Introducing Sabbath
The sweetest sounding words that my wife ever speaks to me are very powerful. They arrest me and make me sit and up and listen. Ladies, if you have a man that doesn’t pay attention, you need this sentence because you will get the undivided attention you so desperately desire. The sentence is - “let’s go for breakfast”! When we have had a really hectic week (every week!), we love nothing more than to slip over to Top of the Hill somewhere and have a quiet breakfast together. We try not to talk ministry and work. We talk family; us. Sometimes we don’t say much of anything but sit quietly and BE. We aim for PRESENCE. If we leave breakfast and feel connected through the experience, we achieved the ultimate aim.
Today’s text is an invitation by Jesus to join him for breakfast! How exciting is that! Summer is upon us. Church activity is coming to a halt. It is a healthy, necessary discipline. I suggest that it is a Biblical discipline. The summer slumber moves us from DOING to allow us the open doors that entice us into BEING – BEING with God; BEING quiet; BEING RESTFUL.
The dozen or so commands in the Bible to “come and rest” are found in the New Testament – the new dispensation, the new covenant, the new Life section of the Bible. We are called to live a life of grace, to embrace BEING; to stop defining who we are by how much we DO. How vain the people who are so busy that they can hardly take a break, or they pride themselves in keeping their ministry going all year when others rest. Those who rest are more attuned to the art and experience of SABBATH-KEEPING.
Bible – not fewer than 132 references to Sabbath rest-taking. Do you think its important maybe?
1. Understanding Sabbath
a. OLD COVENANT SABBATH REST
Sabbath-keeping began with a command from God: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor, but the seventh day is a Sabbath.” (Exodus 20:8-10)
At one point when the people were on route to the “new land” – promise land, God was providing all their food for their journey. On one of those manifestations of loving provision God gave a specific instruction to them. In Exodus 16:23 the Lord appointed the next day as “a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD.” The command involved resting from their normal daily duties and tasks. As a result God provided two day’s food on the day before the Sabbath so his people wouldn’t have to gather on the Sabbath. The people still went looking for food on the Sabbath however and God was displeased and questioned (v 28) why they would not obey his command to not do that. It was a desecration of the Sabbath. They were not resting from their normal routine of gathering food in the morning.
God was not splitting hairs. Looking for food on the Sabbath in itself was not wrong. The wrong was disobedience. Just because we don’t see the harm in something is not reason enough to ignore what God has instructed us to do or how to behave. The further wrong in this action was failing to recognize the purpose, the intent of the command – it was for the reasons stated in Exodus 31:13 - "Tell the people of Israel to keep my Sabbath day, for the Sabbath is a sign of the covenant between me and you forever. It helps you to remember that I am the LORD, who makes you holy.” If however those reasons alone were not enough to motivate obedience, God added an addendum to the plan. In Exodus 31:15 God warned that the penalty for working on the Sabbath was death!
While we live not under law but under grace (thankfully) the principle must be given attention – God is not pleased, is angered actually when all of life is consumed with temporal care, materialism, consumerism and consumption at the expense of neglecting relationship and Sabbath rest. We need to know that ignoring Sabbath-keeping (remembering we are talking about relationship with God, not a calendar day with certain activities) kills us – it kills our potential for good work, it destroys our productivity, it saps our energy, it depletes our tolerance of other people and above everything else, it kills our relationship with God. EVERYTHING hinges on the strength or weakness of our relationship with God.
Sadly, what God intended even in the old covenant command was misconstrued and wrongfully enforced and applied. We’ll see why in the next point:
b. NEW COVENANT SABBATH-REST
What we just looked at is called the old dispensation or the Old Testament covenant. It changed and was completely fulfilled when Jesus came!
Luke 4 – Jesus was in ‘church’ (synagogue) every Sabbath day (according to Jewish custom and law, which was Saturday in the Jewish calendar).
