Sunday 20 (tripp)

Matthew 22:36–40 ESV

36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

From a distance, Sam looked like he was doing well. He was married with three children, seemed active in his church, and enjoyed a successful career. Those who didn’t know him well looked at him with respect. He seemed to have it all. But behind closed doors the picture was very different. In ways that he was blind to, his world was progressively coming unglued. His marriage was increasingly dysfunctional. He and Sally spent almost no time together. And when they were together, he was too distracted, too impatient, and too irritated to actually relate to his wife in a loving way. For several years she had tried to talk to him about the state of their marriage, but he was virtually unapproachable. He was good at turning the tables and reminding Sally that there was plenty of evidence that he wasn’t the only sinner in the room. Their conversations almost always devolved into a litany of all of Sally’s sin, weaknesses, and failures. Sally had quit trying to have those conversations and just tried to stay out of Sam’s way to avoid being told, once again, what a bad person she was.

One reason their conversations were never productive was that Sam was a human biblical-doctrine think tank. He had a high level of biblical literacy, and he would tell Sally that there was nothing she could tell him from Scripture that he didn’t already know. He had no understanding that if your theology makes you arrogant and unapproachable, it’s bad theology. Sam had no clue that it is quite possible to use the Bible unbiblically. Something else caused Sam to be less than open in those hard conversations: he equated biblical literacy and theological expertise with personal spiritual maturity. But he was a living example of the fact that you can know the Bible and theology well and not be following God well in your everyday life.

Yet another component contributed to the worsening home mess. Sam was an absentee father. He had never been a parental presence in his kids’ lives. He got up and went to work before they got out of bed and came home after they had gone to bed for the night. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t really know them. He was fully committed to the pursuit of business success. He had a dream of what that success would look like. This dream got him up in the morning and occupied him until very late at night. For a few years Sally would wait up for him, but he came in tired, with little patience for the report of her day or for her questions about his. So Sally quit staying up. The kids had become increasingly resentful of his absence and even more resentful that, when he was around, he tried to insert himself into things he hadn’t been around for and didn’t understand. All of them would have much rather had a dad who was present and involved than all the money and things he threw at them. But Sam was not just too busy for his family; he had little time for God. This man who once consumed his Bible barely picked it up anymore, and his need to miss Sunday worship was increasing. The things of God no longer filled his heart, shaped his conversations, or set the agenda for his life with his family. Sam lived at the intersection of busyness and self-righteousness and, if he continued, things would only worsen.

I don’t think Sam is alone. These are spiritual dangers for all of us. Think with me for a moment. God has set significant time limits for each of us. You and I will never get thirty hours in a day, we will never get ten days in a week, we will never get fifty days in a month, and we will never get four hundred and fifty days in a year. Within the time limits God has set for us, we are called to a careful stewardship of three dimensions of our lives: spiritual (relationship with God and the surrender of your life to him); relational (relationship with family, brothers and sisters in Christ, and friends); and vocational (world of work). If one of these areas grows and grows, the increasing time investment in that area has to eat into other areas of your life, because you will never have time added to your day or an extra day added to your week. As the work commitments and the lure of success took up more of Sam’s time, they ate into his time with his family and his Lord. More and more of work meant less and less of Sally and the kids and less and less devotional and worship time. Sam knew the Two Great Commandments well (Matt. 22:37–40), but the time demands of his career dreams daily caused him to break them both. Vertical and horizontal love were sacrificed at the altar of success, but Sam didn’t see it.

The crisis of Sam’s busyness was worsened by his self-righteousness. Because he was no longer looking in the mirror of God’s word and seeing himself with accuracy, Sam had a distorted view of himself. This self-righteous man stood in the middle of a growing family disaster, but he couldn’t see it. And when he did have a flash of insight, he would quickly blame someone or something else. Sam was simply too busy and too righteous to see and confess the need for change.

You see in Sam’s story the genius of God’s gift of sabbath. We all desperately need sabbath from our labors, but not just so we can physically rest and rejuvenate. We need sabbath so we can see clearly again, confess our need again, turn to grace again, and surrender again our self-glory to the greater glory of our Savior King. We all need regular moments when our bodies and minds are taken away, by grace, from our work and we sit with our brothers and sisters at the feet of our Savior, being confronted by how much we need his grace and being encouraged by its forgiving, transforming, and restoring power. We all need to step out of the busyness that occupies so much of our time and to gaze once again on the glorious glory of our Lord, remembering that all things are from him, through him, and to him (Rom. 11:36). We need to remember that God is at the center and we are not, and that this is a very good thing. So take time this week with your fellow believers to make sabbath. Rest, remember, confess, worship, and surrender. No matter how mature you may grow in the faith, you will never outgrow your need for the grace of sabbath.