“Remember the Sabbath day to set it apart as holy. For six days you may 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, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your cattle, or the resident foreigner who is in your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.
Exodus 20:8-11
Last year, in a quest to read more books than ever before, I read 43. One of the best was a book by Wayne Muller called, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. The book is dedicated: “For Henri Nouwen, my teacher and my friend.” Nouwen is another favorite of mine. I knew the book had to be good.
One of the ways I feel that I can share about Sabbath and rest with you is through this book and through some of the questions I’ve been asking about Sabbath for a while now.
Muller begins his book with this line: “In the relentless busyness of modern life, we have lost the rhythm between work and rest.” This busyness he says has made us forgetful.
The commandment from God through Moses was to remember the Sabbath, set it apart as a holy day, a blessed day.
Remember my post “{Re}phrase“? My word to rephrase was busy. Muller says that we wear our busyness as prideful badges when in reality this overwork and activism is violence against ourselves.
Innate violence. The Chinese pictograph for the word busy is a heart and killing.
That verb remember seems so cerebral to me. Merriam-Webster says it means to bring to mind or think of again. Why would God command us to do something so passive?
I kept digging. In my Bible, the notes for the verb remember is a little more in-depth. As a matter of fact, it says, “The verb includes the mental activity of recalling and pondering as well as the consequent actions for such remembering.” (New International Translation Bible, page 177.)
Remembering in the sense used here is an ACTION verb.
Truth is busyness keeps us from the action of remembering, of setting aside as holy. As a Christian, sometimes my busiest day is Sunday.
In Sunday School today there was a bit about how our theology informs our actions. That our behaviour is what we believe.
Is my behaviour of setting aside time for rest indicative of my theology? If it is than my Sabbath rest notes my relationship with the Lord. ❤
TotallyKris 