Luke 6 – he was with his disciples who were breaking off “heads of wheat, rubbed off the husks in their hands, and ate the grains.” (v1) In the same chapter, Jesus healed on the Sabbath. This was considered breaking the Law of Moses hence, the Law of God Almighty and it simply was not acceptable.
If God intended certain behaviour on a certain day in the week, he had a very big problem. His Son was breaking all the rules. Jesus was doing everything that the Jewish leadership thought violated the intent and instruction of God. So we have one of two conclusions: i) Jesus blatantly disobeyed God and is no better than we are (and we know that cannot possibly be the case) OR ii) the Jewish leadership had it wrong to begin with. I pick the leadership having it wrong. These and other examples demonstrate that Sabbath-keeping is not a certain activity, day or law-demanding order. It is not about behaviour friends. It is a time, and times, of intentional rest with God, administered by grace-living. Sabbath-rest times are invitations to “Come and have breakfast.”
To carry the thought further, consider God’s words of Exodus 20:8-10 - the fourth commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor, but the seventh day is a Sabbath.” Some will argue that this is the conclusion of recognizing a particular day. Yet the argument is weak because it is a different day depending on which calendar you use. Roman, Hebrew, and Gregorian. One source tells us that “Several thousand years ago, calendars of the earliest civilizations in Mesoamerica, Europe, Asia and Africa all had twelve thirty-day months in the year. Their calendar years each consisted of a nice, round, 360 days.” (http://www.12x30.net/intro.html) There was the era of the Julian calendar, modified by the Gregorian calendar and currently replaced by our Western calendar. There are Muslim and Chinese calendars, cultural realities even for Muslim and Chinese Christians. One can get dizzy if one wishes to argue that Sabbath means Sunday – or… really it means Saturday if we follow the Jewish calendar – oh, let’s not go there!
If you started a new job on Wednesday and worked six days, what day does the seventh fall on? - Tuesday. Or if you started on Friday, the seventh day falls on Thursday. The issue of a particular day is not an easy one to satisfy.
All of this leads back to one option – while God wrote the Law on Sabbath-keeping, the new dispensation, or the time of Jesus to the present, is a provision for embracing the principle of Sabbath-keeping. We are not to have a stringent, straight-jacket mentality about Sabbath-keeping but a sense of grace in our treatment of it.
Sabbath-keeping can be “a moment, an hour, a day or a string of days.” (Leonard Sweet, Aqua Church, p. 153).
Scripturally speaking, “There are many Sabbaths that did not occur on the 7th day so the word Sabbath should not be limited to the narrow meaning of 7th day only as some teach. It means to rest. The true Sabbath was not just a rest one day in seven but involved a complete change of life.” (Let Us Reason Together Ministries. http://www.letusreason.org/7thAd25.htm
(Bold mine)
Sabbath is about BEING and PRESENCE. Which leads us to the final matter of:
2. Experiencing Sabbath.
I frustrate my deprived wife so terribly sometimes. I know you other men don’t do this and your wives could not possibly know what my wife goes through but I’ll share openly for a moment. I fail terribly many times in giving my wife PRESENCE – oh, I’m in the room; I’ll grunt with her comments; get this – I’ll even look at her and nod acceptingly of what she is saying. But at the end of it, I never heard a word. I’m in the same room, eating at the same table, sitting on the safe sofa BUT I’M NOT THERE! The problem is outlined by Chuck Swindoll in Stress Fractures. In talking about being imitators of God he says it “means saying no to more and more activities that increase the speed of our squirrel cage, knowing that God requires that we “be still” (Psalm 46:10, NIV) (p. 158). My mind is too busy. I can experience as much Sabbath in really listening to my wife and giving her PRESENCE as I can by coming here this morning and singing worship songs!
