A Prolonged Sabbath
I read an article this week titled, “Covid-19: A Prolonged Sabbath in a Culture of Productivity.” It captured for me many things I’ve been thinking and feeling over the last five or six weeks. I recognize that many people are working more, not less, right now. And I recognize that some are not working at all but desperately want to. The article isn’t aimed at those folks. It was for folks, perhaps the majority of us, who find ourselves still working, but because we’re working at home, or working fewer hours, we have more flexibility with our time than we used to. Not having to commute to work has added hours and hours to our schedules.
The writer of the article talks about struggling with the “god of productivity.” Even before the quarantine, she says that she resisted boredom and rest, working as much as possible in order to demonstrate her value and success. She says that the quarantine has “only heightened my resistance and raised my expectations. I’ve got more time; more must be done.”
She talks about how this is the air we breathe in our culture. We idolize “productivity and success. Rather than understanding people as intrinsically valuable, we think that we must create that value…In a world of FitBits, GoodReads, and even apps that track your prayer life, we try to measure and quantify ourselves. In this world, we can never be content to simply be; we must always be doing, making, producing, constructing. Our worth depends on it.” Another author says that our culture has turned us into “human doings” rather than “human beings.”
Something God Has Been Teaching Me
One of the things the Lord has been teaching me during this season of quarantine is that I was doing too much before all this started. One of the unique things about my work as a pastor is that the work is never done. There is always someone to call, text, email, visit, counsel, encourage, correct, and disciple. There are always plans to be made, administration to be accomplished, research that needs to be done, and sermons that need to be written. It’s a work that I love and want to do for a long time. But it’s also a work that has, in many ways, taken me away from my more important work of being a lover and follower of Jesus, a husband to Suzy, and a father for my children.
The quarantine has been God’s way of showing me that I need to slow down, that I need to focus on the most basic callings of my life. For that I am thankful. I don’t think I realized how fast I was driving until I entered the “school zone” of this global pandemic. Being forced to slow down has been good for me because I was going too fast.
I Love Productivity
I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. I love books on it. I even taught a college class on the subject once. Suzy will tell you how crazy I am about being efficient with time. I love plans and schedules and routines and tasks and getting stuff done. I even plan when I will make my plan for the week! Just the other day, Suzy and I were talking about taking our family out to a cabin in East Texas. One of my first comments was, “What’s our plan?” I wanted a plan for our rest. It’s hard for me to not “do.” It’s hard for me to just “be.” And I don’t think I’m alone in this.
I planned to do this sermon months ago, not knowing about the global pandemic that was coming, but even in these slower times we’re living in, I think many of us are still in love with the god of productivity, still struggling to rest.
Idleness Can Also Be a Struggle
Now, it must also be said that many of us are struggling on the opposite end of this spectrum, struggling with laziness and idleness and slothfulness. If your life is mostly rest and not mostly work, that’s another problem for another sermon. It’s instructive for us that God gave us six days to work and only one day to rest. So if many or most of our days are filled with Netflix binging and video games and YouTube surfing and sleeping and texting and social media, then we may not be pursuing the sacredness of work as we should be. Paul actually tells us to stay away from lazy people because they discredit the gospel (2 Thess. 3:6-12).
Busyness Is a Virtue in Our Culture
While idleness is a daily battle for many of us, I think working too much is just as detrimental. In our culture, busyness is seen as a virtue. How often do you greet someone, ask how they’re doing, and get a response something along the lines of, “Just really busy right now.” I think we like telling people that we’re really busy because it makes us sound important. And if we’re important, we can feel good about ourselves.
But there comes a point when we’re so busy that we don’t feel good about ourselves any more. We’re exhausted, anxious, have a short fuse with our loved ones, and all we can think about it is the weekend or our next trip out of town.
Why do we live this way? Why do we think we have to be so busy all the time? Why can’t we just stop? Maybe we think we don’t need rest. Or maybe we want to outdo all the other doers so badly that we’ll sacrifice our health, our family, and even our faith so that we can look and feel important.
