Sabbath: STOP
Practice of Sabbath • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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New collection on the subject of Sabbath. We want to bring faith to life….and the radiant life of God doesn’t happen by accident. Our natural tendency is to be radioactive not radiant. When we practice the way of Jesus, we participate in redemptive formation of His Spirit, making us more radiant. One of the practices of our faith is Sabbath.
25 At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants. 26 Yes, Father, because this was your good pleasure. 27 All things have been entrusted to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him. 28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Everything God creates, satan counterfeits or distorts.
Everything God creates, satan counterfeits or distorts.
Rest is an invitation in the Kingdom. Escapism is the world’s counterfeit.
It looks like this: Flip through any popular magazine and you will see all sorts of advertisements–a couple drinking coffee and reading the morning newspaper in bed, a man lounging on the couch playing the guitar, a group of friends on the beach for a picnic…
• What exactly are they selling?
• They are selling sabbath.
• The word sabbath is shabbat in Hebrew and it literally means to stop, or cease, or
be done.
• The marketing departments of companies the world over know that you ache for this kind of a life – but that you don’t have it. And they are offering to sell it to you!
• The irony is, you can’t buy sabbath! And you don’t need to. To sabbath, you don’t need to escape to instagram worthy resort or blow your budget on a vacation you to put on a credit card.
I love pastor Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Matthew 11:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
• “Are you tired” has become a rhetorical question in the modern age.
• Of course you are!
• Low-grade exhaustion is the new normal and we measure our life to others based on who’s more busy.
illu: Did you know, that Up until very recently in human history, the most people slept ten to eleven hours a night. Now, the average in Western nations is just over six. And, Neuroscience has a host of data to show the devastating impact of insufficient sleep on our bodies.
Weariness is a condition, not only of our bodies, but our souls.
Jesus wants to give rest to your soul.
Jesus wants to give rest to your soul.
this problem of chronic exhaustion isn’t just an emotional problem, or even a medical problem, at its core, it’s a spiritual problem…which is why a vacation, no matter how exotic or perfect, won’t heal the weariness.
Even when we go on vacation and catch up on sleep, there’s a psycho• spiritual exhaustion that does not go away in the modern world, as a result of:
• The hurry, busyness, and frenetic pace of modern life.
• The noise pollution of city life.
• The always-on work culture.
• The rising cost of living, more and more people working multiple jobs to stay afloat.
• The digital age - the phone that never stops buzzing, the constant stream of alerts, the
churn of a 24/7 news cycle, full of outrage and fear.
• The polarization of politics.
• Radical individualism, and with it the epidemic of loneliness, what some call the greatest health crisis of our time.
illus: one of the surest signs, for me, that i’m weary in my soul and spirit is my inability to love others well. I get short and snappy. I get irritated, and sinful temptation is more difficult to resist.
Love is an indicator of a rested soul.
Love is an indicator of a rested soul.
Jesus said the greatest command is to love God with all our hearts, soul, mind, and strength. And the second greatest command is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
When i am weary i don’t even love myself well, must less others or God.
Love is a fruit of God’s Spirit, abiding in us…but look at what Jesus says will choke out fruit...
Mark 4:19 “19 but the worries of this age, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.”
God’s word should produce a life of godliness.
Love for God and Obedience to God are two sides of the same coin.
Scientists tell us that a lack of rest erodes energy from our pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain that exercises impulse control. But secondly...As a general rule, tired people are not loving.
Most of my worst moments as a human, as a friend, or co-worker or husband or father, are when I’m exhausted, stressed, and in a hurry.
Jesus’ will for your life is not for you to be chronically exhausted, sleep-deprived, unhappy and living with no margin.
• That’s the enemy’s will for your life! Not Jesus!
• It’s the enemy who is anti-sabbath.
Jesus wants to give you life to the full.
Jesus wants to give you life to the full.
Here’s a metaphor that may help: imagine your life energy as a power bar, like on your phone. 100% is what Jesus called “life to the full,” 0% is dead.
• We usually don’t rest until we’re dangerously tired, down to 20 or 30%. And when we do rest, it’s often not long enough to get all the way back to full, but just to keep going. But what do we miss out on in that last 30%? What the NT calls the “fruit of the spirit” – love, joy, peace, and more. The best stuff all comes when we’re rested – wisdom, insight, hope, vision for the future, grace for other people’s shortcomings, for our own, energy to do our best work,etc….it’s called a short charge. And, like your cell phone battery, you can ruin it in the long term by not charging it properly or using the proper cables to do so.
This is why rest is essential to apprenticeship to Jesus. Because if the end goal is to become a person of love in God, we can’t do that if we are chronically exhausted.
a medical study was one on a large community of Christians who practice the Sabbath. The study found that not only are they much happier, on average, than the general population, but they live eleven years longer than other Americans. One doctor pointed out that if you add up the time devoted to sabbath over a life, it’s right around eleven years. He theorized that for every day you sabbath you literally add a day to your life!
Sabbath is the practice that systematically reorients us back toward “life to the full.”
