What? Working on Sunday?

A few weeks ago our kids spent a number of days at Choral Camp at Rosedale.

While they were doing that, Heidi went back west and spent some time at a place called Innkeeper Ministries which is just a little ways this side of Dayton, Ohio.

Innkeeper ministries is a free retreat center for pastors. It consists of a couple of large houses with acres of yard, ponds, and woods with paths carved through them.

There places of solitude to just sit and think and pray and listen to God.

We both arrived there quite tired and not necessarily in a good way, if you want the honest truth. I guess if you didn’t want it, you got it anyway.

While we were there, I did a lot of thinking about rest. For some time I’ve been working through a book called “The Emotionally Healthy Leader”, by Peter Scazzero.

In this book, Peter tells his story about how through some very painful circumstances, he came to realize that he really was not in a good place emotionally. He came to realize that the more emotionally unhealthy he became, the more he started trying to drag his church along behind him and make things happen. And when things started to crumble around him, he couldn’t figure out why. He thought it was everyone else’s fault, not his

He had done a lot of thinking and writing about what emotional health looks like, but he wasn’t applying those principles to his leadership and he was paying the price

And so he wrote this book out of those painful lessons that he learned.

He divides his book into two sections

The Inner Life

Facing your Shadow

Leading out of your singleness or Marriage

Slowing Down for a Loving Union with God

Practicing Sabbath Delight

The Outer Life

Ways in which being emotionally healthy plays out in practical tasks

I did manage to finish the book, and while there were some things that made me kind of say, “Whaaa?”, there was a lot of it that described me and the place where I was finding myself.

I could talk quite a while about it

The title itself sort of catches my attention. Sabbath Delight.

Peter tells the story of one of his friends who went to Israel. On a Friday he was sitting in an outdoor cafe when a group of teenage boys ran by singing and shouting. At first she though that something was wrong because they were making such a racket. She asked the waiter what was going on and the waiter said, “They are very happy that it will soon be the Sabbath.”

“Happy about the Sabbath?” she asked, uncertain that she had heard him right?

“Yes,” he said, “they are welcoming the Sabbath with their songs and shouting.”

Second Start

(ESV)

15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. 16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

Jesus Is Equal with God

18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

The Sabbath.

(ESV)

12 “ ‘Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. 15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

1. The Sabbath as a Command

Deuteronomy 5:12–14 ESV

12 “ ‘Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.

Deuteronomy 5:

Most of us can probably relate to our Sundays being a command.

We are pretty pious people and have been raised to hold Sundays as a sacred day. At least I was. I can’t speak for how you were raised in this community.

Sunday was a command, not an option. There were certain things that you always did and did not do on Sunday.

Do:

Go to church

Go to church twice

Bow your head when someone prays

Help sing the songs

Have a pretty sizeable lunch

Don’t

Be oversleep

Definitely don’t be late!

Don’t play with toys in church

Don’t whisper and figet

Don’t play ball or any other sports

Don’t go swimming

Don’t go hunting

Don’t go roaring around with the go-cart

In fact, our “Don’t list” was considerably longer than our “do list”. And I’m not alone in this. Our country has had some pretty strict “Sabbath laws”. Examples:

—In Georgia, you can’t carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket on Sunday

—In Rhode Island, you can’t sell toothpaste and a toothbrush to the same customer on Sunday

—In Ohio, it’s illegal to fish for a whale on Sunday. Go figure.

I found this on the internet so it has to be true.

We sort of chuckle, but the truth is that we have held Sundays as a day set apart.

IT is our Sabbath. And we honor this day and are very careful with what we do on this day because we want to honor God.

He said to honor the Sabbath and so we want to show our reverence for Him by having a special day to focus on him and not be distracted by a lot of other things.

The Sabbath is a command. And that’s how I have looked at it for most of my life. So, while I do enjoy taking it easy on a Sunday afternoon, the fact that the Sabbath is a command makes me think that I need to be careful what I do on that day because I might make God mad.

Kind of takes the joy away from it.

But that’s not looking deeply enough at the Sabbath

2. The Sabbath as a Gift of Mercy

(ESV)

Jesus Is Lord of the Sabbath

Man was not created for the Sabbath, but rather the Sabbath was created for man.

