Being the Church Series

Being with Jesus when we Sabbath

DRAFT MISSION STATEMENT - Whitby Christian Fellowship is a community where followers of Jesus, practice the way of Jesus today, as we grow in faith together. We do this by walking with Jesus in the way; learning from His life and teaching and carrying out His purpose and mission on earth.

DRAFT ACTION STATEMENT - We strive to live out the life of Jesus in our community throughout the week, then gather at different stages as a collection of Communities.

WE ARE THINKING ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE WITH JESUS IN...

LAST TIME _ Being with Jesus when we read SCRIPTURE.

Today…BEING WITH JESUS...

2. when we SABBATH.

After this we have two more weeks on BEING WITH JESUS....

3. when we spend time in SILENCE & SOLITUDE.

4. when we choose SIMPLICITY.

BEING WITH JESUS WHEN WE SABBATH:

By SABBATH we mean,

(a). In the OT

the day of rest laid down for the people of God which in the Old Testament it was observed on the seventh day of the week, Saturday, a custom continued in modern Judaism. Technically it started at 6:00 pm Friday evening until late afternoon Saturday, sunset to sunset!

This was slightly complicated by sabbatical year, which happened every seven years in which fields were left fallow Ex 23:10-11 See also Lev 25:4; 26:34; Ne 10:31 , one feature of which was that the poor would benefit from unharvested fields. Also debts were cancelled - Dt 15:1, 9; 31:10; Ne 10:31 and salves were freed - Dt 15:12; Jer 34:14

And further complicated by the “the Year of Jubilee” a year which took place late in the 49th year or 7x7 years and extended through to the 50th year in which again the land was left fallow and the vines unattended - Lev 25:8-12

The rationale for all of this is that the land does not actually belong to any one person to dispose of at will, but to God.

(b). In the NT:

the day of rest observed by the Christian church, in recognition of the importance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, observed on the first day of the week, Sunday. see Mt 28:1;Mk 16:1; Lk 23:55-56; Jn 12:2 See also Jn 20:19,26; Ac 20:7; 1Co 16:2;Rev 1:10.

the rest that God gives to His people who have been saved through faith in Jesus Christ - The Sabbath-rest is seen as a symbol of the salvation of the people of God - Heb 4:1,9; Heb 3:18-19; 4:9

The Sabbath was made BY GOD

Jesus observed the Sabbath day because it was required by law - Ex 20:8. . “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. - He observed the Sabbath regulation Lk 4:16; Mt 24:20; Ac 1:12

But even more crucially written. in to the rhythm of life by creator God - “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. “(Gen 2:2-3).

The word rested in Genesis 2 is shabat in Hebrew, where we get the word Sabbath. It essentially means “to stop” or “cease” or “be complete,” but it can also be translated “to celebrate.”

And notice also the repeated language of Genesis 1, “there was evening and morning” = rhythm!

The Sabbath serves as a rhythm and as Eugene Petersen comments: “The biblical context for understanding sabbath is the Genesis week. Sabbath is the seventh and final day in which “God rested [shabath] from all his work which he had done” (Gen 2:3). We reenter that sequence of days in which God spoke energy and matter into existence, and repeatedly come upon the refrain, “And there was evening and there was morning, one day”… on and on, six times. This is the Hebrew way of understanding day; it is not ours… Day is the basic unit of God’s creative work; evening is the beginning of that day. It is the onset of God speaking light, stars, earth, vegetation, animals, man, woman, into being. But it is also the time when we quit our activity and go to sleep…The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep, and God begins his work. As we sleep he develops his covenant. We wake and are called out to participate in God’s creative action. We respond in faith, in work. But always grace is previous. Grace is primary. We wake into a word we didn’t make, into a salvation we didn’t earn. Evening: God begins, without our help, his creative day. Morning: God calls us to enjoy and share and develop the work he initiated. Creation and covenant are sheer grace and there to greet us every morning. George MacDonald once wrote that sleep is God’s contrivance for giving us the help he cannot get into us when we are awake…. When I quit my day’s work, nothing essential stops. I prepare for sleep not with a feeling of exhausted frustration because there is so much yet undone and unfinished, but with expectancy. The day is about to begin! God’s genesis words are about to be spoken again. During the hours of my sleep, how will he prepare to use my obedience, service, and speech when morning breaks? I go to sleep to get out of the way for awhile. I get into the rhythm of salvation…” - Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, by Eugene Peterson, pub by Eerdmans in 1987, p. 66 – 82)

So the law of God directly connects the law to the creation order and intention:

we rest because He rests and rest means NOT WORKING! You not working, your family not working, your servants (employees) your animals not working - Exod 20:8-11

And to get an idea of how seriously God took this law, he announced in Exodus 35:2 “Whoever does any work on it must be put to death.”

