Teaching Tuesday: Beyond Belief - Sabbath

Series: Beyond Belief
Sermon: Sabbath (6.15.25)
Watch the messages HERE. 

This past Sunday’s sermon on practicing Sabbath was one of those messages where I had more notes and quotes than I could fit in, so I thought I’d share some of them with you.

These are from various Christian writers and podcasters:

The Lord’s Day is a gift to the missional church because resting forms us into the kind of witnesses God desires—those who aren’t frazzled, hurried, and burned-out but the most well-rested and peace-filled folks in a frantic, overwhelmed, and overscheduled world. In a culture that rushes around at a breakneck pace, those who live with God’s governor on their lives stand out. Sabbath witnesses. It sweetly tells the tired and weary about a God who invites them to come and rest rather than go and achieve.

Instead of striving for control of our lives and circumstances, we need to acknowledge and trust in God’s sovereignty. Our Father in heaven is always working for his good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). He feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the fields (Matt. 5:26–29). He never sleeps (Ps. 121:4) and holds all things together in and through his Son (Col. 1:17). Accepting God’s sovereignty frees us from grasping for control and hustling till we drop.

Moreover, God crafted us as his workmanship to walk in the good works he prepared (Eph. 2:10). And his command for us to rest demonstrates how our good works depend ultimately on him. Trust in his supremacy frees us to step away from our jobs for a time, allowing us to slow down and remember our utter dependence on him. Regular intervals of rest affirm our trust that God’s Word will go forth by his power—not ours.

Sabbath is an opportunity to step into a divine "Nope." It’s a defiant resistance to this age’s principalities and powers, a courageous submission to the One True King. God’s divine “No” is connected to an equally important divine “Yes.” When we receive the Sabbath as a gift from the Lord, we embody our limits as his creatures, and the Spirit helps us to experience his love in ways only possible when we stop.

Here’s another:
 
The impact of most Christ followers on this world is minimal, because the degree to which we seek intimacy with Christ is minimal. When there is little that reflects a relationship with Jesus in us, we have little of Him to offer. I know that I have had opportunities when I could have made an impact, but I had little to give all because of spiritual anemia. There was more of this world than the world to come coursing through my veins. But we need not starve our souls or allow our relationship with God through Jesus to fade like the dying embers of an untended fire. We can seek the face of God.

But how?

To seek God’s face is a serious call, one that is to be engaged with utmost earnest. This raises the real question, offered most simply by the Quaker writer Douglas Steere: How does a person become increasingly Christian when he or she already is one?

The answer throughout Christian history has seldom wavered: Live the life that Jesus lived.
“We can… become like Christ,” writes Dallas Willard, “by practicing the types of activities he engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities he himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of his Father.”

Willard uses an example of an all-star baseball player who is our idol. We want to pitch and run and hit as well as he does, so when we play we take the stance that he takes, hold the bat as he does and wear his brand of shoes. From this we expect to perform as he does.

And, of course, we don’t. “The star performer himself didn’t achieve his excellence by trying to behave in a certain way only during the game,” observes Willard. “Instead, he chose an overall life of preparation of mind and body.”

Christ calls us to this kind of discipline in order to answer His call to our world.
Yet there are few spiritual athletes. We are weak, flabby, and out of shape. Our lives have become earthly in orientation and fleshly in operation. We conform to the patterns of the world, when we could be morphed into the very image of Christ (see Romans 12:1-2). Such a life – not rooted in an authentic relationship with God…is all but empty. We become people possessed with knowledge “about” as opposed to a relationship “with.”

But only an intimate relationship with the living God is true spirituality. And only true spirituality can impact the world.

So how do we live with and like Jesus?

Two-thousand years of spiritual history have spoken with a single voice: the reading and study of God’s Word, obedience, prayer, silence and solitude, and some form of spiritual direction. These are the investments and practices that, time and again, have led men and women to true spirituality.

Going deep with God, as with anyone, is demanding, difficult, time-consuming; it calls for intentionality and discipline, purpose and drive. Like most, I know there is more, but I have often found myself to be inconsistent – or unwilling – in the effort.

This is the problem.

“Superficiality is the curse of our age,” writes Richard J. Foster. “The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”

And last but not least:

Rest is one primary mark of the condition of Sabbath in the body, as unrest is a primary mark of its absence. So if we really intend to submit our bodies as living sacrifices to God, our first step well might be to start getting enough sleep.

Sleep is a good indicator of how thoroughly we trust in God. The psalmist, who knew danger and uncertainty well, also slept well: “I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustains me” (Psalm 3:5), he said, and “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me to dwell in safety,” (4:8).

If we are not rested, the body moves to the center of our focus and makes its presence more strongly felt, and the tendencies of its parts call out more strongly for gratification. The sensual disease and ego demands will have greater power over us through our desperate bodies and their parts. In addition, our awareness of what they are doing and what is happening around us will be less sharp and decisive. Confusion is the enemy of spiritual orientation.

Rest, properly taken, gives clarity to the mind. Weariness, by contrast, can make us seek gratification and energy from food or drugs, or from various illicit relationships, or from egoistic postures that are, in Paul’s words, “upon the earth,” (Colossians 3:5). They pull us away from reliance upon God and from living in his power.

Practice regular Sabbath rest, and find peace in God. 

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE GOD KNOWN! 

- Pastor Brady