Here are a few things that might make you nervous:
A nine a.m. meeting with company HR–for what, you don’t know.
A software problem that could take either fifteen minutes or fifteen hours to figure out.
A trip that requires you to wake up, get to the airport, and through security, on time.
A difficult conversation with someone might end in long-term, nasty consequences.
A lot of us would not only be unsettled but unable to sleep the night before dealing with any of these.
Such worry comes from feeling you are all by yourself in the world, that your strength alone must carry the day. We believe in God’s mercy and goodness and power, but in the thick of the crisis moment, it is as though we believe in none of it.
During those times, no verse is more real than the one Ben Franklin penned: “God helps those who help themselves.”
A fair number of Christians live as though there is no God–practical Atheism, I call it. We don’t mean to be that way. It’s just that we’ve allowed a vast disconnect between belief and three-dimensional life.
We usually measure faith in its ability to do great works, but faith is found just as surely in how we rest.
The very idea of sabbath is written right into the Ten Commandments. We’ve historically associated it with the thought of taking a day off from work. Yet, God intends to take us into a deeper understanding, into a sabbath that must be learned.
He included the initial idea of it in His law to illustrate how serious a lesson it is to quit ourselves. I suppose the Hebrews couldn’t help it. Their background involved centuries of slavery and an emphasis on productivity. Every day belonged to work. Only the strong survived. The fourth commandment was, therefore, necessary to break the habit of unbridled self-trust.
It’s amazing what transpires when you have a stretch of unclaimed time, even if it’s a mere twenty-four hours. I’ve discovered (sadly, by accident) that without the tyranny of a schedule hanging over me, creative juices and clarity swim right into my mind. It’s effortless. I might have labored for hours trying to write a single paragraph the night before, but let my eyes open first thing in the morning on a day without expected burdens, and a solution appears to me.
Yep, that second paragraph actually needed to be the conclusion. The lead-in thought needs to be reworded. That one sentence I took so long to craft that I thought was so catchy really just needs to go bye-bye. And beyond literary mechanics, spiritual revelation seems to flow without my needing to wring it out. The Bible verse I had been struggling to understand now seems highlighted in liquid gold.
All of it came without effort.
Maybe that was the initial intention of sabbath. We were supposed to cease life-sapping activities for the sake of recharge. Our minds that had, during a blast of work, become like a shrinking Lake Meade, once more would drink the rain of wisdom.
The day was to be more than a reprieve from the office for the sake of beer and football.
And yet, the Sabbath is not only a stand-alone commandment. In Leviticus 23, Israel is commanded to keep a series of annual feasts, each signifying some experience of salvation. The governing thought throughout is that of sabbath.
The first Feast, the Passover, had to do with God’s initial work of redemption. Just as the ancient Jews, believers in Christ first experience redemption by ceasing from our own works (sabbath), trusting solely in the blood of the lamb to escape the wrath of God.
Closely following the first feast was the connected second, which was the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It represents the ongoing life of God’s people, during which time, leaven, a symbol of corruption, is to be avoided. This feast began and ended with a sabbath, signifying that the Christian life, while not being one of idleness, is one of rest: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).
The next feast was the Feast of First Fruits. It refers in type to the resurrection of Jesus: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). The overcoming of death is beyond anything any mortal can achieve. It is divine work alone, not ours, a fact that Paul reminds us of in Ephesians 2:5– “even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.”
The Feast of Weeks occurred on the day of Pentecost and, in its New Testament fulfillment, referred to the birth of the church, as seen in Acts 2. It was also occasioned with a sabbath, telling us that our placement in the body of Christ was a work of the Holy Spirit and not of our own effort– “But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:18).
The Feast of Trumpets refers to a summoned gathering for an end-time experience of salvation that begins–you guessed it–with a sabbath. The repentance involved is a gift of God’s grace (see Zech 12:10, Acts 5:31, 11:18), not the effort of our flesh. The closely related Day of Atonement, the ultimate day of redemption for God’s people, happens as well on a sabbath.
Finally, the feast of Tabernacles signifies the celebration of life on a restored earth–one that eventually issues into eternity. This feast also lands on a sabbath, meaning that the turning of the age will be due to the subjecting power of God (see Heb. 2:5) and not as the result of the world slowly improving itself into some utopia.
The Sabbath interweaves every stage of salvation and every experience of it. That means there will be no place for the religious braggart on that day when God has finished His work of redemption. Your role during this current time, then, is not to compete with Him but to shout praise, give thanks, and abide in Him.
All of this is great news for those of us who wrestle with worry. In the matrix of sabbath-infused feasts, anxiety doesn’t stand a chance.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
[…] Open the full article on the kingdomwinds.com site […]