“God rested. God, who doesn’t need sleep or a day off or a vacation, who doesn’t get tired or worn down or grouchy, who is without parallel to any other being in the universe, rested. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want you to remember that we are made in his image. We are made to mirror and mimic what God is like to the world. God works, so we work. God rests, so we rest. Work and rest live in a symbiotic relationship. If you don’t learn how to rest well, you will never learn how to work well (and vice versa). After all, the opposite of work isn’t rest — it’s sleep. Work and rest are friends, not enemies. They are a bride and groom who come together to make a full, well-rounded life...Sabbath is a day to pull up a chair, sink into it, look back over the work of the last six days, and just enjoy...“After six “days” of universe-sculpting work, God rested. And in doing so, he built a rhythm into creation itself. We work for six days, and then we rest for one. And this cadence of work and rest is just as vital to our humanness as food or water or sleep or oxygen. It’s mandatory for survival, to say nothing of flourishing. I’m not a machine. I can’t work seven days a week. I’m a human. All I can do is work for six days and then rest for one, just like the God whose image I bear.” (John Mark Comer: Garden City).

We are not machines that can go on indefinitely without switching off!

If we don’t switch off we will burn out. If we are too busy to rest we are too busy! And indeed like overworked machines, which are not built to last forever, we will BURN OUT OR BREAK DOWN!

“Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.” ― John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

The modern world in which we live is driven by productivity and human achievement.

“A "successful" life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks.” ― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives).

Our worth is defined not by who we are but by what do we and contribute but as Walter Burggermann says: “In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.”

We need to act counter-culturally here:

“When we live without listening to the timing of things, when we live and work in twenty-four-hour shifts without rest – we are on war time, mobilized for battle. Yes, we are strong and capable people, we can work without stopping, faster and faster, electric lights making artificial day so the whole machine can labor without ceasing. But remember: No living thing lives like this. There are greater rhythms, seasons and hormonal cycles and sunsets and moon rises and great movements of seas and stars. We are part of the creation story, subject to all its laws and rhythms.” (Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. by Wayne Muller).

“If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath - our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.” ― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

Question 1 - How do you avoid falling into the trap of defining your worth as a person by what you do?

However because it is LAW, it so easily becomes a thing of PERFORMANCE - of the letter of the law, rather than the spirit of the law, which is why the next point is so important...

2. The Sabbath was made FOR GOD

Sabbath is not just about NOT WORKING - “it is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” - its a separation from the every day stuff of normal life, to spend time with God!

The Sabbath is holy, - “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.”- but it’s also something we have to keep holy.

It’s easy to profane, to desecrate. It’s easy for it to just become another day in the rat race. Another day to fall into the pattern — work, buy, sell, repeat.

We’re to keep it holy — to guard it, watch over it, treat it carefully.

Sabbath is a reminder that just as it “was not good that man should be alone” so it is “not good” that we should try and live our lives apart from God.

We were created by and for God and as Augustine famously says: “you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

We are not fully human nor completely fulfilled until and unless we are rooted in God.

3. The Sabbath was made FOR MAN

Jesus said to the Pharisees who were concerned about performance on the Sabbath - “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28).

Jesus got in to trouble with the Pharisees over this issue.

He healed on the Sabbath - Mt 12:9-14 pp Mk 3:1-6 pp Lk 6:6-11; Mk 1:30-31; Lk 4:38-40; Lk 13:10-17; 14:1-6; Jn 5:5-18; 9:1-16

He drove out demons on the Sabbath - Mk 1:21-25 ; Lk 4:31-35

He taught the word of God on the Sabbath - Mk 6:2 ; Mt 13:54; Lk 4:16 - and the Early Church did the same - Ac 17:2 ; Ac 13:14,27,42,44; 15:21; 16:13; 18:4

Jesus got the SABBATH BALANCE ABSOLUTELY SPOT IN - Sabbath was for REST AND WORSHIP - Not JUST rest and NOT JUST worship but BOTH!

