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This sermon has one basic premise, one foundational point to anchor our entire series on spiritual practices for exhausted people. All of the spiritual practices or disciplines are rooted in God’s design of Sabbath rest and liberation. If you know that already, you can go to sleep. If you don’t then wake up and pay attention because we’ve got some learning to do about experiencing rest in God.
1. A Sabbath spirituality teaches us who truly does the work of transformation.
There are two main Hebrew words used for rest in the Bible. The first is shabbat, which gets partially translated into the English word “sabbath.” This word for rest simply means to “stop working.” Think of an hourly job where you clock out at the end of a shift. The work is done, and there’s no more until you clock back in. The other main Hebrew word for rest, and the most common, is nuakh. This means literally to rest by “dwelling” or “settling” in peace with God and others. It’s to cease from wandering. This is not the same as clocking out from an hourly job. This type of rest is like sitting in front of a fire with a loved one or unpacking a suitcase to stay at a friend’s house for the holidays. It’s the rest that happens when a child cuddles and falls asleep in the arms of a parent. It’s about feeling at home in God’s presence. It’s about dwelling with God by recognizing who does the work. It’s about settling with the one “who brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deut. 5:15).
Rest, holiness, liberation are gifts not achievements. So let me express something quite plainly. Spiritual practices like prayer, Bible reading, silence, are not techniques to grow you or free you. Only God can do that. Rather, they simply dispose us to consent to God’s work in our life. The danger of talking about these things is that they become either tools or trophies which feed our ego when the purpose of these disciplines is to dismantle it. The grace that saves us is the same grace that grows us.
We only have one goal in these practices to dwell and settle with God. That’s our work of freedom – the spiritual disciplines of the Christian faith enable us to keep saying “yes” to the God who made us for rest, who wants to be at home with us, to come to Jesus who wants to settle with us.
2. Sabbath spirituality is designed so that you may live freely.
What do you think of when you hear the word “sabbath”? Many of us imagine it’s the knuckle down work of “don’t”? Many of us don’t think of Sabbath and freedom. In fact, we think the opposite and that’s the problem.
But a sabbath spirituality recognizes that your will won’t work. In Colossians Paul lists some of the outward forms that people use to control themselves “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” What he says next is beautifully translated by the KJV of the Bible: “these things have indeed a show of will worship.” “Will worship” is a telling phrase , and how descriptive of our lives. The moment that we think we can “will worship” our way to transformation is when we have lost a proper sense of God’s rest. We’ve simply replaced one slavery with another.
On the other hand, there is something for us to do, there are ways of life to lean into and those ways can properly be called “work.” However, knowing what’s your job and what’s God’s can become quite confusing for many of us. That’s why the operative verbs in our passage are passive – “remember, “observe,” “come.” Let those verbs guide all of the practices that we will be discussing and they are practices – activities, actions, deliberations and not merely ideas. Merely the idea of Sabbath will not be anything good.
One more thing: There is a deeply held myth related to spirituality and spiritual practices that if we somehow don’t do them correctly or don’t do them at all that God is deeply disappointed with us. I understand why. It’s often because we’re trying to capture a reality that sin hurts us, harms others, and God doesn’t want that for us. But a spirituality of disappointment is not a Sabbath spirituality. A spirituality of shame will never free us, will never liberate us, will never give us rest. There is a new worship song the youth learned that is so good. The first lines are:
I'll never be more loved than I am
right now
Wasn't holding You up
So there's nothing I can do to let You down
It doesn't take a trophy to make You proud
I'll never be more loved than I am right now
So the spiritual task is the freedom to be yourself and to recognize that you are loved by God at all times and all circumstances. The freedom you are seeking is to become the person God created you to be, to come as you are, to bring your desire, your idiosyncrasies, your problems, recognizing that Jesus doesn’t call us wicked or stupid, or those who have everything together, but the weary and burdened and wants to give us rest.
3. Sabbath spirituality is created so that others may live freely too – donkeys, and foreigners and trees.
Jesus did it again and the translators have failed us. They didn’t translate into proper Texan. The “you” of our passage is not “you.” No, the better translation is “all y’all”. A Sabbath spirituality recognizes that freedom and rest are relational. So a proper spirituality should be restful not merely for you but for others. We see that in our passages about Sabbath keeping. Deuteronomy offers most clearly:
12 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do.
A proper Sabbath spirituality should place you in the orbit of transformation that alters the very way that you relate to others, animals, the natural world, strangers, foreigners, so that . . .
So that they experience the abiding of God.
So that they are able to flourish
So that they are capable of resting
Friends, becoming transformed will change the world. But we must get the order right – we are to surrender ourselves for transformation first and that will transform the world. Jesus critiques the Pharisees spirituality by noting that what they offer doesn’t allow people to rest. “They bind heavy burdens , hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” (Matt 23:4). So that means you don’t determine other people’s spirituality. If we are to progress in the spiritual walk so that spiritual practices are a blessing and not a curse, we must come to the place in our lives where we rest from the everlasting burden of always needing to manage others. When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God’s work and not ours, we can put to rest our desire to set others straight. Tolstoy once remarked: “Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.”
So what does such a Sabbath spirituality look and sound like? Here this prophecy from the book of Isaiah.
3 On the day the Lord gives you rest [nuakh] from your suffering and turmoil and from the harsh labor forced on you, 4 you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon:
How the oppressor has come to an end!
How
his fury has ended!
5 The Lord has broken
the rod of the wicked,
the
scepter of the rulers,
6 which in anger struck down peoples
with
unceasing blows,
and in fury subdued nations
with
relentless aggression.
7 All the lands are at rest and at peace;
they
break into singing.
8 Even the junipers and the cedars of Lebanon
gloat
over you and say,
“Now that you have been laid low,
no
one comes to cut us down.”
What is the one Sabbath spirituality question that you should keep asking? Does what I’m doing free me or not? Do you need to be free of a vision of a God who wants to burden you? Do you need to be free of a spirituality that doesn’t allow you to experience freedom? Do you need to be free to help change the world?
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