What’s a Sabbath?!?
Andi Merrill / Pastor of Worship Arts
The word “Sabbath” isn’t something we hear much about anymore. Sundays used to be family days when stores were shut down and we spent time just being together in church and at home. How things have changed!
Now Sundays are one of the biggest retail days of the week. Every soccer and baseball field around is filled with kids and coaches. People are hustling to grocery shop and cut the grass and finish laundry so they can start their week with MAYBE a little less stress. We have literally become slaves to our schedules and responsibilities. I’ve learned a little bit about Sabbath over the last couple of years because my body was responding to stress and a non-stop pace in some pretty negative ways – anxiety, panic attacks, random health issues ... I wasn’t in a great spot, and I knew something needed to change.
In the Old Testament, we see that Sabbath was something God took very seriously, but I didn’t fully understand why (other than God modeling it in His creation of the world!) until I looked a little deeper. When the nation of Israel was in Egypt for 400 years, they had become slaves. The Egyptians put them to work, and they worked them fiercely. Slaves don’t get a day off. Slaves are at the beck and call of their master 24/7. I can’t imagine living under that kind of oppression for 400 years! For those Israelite generations, slavery was all they knew.
When God pulled them out of Egypt and they started journeying toward His Promised Land (Exodus 12), He needed to get the slave mentality out of them. They were used to forced labor seven days a week, but God said they would be set apart, no longer slaves but under the jurisdiction of a Father who had more than enough resources to provide for them even if they only worked six days. That seventh day wasn’t only a day of rest and recovery, but it was also a way that God wanted to show them who He was and how faithful and capable He would be to provide. They weren’t slaves obligated to keep working anymore but were now children of the richest Father ever to exist.
It takes faith to put aside a hectic schedule, a never-ending to do list, to stop the pace we’re so used to running at and just rely on the Father to take care of the things that weigh on us. It takes DISCIPLINE to shut off my phone, not make a “quick run” to the store and just trust God to multiply my time later in the week ... but I do it because I don’t want to live in slavery to my schedule, my responsibilities, or just the pace of the people around me. God called me out of slavery and says that there’s a better way! I need to remember Whose I am – I’m a child of GOD.