but Matthew 26, 40 -41.
And he came to his disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, So could you not watch with me one hour? Jesus stayed awake when it was necessary to stay awake. He understood that the means of God were good in prayer and stayed awake.
As we are joined to Christ in faith, as we turn to him in faith and trust in him, he so joins us to him, filling our lives with a further understanding of who God is, that we would trust in him, that we would not be anxious, that we would not be lazy, that we would trust both God's purposes and the means that God has given, both his purposes for us and the means that he has given us to accomplish those purposes so that we would have right sleep, neither too much nor too little.
Trust in the Lord. Turn to Jesus Christ. Ask him for his strength, that you would trust in the Lord as he, being a perfect man, also being God, but being a perfect man, trusted in his God. He will give you that strength in order that you, joined to the vine, may trust in the Lord as you ought.
He, out of his shed blood, will assure you of the pardon that you have, that you will not have the guilt that would keep you anxious, not trusting in the Lord, that would keep you anxious, worried about your own condition and the things that you would have to do to have what you need, but instead, knowing that you are pardoned, knowing that you have everything that you need, and that the future that is before you, no matter what you face in this life, is excellent and glorious, you may sleep the way that you ought to sleep.
Assess your sleep. Consider whether or not you are sleeping the way you ought. Now, different people have different sleep needs, but if you're rolling around in bed just trying to sleep in, trying to escape things, it's time to wake up.
Consider the examples that we have in Scripture. Godly people. Godly people rise up early. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. All the examples of rising early for prayer.
All these are examples to us to consider regarding sleep. Do not tell yourself lies about your identity. So many people will give themselves labels such that it excuses all kinds of behavior. People do it with things like introversion and extroversion so that because they're an introvert, that justifies all kinds of recluse behavior that is antisocial.
Or because they are a night owl, it excuses all kinds of procrastination, all kinds of laziness. I'm not denying that some people may function a little better at night than other people who find it easier to rise early, but none of this should be an excuse to justify a little sleep, a little slumber.
Oh, this is okay for me because this is just who I am. And then you find 10 years later, you've been making that excuse and you have poverty in your wealth, poverty in your relationships, poverty in your relationship even with the Lord.
Do not make those excuses. And pray. Pray. Two reasons. One, it is an exercise in right sleep. It is an exercise in wakefulness. There are the examples in Scripture of people rising early to pray. There are the examples that we have of people staying up when they need to in order to pray.
Pray to the Lord. But then in addition, praying is one of the primary ways that we exercise trust in the Lord that we take our anxieties to Him in order that we would have proper sleep. Prayer is a proper wakefulness that grants a proper sleep.
Go to the Lord in prayer. You know, I ended this morning. Oh, before that, let me read you Romans 13, 11 through 12. Besides this, you know the time that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is near to us now than when we first believed.
The night is far gone. The day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. God has called us to a spiritual wakefulness, but this is not completely divorced from the wakefulness of body as well.
We ought to be a people who are excellent in moderation, even in sleep. This is not something that is, the physical realities are not something that are completely independent of the spiritual realities.
The call that we have for wakefulness and for restfulness, right trust in the Lord, all those things are reflected in the way that we live our lives outwardly. As you trust in the Lord rightly, you will find that reflected outwardly.
Now I ended this morning in talking about the relationship between Christ and his vineyard and how he is so in love with his people that he desired the thorns in order to battle them and demonstrate his love.
I'd like to end similarly this evening. Psalm 121 verses three through four tells us of the Messiah's concern for his garden in terms of sleep. He will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. Consider the proverb that we have before us. Proverbs 24 beginning in verse 30. What does this describe? This describes a man who cannot take care of his vineyard.
Christ repeatedly described his people as a vineyard that was wrongly ruled by others that he had taken from it. He has conquered the thorns. He has by his wakefulness watched over the vineyard. He watches over us now.
The reason that the vineyard of the church grows more and more glorious is because of his right sleep, because of his right wakefulness. And so as we are joined with him and he has given us the wonderful privilege of investing in his kingdom while he is watching over his vineyard, he has given us the opportunity to be part of building up that temple, to be part of watching over that vineyard ourselves in each small capacity that we do with our brothers and sisters, with those relationships that God has entrusted us with, with the things that he has entrusted us with to steward.
We may watch over these things as well and being joined to Christ, may he work through us that we would watch over these things as we ought, reflecting the character of our Savior, who neither slumbers nor sleeps, but rather watches over the vineyard in order that it would not be covered with thorns, that it would be free of the curse, that it would have only the blessing of her Savior.
Amen. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the wonderful blessing of Jesus Christ. We pray that we would have his strength, his life, that we would have from him that right posture, that right trust of you, that we would trust your purposes as well as your means, that we would not sleep too little or too much, but that we would enjoy the gift of sleep that you have given rightly with gratitude.
In Jesus' name, amen.
