 book
excerpt
Sabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom
in the Rhythms of Rest
by Lynne M. Baab
InterVarsity Press 2005
Chapter One
The Sabbath and Grace
Recently I was talking with a friend about a passage in the Bible about grace,
Ephesians 2:1-10. In that passage, the Apostle Paul insists that apart from
Christ we are dead, and in Christ we receive love, mercy, and new life. All
this comes to us as a gift, the gift of grace. We cannot do anything to earn
it. My friend asked me if I ever truly experience God’s grace. As I
thought about her question, I realized that the sabbath, more than anything
else, has enabled me to experience this grace that comes to us in Christ.
The sabbath teaches us grace because it connects us experientially
with the basic truth that there is nothing we can do to earn God’s
love. As long as we are functioning, working hard, using our gifts
to serve others, experiencing joy in work along with the toil,
we are always in danger of believing that something we do triggers
God’s love for us. Only in stopping, really stopping, do
we teach our hearts and our souls that we are loved quite apart
from what we do.
The sabbath teaches grace because we have the chance to take
a deep breath and look around us at our lives. God is at work
every minute of our days, yet we so seldom notice. Noticing requires
intentional stopping, and the sabbath provides that opportunity.
On the sabbath we can take a moment to see the beauty of a maple
leaf, created with great care by our loving Creator. We can slow
down long enough to observe the beauty of our child’s face
or our friend’s smile. On the sabbath, perhaps while taking
a walk or waking from a nap, we can reflect back on the previous
week and notice some particular way God was active in our lives
or a prayer that was answered. All these good gifts come to us
from the hand of God, and taking the time to notice God’s
gifts helps us remember the generosity of the giver.
The sabbath teaches grace because we are invited to rest and
rejoice in what we do have, rather than focus on what we do not
have. On the sabbath we are invited to practice thankfulness.
On workdays we have to think about what we don’t have and
what needs to be done. On the sabbath we can forget all that and
simply enjoy what is.
The sabbath invites us to step outside our culture’s obsession
with production, possessions, and accomplishments. The sabbath
invites us to spend one day each week apart from the media’s
incessant cry of “More!” The sabbath invites us into
a rhythm, a structure, that gives freedom from so many outside
pressures. And that freedom communicates God’s grace to
us.
The sabbath gives us time to reflect. What do I really care about?
What are my deepest feelings and longings? In what areas of my
life do I need God the most? What do I need to confess to God?
What do I need to explore that has great potential for growth?
Who am I, anyway? Why am I here? What purpose does God have for
my life? What purpose do I desire for my life? Bringing our innermost
feelings out into the open can teach us deep grace, as we grow
in understanding that God accepts us completely, giving us forgiveness
for the sin we find and helping us grow in our sense of purpose
and direction.
Without time to stop, we cannot notice God’s hand in our
lives, practice thankfulness, step outside our culture’s
values, or explore our deepest longings. Without time to rest,
we will seriously undermine our ability to experience God’s
unconditional love and acceptance. The sabbath gives us a gift
of grace that cannot be duplicated.
Friendship with God
The sabbath nurtures relationships. The fast pace of our world encourages us
to forget that relationships take time. Friendship is a slow art, whether
we desire to become better friends with God, family members, or other people
in our lives. The sabbath can give us precious and much-needed time to grow
in friendship, to have those slow and leisurely conversations that help us
go deeper with the people we love and with God. Loving and being loved bring
grace into our lives.
As people near the end of their lives, they usually engage in
a kind of life review, examining their regrets about how they
lived their lives. “I worked too hard,” many people
say. “I was a stranger to my kids when they were little,
and I wish I had spent more time with my spouse.”
In the same way, the hard work and busy pace that characterizes
so many of our lives today can make us a stranger to God. Catholic
theologian Leonard Doohan believes that without the reflection
and meditation that come from taking regular times to stop all
our activity, “we lose a sense of God or drag an outmoded
image along behind us.” Our relationship with God gets stuck,
and we deny ourselves the opportunity to let our childish views
of God grow into a real relationship, full of depth and wonder
and mystery.
