Deeper: S3, E7 - Rested

Taking a day off can be tough - but what if there's much more to the Sabbath than simply a day off?  What if a whole people-group committing to honour God weekly together in prayer, thought, action and presence could be something revolutionary for the planet?  

Transcript

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Hi there, I'm Alex, and here we are into episode 7 of 10, exploring the idea of experiencing and bringing to others the abundant life that Jesus spoke about. To do this, we have been moving backwards through the Ten Commandments, and in this episode called Rested, we're going to look at Sabbath. What is God actually looking for in a Sabbath rest? Is it more than a Sunday off? And what are we meant to do on a Sabbath? This command is going to shift the gears, where the others have all focused on how we honour God in the way that we interact with or see other people and our resources. These next four, which are actually of course the first four, are all going to focus in on our relationship with God, who God is with us and how we interact with Him. Because to live truly abundantly, it is God who's going to make all the difference. So Brace for Impact, this is resting. Father God, as what as we look at what it means to have this abundant life that you say believers will have, I pray you'll help us to have the courage to put down the things we might already think and feel about how we live and who you are. Help us to lay them at your feet and to re-examine our beliefs and practices in the light of what you might be saying. Help us to weigh up what's being said here, to take what's coming from you and leave behind anything that's just not. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay then here we go. So let's let's call out the elephant in the room straight away, shall we? I don't think I know many people who find themselves able to take a full day of rest every single week. It's like the world has stacked everything against us. Our work lives so often overflow into our personal lives, and more and more jobs are requiring people to fill in the blanks in their own time, especially jobs like teaching, where the face-to-face classroom time needs to be filled in with preparation, marking, sports days, trips, research, extra clubs, meetings, parent consultations, and a whole load of other stuff. There are jobs where overtime is an expectation. But even without that, most families have such a full timetable that on our day off, it's actually filled with what we now call adult admin, things like bills, forms, registrations, DIY, cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing, email messages. And when we do have five minutes to ourselves, all we're good for is to pull up the drawbridge and hide with the latest binge watch series. Some of our churches don't help with that. Because for some reason, only known to humans, some of our churches, and I know that I have been guilty of this too, we feel the need to mobilize congregations for the kingdom by asking them to attend a home group and a Bible study and church on Sunday in a leadership meeting and a prayer triplet and ask them to help with the youth or go to a conference or be in a band. And for so many Christians, we feel like when it comes to our time, we're failing at work, we're failing our families, and we're even failing God because we just don't know where we're meant to get this time from. It is not an abundant life. Lots of activity, but not much abundance going on. So what is the Sabbath all about? So Sabbath was intended by God as a day of rest from all of the work we're supposed to do in order to focus on being present with Him. It's 24 hours to talk purposefully about God with each other, to talk purposefully with God in prayer or just inside ourselves to move through the whole day with God, all day, to weekly remember that our lives do not revolve around business or our own busyness or church activity or money or an ability to perform. Our lives revolve around a relationship with God and relationships with other people, loving God and loving others. This commandment is literally best translated as remember the day of stopping and treat it with holiness. It's a holy thing. I mean, can you imagine what it would have been like a whole nation, a whole nation stopping for a whole 24 hours every single week? We got a little taste of that, I think, at the beginning of the lockdown months in COVID-19, where especially to start with, everybody was simply sent home. But then we gently slid back into the frantic pace that we were used to, found other ways to do things. But at the start, everyone just stopped. Imagine if that was a national policy every Saturday. No one is allowed to call you about work or allowed to message you without with a sneaky little work-related message. You literally can't cheekily check your emails or do that DIY job that needs doing. You're not allowed to do things that cause other people to work, so you're not allowed to use your phone or the internet, you're not allowed to eat out in a restaurant, no theatres. The only things you are allowed to do are things that are free and easy, like telling stories as a family, eating a picnic that you prepared last night, unless you're fasting. Sabbath rest and fasting are closely linked. Maybe you go for a family walk, or you play a board game, or you look through some old photos. Kids are playing in the street, not legally allowed to do homework or revision on this day. Adults are chatting with friends and neighbours in the street. There's no feeling of urgency or being called on, and God is living at the center of this story. Sabbath is designed to remind us weekly, God is our provider, not us. We're supposed to work hard, but God feels in our lack, and sometimes he feels in that lack through other people. On a Sabbath and during a fast, the emphasis is on being present with God, remembering what God has done, taking notice of what God is doing, and looking forward to what He will do. And there's also a focus on social concern. Where are the people who are in need in our community? This is the day according to Isaiah 58 when God's actually after us taking in those in need and sharing with them what we have. It's not just a day when wealthy people get to lay back and have a rest. It's a day when those who struggle to make ends meet are provided for by the community around them. Weekly sharing of goodness and relationship and resources and food for the week ahead. This is community living at its peak, with God at the center of it all. I wonder how our families would look if every single Sabbath day, whether for you that's a Sunday or a Saturday or some other day, but weekly as a family, we sat down and we prayed, Father, who do you want us to help this week, and what can we do for them? And then as a family group or as a pack of individuals, but weekly, we did something which equalizes the spread of wealth or resources, which equalizes the spread of food or clothing, which equalizes the spread of shelter or company. This is a day where our focus is on resting with God and on looking outward. Maybe this day, this stopping, is designed to remind us that our time doesn't actually belong to ourselves. Time is a gift and a resource that we've been given, and no one really knows how much of that each person has. So just like with all of our resources God gives to us, we are meant to use this to bless the world, not just to bless ourselves. For so many of us, when we finally get time to ourselves, our