Keep The Sabbath

    I first started keeping a sabbath when I was 19, and it was one of the many gifts a year doing foreign missions gave me. If not THE most important, it is at least one of my favorite and most impactful gifts God gave me during that time

    Going abroad with a missions organization requires you to align with their way of doing things, from fundraising to employment overseas, and included in our alignment was sabbath. We were to take one every week for the entirety of the year, and that was that.

    We received great teaching and testimony regarding a day of rest, and were sent around the world to work hard for 6 days a week and rest completely for one. I would not have survived the year, let alone the 12 years since then, without that weekly day off.

    I have come to experience the principles and best practices for a sabbath, and with 12 years of rest days, I have found freedom rather than legalism in saying no to the world’s overactivity and yes to God’s rest one day a week.

My sabbath starts when my head hits the pillow the night before. I confess to God that, no matter what I might think or how I might behave to the contrary, the world will continue to spin and God will accomplish his perfect work for others without me tomorrow. Self-deprivation and neglect long held me in their clutches, disguised as productivity and value based on my output. And while sabbath wasn’t an automatic magic cure-all for that, allowing God to put me in my place once a week loosened their grasp and led me towards freedom. The best part is, God sets me in my place with his rest, love, delight, and peace, which I indulge in unquestioningly on sabbath.

    One of my favorite parts about sabbath is that I get to do whatever I want in enjoyment of the Lord. Our lives so consistently exist for others, whether that is self-motivated or induced by others (or usually both), that we never allow ourselves to consider ourselves. Any introspection and self-care has been suspect for so many years and branded with a scarlett “S” for Selfish. While selfishness is not a characteristic of Christ, self-awareness, self-love, self-delight, and self-work are. 

How could we regularly agree to the Great Gardener pruning us if we have no awareness of what in us needs to be cut off? How could we ask for anything we wish if we are not in touch with our desires and self-will? How could we, then, pray “Your will be done” if we are blind to the clutch our hearts have on our self-interest? We can never surrender to God what we know nothing about. And we can never receive the will and blessings of God if we never release our will and self-interest to him.

This awareness of self and it’s reckoning to God become visible not just in the wreckage of our own selfish ambitions crashing down upon our heads, but on days of rest, where we sit beside the River of Life flowing through us, and begin to see the impurities within us as we gaze into the purity of his heart.

Rest and refreshment have been important words for me as I consider what I will do with a sabbath day. Self-awareness and care is different from self-indulgence, and therefore, as I consider what I want my day to look like, I am holding it up to the light of Christ, considering whether this will grant me the soul rest and refreshment that comes from knowing and being close to Christ, or if it will lead to deeper anxieties and discomfort than I was experiencing before. 

There is a great deal of difference between things we call rest and  what God calls rest. Most often, when left to our own devices, our rest really just means escape or avoidance. Think about the last time you binged a TV show. Apart from the rare times that it is exactly what you need, most of the time we feel the weight of wasting a day, the anxiety of undone tasks, and the trepidation of stepping into the next day’s tasks without preparing ourselves physically, mentally, or emotionally. Once in this pattern, however, “just one more episode” is the path of least resistance and the delusion we cling to to bring us the peace we need. We are looking for escape and avoidance while God wants to grant us peace.

The invitation of God on sabbath is to rest and refresh ourselves in him. This does necessitate time in his word and in prayer, for he keeps us in perfect peace when our hearts are set on him, but this also extends to all the mundane pleasures we turn to. In fact, in the hands of the Prince of Peace, all things can bring us heavenly comfort (with the exception of willful sin and disobedience, of course). A tv show binge session, an hour of silence, creative work, coffee shop pondering, hosting friends, anything can bring us rest and refreshment in God if our main goal is to receive his shalom (perfect peace).

And this is where sabbath gets the most fun! God knows exactly how he made you. He knows what you enjoy, delight in, and find rest in. If we take the opportunity to surrender our self-will and our constant attempts at avoidance in order to attend to him, he will reveal what will actually bring us life on our sabbath. Your love for naps or books or hiking or donuts or dog parks or museums or flower picking or cloud watching or babysitting or whatever, when revealed to be heavenly gifts that bring delight and rest to your soul (more than just your mind and body), will take on supernatural goodness and bring the peace of heaven to you.

This promise of more perfect rest and personal delight (motivated by Christ as opposed to selfishness) has given me the ability to, week after week, month after month, year after year, give of myself on the other days of the week. Knowing I have a day of rest where I seek and receive the rest of God helps me to lay all of who I am before God for his kingdom advancement and the love of others.

This does not enable the type A workaholics to run themselves ragged for 6 days, because I believe that sabbath sets us up for healthy daily rhythms of rest as well as weekly. It helps us recognize the power of God as he restores us while we are distanced from our labor on that one day a week, which then leads to the understanding and experience that his power is sufficient to bring us rest, refreshment, and peace every moment of every day, whether I am working or not. 

As our hearts are shaped to look like his through our daily intimacy with him, we recognize that his priorities are different from our first instincts, which then causes us to place limits on our time in some places and increase our investment in others. Work is a means to an end, not the end itself. This is true for everything in life: family, career, possessions, suffering, you name it. Everything is intended to bring us to our place of union with God, and therefore our lives will mirror his priorities, one of which is daily moments of sabbath. These are times when we take a deep breath, do something we love, and receive his heavenly rest.

I do not believe anyone can function in their full potential as image bearers of Christ who bring light into direct confrontation with darkness without a weekly sabbath. Said a different way, to advance the Kingdom of Heaven we must invest in rest. Paired with persistent prayer, soaking in scripture, and faithful fellowship, sabbath will unleash kingdom potential in our hearts and lives as we align our hearts with God’s, and it will allow him to unload his persistently peaceful kingdom power into our hearts as we move from frenetic effort to unresisting rest. 

Please, for the love God has for you, keep the sabbath.