The Gift of the Sabbath
Many of us know we need to slow down. We know we’re hurting ourselves and those around us. But what should we do? Does God have a way out of our slavery to busyness? In his goodness and grace, he does. God created what the Bible calls the Sabbath in order to set his people free from slavery to the tyranny of productivity and work. God wants us to take a day off, so he gave us the Sabbath.
We’re going to look at what the Bible says about the Sabbath in a moment, but first we need to understand how counter-cultural the idea of taking a day off was in the world of the Bible. The Sabbath laws made Israel unique in the Ancient Middle East. All the pagan nations worked every day. Even today, countries without a Judeo-Christian heritage work every day. Sunday isn’t seen as a day off but as a work day. Not taking a day off is more pagan than Christian.
The Sabbath is a unique gift to God’s unique people. Judith Shulevitz, a Jewish writer and editor, talks about how the Jewish rabbis described the Sabbath in her book The Sabbath World. She says, “The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is a bride given by God to her groom, the people of Israel. Once a week, they go forth in wedding clothes to marry her. The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is a gift from God’s treasury. Once a week, his people receive it and are enriched. The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is the Temple in time rather than space. Once a week, every Jew becomes a priest and enters it. The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is the Chosen Day, just as the children of Israel are the Chosen People.”
Jews have historically understood how wonderful and beautiful and unique the gift of a day of rest is. I’m afraid many of us modern evangelical Christians have not. This is all the more interesting when Jesus explicitly says that the Sabbath was made for us. Mark 2:27, “And he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’”
In this verse, Jesus is interpreting for the Pharisees a passage he’d just quoted to them about David eating the bread from the Tabernacle when he was hungry. Jesus is saying that, though they knew the letter of the story, they didn’t understand its spirit, and the same was true of their understanding of the Sabbath. They were making the Sabbath a burden instead of a blessing. So Jesus tells them that the Sabbath is a gift from God, “The Sabbath was made for man.” The rabbis had taken the gift and made it a burden by adding all sorts of regulations to it. But the work it took to keep all the regulations undermined the point of the Sabbath. The rabbis’ version of the Sabbath made people tired when God wanted to give people rest.
Before God Did Anything, He Was Resting In Himself
Let’s look now at an overview of Sabbath in the Bible. The first passage I want us to consider doesn’t mention Sabbath directly, but it helps us understand why rest is important to God. While praying to the Father, Jesus says, “You loved me before the foundation of the world” (Jn. 17:24). So before God the Father was doing anything else, he was loving God the Son. Before God created time, space, and matter he wasn’t bored or anxious or stressed out about his big work project coming up. He was delighting in his Son. Within the Trinity, before time, there was perfect love and fullness and joy.
Why is this important to point out? In his book The Art of Rest, pastor Adam Mabry helps us understand. He says, “If God is a hurried taskmaster constantly turning knobs and pushing buttons, frenetically refining his work, it’s hard to imagine resting with him. But if God the Father, Son, and Spirit are the very definition of love, and fundamentally relational, then the idea of resting with him becomes more than imaginable. It becomes desirable.” Before God did anything, he was resting in himself. That tells us how much he values rest. It tells us that he’s the ultimate source and giver of rest. And it tells us what we’ll find when we rest in him.
God Took a Day Off
The first place we encounter the Sabbath is in Genesis 2. After God made everything in six days, the Bible says, “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (vv. 2-3).
God worked hard for six days making everything in the universe, then he took a well-earned day off! He didn’t rest because he was tired. He’s God, he doesn’t get tired (Ps. 121:4). One of the reasons we need sleep is because God wants to remind us every day that we’re not God.
God rested on the seventh day out of exhilaration, not exhaustion, out of triumph, not tiredness. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (1:31). He was so pleased with what he’d made that he wanted to step back and enjoy it. On the first Sabbath in the universe, God the Father, Son, and Spirit inhaled the satisfaction of a job well-done.
This means that God wove Sabbath rest into the very fabric of creation, punctuating the first week with a day of rest. Because we’re made in God’s image, designed to represent and reflect him to the world, we have a desire to rest. This is why we watch the clock till quitting time and count the days till the weekend or the vacation or summer break. We have a desire to rest because even God took a day off.