“When I Sabbath, I run everything through this grid — is this rest? Is this worship? If the answer to both questions is yes, then I delight in it; if the answer is no, then I hold off until the next day. Because the Sabbath is not the same thing as a day off. Make sure you get the difference. On a day off you don’t work for your employer, but you still work. You grocery shop, go to the bank, mow the lawn, work on the remodel project, chip away at that sci-fi novel you’re writing . . On the Sabbath, you rest, and you worship. That’s it.” (John Mark Comer - Garden City).

Application

How do we work this out? Doing SABBATH with Jesus

Jesus loved the Sabbath Day and so should we.

The Sabbath is a COMMAND and a GIFT! It is one of the 10 Commandments and it is part of God’s moral laws which cannot be abrogated or annulled.

Jesus needed rest and so do we. Jesus needed fellowship with His Father and so do we.

The Sabbath is our regular anchor point to bring us back into connection with God- “If busyness can become a kind of violence, we do not have to stretch our perception very far to see that Sabbath time – effortless, nourishing rest – can invite a healing of this violence. When we consecrate a time to listen to the still, small voices, we remember the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful. We remember from where we are most deeply nourished, and see more clearly the shape and texture of the people and things before us.” ― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives

2. The Sabbath Day is a weekly discipline that we owe it to ourselves to observe:

“Most of us are more tired than we know at the soul level. We are teetering on the brink of dangerous exhaustion, and we cannot do anything else until we have gotten some rest...we can't really engage [any spiritual disciplines] until solitude becomes a place of rest for us rather than another place for human striving and hard work.” ― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy”!

The reason why the Sabbath is a command is because we sinful, human beings are too prone to forget to connect with God on a daily basis.

Of course it would be great if we did not need a weekly reminder to do this, BUT “Like a path through the forest, Sabbath creates a marker for ourselves so, if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center." — Wayne Muller (Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives).

Heschel said, “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.”

God gives us TIME to take time to be with Him; to rest and be blessed!

‘For six days we wrestle with the world of space — the hard work of building civilization. But on the Sabbath, we savor the world of time. We slow down, take a deep breath, and drink it all in.”(John Mark Comer).

Question 2 - How do you ensure you get the balance right between work and rest in your life?

3. Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath!

“The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath”(Matt 12:8).

That is to say, He establishes what the Sabbath Day is to be used for and how it is to be observed.

It is not about a regimented 24 hour day, it is a life lived in balance to rest and hear from God and be ministered to by God.

But also, Jesus is to be our focus on Sabbath - a day when we put him first!

For most of us this will be Sunday - that works for most of us, that’s the best day - but for some Sunday does not work or allow us to spend the kind of day, we need to spend to get the balance of rest and worship right in my life!

Simply select a day of the week - Paul said any day will do! Rom. 14:5-6 - stop working and deliberately spend time cultivating your relationship with Jesus!

And having selected the day, protect it from your everyday. workday instincts. Resist the urge to do that email; get that extra job done; catch up on the never-ending housework or maintenance jobs - take time, relax and be with Jesus!

Sabbath is more than a day off! - “Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.” ― Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives.

“Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath”! It is more than just a day, it is a way of being in the world.

“That’s why Sabbath is an expression of faith. Faith that there is a Creator and he’s good. We are his creation. This is his world. We live under his roof, drink his water, eat his food, breathe his oxygen. So on the Sabbath, we don’t just take a day off from work; we take a day off from toil. We give him all our fear and anxiety and stress and worry. We let go. We stop ruling and subduing, and we just be. We “remember” our place in the universe. So that we never forget . . . There is a God, and I’m not him.”― John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

So test yourself here!

“When I Sabbath, I run everything through this grid — is this rest? Is this worship? If the answer to both questions is yes, then I delight in it; if the answer is no, then I hold off until the next day. Because the Sabbath is not the same thing as a day off. Make sure you get the difference. On a day off you don’t work for your employer, but you still work. You grocery shop, go to the bank, mow the lawn, work on the remodel project, chip away at that sci-fi novel you’re writing . . .On the Sabbath, you rest, and you worship. That’s it.” (John Mark Comer - Garden City).

Question 3 - In what ways might tonight’s study challenge or change the way you think of your practising of Sabbath?