Gimme A Break - Sabbath

I was actually back up here just last weekend after some extended time off - but it’s summer, and maybe you missed last week, and if so, it’s been several weeks since we’ve seen each other.

But I did come back to a job. My office wasn’t all packed up. So that was good.

Hey: I didn’t have time last week to share anything with you about my time away - so I wanted to take some time here on the front end to share a little bit about it.

For those of you who don’t know:

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PLC’s Policy - Annual Lead Pastor Out of Office (OOO) Time:

(4) consecutive weeks off

To be used for:

Vacation (PTO)

Spiritual, physical, and emotional rest

Study

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So this is something we began doing with Pastor John like 10-15 years ago. And we saw just a lot of fruit from it - good for him and good for the church. And now that has been passed down to me. And:

Wow… what a gift. And I never, ever want to grow accustomed to it or come off as entitled to it. It’s just such a generous gift that our board and the rest of the staff give me.

And, listen: this place hums right along without me. We’ve built it that way. But still:

In order for me to be out for (4) consecutive weeks, other people have to pick up things. Specifically:

Zach Elster and Cody Caraway, the other two members of our staff Executive Team, have to carry more in my absence.

Pastor John and Pastor Chip have to teach more in my absence.

Our board has to have meetings without me being present (which I think they like).

But also: there’s central and campus folks that have to wait until I return for any communications or tasks that I’m attached to.

And so:

I’m so grateful for this gift, because it doesn’t come without cost. And It’s one that I do my best to steward well.

Now: would you indulge me for just a little bit more by letting me do a mini slide show of sorts? You can all just kinda pretend you’re in my living room while we share our family vacation that you’re not really interested in but are polite enough to fake it through?

Great.

So I started my OOO time with my wife and kids on a 2-week family vacation to Europe - starting in London:

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SHOW TOWER OF LONDON PIC

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So this is the Tower of London - NOT the London Bridge, as it’s so often mistaken for.

I actually took a picture of the London Bridge. Wanna see that?

Ok; here it is:

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SHOW PICTURE OF THE LONDON BRIDGE

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Not very inspiring, is it? But that is indeed the one that has fallen down, just like the song says. And now it’s… back up…

Our next stop was Paris. And, of course, we went to the Louvre and we saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo and all this incredible, iconic art.

But the coolest thing for me in the Louvre was actually an exhibition from the first Persian Empire under King Darius - the king mentioned in the Bible books of Daniel, Ezra, Haggai, and Zechariah.

So when we were able to see things like…

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SHOW PICTURE OF DARIUS CAPITAL

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This capital, which served as a pillar in Darius’ palace; or things like…

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SHOW PICTURE OF DARIUS FRESCO

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This frieze, which would have been on the walls of his palace—

It was amazing to think that I was seeing something that Daniel from the lion’s den saw. It just reminds you:

All of this stuff in this really old book we call the Bible…

This stuff happened. To real people. In the real world!

Alright. Last stop on our vacation was Munich, Germany:

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SHOW PICTURE OF NEUSCHWANSTEIN CASTLE

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This is Neuschwanstein Castle, kinda right on the edge of the Alps. This castle inspired Walt Disney when he went to create Cinderella’s castle. Just gorgeous.

Anyways, we just had a fantastic time. Those are the trip pics. Thanks for indulging me.

After we got back, I spent a week mostly at home resting. Just some extended, slow times with God. Walks. We had a kid at camp and my wife was back to work. So, super quiet. Just really refreshing.

And then I spent the last week up at a AirBnB finishing a book we’ll be using during a fall sermon series on Galatians.

In fact…

I even have a draft copy of the finished product:

There it is! It’s real!

It was such a joy to write—and we produced this in house. Sara Fitzgerald, our Creative Media Director, did the design work. Chris Bowden and Simon Campbell, Monte Bowden and Jill Gronewold edited it and provided me with feedback along the way. Nikki Thomas scrubbed it for all the grammatical errors she could catch.

We did this, you guys. Your church did this. Just super cool. And we’ll let you know how to get a hold of it as that series gets closer.

Oh… kay. Out of Office time. Really fruitful. Really grateful.

Next time I’m up, I’ll tell you more about the mission trip Jude and I went on to the Dominican. But I’ve used too much time already.

Hey - let’s talk about the Bible now. (About time; I know.)

Series Intro: Gimme a Break

It’s August. Two weeks into August, actually.

And here’s what my life (and maybe your life as well) starts to feel like at this time of year:

A lot of us are starting to feel the “Fall Scaries.”

The Fall Scaries—meaning we’re watching our calendars fill back up again, we’re being inundated with emails from our kids’ schools (or with notifications from the 13 different apps they use), we’re way behind on our school shopping, we’re not sure what pant size Jimmy is in now, and… we’re wondering where the summer went.

It’s the Fall Scaries—that underlying feeling of anxiety that creeps in on us as we watch the mountain of busyness once again loom out on the horizon.