God Commands His People to Rest
God knows, however, that sin has marred and corrupted our desires, so out of love he gave us an explicit command to rest. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep 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, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex. 20:8-11).
One of God’s top ten rules was to rest. In verse 11, we find the reason why we should rest, the basis for the command. We should stop working because we didn’t make everything. God did. We’re not sovereign. God is. When we rest, we’re living out what we believe. We all say that we believe God is in control. But if we never take time to rest, we’re contradicting what we say we believe. Resting reveals that we really think that God is in control, not us.
Sabbath Is for Refreshment
The next place we hear about the Sabbath is a few chapters later in Exodus 23. Verse 12 says, “Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed.” Why does God keep mentioning children, servants, immigrants, and animals? God is making it clear that all people and all animals also get to enjoy the gift of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for them just as much as it was for the head of the household.
Old Testament scholar John Goldingay explains it like this: “One can imagine it would be tempting for the head of the household to make sure that the inner family had their day off but to do so by assuming that the servants and the resident aliens did the work that needed doing, such as cooking and feeding the animals…The people (God) says are to find refreshment are not the inner family but those other, more marginal people (and the animals!).”
Everyone should be able to experience the blessing of the Sabbath. Goldingay applies this point like this: “If we don’t make it possible for people to feed their families without working seven days, in our own way we are breaking the Sabbath…the point (of the command) is that people should have the opportunity for refreshment.” If we have charge over people at work, or at home, we must do what we can to ensure that they get time off. God says that his Sabbath is for all people, not just a special class of people.
Also notice that this verse says that the Sabbath was given so that you “may be refreshed.” God gives us the Sabbath to refresh, or rejuvenate and recharge, us. If you’re exhausted physically and emotionally, it may be because you aren’t using the gift that God has given you to charge your batteries.
We have this automatic vacuum thing in our house that’ll sweep the floors on its own, using little sensors to guide it around. I’m very easily entertained, so sometimes I’ll just watch it work. It’s fascinating, and scary because it makes me think that robots are going to take over the world soon. The coolest part is when its battery starts to get low, it slows down, and starts moving itself back to the charger on its own. It knows it can’t keep working if its battery is getting low, so it moves toward the charger. Why does my robotic vacuum cleaner know how to rest better than I do? We need to be paying attention to ourselves, to know when our physical, emotional, and spiritual batteries are drained, and move toward the charger, the Lord, through the Sabbath – the temple in time where we meet him.
Rest Is a Result of Redemption
The next passage about the Sabbath I’d like us to look at is Deuteronomy 5:12-15. This is Moses’ retelling of the Ten Commandments to the people about to go into the Promised Land. He repeats the Sabbath command, but adds a reason why it should be observed. He says, “Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. 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, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”
Why did the Lord tell Israel to keep the Sabbath? Because he’d rescued them from slavery in Egypt (v. 15). They should rest because they were redeemed. God worked hard to save them, using his “mighty hand and outstretched arm” to set them free. God worked so that they could rest. He worked for them so that they would rest in him.
In Egypt, the Israelites were slaves to work, so God set them free to rest. God and God alone can save us from slavish devotion to work, from bondage to the god of productivity. God commanded his people to rest because he rules and because he redeems. His creative and redemptive work compels us to stop what we’re doing and sit with him. God is both Creator and Redeemer and he wants us to take a day off so that we’ll remember that we’re neither. He wants us to rest in order to worship.
Are Christians Commanded to Keep the Sabbath?
Now I’d like to address several practical questions about the Sabbath. First, are Christians commanded to keep the Sabbath? Yes and no. The Sabbath command is the only one of the Ten Commandments not explicitly repeated in the New Testament. What is made explicit is that Jesus fulfilled the Sabbath laws for us. Hebrews 4:2-3, “For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest.” And Colossians 2:16-17, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”
By working hard to live a perfect life and by laying down his life for our sins and raising from the dead on the third day, Jesus fulfilled the law and grants eternal rest to everyone who puts their trust in him and turns from their sins. Jesus’ work was for our eternal rest. Therefore, the Sabbath day has become a pointer to him and his gospel.
The Sabbath laws point us to the One who can give us true rest, rest for our souls. Listen to Jesus’ offer, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).
