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\u201cThere remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God;\xa0for anyone who enters God\u2019s rest also rests from their works,\xa0just as God did from his.\u201d (Hebrews 9:9-10)

I was recently in a conversation over the topic of Sabbath.\xa0 Some folks have grown up not allowed to ride their bike on the Sabbath or go to the public pool on the Sabbath, and hopefully your pastor never was found doing something as controversial as mowing their lawn on the Sabbath!\xa0 Myself, not growing up in a Christian home struggled with the concept of Sabbath when I accepted Christ as a young adult.\xa0 What was I allowed to do, and what wasn\u2019t I?\xa0 Then I attended a church where the pastor\u2019s wife would slip out with their son halfway through Sunday morning services in the winter months and come out of the bathroom with him in full hockey gear.\xa0 Where was the line?

It seems to me that there are two views of Sabbath that are at odds with one another. Christians may either feel the need to climb some metaphorical mountain to reach God and attain His rest, to follow all the rules and thus \u201cachieve\u201d Sabbath rest.\xa0 Alternatively, Sabbath is a day filled with jubilee and fun, but prayer and devotion is fleeting.\xa0 Either way, Sabbath becomes drudgery, a task to do, a mountain of shifting sand to reach the top of.\xa0 The \u201cSabbath-keeper\u201d is left either joy-less or God-less.\xa0

In Exodus and Deuteronomy, God commanded the Sabbath as a covenant between Him and His people, Israel.\xa0 It was part of an Old Testament covenant.\xa0 When Christ came, it was not to abolish that law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17).\xa0 We no longer need to follow strict rules in order to enter the rest of God.\xa0 We come into that rest through Christ.\xa0 And so, there is a third option. A Sabbath of grace. \xa0

The seventh day is not simply a \u201cday-off.\u201d That is a secularized view of Sabbath.\xa0 Sabbath means to stop. Take a break.\xa0 There is nothing holy about the word itself.\xa0 It is a word talking about our nonuse of time \u2013 what we might call \u201cwasting time.\u201d\xa0 Sabbath-keeping can feel like an interruption, an interference with our routines.\xa0 It challenges assumptions we build up over time that our daily work is indispensable in making the world go. And then we find that it is not an interruption at all but simply a part of the rhythm of life that God ordained from creation.

We feel like what we do is important, and the world can\u2019t do without us if we were to pull away.\xa0 But by including a rhythm of Sabbath in our weekly rhythms, we can focus on relationships which we want to deepen and detach from others in which we feel ourselves constantly pulled at and having our attention vied for.\xa0 The Sabbath day is uncluttered time and space to distance us from the frenzy of our own activities, to pull away from the need to \u201cdo\u201d and instead looking to God to fulfill in us what we can never do on our own.\xa0

In the two biblical versions of the sabbath commandment, the commands are identical but the reasons for keeping sabbath differ.\xa0 The Exodus reason is that we are to keep Sabbath because God kept it (Ex 20:8-11).\xa0 There are some things that can be accomplished, even by God, only in a state of rest. This, a call to prayer.\xa0 The Deuteronomy reason for Sabbath-keeping is that our ancestors in Egypt spent four hundred years without a vacation (Deut 5:15).\xa0 They were no longer considered people, but slaves. This, a call to play.\xa0 And so, Sabbath is a mixture of play and prayer.\xa0 Opening ourselves up to the Word of God and the work that the Holy Spirit is doing in us through it, and also to \u201clet go\u201d of what we must accomplish for a day and quiet our mind and soul and taking time to rest \u2013 with God, family, friends.\xa0 But just to rest. In play and prayer.\xa0 Because of what Christ has done for us.\xa0 Time well wasted.