Sabbath Rest
I think know that our world would suffer significantly fewer mental health problems if everyone started to shape their lives around the rhythm of Sabbath rest.
For the past several years I have been practicing Sabbath. Here’s how:
Be present in my church community
Read good books
Be outside
Create art
Take naps
Laugh
Cook + eat delicious food
Do no work (not even emails)
Do stuff that feeds my soul
But Sabbath wasn’t always a joy to me.
Growing up, I practiced Sabbath because I feared God. Sabbath was a duty, a way to prevent God’s wrath.
I took a pause from my to-do list on Sundays for the same reason that I zealously applied myself to my to-do list all the other days. I was trying to hit the standard so that God and others would accept me.
No matter what, I never seemed to have completed the task of proving myself to God and man. I didn’t follow Sabbath perfectly, nor did I achieve any other of the burdensome tasks I laid on my own shoulders to a perfect standard. On a daily basis, I suffered stomach-knotting anxiety and agonizing shame at my many failures.
The funny thing is, Sabbath was my answer, but not in the way I thought.
I had no clue that Sabbath was quite possibly God’s most magnanimous and lavish gift to humanity. Hebrews 4 lets us in on the secret. See, most of us (present company included) think the world rests on our own shoulders. We are deluded into the idea that we are the authors of our own fate, and we must prove ourselves worthy. That is what I would call the “anti-Sabbath” mindset. I had all the American “pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps-ness” and none of the shalom that Sabbath was meant to bring.
Hebrews 4 reveals that Mosaic Sabbath laws were instituted by God as a “shadow of things to come”, but the “substance” always belonged to Christ (Col. 2:17). The Hebrews failed to enter God’s rest as they trudged around the wilderness in grueling, self reliant distrust of God. We are in peril of endlessly trudging the same wilderness trail if we buy into self sufficiency and the notion that identity is something earned rather than received with open-handed gratitude.
Sabbath rest was but a shadow of the benefits Christ would earn for us one day on a Roman cross. Christ’s life was a thing of beauty, the full performance, the mind-blowing display of perfect righteousness and love. And at the end of that earthly life, He took all of our ugly pride and failings upon Himself and died. This was no ordinary death, but a dramatic spit in the face of the demonic powers that would have preferred to keep us shackled to self reliance. But He didn’t leave it there - in a glorious breaking of an ancient curse, God raised Christ from the dead, the chains of sin and human arrogance forever broken and withering in an empty grave.
In His life, death, and resurrection, Christ made the way for you and me to take on His own identity as righteous children of God (2 Cor. 5:21). No success or failure on our part can overpower the new creation God has brought forth.
Now I know that Sabbath means letting go of my belief that belonging is the reward at the end of the to-do list. I am putting to death all my grandiose attempts at being my own savior.
Good news has come to us. Shalom is ours if we lay aside striving. Sabbath rest has already been hard-won for us by the Savior who beckons us to the family table if we will only kick back and relax.
