When we say “sabbath” these days, most people think “day off” from work or “go to church,” if anything comes to mind at all. When we look a little deeper into what biblical sabbath is, however, we find that there is much more to it than that. Among other things, sabbath is about making sacred space for God in our lives so that God can work in us outside of our daily routines—especially our work routines where we make our living, often on autopilot.
Why is this important? When we grind it out day after day, our tendency as humans is to drift into believing that we are providing for ourselves. This is natural, but it is not accurate. God is our provider, and sabbath intends to interrupt our descent into self-focus and self-reliance on a regular basis for the simple reason that we need it. Part of any sabbath keeping should include some reflection on where our trust really lies: Can I stop working (doing whatever I do for a living) long enough to reconnect with the fact that even when I am not working, God is still providing? From that awareness, I re-enter my work with a recharged and refreshed trust in the Lord, my life hopefully recalibrated with God at the center and myself humbly at his feet. The same is true for those who are retired, who do not have to work, or who are between employments. Is there regular time for sacred space to break our often self-centered routines and to let our hearts rest in God as the true center of our trust?
Of course, we can say much more about sabbath, but this is not meant to be comprehensive. For now, let’s just observe that not only does sabbath have a weekly expression of one day in seven (Exodus 20:8-11; Leviticus 23:3) but also an even broader practice of one year in seven (Leviticus 25:1-7). Every seventh year in ancient Israel, no planting, pruning, or reaping was to be done. God was promising that if the Israelites would trust him, he would cause the land to give them what they needed. Although most of us are not farmers, we still have opportunities to take sabbath in our lives to the next level. I suggest (from experience) that a pilgrimage to the Holy Land can be just such an opportunity.
A journey to the Holy Land can function as sabbath for you because it moves us far out of our routines and sets us in the very place where the story that shows us God’s unfailing trustworthiness happened. There is no other sacred space like this, and the connection that it invites you to make with the God of the scriptures is faith building, deeply satisfying, and refreshing to the spirit. In this space, you can hear God in a new way, a fresh way, if you listen. As you walk the land, stand on history, imagine the stories in their real settings, and see the Bible come alive with new eyes, you will discover your faith growing and deepening in ways you didn’t know it could. This is God providing what we cannot produce in our workaday lives (or any other time), but we must stop long enough for this deeper work to take place. By God’s grace, the potential is there for a transforming renewal of our prayer lives, worship, Bible study, missions, and service.
If you are a Christian leader, then this kind of sabbath is especially important, but it is also true for anyone. I know what it is like to run myself to near collapse and in the fog to begin to lose sight of what God really created me for. Sabbath is also healing and restoring space because God is at the center of it, and our awareness is heightened concerning where our focus is and where it should be. God will meet you there, too, and the surrender with which you stop and enter your sabbath journey will become clay in the hands of the master Potter. In those hands, we are the same beloved child of God whom he transforms such that we are never the same again.