Sabbath is the practice that systematically reorients us back toward “life to the full.”
The word sabbath, or shabbat in Hebrew, most literally means to stop. But it can also mean to rest, to delight, and even to worship. Based on that, you can frame the Sabbath in four movements – stop, rest, delight and worship.
1 So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed. 2 On the seventh day God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation.
God Sabbathed.
God Sabbathed.
Seriously…the creator of all things who has not limitations and never grows weary…sabbaths…HE STOPS.
Yeah, but I’m a type-A, high capacity person–God sabbathed.
Yeah, but I’m more a doer, and I have a lot going on in my life right now–God sabbathed.
Yeah, but I have little kids at home and I’m starting a business–God sabbathed.
God the Creator stopped.
And in doing so, he built a rhythm into the fabric of creation.
We work for six days, and then we sabbath, we stop, for one.
It comes as no surprise that every single society in the history of world civilization has been built around a seven-day week, even though, the week is the one unit of time that’s not tied to the movement of the stars–the day is tied to the earth’s 24-hour rotation, the month to the moon’s lunar cycle, and the year to the earth’s journey around the sun. The seven-day week is not. It’s built out of God’s own life rhythm
To go against the rhythm is live out of sync with the Creator and the symphony we are a part of.
The smart phone, electricity, the alarm clock, the car, and more have created a world where
we go and we go and we go and we never stop.
• But God created the human body and the planet itself to live in a rhythm.
• There is a rhythm between day and night, waking and sleeping.
• There is a rhythm between the noise and activity of spring and summer and the quiet and dormancy of fall and winter.
• There’s a tidal rhythm between the land and the sea that’s over all the earth.
• Within our own bodies there’s a rhythm of the breath as we inhale and exhale.
• When we lose this sense of rhythm, of pace, of back and forth, we lose a part of our humanity.
• You are not a machine; you have a soul, and it was not created to move 24/7.
• When we live without sabbath, we go against the rhythm that God the Creator himself built into our body, and into the fabric of all creation.
The philosopher H.H. Farmer once said, “When you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters.”
illus: my daughters and splinter.
God created the world, you, and everything within it - He knows how it works best.
God created the world, you, and everything within it - He knows how it works best.
8 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: 9 You are to labor six days and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates. 11 For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.
God has established Sabbath, showing us what a flourishing life.
like the law of thermodynamics and gravity or trying to pet a wild tiger, you can ingore wisdom, or leverage it.
illus: get fired for breaking a command; get a raise for breaking one.
27 Then he told them, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. 28 So then, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
Meaning, we are not enslaved by sabbath rule keeping, rather, Sabbath is a source of life and a gift to us.
Our problem isn’t that we have too many rules for the Sabbath; it’s that we don’t have any!
Long before the Sabbath is a command in Scripture, it’s a gift, from the Creator to you and me and all of creation… from a generous, joyful, loving God.
What gift from God do you not want?
God has blessed something and mad it available to you? Do you want the blessing or live under a burden? When we don’t live in blessing, the alternative is to live under a curse.
Who is Lord of your life?
Remember, Jesus is “Lord of the Sabbath” too.
The practice of sabbath is a day of rest by which we cultivate a spirit of restfulness in all of life.
• A practice by which we undergo a dramatic shift, from restlessness to restfulness:
From/to:
• Hurry/Peace
• Busyness/margin
• Burnout/sustainable pace
• Noise/quiet
• Distraction/clarity
• Isolation/solitude
Sabbath, like all of the practices, is a means to an end. The end isn’t, I practice sabbath. It’s not even to be well rested and happy. It’s to participate in the love and life of God himself. To center our entire life around him, to live more deeply in him.
• You do not have to live in non-stop exhaustion. You, right where you are, no matter your stage of life, can adopt the practice of Sabbath.
We want you to stop this week. Pick a day for your sabbath. Maybe it’s Saturday evening through Sunday evening.
We are sending an email every Sunday evening, with some tips, prayers, and encouragement for you to consider this next weekend as you practice sabbath. (text keyword “news” to 620.604.9280.)
We remember that we don’t stop when we’re finished; because we’re never finished; it’s never enough; we stop when the rhythm God built into our bodies says, stop.
• Many people fear stopping, they fear what emotions may come up – who am I if I’m not producing or performing? Sabbath is a weekly act of identity formation, we remember –I am God’s loved one.
• We remember that our life with God is not a “right,” but a gift.
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Talk it Over (being honest & open with friends, a spouse, or your Group)
The message was about learning to STOP, living in sync with God’s rhythm for life. What is one idea from Sunday’s message that impacted you?
Read Matthew 11:25-30. What is the Holy Spirit saying through these verses?
What’s your current understanding of the Sabbath? Is the Sabbath a part of your life currently or not?
What thoughts and feelings do you have going into this Sabbath practice?
Read Exodus 20:8-11. What is the Holy Spirit saying here?
What are the obstacles that get in the way of your practicing Sabbath? Either practically or emotionally?
What is your plan to practice Sabbath this week?
