Delight

We are continuing our series called Redeeming Rest. We’ve been looking at how we can restore the ancient biblical practice of Sabbath in a way that leads to what Jesus calls “rest for our souls”. One of the things I’ve been trying to do in this series is to undo some bad church belief regarding Sabbath.

First, that the Sabbath is obsolete. I’ve already mentioned a couple of times that most Christians view the Ten Commandments as still applicable. But when asked specifically about the Sabbath commandment, the response is “that’s the OT”. All the other commandments are valid in our minds, but this one is obsolete. I’ve tried to show that far from being obsolete, the Sabbath is part of our design. It’s not based on any rhythm in nature but solely on God’s rhythm of work and rest. We were made to keep a Sabbath. 

The other part of church history they needs to be rewound is what it looks like to keep the Sabbath. For my Jewish friend, Sabbath meant attending synagogue Friday evening for prayers, and then again Saturday morning for Hebrew school, and then spending the rest of the day staring out the window wistfully watching the other boys in the neighborhood play baseball. Many Christians raised in very religious homes have similar stories. The Sabbath was shifted to Sunday, which meant going to church - twice - and then sitting at home the rest of the time contemplating either holy thoughts about God or your own unholiness. The mood for the day could be summed up as - somber. No wonder we aren’t interested in the Sabbath.

Whether Jewish or Christian, both came to regard the Sabbath as a day when no fun was allowed. But was this God’s intent?  Does denying yourself joy and enjoyment on the Sabbath somehow give God glory?  I think the opposite is true.

We’ve seen so far in this series that the Sabbath is a time to cease from our normal work. It is a time to resist the anti-human forces that say your value is only in what you produce. What I hope to make clear this morning is another deeply embedded aspect of Sabbath-keeping: Sabbath is a day to practice delight.

Genesis 2:1-3

This should be a familiar passage by now. We’ve already explored various meanings of the the word “rest” - in Hebrew shabbat. We’ve seen so far in this series that “rest”:

is connected to the Hebrew word for seat or throne, the idea being that God’s rest, and ours, involves ruling over our creative work. 

is connected to ceasing from normal work and trusting in God’s ability to uphold our lives.

is an act of resistance to the de-forming powers that shape us contrary to God’s design.

Now I want to peel back another layer for the word “rest”. If you didn’t already know, there were no chapter and verses in the original manuscripts to make up our Bible. We’ve added those to make things easier to reference. But they can have unintended consequences. For instance, we might begin reading chapter 2 of Genesis as if it is a complete thought by itself, without understanding that what precedes it is part of its context. So, what is the context of our chapter 2 reading?

Chapter one has this repeated pattern as God begins to carve out boundaries and assign function to his creation. After each day, God declares that day’s work “good”. Then, after he has finished his final work day, having created human beings, we read this:

Genesis 1:31 “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

What’s happening here?  Read with our chapter 2 verses, let me suggest that the author is telling us that another aspect of God’s rest was so that he could delight in what he had made.

My dad’s delight over a freshly tilled garden...

The image we have before us is of a master craftsman who works diligently and exactingly with his hands until his creation is just right. Exactly how he wants it. And only then can he sit back and enjoy what he has made.

God looked upon his completed creation and everything was exactly how he wanted it. Everything was functioning perfectly according to his design. And only then he pronounced that everything was “good”. “Good” is the Hebrew word tov = “good”. Tov carries several meanings in Hebrew. It includes moral goodness. It is also used for something beautiful or desirable. It describes something when it is in its right order, they way it’s supposed to be. And, it can even be used for “happy”.  God rested on the seventh day so that he could delight in all the tov - the goodness - he had made. How does this shape our understanding of how we should delight in Sabbath rest?

Delighting in God’s tov

We are to delight in the tov of God’s creation.

A true Sabbath should find us delighting in what God has made. Rather that staring wistfully at the other boys playing baseball, we should be the first to pick up a bat. 

Honoring God on the Sabbath should involving doing what brings you joy. Take a walk. See a movie. Go fishing. Plant a garden. Fly a kite with your kids. Go out with friends. Find joy in all the the goodness that God has created. 

