The Gift of Sabbath
The Discipline of Rest
by Andy Perry

I recently preached a sermon about some lessons I learned on vacation last month. The lessons, you’ll recall, came in the form of gifts God gives and disciplines we employ. They were beauty - the discipline of recognition, family - the discipline of relationship, and forgiveness - the discipline of grace. Those are important, but the Lord gave me one more gift on my vacation helpful to most fully enjoy the first three. It is the gift of Sabbath, and with it comes the discipline of rest.

Like many with type-A, production-driven personalities, rest is something I don’t naturally know much about. Living in the same world as I do, you can likely relate. But why are we like that? There are many reasons. For instance, I could walk you through the last 300 years of history and describe how we became a society that burns the candle at both ends and thrives on its frenetic pace and never-ending list of things that simply have to get done or the world will end. I could describe how the shift from a rural, agricultural to an urban, industrial and now information-driven society with a constant lust for progress, change and improvement has turned us into slaves to mobility, technology and the ever-increasing flow of products we simply must have, places we must visit, information we must know and entertainments we must experience to feel complete.

Most of us are unaware that we’ve bought into that kind of life, but we have and it’s exhausting not only to the body but to the mind and the soul. I could take time in this article arguing, as Randy Frazee and others have done, that the simple invention of the electric light bulb – for all the blessings it affords us – has helped us become a world that’s open 24 hours a day. God in His wisdom framed creation with night and day for a good purpose: to work during daylight hours and rest after sunset. He created nature as a means of positive accountability for our good. But thanks to our limitless use of electricity, we’ve rendered night and day irrelevant.

I could go on for some time describing why I believe the world as we’ve ordered it – or, should I say, as it’s now ordering us – makes the concept of true rest a fleeting wish and a very rarely embraced reality. But according to the Bible, men, women and children have always needed regular times of true, restorative rest which reveals our human limitations and our dependence on God’s limitless power. Is it any wonder why He wove the concept of Sabbath rest into the fabric of creation from the beginning?

Though the Jewish prohibition to work on the Sabbath day is specific to the Law of Moses and the land of Israel, the concept of weekly Sabbath rest goes back much farther. Like the command to be fruitful and multiply, God’s command to say ‘no’ to obligations of a thousand kinds so we can say ‘yes’ to rest for our souls, rest for our bodies, rest for our minds, rest for our relationships was His intention for all people from the beginning. You can read it for yourself in Genesis 2:1-3. God didn’t rest after creation because He needed it. Rather, He founded rest in creation because He knew we would need it. Who would need it? Not just the ancient Jews but us Christians too.

Even though the hard and fast law to cease work on the 7 th day is gone in the New Testament, the concept of Sabbath rest reemerges there with a Christ-focused purpose. On the one hand it points us beyond this life to the ultimate rest we’ll find in heaven because of Jesus’ sacrifice for us here and the rest here and now of knowing we’re at peace with God. Heb. 4:8 says of the Jews, “For if Joshua had given them [true] rest [in the promised land], God would not have spoken of another day later on. So, then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.”

So, Sabbath rest for the Christian means the spiritual peace we have with God now because of the Cross and the ultimate rest we’ll have soon in heaven. Does that, then, mean that setting apart one day out of seven is just a Jewish practice irrelevant for us Christians? I don’t think so. The NT indicates that Christians continued to set one day apart for worship and rest, but no longer the seventh, now the first. No longer the Sabbath, now the Lord’s Day. No longer to remember God’s work in creation, but to remember Christ’s victory in the Resurrection. Acts 20:7, I Cor. 16:2 and Rev. 1:10 provide strong evidence for that.

Still, my intention in this article is not to weigh you down with a law of prohibitions but to help you embrace Sabbath rest as a positive blessing. I believe the Bible continues to hold it out to us as a special gift from God for our good to be treasured, protected and enjoyed. Our bodies need it because God did not design them to work seven days a week. Our minds need a rest from the flood of news and information coming at us all week. Our eyes and ears need a rest from the constant drone of our radios, our workplaces, our televisions and our computers. Our relationships need it so we can sit together, talk together, play together and eat together in quiet leisure with no place to run off to. Our souls need Sabbath rest because living in these sin-prone bodies in this sinful world takes a toll on us. We need to gather weekly to hear God’s Word, to sing His praises, to pray together, to encourage each other and let the sacraments bring us back to the Cross, ready and able to pour ourselves out in faithful service for another six days.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the lumberjack who challenged another to an all-day wood chopping contest. The challenger worked very hard, stopping only for a brief lunch break. The other man had a leisurely lunch and took several breaks during the day. At the end of the day, the challenger was surprised and annoyed to find that the other fellow had chopped substantially more wood than he had.

“I don't get it,” he said. "Every time I checked, you were taking a rest, yet you chopped more wood than I did.”

“But you didn't notice," said the winning woodsman, “that I was sharpening my ax when I sat down to rest.”