Doohan writes, “To fail to see the value of simply being
with God and ‘doing nothing’ is to miss the heart
of Christianity. . . . If in life we are not still, cannot be
inspired by the beauty around us, cannot concentrate or be silent,
how then can we suddenly achieve this in prayer?” Prayer
and contemplation grow out of patterns of quiet and leisure. We
want to bring our concerns to God, confess our sins, and draw
near to God in prayer, but we are expecting something impossible
if we do not also allow ourselves to “do nothing” and
rest in quietness from time to time.
The sabbath provides a structure to build “doing nothing” into
our schedule. This kind of rest provides a foundation for deeper
prayer and continued growth in friendship with God because it
nurtures within us the stillness and silence that are essential
to prayer.
Noticing
We can describe some of the significant needs of our age by considering the
word “notice.” In order to live the kind of life God has designed
for us, we need to follow many of the commands and instructions in the Bible.
In order to obey them, we need to notice things. In order to notice, we need
time to reflect, time to stop functioning.
We are called throughout the Bible to be thankful. How can we
be thankful if we aren’t taking the time to notice what
we’ve been given? The beauty of the earth, the food on our
table, the people who express love to us, the satisfying aspects
of our jobs, hobbies we enjoy . . . it takes time and reflection
to notice how blessed we are by those gifts.
Even more challenging is noticing God’s hand at work in
the world. Perhaps I’ve prayed for something specific, and
several weeks later I receive an answer. Am I aware that the prayer
has been answered? Perhaps a relationship has turned around or
a particular problem at work or in the family has completely disappeared.
Am I aware that God has been working in that situation? In order
to thank God for these gifts, we have to take the time to look
back over our lives and observe that they happened.
In order to draw near to God, we have to know we need God. How
can we notice our need for God if we have no time to reflect on
the pattern of our lives? Unless we stop moving, we will not be
able to notice the emptiness inside us that can help us perceive
our need for God.
The Bible calls us to confess our sins (I John 1:9). How can
we confess if we don’t take the time to notice the ways
we fall short? The Bible calls us to bear one another’s
burdens (Gal. 6:2). How can we do that if we don’t spend
time considering what another person’s burdens are and how
God might be calling us to help carry them? We are called to “serve
one another with whatever gift each of you had received” (I
Pet. 4:11). How can we serve using our gifts if we don’t
know what our gifts are? How can we know what our gifts are unless
we spend some time reflecting the pattern of our life, noticing
the ways we find joy in serving, noticing how God made us?
Have you ever looked for animal footprints in the woods and tried
to follow them? It takes concentration and stillness to find and
follow tracks. Our lives will be immeasurably richer if we take
notice of God’s footprints in our lives, God’s fingerprints
all over the events of our days. All this noticing takes time.
We can and should pause each day to take time to notice, but we
need more than moments.
The sabbath enables us to notice on a larger scale because of
the length of time involved. Stopping work for a few minutes helps
a lot, but stopping for a whole day enables a quality of relaxation
that brings refreshment, refocusing, and receptivity in a profound
way that a few minutes can’t give. Over time, the sabbath
trains us to notice the hand of God because our own hands are
still long enough for us to be inwardly changed.
The sabbath teaches grace in a deep, experiential way. Perhaps
more than anything else, in our time we need to know grace. We
need to rest in the reality that our lives do not originate with
us, that all love comes to us as gift, and that God’s grace
surrounds us and fills us. God’s love and favor come to
us, not because we deserve them, but because of who God is.
Week in and week out, the sabbath calls us into an experience
of that love and favor by inviting us to rest in God. The sabbath
brings us freedom from so many of the life-destroying forces in
our world. The sabbath gives us an engaging rhythm, a musical
beat, that helps us step away from advertising and media and competition
and stress one day each week.
Our culture encourages us to live 24/7, never stopping, never
resting. God invites us into a live-giving rhythm that we might,
with a smile, call 24/6. Truly the sabbath is a gift for our time.
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