What you must not do is infringe upon this day of delight by doing laundry, running errands, and opening your laptop to respond to work emails. You will know you have Sabbath-ed well if at the end of your time you are not exhausted but refreshed. We need to renew the practice of delighting in God’s creation.

We are to delight in the tov of God’s provision.

Enjoying God’s goodness in creation should naturally lead to gratitude. It is so easy to notice all the things we don’t have, all the things that aren’t right, all the ugliness in the world. But grumbling and joy cannot exist together. One will always drive out the other. 

The power of gratitude is that it produces joy. As we remind our soul of all God has done for us, all that he has given us, we find our joy increasing in spite of our circumstances. 

The Jews have a word for this practice of gratitude - dayenu. In Hebrew it means something like dayenu = “it would have been enough, but...”. They sing a song by this name at Passover. The song is about being grateful to God for all of the gifts given to the Jewish people, such as taking them out of slavery, and giving them the Torah and Sabbath. And had God only given one of these gifts, it would have still been enough.  Practicing dayenu means reminding our soul that it would have been enough:

that God provided me a home, but he has also filled my home with good things. 

that God gives me daily bread, but he has also given me a feast of things to eat. Usually more than I need.

that God made me, but he has also placed me in a family and with friends who love me. 

Dayenu helps us to look at one thing we’re thankful for so that we can gain an appreciation for the whole. Practicing gratitude is a way of delighting in God’s provision.

We are to delight in the tov of God’s person.

The psalmist writes, “Taste and see that the Lord is tov.”  God is good. He doesn’t have tov, he is tov. 

I don’t think we should see this as a separate way of delighting in addition to delighting in God’s creation and provision. It’s not about sitting around thinking delightful thoughts about God. I mean, I guess you can do that, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Psalm 119 is essentially an entire song about how much the author loves God’s word.

Maybe a better way of think about this last one is in terms of focus. AS you delight in God’s good creation, AS you delight in his provision, simply point the beam of your delight upward. Do these delightful things with an eye toward heaven, recognizing that it is a good, good Father who has given all of this. This I think is at the heart of genuine worship. It’s delighting in the goodness of God by doing, whatever we’re delighting in, to the glory of God. It’s delighting in God’s person as we fish, see a concert, take a walk. It’s aiming the focus of our delight back toward him. Here is a pure sacrifice of praise. But I don’t want to say more about this because it will spoil next week.

Jesus is tov

Sabbath is an invitation to delight. God rested in order to delight, and he wants you to rest for delight as well. I think he wants to rewire your concept of Sabbath as a day for joy, not dreary somberness.

Ultimately, our Sabbath delight is found in the tov revealed in Jesus. Jesus is God’s goodness revealed perfectly. He is beauty, he is truth, he is how things and humans ought to be. He is what we will look like when God finally makes everything right again, when he looks out over his new creation and again says “indeed, it is very good”. When we find Jesus we find an ultimate goodness that begins to transform our life even now.

Genesis reveals that God’s greatest source of delight was in his human creation.  Let me make that very personal: Jesus delights in you. I don’t know if you can receive that, but it’s true. He delights in you - in us. And when sin threatened to destroy us, his delight led him to the cross. His delight in you is such that he cannot bear the thought of losing you. And so he became one of us so that he could reverse the effects of sin. At the cross he took all the death consequences of our sin and carried it with him to the grave. He took the ugliness so that we could have the beauty. He took death so that we could have life. And then he rose on the third day as our victorious Savior. Sin and death are defeated, and the way to eternal life is restored. I invite you to make a commitment to Jesus as your savior if you never have… (next steps slide). This is the pathway to true delight.

Learning to practice Sabbath delight is hard. Most of us have no positive example for this. So once again I’ve provided a QR code and link to a resource that will give you some ideas on how to delight on the Sabbath, including how to have a Sabbath meal. You’ll find on the list that one of the delightful things to do on the Sabbath is to make love to your spouse, so it might be worth your time to download!  But there are several other activities to engage in if that is not delightful.

I want to close by reading from Isaiah 58:

Isaiah 58:13–14 “If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”