Mark 2.27-28 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.” – Jesus
Everybody needs a day off, a day to rest and refocus.
Everybody needs a change of pace and something else to think about; if only for
a while. God didn’t create machines, He created people. And the Creator knows
how people work and what their needs are. Some people act like machines – they never
shut down; I’ve worked for machines. Others look for every excuse to take a
break. But all of us need time away.
A Sabbath is a rest period that is two-fold: we’re to sabbath from the everyday grind; the
monotonous humdrum of the ordinary, the expected, the usual. And, we're to think about God. In a free society,
freedom is cherished. Free time, is a premium. But it is a necessary premium; a
Sabbath is a time to look away to other things. God’s original Sabbath was a
time to quit thinking about all that needed to be done and thank Him for all
that has been done. God expects His people to put aside the temporal for a
while and focus instead on the eternal.
By the time Jesus was on the earth, the Sabbath, to God’s
people, was a ruled and regulated obligation: you had to do this; you couldn’t
do that. Somebody decided rather than willingly taking time out of the
week to think about God, it had to be regulated up the kazoo and now it was just
another day of work wrapped up in different paper. I served on a church staff
for a while and we called it: pre-planned
spontaneity. Oh, the tangled webs we weave.
Nowadays, most people take Sunday as a
second Saturday. The weekends are cherished as two full days of fun. Often we
work harder on the weekends than we do in the work-week. But God still desires
that we take a Sabbath – a rest period from the grind of everyday. Fun days can be work!
Our society’s problem is we don’t know how to effectively shut down. We truly
are a 24/7 society and God is a very small part of it if He’s any part of it at
all. “We work our jobs, Collect our pay; Believe
we're gliding down the highway When in fact we're slip slidin' away.”
God designed the Sabbath for a reason, and the reason is to refresh and refocus before we reenter the fray. You ask most people how things are going and their patent response is: busy! What would we think if they said, Wow! I am refreshed and refocused! I’m reenergized and reignited! We’d think they were on something, or lazy. Or crazy.
God gives us permission to Sabbath. But in that
permission God also desires we give Him some credit for life, and we can’t do
that very effectively if we continually concentrate on making life the object of our affections. The Sabbath
is for our benefit and it is magnified infinitely when God is the focus in our
moments of time off. God doesn’t care what I do on the Sabbath – the free
version; He just asks that I let Him be part of it, and asks that I think of
Him in the midst of it. Hmmm. What a concept.
Part of my daily
Sabbath is this: reading, thinking, and writing about what God means to me. Your
Sabbath may be different; you may paint, or sculpt or sing, or dance; but
whatever it is, does it free your mind for a while and help you to recharge,
regain, refresh, and refocus on what is really important in life? I hope so. I
hope part of your Sabbath is renewing relationships, recreation, and allowing
yourself to relax and rethink about the important things of life before the
commitments, obligations, and demands of life start up again. The Sabbath was
made for us, not the other way around…
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