And so, here’s what we thought:

Right now, in the middle of the Fall Scaries, let’s do a 2-week series called:

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SHOW “GIMME A BREAK” SERIES GRAPHIC

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Heres the idea behind the series:

We want to encourage you, as your calendar starts to fill up again and as you feel the pressure and the stress of being in 4 different places at once—

We want to encourage you to give yourself a break.

But not just any kind of break:

We want you to give yourself a break with a purpose.

The kind of break that your soul actually needs.

We want to encourage you (and even equip you) to build in some breaks with God—

Which are the kinds of breaks that are actually renewing and restful at the deepest level.

Practically, we’ll be talking about two different kinds of breaks this week and the next:

This week, it’s Sabbath.

Next week, it’ll be retreating—how do we build in some extended times away with God.

Weekend Intro: Sabbath in the Old Testament

So, let’s open up our Bibles to Exodus 20:8-11.

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Exodus 20:8-11

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(Explain where to find Exodus.) What you’re turning to is a passage of Scripture that you might be familiar with: it’s the Ten Commandments. And what we’ll be reading together is commandment #4.

Let’s read together:

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Exodus 20:8–11 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

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Okay. There it is. #4 of 10.

Now, the word “Sabbath” is an English cognate of the Hebrew word “shabat”—which just means to “cease” or to “rest.”

So here’s a simple definition of the word, Sabbath:

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Sabbath is a 24-hour period set aside to stop working, rest deeply, delight fully, and worship God intentionally.

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It’s a day you set aside intentionally where you stop doing all the things you have to do just to enjoy God and his many good gifts. That’s what it is.

And it’s important enough to God for him to have included it in the list of things he wrote with his own hand on stone tablets.

Think about that for just a second:

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Exodus 31:18 “When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.”

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God didn’t say, “Write this down.”

God said: “Gimme that notepad. I don’t want you screwing these up.”

Now in case you need a little refresher of what else in on his top ten list, here ya go:

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No other gods

Don’t make or worship idols

Don’t misuse or abuse my name/reputation

Remember & keep the Sabbath

Honor your parents

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6. Don’t murder

7. Don’t commit adultery

8. Don’t steal

9. Don’t lie about someone else

10. Don’t covet what someone else has

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Ok. So:

Here’s what’s interesting about the 10 Commandments:

They are ubiquitous. Universally accepted. Everywhere.

They transcend the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Almost everyone accepts them as being true and relevant for us, even today.

Nobody out there is going, “You know, that whole “don’t murder” thing… that just sounds a little old-fashioned.”

Or:

“You know, it’s 2025, for Pete’s sake; let’s get rid of the stigma around stealing.”

No! While you could argue that you’d wish more of us would live these commandments out, nobody looks at these Old Testament commandments as being old-fashioned or out of date or irrelevant.

Even if you don’t always tell the truth, or wish you had the toy in your garage that your neighbors do—you’d still probably agree that…

It’d be better for you if you did tell the truth, or

You’d probably be better off if you were more content with what you have.

My point is that we’d all agree the 10 Commandments are just as good and just as relevant today as they were when Moses brought God’s hand-written memo down from the mountain.

(Pause.)

Except for #4.

(Pause.)

We wouldn’t give ourselves a pass on breaking any of those commandments, even today—

Except for #4. Most of us could take or leave #4.

Isn’t that interesting? When you frame it up that way?

I mean:

It’s in the same list as murder, adultery, idolatry—

Things that we all would acknowledge as pretty serious, pretty weighty commands if you were to break them…

But most of us feel very little or even no guilt or shame about how we’re using our weekends.

Changing our Mindset

Why do you think our mindset about the 4th commandment is so different from our mindset about the other 9?

Why is our mindset about #4 so different?

Because here’s how I would describe our mindset about the Sabbath:

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Our Sabbath Mindsets:

“That’s one of those ‘Old Testament’ things.”

“That stresses me out.”

“What does ‘Sabbath’ even mean for me today?”

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So here’s what I want to do:

I want to change your mindset about the Sabbath. That’s what I want to spend the rest of my time doing.

Now, after I hand it back to your campus pastor or weekend host in the room with you, they are going to connect you with a resource on how. And I know that’s where some of us just get stuck right off the bat: we get stuck on the how. We got you—I promise. But we’re gonna address that in a few minutes.

What I want to do is change your mindset…

Starting with (3) statements that will help us make this shift—statements that I think we can all agree on.

Would you agree that…

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God knows better than you.

God knows you better than you.

God knows what you need better than you do.

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So:

If God knows better than you, and he knows you better than you, and he knows what you need better than you do…

Then maybe we should at least give him a chance to prove to us why this 4th commandment is something we might want to reconsider.

So, jump with me to a few different places in Scripture ok? Because here’s what I want you to see:

From literally the very beginning of our story, to literally the very end, Sabbath is not only a part of God’s plan…

It’s sometimes the plan.

Let’s start in Genesis.

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Genesis 2:1-3

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So as you turn there, think about this:

From the front cover of our story—the title page, the page of contents, chapter 1—Sabbath is part of our story.

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Genesis 2:1–3 “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. 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.”

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The creation story in Genesis is this beautiful poem:

There are these complementary opposites in God’s design—light from dark, waters above from waters below, day from night, land from water.

