Sabbath Rest

We’ve been having a series of teachings at church on the Anchors of Our Faith, one of which is Sabbath Rest. That particular message is still to come but I was recently chatting with the woman who will be teaching it and she was talking about how God has built a Sabbath into all of nature.

I look out my window and see evidence of that. The leaves have fallen from all the Maples in the yard. The last of the corn has been harvested and the fields lie dormant. Some of those fields will eventually be left to lie fallow for a season so that the soil has a chance to replenish itself. Animals designed to hibernate are doing their last fattening up before their long winter sleep.

God knew what we needed when He made it a commandment to remember the Sabbath. Unfortunately, many of us no longer make much of a distinction between one day of the week and another. People often have no choice but to work on Sundays and even for those blessed with having it a day off from regular work find themselves using that day to catch up on all the chores they were unable to get to during the week. I don’t find attending church particularly restful as Bev and I generally find ourselves serving in some capacity on most Sundays. There are those who do try to take what remains of the day for a bit of relaxation and I suppose that I fall into that category. We might use the time for visiting, or curling up with a good book, or perhaps going for a drive in the country. I’m not sure that is enough.

Over the course of my Christian life there have been seasons where I’ve felt like I have nothing left to give and I end up disengaging from just about everything, sometimes for a year or more. I know that I am by no means the only one to have experienced this. I somehow think we may be missing some of what God meant by Sabbath Rest and why it needs to happen on a weekly basis. Perhaps that’s why we end up feeling so weary and burnt out from time to time.

I am looking forward to hearing the message on this subject. I suspect I have something to learn