Confessions of a Sabbath Breaker
Genesis 1:26-2:3
Feeding the soul
We have been thinking about Christian spirituality for the last few weeks. For my money, this is the most important stuff we have done yet. You care for your body, and you feed your mind, but the majority of Christians are clueless about feeding their souls. This must change.
Christian spirituality is often summarised in the words of that famous song, “Read your Bible pray every day”. But this is only part of the story, to re-cap the things we have learned in Matthew chapter six:
- You feed your spirit when you live a generous life (Matthew 6:1-4)
- Christian spirituality is a conversation, we grow as we speak to God (Matthew 6:5-13) – reading our Bibles is the other side of the conversation.
- We grow as we practice forgiveness (Matthew 6:12-15)
- Fasting, abstinence from mind-consuming activity, creates the space for time with God (Matthew 6:16-18)
- Our souls are fed when we store up treasure in heaven and look on others with ‘generous eyes’ (Matthew 6:19-24)
All this takes time, and time is the one thing we do not have!
Sit quietly in a bar and listen to men long enough and you will notice that they brag about two things. First, they brag about speeding and how many points they have on their license. Second, they brag about the number of hours a week that they work. “I am working sixty hours a week”, someone says, “Really”, his friend replies, “I was doing that last year, until things got really busy!”
British people work longer hours than any of their counterparts in Europe. You can tell, their daughters get pregnant younger than the other girls in Europe and their children are significantly unhappier than children in other European countries. We love to proclaim that families need fathers, but so many married mums are, in effect, single parents because the husband is out all the time.
Anyone with half a brain can see that overwork is not macho… it is stupid. Christians are more prone to it than anyone else.
Take Elijah as an example. He was an idealist with a powerful sense of mission. He cared deeply about Israel and the law of God – he preached against the prophets of Baal year in year out. Then he got his big break. A contest was organized on Mount Carmel, and Elijah won. Elated, he supervised the destruction of the false prophets, and ran to Jezreel with the king to spread the news. Then he met Jezebel, a foreign princess who hated him. One word from her and he ran for his life – he wound up having a nervous breakdown.
He should have known better – Elijah got results, but somewhere along the way he had forgotten that God cared deeply about his 
mental and spiritual well-being. Elijah had ignored the very law of God that he was so passionate to proclaim.
I know how he felt; I too have passionately proclaimed the things I have neglected to practice. I stand before you this morning to make my confession – I am a Sabbath breaker!
It is sometimes useful to think of the Bible as being like the instruction manual you get with a new car or a washing machine. Neglect to read the manufacturers instructions and you are heading for trouble. When we don’t bother with the maker’s instructions, and we treat our bodies, minds and spirits as though they were indestructible, we are heading for disaster.
Let’s look at what the manufacturer says.
The lifestyle of the people of God
Read Genesis 1:26 to 2:3 and it is clear that God made us and gave us a job to do. Genesis 1:28 speaks of multiplying, filling and subduing. We are made to rule the earth – that is a huge responsibility. Humanity was made for work.
Read on and you encounter something very surprising. At the end of the creation story, God is said to rest (2:2). Think about this for a second and you ask, “What on earth does this mean? Was God tired?” God invented rest – and he takes rest himself – not because he was tired but because when you have made something it is good to look back and enjoy what you have done.
When my friends and I go walking in the mountains we stop every twenty minutes or so just to look around. For sure, we are exhausted and glad to stop, but we also want take in the beauty of the country we are moving through. There would not be any point in mountaineering if you didn’t do this. Rest is giving yourself time to appreciate what you have done, there is simply no point in living if you never so this.
So the idea of rest is built into the lifestyle of the people of God from Genesis to Revelation. At any point in the life of an ancient Israelite, he could look forward to rest.
- A Sabbath day every week
- Three great feasts – two of which were preceded by a seven day holiday
- One year in seven was a Sabbath year – even the land was required to rest!
- One year in fifty was a Jubilee year
Long before the Factories act, long before human rights legislation, the law of God was ahead of the game. Just as Christians once spearheaded the fight against slavery, it was Christians who fought the campaign to give people proper holidays – the opportunity to rest. It is a profoundly biblical thought.
It is also a profoundly biological thought. You and I are built to work on a daily, weekly and an annual rhythm.
Miss a couple of hours sleep and your next few days are out of kilter – the daily rhythm is important. Work through a couple of weekends and you notice that you are irritable and snappy. A weekly rhythm is part of your makeup. Around January and February you feel a longing for time out – everything is so exhausting. You have an annual rhythm; there is a brown bear inside you that just wants to hibernate!
