Elijah Broom Tree Rest: When God Tends the Body First
⏱ 7 min read
If you have gone looking for the Elijah broom tree rest — the part of the story where a prophet asks to die and God sends food and sleep instead of a lecture — you are probably asking something more personal than a study question. You are asking whether you are allowed to be this tired. Elijah, fresh from the most public success of his life, walked a day into the wilderness, sat down under a broom tree and asked to die. What happens next in the account is worth reading slowly, because it is not what a modern devotional would script.
What happened under the broom tree: bread and sleep before any word
No rebuke arrives. No lesson is administered. An angel touches him and tells him to eat. He eats and sleeps. He is touched a second time and fed again, on the grounds that the journey ahead is too much for him. Only much later, after a long walk and a night in a cave, come the wind and the earthquake and the fire, and then the low voice that was none of them.
The order is the whole point. Bread, sleep, bread, sleep, walking, and then the word. Whatever else that passage teaches, it does not teach that the body is an obstacle to be pushed past on the way to hearing from God.
The devotional tradition noticed this. Not consistently, and not without an argument that has never quite been settled, but it noticed.
Is sleep a duty? Spurgeon’s plainest word to the exhausted
Charles Spurgeon, considering the weariness of Christ himself, made a remark that has almost no ornament on it at all.
Christ was weary and worn; and when anyone is exhausted, it is his duty to go to sleep if he can.
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Duty is a strong word, and he chose it deliberately. He is not offering permission to the tired. He is placing sleep in the same category as the other things a Christian owes God, which is a considerably higher claim than most exhausted readers have been given by their own churches.
Elsewhere he sets out the plain meaning of the word itself, and refuses to allegorise it into something more impressive.
The idea connected with sleep is “rest,” and that is the thought which the Spirit of God would convey to us.
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
How to rest in God when sleep alone does not settle you
The older writers were careful here, and the care is useful. They did not think a full night’s sleep would settle a soul. Richard Baxter, whose best-known book is an entire volume about rest, kept insisting that the thing he meant could not be supplied by a bed.
The soul’s rest must be sufficient to afford it perpetual satisfaction.
— Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
And, describing a mind carrying its ordinary load of fears, debts, grudges and unfinished business, he asks the question that anyone who has lain awake at two in the morning already knows the answer to.
And can the soul have rest that is pestered with all these, and that continually?
— Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
Spurgeon put the same observation the other way round, from the shoulders inward.
As long as we have any burden resting on our shoulders, we cannot enjoy perfect rest; and as long as there is any burden on our conscience or heart, we cannot have rest of soul.
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
So the claim is not that sleep fixes anything. The claim is narrower and more honest: the two rests are connected, and a person cannot usually work on the second while wholly neglecting the first.
Arndt, Tauler and Wesley on soul rest and body rest
Johann Arndt, the German Lutheran whose True Christianity shaped generations of Protestant devotion, states the traffic as running both ways, and puts the soul first in the sentence.
When the soul is at rest, the body sleeps peacefully, so that the peace of the soul gives peace also to the body.
— Johann Arndt, True Christianity
Johannes Tauler, preaching more than two centuries earlier to people living under a hard rule of life, made room for the tired body inside the discipline rather than in spite of it, and used a phrase worth pausing on — the needs of the body.
Though the body must sometimes rest outwardly from discipline, the heart ceases not to give God thanks, to honour Him, and to resist all that is inconsistent with the needs of the body.
— Johannes Tauler, The Inner Way
Even John Wesley, who was not a lenient man about anything and who timed his own habits like an accountant, arrived at a fixed quantity of sleep and defended it in both directions at once.
I know this quantity of sleep to be most advantageous to the body as well as the soul.
— John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions
Where the tradition disagrees about sleep and prayer
This is where honesty requires slowing down, because the same tradition also produced its opposite, and the opposite is often the more quotable half.
E.M. Bounds, writing in praise of the great praying preachers, treats the bed as a rival.
The bed and sleep could not chain his soul in its eagerness after God.
— E.M. Bounds, Preacher and Prayer
That line has launched a great deal of guilt. It is praise for a particular temperament and a particular season, offered as though it were a standard. Read it as the compliment it was, not as the measure it later became.
Harsher still is the strand of medieval asceticism that treated the exhausted body as raw material. Henry Suso records Eternal Wisdom addressing him in words no contemporary pastor should repeat to a person who is already depleted.
Thy sickly body must often, in honour of my dislocated bones, be wearied out in spiritual exercises, and rendered incapable of fulfilling its own desires.
— Henry Suso, A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom
Stilling Waves does not commend that. It is printed here because pretending the tradition speaks with one voice on the body would be a lie, and a reader who later meets Suso in the wild deserves to have been warned.
Samuel Rutherford, characteristically, refuses both ditches in a single sentence.
And, therefore, here the Spirit of God must hold your soul’s feet in the golden mid-line, betwixt confident resting in the arms of Christ, and presumptuous and drowsy sleeping in the bed of fleshly security.
— Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford
Rest that receives, and rest that refuses to get up, are not the same thing. Rutherford knew that both are real, and that the exhausted person is usually being accused of the second while suffering the first.
What the old writers actually prescribed for a depleted person
It should be said clearly, because the claim is often overstated in both directions. None of these writers taught a technique. There is no breathing method here, no posture drill, nothing that could be packaged. What they prescribed were conditions: a place, a shut door, an unhurried hour, a bed, a meal, a pause before speaking. They simply never treated the body as irrelevant to devotion, and they did not think a depleted person could be lectured into attentiveness.
Andrew Murray, writing on nearness to God, notes that what a person seeks in prayer and what a person seeks in sleep are not unrelated appetites.
Insofar as this expresses a desire for rest and quiet in prayer, it agrees with what we seek in sleep.
— Andrew Murray, To Be Near Unto God
Readers who want to follow Murray further will find his practice traced in the complete readers guide to Andrew Murray and in the account of the Andrew Murray Centre in Wellington.
And Augustine, centuries before all of them, locates the destination rather than the method, which is where the argument ought to end.
For those, on whom Thy good Spirit is said to rest, He causes to rest in Himself.
— St. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine
That is not a promise that the tiredness lifts. Elijah’s did not lift at the broom tree; he still had the walk and the cave and the long argument with God ahead of him. It is a claim about who is present while it lasts.
How to pray when you are too tired to pray
There is no method here, but there is an order: do the bodily thing first — eat something, drink water, lie down if it is night — and let the prayer be short and honest rather than long and performed. A sentence said in the dark counts. The old writers would not have called that a lesser prayer. They would have called it the prayer of a person who was fed before he was spoken to.
Why a journal day starts with a pause
This is why a Stilling Waves journal day opens with one short pause before the reading rather than with the reading itself. It is not a technique and it is not doing any spiritual work of its own. It is a small structural admission that the person holding the book arrived tired, and that the old writers would have fed them before they said anything.
This article belongs to a series on what the older devotional writers actually taught about the body in prayer. The overview is here: Does the Body Matter in Prayer? What the Old Writers Said.