23 One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24 And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” 25 And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: 26 how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” 27 And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

What did Jesus mean by that? What did me mean that the Sabbath was created for man?

If you go back to our passage from , you will see God giving a reason for the Sabbath that He doesn’t give in the Exodus account of the 10 commandments:

15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

Remember that you were a slave and that you were delivered

What does a slave do? He works.

When? Just when he feels like it? No, day in and day out. Slaves don’t get a day off. They are driven by their task masters.

The Bible says that the Israelites groaned under the heavy burdens that were placed upon them. They lived a life of toil and sweat and pain and death. They had no will of their own. They were another people’s property.

But now God is giving them this incredible gift of mercy! He says, “Yes, you will take a day of rest to remember that you were once slaves, but you aren’t anymore!

And in a spiritual sense, we were all slaves. Slaves to sin, the Bible calls us.

The Sabbath is a time when we remember that we are now free, because of God’s incredible mercy that he has shown to us. We have been brought out of captivity and are now being given rest.

I just finished a book by Peter Scazzero called “The Emotionally Healthy Leader”.

But the section of the book that I think had the biggest impact on me was the part about Practicing Sabbath Delight.

The title itself sort of catches my attention. Sabbath Delight.

Peter tells the story of one of his friends who went to Israel. On a Friday he was sitting in an outdoor cafe when a group of teenage boys ran by singing and shouting. At first she though that something was wrong because they were making such a racket. She asked the waiter what was going on and the waiter said, “They are very happy that it will soon be the Sabbath.”

“Happy about the Sabbath?” she asked, uncertain that she had heard him right?

“Yes,” he said, “they are welcoming the Sabbath with their songs and shouting.”

Why can we delight in the Sabbath? Because we are delighting in the great and matchless mercy of God who delivered us from a life of death and gave us eternal and abundant life!

This is something that we can rejoice about and say with David, “I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house the Lord”

3. The Sabbath as an expression of Faith

In his book, “The Emotionally Healthy Leader”, Pete Scazzero tells another story about getting frustrated with Christian leaders who refused to take a day off or a Sabbath rest. Pete was spending his time talking to leaders and teaching them about Sabbath rest but it seemed to be ineffective. So many of them were just going, going, going and some of them even burning out.

In frustration, he went to talk to his friend Bob, a clinical psychologist and poured out his heart to him

Story picks up on page 143

I think that “Bob’s” diagnosis was getting to a deep problem that Jesus’ statement in our passage from John zeros in on:

“My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

“My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

Here is what Jesus is saying: God doesn’t take a day off.

Do you believe it? God doesn’t take a day off.

See, what Bob was talking about was this “drivenness” that many of us feel. We drive ourselves to work harder and longer. If we aren’t exhausted, we didn’t work hard enough.

Work is our identity. I’ve talked to people who hate days off. They love their work so much. They would rather be at work than doing anything else.

If you love your job, that’s great!

But for others, they feel driven to always be working. And thats what Bob was getting at. And the deeper problem that he was identifying, I believe is a lack of trust.

Do we really believe that if we take a Sabbath rest, that God will continue to work?

God doesn’t take a day off.

Now we read in the Creation story that God created for 6 days and on the 7th, He rested. That’s true. He rested from His creating.

But did He lie down on his sofa and go to sleep?

But for many pastors, many business men, many people in general, rest is so hard because we wonder, “how will things continue without me?”

But a question I have to ask myself is, how much do I trust God?

Do I trust that He will continue to work, even on the Sabbath?

If I’m completely honest and manage to choke out a “no” to that question, then God has something to work with.

If I say “yes” to that question, then why do I feel so guilty for clearing my schedule for a day and saying, God can handle this!

There’s much more that could be said about the Sabbath. We are barely scratching the surface.

But I want us to think about our Sabbath rest.

Yes it is a command…one to be taken seriously

But it’s a demonstration of the mercy of God: One that should cause us to rejoice in His unfailing love

And it is an act of faith on our part..trusting that God will continue to work even when we aren’t.