You Can't Sleep. Now What?
- Cornerstone Community Church
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
Most of us have had that night. The one where sleep simply refuses to come. The mind runs through the same loop again and again, rehearsing what went wrong or what might go wrong, and the darkness feels less like rest and more like a place where every fear gets louder. You try to pray, but the words dry up. You want to trust, but you can't quite find your footing.
Asaph knew that night.
He was one of the most gifted musicians in Israel, appointed by King David to lead worship before the ark of the Lord. He wrote twelve psalms. He stood at the front of the assembly and called people into the presence of God. And yet, Psalm 77 finds him sleepless, stretched out with his hands raised in prayer, too exhausted and distressed to even speak. "I cry aloud to God," he writes. "In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted." (Psalm 77:1-2)
What Asaph does next is worth paying close attention to, because it turns out to be one of the most practical things a person of faith can do in a hard season.
THE CRY THAT EXPECTS AN ANSWER
It's easy to read "I cry aloud to God" as desperation. And it is. But Asaph doesn't stop there. He adds something that changes the whole tone: "he will hear me." That's not despair. That's confidence. It's the voice of someone whose history with God has taught him that crying out is never wasted.
Pastor Johnnie Jenkins reflected on how long it took him personally to reach that kind of reflex in prayer. His first instinct in trouble, like most of us, was to find a solution, to work it out, to say in the familiar way, "I got this." What Asaph offers is a different habit of heart — one that forms over years of finding God faithful and then actually reaching back toward him when things get dark again.
The phrase "he will hear me" is not a shout into the void. It is a statement drawn from memory. It's what you say when you've already been heard before.
WHEN GOD HOLDS YOUR EYELIDS OPEN
Verse 4 is one of the stranger, more honest lines in this psalm: "You hold my eyelids open." Sleep won't come, and Asaph doesn't pretend otherwise. But he doesn't just blame the insomnia. He reads it as something God is doing. Not cruelty, but invitation. God keeping him awake because there is something to attend to that can't be attended to in the rush of daylight.
We tend to treat sleeplessness as a problem to manage. Melatonin, white noise, the right podcast. But Asaph, in his restless night, turns toward God and asks: what do you want me to think about? That posture transforms an inconvenience into a place of encounter.
One of the things God seems to be doing with Asaph in that sleepless night is walking him back down memory lane. Verse 5: "I consider the days of old, the years long ago." Not just a few months back. Years. Decades. A long record of God showing up. This is the spiritual exercise Asaph returns to: not the immediate problem, but the longer story.
THE QUESTIONS THAT LEAD SOMEWHERE
Before Asaph gets to his conclusion, he has to work through some difficult questions. He asks them in verses 7 through 9, and they are the kind of questions you can understand if you've ever been through something that went on too long. "Will the Lord spurn forever? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Has God forgotten to be gracious?"
These are almost peevish questions. They come from a place of real exhaustion. But the thing about Asaph is that he asks them instead of simply acting on them. He doesn't pull away from God. He presses into the questions and lets them lead him somewhere.
Moses said something similar to Israel after forty years in the wilderness: "You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you." Not the hardship alone. The whole way. Where you started, what happened, how it ended, what you learned. The point of that kind of remembering is not nostalgia. It's evidence. It's the accumulated record that God has been faithful, and that record becomes the ground on which present trust is possible.
DON'T DOUBT IN THE DARK
Asaph's conclusion lands in verses 13 through 15 with a simplicity that's almost startling after all the anguish. "Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders." That's it. That's where the long night leads him.
He doesn't arrive at easy answers. He doesn't explain why the trouble came or when it will end. He arrives at something more durable: a settled recognition that God's character has not changed, that his record of faithfulness stands, and that no night has ever proven him untrustworthy.
"Do not doubt in the dark what you know to be true in the light." Pastor Johnnie returned to this line near the close of the message, and it's the kind of thing that is easy to agree with in principle and hard to live in practice. The darkness has a way of making everything feel less certain. Asaph's discipline was to do the interior work of remembering before the darkness could convince him of something that wasn't true.
A.W. Tozer wrote a chapter called "The Ministry of the Night," and it captures something Asaph seems to have understood: the night is not an interruption to God's purposes. It is often where those purposes deepen. "Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is like light to you." (Psalm 139:12)
WHAT THIS MEANS RIGHT NOW
There are people at Cornerstone right now who know exactly what Asaph was going through. A diagnosis. A surgery. A loss. Something that will not resolve no matter how hard you work at it. You've been praying. The resolution hasn't come. And the nights are long.
What Asaph offers is not a formula. He offers a practice: when the night comes and sleep won't follow, don't reach for distraction. Ask what God might be doing. Go back over the years. Read through the record of what he has done. Sit with the evidence long enough to remember what you know.
Paul says it differently in Philippians 4: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:6-7) The peace that comes from that kind of prayer is not the absence of trouble. It is the presence of something standing guard over your thinking so that anxiety and confusion can't find their way in unchecked.
This week, the next time sleep won't come, try what Asaph tried. Stretch out your hand in prayer. Let the night become a place of memory. Go back over what God has done — in your own life, in the lives of people you've watched, in the long record of Scripture. Let that memory do its work. You may not wake up with answers. But you may wake up with something better: the settled confidence that God's way is holy, and that he is still the God who works wonders.
To hear Pastor Johnnie's full teaching on this passage, click here.