Exodus 20:8-11 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
God considers a day of rest – one day out of seven – so important that it is one of his Ten Commandments. The Sabbath is a day to cease from work, a day set apart as very different from the other six days of the week with their strenuous effort, toil and grind, deadlines, focus on generating income, paying bills, and financial concerns.
What does this rest look like? Certainly it means I take a break from my job. This is both an act of trust in God (he knows the looming deadlines and endless demands I face) and a recognition that my work of the preceding six days is, in God’s eyes, complete. This is very important. God’s view of what is complete may be very different from what my employer, my customers, or I myself perceive. God designed the week to contain six days of work and one day of rest. He commands me to live by his design, not by anyone else’s.
God wants me to experience his presence and worship him every day (Psalm 45:1-2). But setting apart the Sabbath (“keeping it holy”), puts a special emphasis on worshiping God together with others in my church community. The Sabbath is a day set aside to spend extra time in Scripture and prayer and praising God, a time to reflect and be renewed, and a time to celebrate life with others under God’s blessing, to share a meal, and to enjoy relaxed time with one’s family.
Dawn and I saw this unfolding on a Friday afternoon in late January as we walked through the famous Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem. We were instantly swept into the bustle, hustle, and energy of the people around us shopping, selling, and shouting out deals to passersby. We saw the smiles of teenage Hasidim boys, having finished their work, wolfing down shawarma as a kind of extra-large pre-shabbat appetizer. And then, as the sun began to fade, the market grew quiet. People cheerfully dispersed to their homes eager to enjoy the shabbat meal and twenty-four hours of peace and quiet among family and friends. What impressed me most was the joy and anticipation of this weekly routine. It was not difficult to sense that these people were setting apart the next day as something very special and desirable, distinct from any other of the week.
Over the years, I’ve become more consistently obedient to God’s command to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. But I want to get much better at this – not out of legalism, but because God designed the good life to be lived this way.
Father, thank you for designing human beings for work and for rest. I want to celebrate the end of every week, worshiping and enjoying you in a more focused way than is possible in the busyness and demands of the other six days. Please help me to get better at this, to enter every Sunday worship service with joy and anticipation, to invest my time in family, and to be restored and renewed in readiness for the week ahead.
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This week:
How can you prioritize your work this week so you can take one full day off for Sabbath rest on Sunday? Sometimes it can be easy to celebrate the Sabbath, it comes naturally after a good week without much unfinished business. Other times, however, it requires an iron will to set work aside (whether in my job or volunteer work or anything else that feels like the other days of the week). Yet I must trust God to provide exactly what I need with only six days of work out of every seven. Exodus 16:29a “Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days.”
How does obeying the Sabbath command relate to this statement from the Apostle Paul? Colossians 2:16-17 “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.”
What about Jesus’ approach to the Sabbath? Mark 2:27-28 “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” What did he mean by these statements?
Jesus often performed healings on the Sabbath to the dismay of religious leaders. Was he making an exception for certain cases (that may, for example, apply to firefighters, health care workers, etc.)? Matthew 12:11-12 “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Also, Mark 3:4 “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”