Keeping Sabbath

Do you keep a Sabbath? Do you have one day every week where you ignore the phone, your email, and your “to do” list? I was going to write a great post on what it means to take a sabbath… and then I saw that Darryl Dash already had. In “God’s Gift of Sabbath”, he points out the following:

1. See the Sabbath as a time to cease work and to enter into joyful activities that refresh the soul.

2. Sabbath begins to set the pattern for my entire life.

3. Sabbath is an act of trust in God and a statement about ourselves

4. Be radically counter-cultural and figure out how to enjoy the gift of Sabbath in your own life

Above are just the section headings. Read the whole post here.

I can’t really claim to be succeeding at this at this point but I’m working on it. As I’ve mentioned before, switching from a job where 44 hours was way too much time to do what little work I had to do to a job where 60 hours hardly seems adequate has its thrills but also its drawbacks. On the thrill side, I can’t wait to get to work every day. I’m doing all the things I love AND I’m getting paid to do it. On the drawback side, consistently working 60-hour weeks is tiring.

The main issue is making the adjustment from a “work that bores me” to a “work I can’t get enough of” culture. It is very easy for me to work too many hours. Anne Marie can verify this.

Additional resources:

1.       The Rest of God by Mark Buchanan

2.       Keeping Sabbath: A Neglected and Necessary Discipline by David Barker

Reasons for keeping sabbath (David Barker):

1. The release from the tyranny of (over) work
2. The cessation of the need to be productive
3. To bask in the blessing of God
4. To consciously reflect on something holy
5. The celebration of redemption and release from slavery (slaves were never allowed to keep Sabbath in pagan cultures)
6. It anticipates the life to come
7. To reflect on being and not doing—a day not to get things done, but to reflect on what God has done and is doing.

3.       Matt Chandler preaching about Sabbath (

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, PDF, study notes in PDF).