This is important – our need for rest is not a matter of blindly following the Ten Commandments, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy…” We are not looking at the law in Exodus but the creation in Genesis. We are hard-wired at the level of our biology to work to a weekly rhythm of work and rest.
We ignore this at our peril. We are not being macho, we are being ignorant and stupid.
What happens when you don’t rest?
Everyone is different, but we are remarkably similar in the way we respond to lack of rest. It is possible to trace a path that all of us will follow if we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that overwork is macho. As I describe four clear stages in this, see if you don’t recognize these in yourselves and others.
Tiredness – a bone-tiredness so deep that you feel tired after a good nights sleep. You are tired all the time, and you can’t seem 
to shake it off. You know that you should stop but persuade yourself that you just cannot. There is always a reason not to stop.
Some of us attended a seminar with Gordon MacDonald on Monday. He described being in an eastern European country and watching a couple of farmers harvesting corn in the old fashioned way with a long sickle. Every minute or two they stopped and fished a stone out of their pockets, they sharpened their blade with the stone before resuming the work of cutting the corn. Time spent sharpening seemed less of a priority – but without it their work would have been harder and less efficient.
Rest is powerful – tired people should sharpen their minds, bodies and souls with a rest every seventh day.
Anger – If you don’t deal with the tiredness and just bash on you will notice yourself getting angry with people. No-one works as hard as you and they don’t care about you – so you get mad with them – outwardly you are sweetness and light but inside you are a volcano and you are longing to give some people a piece of your mind. Then one day it boils over and you let them have it.
When I was in my final year at college there was a group of six or eight of us in competition for two plum research jobs in the department. The two best ones would get the prizes. We fought each other tooth and nail for these jobs. Then it got dirty; some of the group teamed up with a friend to take important books out of the library in relays so that the others could not get at them. The cold war between us became a hot one, angry words were exchanged.
I had made a decision in the run up to finals – I would work hard six days a week and stop on Sundays. The others thought I was nuts, but every Sunday I went to church, went rock climbing and read a novel. When tempers flared over the library books problem I decided to make a stand – I took my limited loan books and gave them to the others. No problem; you see, I had peace and they were all over the place.
Rest is powerful; it creates the time for your mind to process the toxic emotions that destroy other people.
I didn’t get the job, by the way!
Bitterness – of course, if you do not get rid of those psychological toxins, they stick around and become bitterness. This is a whole lot more difficult to deal with. Bitterness is a particular disease of the church volunteer. Think about it; you are very idealistic and committed, you are making real sacrifices, you are working with the minimum of equipment and no money to speak of. No-one seems to notice what you do; you feel that the church is abusing your commitment.
I bet quite a few of you are here today because you are bitter about your treatment in other churches. Others here today are seriously considering not being here next month because you are about your treatment in this church.
Rest is powerful. You cannot afford to miss this one-day-in-seven opportunity to recover from the stresses of Christian ministry.
Burn-out – beyond anger and bitterness you get to the point when you just don’t care any more. In Graeme Green’s novel, A Burnt-Out Case, the central character writes in his diary, “I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings to do anything for them out of pity” This is not the point of psychological collapse, like Elijah, it is arriving at a moment in your life when you couldn’t give a tinkers cuss for anyone, you just wish they would all go away
Rest is powerful, therapeutic; we need rest for our souls.
Rest for your soul
How do we find this powerful, therapeutic, rest for our souls? Well, we ought to take a proper Sabbath – one day in seven when we rest. It doesn’t have to be Sunday, but it does need to be one regular day.
Then that day needs to be holy. Holy is an interesting word – we usually take it to mean religious but this is wrong – it means different. Therefore, on our Sabbath we will do something that is different to the things we normally do. Doing something different refreshes your body, mind and spirit.
Yet it is good if we give our rest a spiritual purpose. Six days a week most of us chase goals that are to do with the material world. Set the seventh day aside to pursue things that will feed your soul. A Sabbath is a good time to read, listen to some Christian music, or to get together with other believers for worship.
But be careful not to separate spiritual from material too sharply. Do you remember when Jesus was asked what God’s greatest commandment is he said, “The most important one is this: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. There is no commandment greater than these.” Perhaps the greatest spiritual benefit comes to us when we nurture the three relationships that this great commandment includes.
- Express our love for God – to meet with him and to worship him
- Express our love for the people of God – serve those in need and give them our time
- Express our love those who are not (yet) the people of God – nurture friendships and build bridges
We won’t be able to do all this every Sabbath, but as the weeks go by these are the things which compose our Sabbath. What will be the result of this change in our lifestyle?
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways,
re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence praise.
O Sabbath rest by Galilee,
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee,
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love.
Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease,
take form our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess,
the beauty of thy peace.
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1882)