4 Reasons to Take a Break

If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been taking more breaks than usual from these weekly prayer email devotionals over the summer.

The main reason for this is that I, perhaps like many of you reading this, have felt both an invitation from God as well as my own practical limits this summer, and I have tried to create a bit more spaciousness in my schedule. That unfortunately meant dropping this weekly email to more sporadic releases!

As part of my continued desire to help you come alive and live in love with Jesus through the simple practice of prayer, I hope to continue a weekly rhythm sometime this Fall.

In the meantime, I’d love to invite us to reflect on how God might be drawing us towards rest in these last few weeks of Summer.

The main thing I want to suggest this morning is that you were made for rest.

Consider Pastor Eugene Peterson’s translation of the words of Jesus in Matthew (and maybe take some deep breaths as well while you read it):

How do these words strike you? Do you feel rested this morning? Do you feel unburdened, at ease, and light?

Or do you perhaps feel a bit more tired and worn out?

I want to suggest that God made you to feel deeply at rest, and that anything less than this is short of what God desires for us. Yet, the demands of life and the pressures of performance and productivity can make it hard for some of us to remember the last time we felt, the words of Pastor Eugene, free and light.

Biblically, the concept of rest is usually tied to the word Sabbath.

Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word Shabbot meaning to cease or to stop. Put simply, Sabbath is a time when we cease from work. Traditionally, Jews and Christians have practiced the Sabbath through a traditional, weekly 24-hour cease from paid and unpaid work. For Jews, this happens from Friday evening to Saturday evening, and at some point in church history, Jesus-followers changed their sacred day from Saturday to Sunday to commemorate the day that Jesus was raised from the dead. (If anyone happens to know when this was, please feel free to send me the resource!)

I would argue that as New Testament believers, we may not be legally required to take a full 24-hour Sabbath each week, but…

1) There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. Sabbath is initiated in Genesis 2, when God rests from his work of creation on the seventh day. The author of Hebrews tells us that “a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9), meaning something about what God initiated in Genesis is both fulfilled and continued in Christ. There are principles, practices, and postures cultivated in this practice that are meant to continue for us as Jesus-followers.

2) Because Sabbath starts in the creation story, and appears closely tied to what it means to be made in God’s image, we won’t become fully human until we embrace some practice of rest and Sabbath.

3) Because of Western culture and the sheer demands of life, it would be extremely difficult (and for some us, impossible) to become a person of deep rest, joy, and trust in God without a 24-hour Sabbath each week. Thus, while not legally “required,” I would say it should be at least recommended!

4) If we don’t practice a Sabbath each week, we will miss out on one of the greatest gifts from God that the people of God have been enjoying for thousands of years. Even Jesus says that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27, NRSV). He tells us that the Sabbath is a gift for us.

So, in other words, you don’t have to Sabbath, you get to Sabbath.

And, for me, Sabbath is about both the 24-hour day of rest each week, and the moments throughout the week of accessing the deep joy and delight of the kingdom of God, as well as the longer vacations, retreats, and breaks in my calendar year.

I want to offer four biblical reasons to try a Sabbath — or at least to take more breaks:

1. You were made for this

In the Genesis account of the creation of the world, God does three things: he creates, he speaks, and he rests.

Then when humans are made in the image of God, there is an implication that humanity is meant to imitate the activity of God in creating — Adam is invited to tend to the garden, in speaking — Adam is invited to name the animals, and, finally, in resting — as Adam walks with God in the cool of the garden.

Quite simply, we were made to live with a healthy rhythm of rest, and to not rest means we both cease being human and we cease living in imitation of God.

Any time we try to work more than 6 days a week, we try to be bigger than God as well as bigger than our own human selves.

2. It’s a sign to a watching world

Quite early in the biblical story, God commands the Sabbath to the nation of Israel specifically to maintain a sense of a unique national identity towards their neighbor, Babylon.

If we think about this, if Yahweh is a God who rests, then Israel’s act of resting on the seventh day was meant to demonstrate to the Babylonian nation what the Jewish God was like.

This is corroborated by a reading of the Babylonian creation account — the Enuma Elish — where Babylonians saw themselves as created to serve taskmaster gods. When the Israelites rested instead of endlessly working, they were demonstrating something about Yahweh — he desires rest, not striving, and partnership, not servitude — directly in contrast with the Babyonian understanding of their gods.

In short, Sabbath was an act of prophetic witness. And, I would argue, it still is.

Instead of a Babylonian pantheon of gods, we live in a culture that worships money and success. As followers of Jesus, we are invited to be a people of deep joy, rest, trust, and delight — free from the addiction to productivity and performance!

I feel a deep challenge by this — does my life model a deep rest and joy and trust in God? Or am I overburdened by the responsibilities of life?

3. We learn to trust God more

Sabbath-keeping is ultimately an act of practicing trust in God — that our productivity is up to God and not our human effort.

Sabbath is not meant to make us more productive. Some argue that those who keep Sabbath get more done on the other six days and, while that may be true, I just don’t think that’s reason enough to Sabbath. This view commodifies time and ties our identity to our output — the very things Sabbath is meant to protect us against. When we Sabbath we to learn how to trust God with the outcomes. Sabbath is not a trend or a hack to make us more productive. It’s meant to help us engage in the lifelong work of discipleship and spiritual transformation.

4. It prepares us for the age to come

Every time we Sabbath, we are experiencing a little piece of heaven on earth. This is a lot of what the author of Hebrews means when he says that “a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God.”

Space would fail me to do a full exegetical breakdown of Hebrews 4 — perhaps another week — but the author compares Sabbath rest to the Promised Land in the biblical story. The Promised Land points to the new creation — heaven — and so when we practice Sabbath, we are practicing for what life will look like in heaven. We are practicing the delight, joy, feasting, and rest that will mark the age to come.

The author of Hebrews is not mandating the Jewish Sabbath as a 24-hour period from Friday evening to Saturday evening on early Jesus followers, but he is mandating the principle of learning how to experience a foretaste of heaven now. Sabbath meant to be a weekly image of the age of the come — and age where striving will cease, feasting will abound, and every longing in our hearts will be fulfilled.

And to carry the argument of Hebrews further, this practice can become a way that we become new creation people today. A people who know how to practice rest, delight, and deep joy.

So, how can you make space to take a break this week?