Living What We Believe
During this Lenten season I invite you again to set apart
one day a week to stop your work and make time for rest and worship. Live
what you believe by trusting God and his ability to care for you and the world
without your help.
One of the worst problems for those who don’t
observe the Sabbath day is that life can become so humdrum, every day the
same—day after day! The pressure of work never lets up; there is always something more to do. This was my
experience. Our culture’s great need to cease working is evidenced by the mass
exit from the cities for the weekend—thousands of people are trying to “get
away from it all.” Celebrating the Sabbath is different from running away. We
do not merely leave the dimensions of work and responsibility that we have been
talking about—we actually cease letting them have a hold on our lives.
Everything is turned around when we keep the
Sabbath. If we don’t observe it, Sunday just leads us back into the humdrum of
the regular workweek (which leaves a great number of people awfully depressed
on Sunday evenings); keeping the Sabbath ushers us into the recognition that
all days derive their meaning from the Sabbath. As Abraham Heschel points out
in his book The Sabbath,
To
the biblical mind, labor is the means toward an end, and the Sabbath as a day
of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering
one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is
a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is
not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. “Last in creation,
first in intention,” the Sabbath is “the end of the creation of heaven and
earth.”
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