August 16, 2011

For this is what the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, has said: “In repentance and rest you will be saved, In quietness and trust is your strength.” But you were not willing, And you said, “No, for we will flee on horses!” Therefore you shall flee!  “And we will ride on swift horses!” Therefore those who pursue you shall be swift.  Isaiah 30:15-16  NASB

Rest – On August 16, 2011, I published some comments about Sabbath.  Eleven years have gone by.  I desperately need to reread these.

Consider the work of Mark Buchanan: The Rest of God:  Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath.

“In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth.  But without rest, we miss the rest of God:  the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply.  ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’  Some knowing is never pursued, only received.  And for that, you need to be still.  Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness.”[1]

If we don’t understand God’s view of work, we cannot understand His view of rest.

“The opposite of a slave is not a free man.  It’s a worshipper.  The one who is most free is the one who turns the work of his hands into sacrament, into offering.  All he makes and all he does are gifts from God, through God, and to God.  . . . . Virtually any job, no matter how grueling or tedious . . . can be a gift from God, through God, and to God.  The work of our hands, by the alchemy of our devotion, becomes the worship of our hearts.”[2]

God is more interested in changing your heart than changing your circumstances.  His way is not escape.  It is acceptance.

Living for the weekend is a sign of two things:  a misunderstanding of work and a mistaken view of time.

“Leisure is what Sabbath becomes when we no longer know how to sanctify time.  Leisure is Sabbath bereft of the sacred.  It is a vacation – literally, a vacating, an evacuation.  As Rybczynski sees it, leisure has become despotic in our age, enslaving us and exhausting us, demanding from us more than it gives.”[3]

“Chronos is the presiding deity of the driven.”[4]

The Destination Question:  If I stay on this track, where will it take me?

Only those who wait on the Lord renew their strength.

The Sabbath begins with sleep.  It begins in the evening.  In a world without electricity, the Sabbath meal and liturgy lasts only as long as the candles.  And then comes sleep—a time when we are no longer in control, when we return to the womb.  Unconscious of the world.  A city that never sleeps is a blatant statement of idolatry of the highest order.  It stands in opposition to everything about God’s creation and character.

“We sleep simply because we believe God will look after us.”[5]

Sabbath depends on trust.  We cannot let go of our need to control circumstances and set aside labor (the effort to control) unless we trust God.  In this sense, Sabbath-keeping is a tangible sign of the level of confidence I have in God.

Who can enter into rest?  Only “those calm, unhurried people who live in each moment fully, savoring simple things, celebrating small epiphanies, unafraid of life’s inevitable surprises and reverses, adaptive to change yet not chasing after it.”[6]

“The truly purposeful have an ironic secret:  they manage time less and pay attention more.”[7]

Yeshua wandered in order to bless.  Interruptions were His life’s work.

Redeeming TIME is at the heart of God’s economy.  To redeem time, you must be aware of kairos as an interruption of chronos.  Sabbath is kairos practice.

“To refuse Sabbath is in effect to spurn the gift of freedom.  It is to resume willingly what we once cried out for God to deliver us from.  It is choosing what once we shunned.  Slaves don’t rest.  Slaves can’t rest.  Slaves, by definition, have no freedom to rest.  Rest, as it turns out, is a condition of freedom.”[8]

Let My people go that they might worship Me.  But worship begins with rest.  Let My people go that they might rest in Me, that they might trust Me to provide.  Let My people go that they might experience My grace, for they cannot find this rest as slaves to another master.

John the Immerser, “I must decrease so that He can increase.”  Sabbath is the practice of emptying myself—to God, to God’s world and to others.

Life in the light of Sabbath is:

Fuller

Richer

More Satisfying

Deeper

SLOWER

Topical Index: Shabbat, Sabbath, rest, Mark Buchanan, Isaiah 30:15-16

[1]Mark Buchanan: The Rest of God:  Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath, p. 3.

[2] Ibid., p. 24.

[3] Ibid., p. 35.

[4] Ibid., p. 36.

[5] Ibid., p. 63.

[6] Ibid., p. 77.

[7] Ibid., p. 78.

[8] Ibid., p. 90.