first thought is, What do I want to do? But maybe the question should be, is there something you want me to do, God, for someone else? I mean, if I truly believe that God has my well-being and my health as one of his own priorities, I can safely ask that question and allow the Holy Spirit to guide me and to pace me. Just maybe God is telling someone else to take care of me on that day. Yeah. According to the UK National Health Service, we thrive the most in our mental and our physical well-being when we do five things. Here's the five things. Connect in with people in person, do something that gets physically active, continue to learn new stuff, serve the needs of humanity around you, and be present in the moment, not always focusing our thoughts or our attention on the past or the future. I mean, doesn't it feel like the biblical view of the Sabbath takes in at least four of these? I mean, we come together as communities of faith in person and as families. We can spend time in a day reminding ourselves what the Bible says, learning about our faith. We revisit the life and work of Jesus, so we learn from him and from each other about being a disciple. We should be asking God how we can serve the world around us, and then actually doing something about it. And the Christian version of the secular idea of mindfulness is where we train ourselves to be mindful of God with us. How is God speaking to me today in the here and the now? On a Sabbath, I purposefully continue to train myself to be conscious of God with me, accompanying me through the day, and for no reason than he longs to be with me. So Sabbath is not just about the legality of not working, I mean that's what it had become in Jesus' day, uh and like this robot-like commands to not work so that you couldn't even write anything on a piece of paper or walk for too far because you'd crossed this line from recreation to work. Jesus looked around at that and he said, no, no, no, no, no. The Sabbath wasn't made as a slave driver for humanity. God isn't served by the Sabbath. The Sabbath is designed for humans, for your own good. So day one, where God makes light, then there's evening and there's morning, and it's the first day. Same with days two, three, four, five, six. The same. There's evening and there's morning the sixth day. But that marker phrase in the story doesn't happen with day seven. The writer wraps up the story like this. So this is verse two of Genesis chapter two. By the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing, so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. And that concludes the first creation of the story. So the perfect seventh day, the Sabbath, in theory, is a day that never ends. Like it lingers there for the whole rest of creation to live in. And that's that's kind of what God is after. That's the abundant life. He knows that as humans we really struggle with that. So to get us to remember that we are meant to live inside this Sabbath weekly, not on our own, as a whole community of faith, we stop. This is a significant part of the abundant life Jesus is offering to us. But it is a choice that we need to make again and again and again. Choosing to live consciously with God amongst us, asking him how we can serve him in his world, living from a point of rest. The New Testament letter that we call Hebrews picks up this theme big time and says that once we know Jesus and the complete forgiveness that he brings, we enter into a new spiritual season for our lives. Where instead of trying to please God by earning our way to him with good behaviour, we rest from all that. We simply know. We live knowing that we are accepted, that we are forgiven, we are God's children. Whereas before we had feelings like, Am I good enough for you, God, or will God accept me, or what if I stuff all this up? Jesus' sacrifice on the cross puts into place a new way of being alive. We live in what Christians call grace, the complete, undeserved forgiveness and acceptance of God. He fills us with himself, he transforms our character over time. And that, but that's for uh that's for another time. Right now, the focus is on taking time to remember God, that our Sabbath rest literally becomes an unending spiritual Sabbath experience, and that all the things we focus on during our regular Sabbath day become our lifestyle. A life of recognizing God's presence with us, a life asking God to show us how to be alive with him and for him. Finally, there's one more nugget of information about the Sabbath. It's the seventh day in the order of creation, but he makes humans at the conclusion of day six. So the Sabbath is actually the first full day that humans experience. The first, not the last. It's not a tag on, it's the launch pad. We go into six days of working from a whole day of being rested. It's not that we slump into a day of recovery after six days of working, it's the other way around. We live from rest. That's a very different way of being, especially if we assume that we're meant to be carrying this Sabbath attitude all week with us. Be present with me, God. Help me serve other people, God. Help me to rely on you as provider, be focused on holiness and be not be drawn into overworking. But who is the Sabbath for is also important. This fourth commandment is super long. Loads of the others are literally just two words don't murder, don't adulterize, don't steal. This one contains a list of people that we're meant to ensure are able to keep the Sabbath alongside us. Here's the list. See if anything jumps out to you. The commandment says this remember the Sabbath day by keeping it as holy or set aside to honour God. And we remember that honour your parents means have this weightiness and this gravity that keeps that relationship special. Six days shall you work and do all your labor, but on the seventh day it is a Sabbath or a stopping day, focused toward the Lord your God. On that day you shall not do any work, not you, not your son or daughter, not your male or female servants, not your animals, nor any foreigner who lives in your towns, not any foreigner who lives in your towns. Did you get that? God wants his church to care for the well-being and the spiritual health of ourselves, the young, everyone who works for us, even the animals around us, and people of every nationality who live where we do. This isn't a God who sees believers as the top of the tree. This is a God who sees believers as the agents of Sabbath for all people and even for nature itself. That's why there are laws in place about how we treat the land we work, laws that let the land rest, laws about how we treat our livestock, not overworking them, letting them rest, laws about how we care for refugees and immigrants. This, our role in the world is to help all people, to enable them to be whole and healthy and rested and welcome among us. We are meant to bring them into this eternal Sabbath alongside us. This is abundance. So, Father God, may we have the foresight to live in a way that enables us to put things down for one day a week. Help us to dedicate that time weekly to you, keeping it holy, noticing you, asking you to be tangibly present with us, listening for your voice, telling us how to bring about that abundance to other people around us, and then help us carry that into the whole rest of our week and our lives more and more and more. Holy Spirit, use our Sabbath as a training ground for a lifestyle of abundance. And Jesus, would you remind us of your words that this whole idea is not for God's benefit, it's for ours. Amen.