EP 08 A Whole Day of Rest
Work is good. Rest is divine.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. (Exodus 20)
The first time our family memorized the ten commandments, I was struck by how the fourth commandment just goes on and on and on. For the biblical authors, when they say something once, and then restate it and repeat it a third time, it means that we ought to pay special attention to it. Rest is essential to human flourishing. Rest is both a gift and a human right that will not only help us enter into the good blessings God offers us spiritually and relationally but will restore our bodies from the labors of this life and allow us to flourish mind, body, and soul.
The timing of the offering of the ten commandments to the Israelites is notable because they deeply understood what life is like without rest. As slaves of Pharaoh, were overworked. Pharaoh was never satisfied with the work the Isrealites did. When they would meet his demanding goals, he would raise the bar and force them to work more. He wasn’t honoring their humanity; he was treating his workers like machines.
Pharaohs demands are familiar to the demands placed on us by technology and our culture of busyness. Our computers are able to go without rest, they never grow tired, and the algorithms are able to change and adjust to our workload to ask for more and more of us. Just as Pharaoh was never satisfied, when we are plugged into the machine, it never says, “Enough.”
This season on However Imperfectly, we’ve been looking at the good work we are doing in our homes. We’ve explored our laundry systems, our meal planning routines, and our family devotions. This is good work and as we shape our hearts to love what must be done and feed our minds to understand our work more fully, this leads us naturally to realize that we can’t just keep up the level of effort required to restore order, feed all the people and be on top of the messes all day every day. It’s exhausting because the work is truly never done.
It’s easy to imagine that leaving an office allows you to leave work behind when you return home. But what if you work at home? What if your work is always available to be done on your phone or in the office down the hall from your bedroom? Or, as with a mother, what if our work is our family life? How do we receive the rest that God offers?
As a young mother I remember contemplating this particular problem in that my work was caring for the physical needs of my small children, namely, food and basic hygiene. This is not something one can put aside one day out of the week - the baby still needs to be nursed and the diaper needs to be changed. If a child cuts his leg, he needs to be cared for and the wound cleaned and bandaged.
Jesus addressed this conundrum in his earthly ministry. In Mark 3, he entered the synagogue where there is a man with a withered hand. Jesus heals the man, but before he does so, he asks a question: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent, our text tells us. Caring for the sick and the helpless are acts of mercy. These life-giving tasks are good and right to do any day.
So, if it is not the life-giving work, we take a break from, how do we enter the Rest that God offers us so that we can be restored for the work at hand?
In our modern lives, pausing for a day of rest is counter cultural. Often, sports teams will schedule games on Sundays or businesses will host special events. Each day is like all of the others. Being counter-cultural will often make a family or individual stand out or it may even hurt relationships. If you take a day of rest when everyone else on your team is pushing through, you could lose your job or additional income or lose your ability to work. Some professions often will take an alternative day of the week off - such as Thursday or Monday if the weekends are particularly demanding for their profession. As mothers we can take the cues from our husband’s weekly schedule in order to help the whole family enter into this rest. Each family will require different adjustments, but the principle remains the same. We have six days to work and one day, that is a gift, to rest.
Ok, so before we get going much further, let’s look at what a day of rest is not:
It’s not a day of sloth. You don’t allow your house to fall into chaos in the name of rest. Disorder is not restful. So, if you come to Sunday and the house is upside down in filth, take a look at your habits to prepare for Sabbath and see if there are anything you can put into place ahead of time to allow for Sunday to be restful. This might mean being more intentional on Friday and Saturday to get laundry, meal prep or shopping done before Sunday so that you aren’t running to the store or shopping online. These are the things I like to avoid on Sundays because it distracts from worship and rest which are what the day is set apart to enjoy.
It is not a day of work. We work so we can rest. Scripture tells us “Strive to enter His rest.” Which lets us know that there truly is a level of work involved in preparing our homes, hearts, and bodies for the Sabbath. I used to think about the work of a mother never fully getting the “day of rest” because diapers need to be changed and the baby fed. These are not things to rest from, these are life-giving practices that offer love to another. But I can get laundry done on Saturday or be prepared with the ingredients and other needs for our Sunday meal. This level of preparation and work ahead of time, makes our Sunday run more smoothly. I can feel my own lack of preparation if I neglect to do these things and my leisure time suffers.
It is not a day of pride. Whenever we talk about the law, it’s really easy to get into prideful ways to carry it out and get all puffed up about our execution. Yuck. But it’s easy to start adding rules and making all sorts of conditions for us and others in our family. The best I can say is that, thank God for His kindness in giving us the body of Christ through family, spouse, church family to help bring us toward the life God is ready to offer us and not burdensome rules that feel weighed down. Rest is a gift. Gifts are to be received with grateful hearts in humility.
What if you get to Sunday and you and the kids have been sick all week, the house is upside down, there’s no clean laundry, and you feel just awful. I’m so sorry, yes, I’ve been there.
What’s fun about God’s promises is that we receive them by faith and not by what we do or how organized we are. I know, I just told you that we “strive to enter His rest,” which is true, but like most biblical truths, there’s an AND. And we receive His rest through faith. We obey and trust that God has offered this gift of rest. We thank Him for it. Obedience is something that we can do by taking the day of rest. We find our rest in Him. He is our rest.
Let me give you an example from history:
When Prince Albert married Queen Victoria, the duties of the royal family were changing and becoming more and more demanding. Prince Albert had multiple social engagements each day and was also battling some sort of abdominal disease, like Crohn’s. He needed a larger amount of rest for his body because of his condition, but he was unable or unwilling to take a break because his schedule and royal duties were so demanding. He pushed his body to its limits and in the end, he died young, leaving his nine children and grieving wife behind. He literally worked himself to death. His wife, the Queen, wore black for the rest of her life and never got over the loss of her love.
Prince Albert pushed his body beyond its limits. Even a prince has limits. We are all finite. Our whole life can be stressful and busy stretching our humanity to its very ends. We need to rest in order to thrive during the very demanding work of caring for small children. We don't want to treat ourselves the way Pharaoh treated the Isrealites. The human body is not a machine that can go nonstop without taking a break. We were created to reflect the image of God and even He rested one day in seven. Rest doesn’t mean we are lazy; we’ve worked to claim it. Rest comes when we forget ourselves and remember that we are here to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Our minds are focused on praise outwardly and not on pride inwardly. Praise is restful, pride is not. As you do the good work this week of caring for your children and cleaning up all the messes, I hope you are able to work to enter His rest. In it you will find strength and peace.
I’ll leave you with the full commandment from Exodus 20 that really does bring us life if we will claim it:
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.
Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
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This is such a helpful explanation, I am just meditating on how to rejoice in what HAS been done with thankfulness on Sundays to set the tone for the week. Not to feel like we can "save ourselves" by doing more.
True we must sustain life and find the easy yoke to do it. It takes a lot of self-control for some people to put down the work!
Do you have any more resources on HOW to put aside work on business or school for celebration times? It is a perennial problem for me and I want to be able to enjoy the holidays and sabbath as much as possible. Musicians/Moms often work to make the holidays special and then feel too stressed to look forward to them!