God’s Day Off
Introduction – Busy, Busy, Busy
Tattoo Syndrome
A Tacoma, Washington, newspaper carried a story about a basset hound named, “Tattoo.” One evening, Tattoo’s owner accidentally shut the dog’s leash in the car door and took off for a drive with Tattoo still attached to it. Tattoo didn’t have much of a choice but to run alongside the car.
Thankfully, police officer Terry Filbert noticed a car go by with the little basset hound he described as "picking [up his feet] and putting them down as fast as he could." He chased the car to a stop and rescued the dog, but not before he had reached a speed of 20 to 25 miles per hour. (The dog was fine but asked not to go out for an evening walk for a long time.)
Some of us know how little Tattoo feels. We live our days just “picking up our feet and putting them down as fast as we can.” And there seems no end in sight.
Marginless
In his medical practice, Dr. Richard Swenson sees a steady stream of hurting people coming into his office. He claims that a majority of them suffer from a chronic ailment which has reached epidemic levels in our country.
Do you know what it is? SARS, maybe? Or AIDS?
The disease Dr. Swenson is concerned about is what he calls a lack of “MARGIN.”
“Margin is the space that once existed between ourselves & our limits. It’s something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations.
“As a society, we’ve forgotten what margin is. In the push for progress, margin has been devoured. We’re overloaded.”
Swenson describes the results of this kind of living this way:
“… we feel distressed in ill-defined ways. We are besieged by anxiety, stress and fatigue. Our relationships suffer. We have unexplained aches and pains. The flood of daily events seems beyond our control.”
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
How different does that sound from the words of Jesus:
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. KJV John 10:10
Or as the New Living Bible says:
My purpose is to give life in all its fullness. NLT John 10:10
Last week I said that Christ Himself was the fulfillment of the Sabbath, and so we are not bound to keep the Sabbath in the same way that is laid out in the Old Testament. I said that the Sabbath law gave us a glimpse of grace in the middle of the law.
But does that mean that we just toss the idea of Sabbath out the window? This week, I want us to look more closely at the value of God’s gift of the Sabbath.
Christians hold a wide array of beliefs about the Sabbath.
They range from, “Christ fulfilled it, so we don’t have to think about it AT ALL.”
To: “If you don’t make the Sabbath a day of complete rest (and you’d better stick to Saturday, not Sunday) then you’re probably going to go to hell.”
I really did read an article this week that pretty much said that.
I believe that the truth is somewhere in between.
I believe that the Sabbath is a Gift from God
And it is a gift that is desperately needed in a society that is increasingly showing signs of stress, anxiety and exhaustion.
And far from being immune from those things, Christians are sometimes in worse shape than unbelievers.
A number of years ago, a woman named Jean Fleming shared this in Decision magazine:
A few years ago our neighbors were drawn to us, but when we talked to them about the Lord, their response was, "We couldn’t be Christians; we couldn’t live at your pace." They had been attracted to Christ, but the busyness of our lives had scared them from a commitment.
Would the pace of your life have the same impact on an unbeliever?
Think for a minute about the life of Christ.
Jesus, with all that He did, with all there was to do, never, ever gives the impression of being in a hurry.
Not once do we hear Him say to someone, “NOT NOW! I’m too BUSY!”
Somehow, Jesus was able to live a life of tranquility in the midst of turmoil.
Is it possibly that we could do the same?
I believe that one key – maybe the most important key – to living a life of tranquility in the midst of turmoil is to rediscover God’s gift of the Sabbath
How can we afford Sabbath rest in the midst of the craziness of modern life?
Perhaps the better question is, “How can we afford to IGNORE the Sabbath rest in the midst of the craziness of modern life?”
The world God created has rhythms of work and rest, light and dark
But technology allows us to ignore those rhythms.
We’ve got electric lights that burn all night
We’ve got cars, trains and airplanes so we can go further faster
We’ve learned to multi-task
But we’ve forgotten how to rest
There is an ancient Greek legend concerning the great storyteller, Aesop (of Aesop’s Fables). It seems a man saw Aesop playing childish games with some little boys and began to make fun of him for wasting his time in such frivolous activity.
Aesop by picked up a bow (as in bow & arrow), loosened the string, and laid it on the ground. Then he said to the man, “Answer the riddle, if you can. What do we learn from the unstrung bow.”
The man looked at the bow for a while, but had no idea what point Aesop was trying to make.
Finally Aesop said, “If you keep a bow always bent, it will eventually break; but if you let it go slack, it will be more fit for use when you need it.”
People are like that, too. That’s why we all need to take time to rest. God showed us how. Loosen your bow and be refreshed.
And the Sabbath is God’s gift to enable us to be refreshed and restored.
At this point, some of you are thinking, “If the Sabbath is about rest and refreshing, why am I not still in BED??!!!”
And the answer is, because the most important aspect of the Sabbath is worship.
Worship enables us to refocus our lives and our hearts on God.
– which is what we need desperately in order to be refreshed not just in our bodies, but in our spirits.
God doesn’t need your worship.
But you need to worship Him.
If we truly enter into worship – that is, we don’t just show up, but we actively seek God’s presence in Worship, then we will experience the renewal and refreshing that we so desperately need.
For many families, just getting to church is such a stressful experience that it’s hard to see how it can help destress our lives.
In fact, it may seem that getting the family to church just ADDS stress!
But maybe it’s because we haven’t prepared for it.
In Jewish homes – at least in Jesus’ day – the day before the Sabbath was always called “Preparation Day.”
It was the day when they got everything ready so that they wouldn’t have to work on the Sabbath itself.
Their food had to be prepared ahead, their clothes neede to be washed and ready.
Imagine making these preparations in a day before freezers & microwaves!
But think how much easier Sundays might be if you had clothes laid out and ready the night before.
If you made sure on Saturday that you had something ready for breakfast and for lunch on Sunday.
How about if you made sure you (& the kids) got to bed at a decent hour on Saturday night, so that getting up on Sunday wasn’t torturous?
If we don’t prepare for a Sabbath, we won’t receive all the benefits from it that we could.
Apart from time to worship, the Sabbath should be focused on activites that strengthen relationships and give needed rest and refreshment.
What that means will depend largely on who you are and what you normally do during the week.
If you have a physically strenuous job, you may want to just stretch out on the couch on Sundays.
If you sit at a desk all day, you may need to get some exercise.
But set aside a Sabbath to rest and worship
Conclusion
Isaiah 58:13, 14 "If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD’s holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, 14 then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob." The mouth of the LORD has spoken.