Sabbath-keeping is not an exercise in spiritual disciplines alone, things like meditation, prayer, fasting, Bible study, living simply, submission, service and so on. Neither is it about focusing on doing other things that are not professionally defined as work or my job. Joanna Weaver in her book “Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World” writes of her “devotional time as another duty to perform. I loved the feeling I got as I checked off chapters in my Bible reading and conquered another memory verse…
“Suddenly my eyes were open to what true devotion is. It is not duty. It is a delight. It is not an exercise in piety. It is a privilege.” (2002, p. 71).
Lynn Babb, author of Sabbath Keeping challenges us to broaden our definition of work. Some will think “I don’t work – I’m retired.” Work is not about paid employment. Work is any activity that is dutiful – anything done because it has to be done – reporting to your paid job, cleaning house, attending to children, or even going to the fitness centre because one needs to do that for health reasons - but it is not a preferred or enjoyed activity – is WORK. Babb offers two questions we should consider when talking about taking Sabbath rest.
◦ “On my Sabbath, what will I cease from doing?
◦ What will I do during Sabbath time?
“Genuine Sabbath-keeping is not a series of “you shall nots,” says Leonard Sweet, “but a string of celebrations. Its goal is not to shut you off from the realties of life, but to open you up to living.” (Leonard Sweet, Aqua Church, 2000. p. 152).
The Christian church has effectively destroyed Sabbath-keeping. We have relegated it to a certain day (Sunday) every week rather than teaching Sabbath to be an attitude of heart and experience a day in the week. We push it as busy activity going to church and other “spiritual” obligations instead of pushing it to be a stretch of time of just BEING and only doing what encourages and strengthens identity in Christ. We have narrowed Sabbath-rest so effectively that we fail to understand it could be about baseball as much as it can be about going to church; it may have more to do with family reunions and feasting than organizing an outreach day for the masses of strangers we don’t even know. Not sure you agree? Consider for a moment what the Pharisees and teachers of the law labeled as Sabbath activity against the back-drop of Jesus’ practices and you’ll find the two didn’t agree. Now who do you suppose was right?
Here’s a novel thought. Spiritual activity is found in baseball and feasting as much as what we call “going to church”. The reason we struggle with this liberating thinking is because of our definition and understanding of worship. We see worship as coming here on Sunday morning or the Praises in the Park on Sunday evening and putting songs together and a ‘performance’ effort to share the spiritual with other people. That thinking could not be further from the truth. Spiritual activity is completely about how we live the moment – every moment – in the settled reality of God’s presence in the here and now of where I am and what I am doing. That is true worship.
Now, before you get too excited, understand that I am not preaching a license to neglect ministry obligations like those mentioned. There is something to be learned, received and given in these times together and they are an integral part of godly community. I am however suggesting we need to break down the boxes of religious definitions we have and realize it is about so much more than religion and rules – it’s about RELATIONSHIPS.
Sweet suggests that the Greek used in Mark 4:36, “leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat” not only means “leaving the crowd behind…” but more than that suggests “abandoning the crowd…” This is not about gradual release but instantly severing oneself from the demands of the everyday. We find that hard to do. All our lives we have been told that it is always about everyone else. I remember too well the words of Ruth Tracy that are in our songbook (435, v3):
“Only as I truly know thee
Can I….
Only bring the power to others
Which….”
Some of you are not sure you agree with what I’m sharing. Others of you absolutely agree and those who agree are wondering how we get ourselves so removed from this reality of Sabbath-rest. We have the best of intentions but can’t seem to deliver. Sweet offers a stinging possibility: “Let’s admit it. We’re not too busy, too important, too needed, or too gifted to take a nap. We’re too scared. We cannot close our eyes because we cannot bear to relinquish the little bit of control we have convinced ourselves we hold. We are terrified that in an unguarded moment we will lose all the reins of power we have so tightly grasped.” (p. 154) But release ourselves we must for, as the gospel herald says, “Salvation begins by resting in the perfect, finished work of Christ — not by doing something.”
(http://gospel-herald.com/sabbath_studies/bb_ch18.htm)
WRAP
Presence
Renewal
Intentional relationship
Being
Stillness