There’s 7 “days,” a number that symbolizes completion or perfection. God made everything, and made it perfectly.

But then we get to this really interesting verse.

God “rested.” He sabbathed.

Was it because he was tired? Well, no.

This is a poem, remember? You interpret the meaning of a poem differently than a newspaper or a textbook. When Genesis said that God rested, he didn’t literally lay his head down on a pillow.

Here’s what the author is telling us about our God, our world, and even us as he ends his creation poem:

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We are designed to rest—just like our Designer.

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God knows better—and he knows us better than we know ourselves… because he designed us.

We aren’t designed to keep going. We are designed to just stop. Regularly.

Let yourself be confronted by this truth:

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If the Creator of the world stopped, and yet the world kept on spinning—

How much more true is that for you?

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I know several of you who want to scream back at me and everyone else right now:

“You don’t know the wave of stuff that will just come crashing over me if I took a day a week to just stop.”

But I’d say to you:

You don’t know the wave that’s coming for you if you don’t.

This past week, we made some upgrades to our video and broadcasting system here at our Cedar Falls campus. Maybe you noticed a difference in what’s on the screen in front of you.

But this project required the crew working on it to dig into some things that hadn’t been uncovered since the building was constructed back in 2004.

Now, since 2004, we’ve made different upgrades or changes or additions to that system. But what our team found was that…

Nothing old was ever torn out.

They always just… added.

Here’s what they uncovered:

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SHOW CABLING BEFORE PIC

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At one point, there was a rhyme or reason to every single one of those cables.

But with each new change or addition, more and more was added, until you couldn’t tell what was still needed—

And what was just clutter.

That’s how a lot of us are living in our Sabbath-less lives.

Never really stopping. Just a rats nest of cables all jumbled up in our souls.

But that’s not how we’re designed. We’re designed to rest. To stop. To let God unclutter our souls regularly.

Here’s what it looked like after our team got done with it:

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SHOW CABLING AFTER PIC

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Sabbath is God’s way of untangling our souls.

Go two more places with me real quick. Because this Sabbath idea is all the way through Scripture.

Turn with me to Mark 2.

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Mark 2:23-28

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(Explain where to find Mark 2.)

As you find that, I mentioned earlier that some of us probably approach the Sabbath like it’s some weird Old Testament practice that we don’t have to do anynore—and that’s in part because, by the time Jesus was walking the earth, that’s exactly what it had become: a weird Old Testament thing.

The religious leaders of the day started to get real specific and even argue over what was permissible to do on the Sabbath.

For example:

You could walk only a certain distance on the Sabbath until your next step was considered “work.” Like, when Luke says that the Mount of Olives was “a Sabbath day’s journey” from Jerusalem—that’s what he’s referring to. It equated to about a half a mile or so.

Like 1,000 steps.

But 1,001?

Sinner.

Listen to this:

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Mark 2:23–28 “One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need?

In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

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The Pharisees had this “Old Testament” mindset that boiled the Sabbath down to a list of do’s and don’ts.

And I think that’s where some of us get stuck in our thinking as well.

Can I mow the lawn on the Sabbath? How much Netflix is too much Netflix on the Sabbath?

Or maybe our thought process sounds more like this:

If I don’t have a day where I can catch up…

Catch up on work, catch up on projects around the house, catch up on whatever I couldn’t catch up on because we had tournaments or games or family stuff or…

A lot of us, when we read #4, immediately start seeing red: because it feels more like being handcuffed.

But what Jesus is saying is this:

It’s not being handcuffed from doing all of the things. It’s being free—free to not do all of the things.

God doesn’t want something from you on the Sabbath. He wants something for you.

We love to use the metaphor of a snow day. You wake up thinking you gotta go to school or get into work, but everything shuts down, and nobody has to go anywhere.

That’s what the Sabbath is all about: what you don’t have to do.

It sounds weird to our ears, but it’s so true:

God invites us on the Sabbath to work hard on stopping.

I’m a big guy. And when I get going, there’s a lot of mass and momentum and force all coming at you. Takes a lot of effort to just stop.

And that’s where a lot of us are at. We’ve been going a long time. Lots of momentum. And It’s gonna take a little bit of work to stop.

But let me just take you one more place quickly to help you in that effort.

I said that Sabbath is all throughout Scripture, from beginning to end.

I said that it’s not just a part of our story, but the point of our story.

And this is what I mean. From the end of Revelation, last book in the Bible, second to last chapter:

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Revelation 21:22–25 “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.”

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Genesis talks about the creation of the sun and moon.

Revelation talks about not needing them anymore.

Genesis talks about days and nights.

Revelation talks about a neverending light of day.

One day, every day will be a snow day with Jesus. A neverending Sabbath day. That’s what Revelation is talking about here.

And so when you and I work hard to stop,

When we start to live our lives according to our design, building in a Sabbath rhythm—

What we’re really doing is giving ourselves a preview of coming attractions:

Giving ourselves a taste of eternity in the present.

Sabbath isn’t just a part of our story.

Sabbath is the point.

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