Those in Christ are free to not observe the Sabbath laws, free from the specifics of the Old Testament commands. But we aren’t free to ignore God’s wisdom. We’re not free from the wisdom of the principle of the Sabbath. Pursing a pattern of regular rest is wise, not slavish law-keeping. Adam Mabry says, “If you’re concerned that by embracing regular Sabbath rest you’re in danger of coming under some harsh legalism, simply ask yourself how not observing Sabbath rest is going for you. It’s not rest that threatens to oppress you, but your refusal to.”
When Should We Rest?
Secondly, when should we rest? Do we have to Sabbath on Sunday? Many Christians think that Sunday is the new Christian Sabbath. The New Testament doesn’t teach this, but it doesn’t teach against it either. This means that there’s freedom for how we think about the Sabbath. We shouldn’t judge one another if we have differing views on the Sabbath. Paul says, “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom. 14:5). There were Christians who “esteemed” different days in the early church. Paul tells us to be “fully convinced in our own mind,” or know why we believe what we believe, and then later he tells us to “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (v. 19).
Teaching that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath might bind the consciences of individuals too much. So we say we’re characterized by not being Sabbatarian, meaning that we don’t teach that Sunday is the Sabbath day. However, if someone believes Sunday is the Sabbath, that’s fine! They just cannot require other church members to believe the same.
When, then, should we Sabbath? Whenever is best for you and your family. There should be a pattern of regular rest in your day, week, and year. Spend some time each day resting in the presence of the Lord. Take a day each week, or a portion of a few days, to cease from working and rest. Take time each year to rest – we call this vacation. Find what works for you and your family and your stage of life. Talk to another brother or sister in Christ and see what they do.
Let me say a quick word to husbands who have young children: your wife needs you to give her time without the children. Mothers won’t be able to clock out of caring for the little ones unless you step in and do something to make it happen. Young moms need rest perhaps more than most of us. Dad, what you are doing to make sure she finds regular refreshment in the Lord?
What Should We Do When We Rest?
Finally, what should we do when we rest? Two things. First, do anything that’s not work. This doesn’t mean inactivity. It means do something that’s not part of your regular work. It means do something just for fun. Find a hobby, something you can do to unwind that isn’t part of your job. For me it’s running and reading. Running isn’t easy, but it’s super relaxing for me. When we go on vacation, I take a stack of books to choose from, all on things I just want to read about that aren’t directly related to my work. Because I’m a pastor and around people all the time, rest for me means being away from people. Having community group on my day of rest would feel more like work for me. What do you love to do? When can you carve out time to do it?
Second, we should worship when we rest. Sabbath is “a time of rest, holy to the Lord.” Sabbath means setting apart time to rest in and with the Lord. This means that you need to open your Bible and pray during your time of rest. The point is to rest with Jesus, not from Jesus. Binging on Netflix on your day off isn’t Sabbathing. Pursue things that will fill your soul, not numb your mind.
We need extended time to think about Christ and ourselves. We need to process what’s going on in and around us. Some of you struggle to grieve because you never sit with yourself long enough to grieve, to feel what you feel and think what you think. Sabbath is God’s invitation for you to find healing and peace and rest in Jesus’ name.
God’s Delight Precedes Accomplishment
Jesus is asking you to come to him to find the rest that you need. When we come to him, we realize that he delights in us because he made us and saved us, not because we’ve been productive. God delights in our existence, not in our work. He declared his love for Jesus at his baptism, before Jesus began his ministry, before he died on the cross.
God’s delight precedes our accomplishment. He loves us because we’re his children. And like every good Father, he loves to give good gifts to his kids. Sabbath is one of those gifts. When we rest in God as our Ruler and Redeemer we proclaim our “unessential” status. Sabbath is our way of saying that God is essential, that God is God and we are not, that we need him, that he’s the deepest refreshment of our lives.
Perhaps this prolonged Sabbath that many of us are experiencing is God’s way of helping us to stop striving to prove ourselves and to rest in his love for us. God doesn’t love us because of what we’re capable of doing, but simply because we belong to him. May he help us to find regular and holy rest in his delight in us.