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My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Finding Rest in God Pt 2

4/10/16 Sabbath: Pt 2 Deut 5: 12-15
Time is a precious thing. We only get 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 8,736 hours a year. How are we going to spend them? And what is our relationship to time. Does time control us - pulling us this way and that? 
The bible has two words for time - chronos and kairos. We are probably most familiar with chronos time - chronological time. What happens during our days. How we are going to spend those 8,000 plus hours we have been given a year. But kairos time is different - that’s God’s appointed time. God’s moment or season that are a gift to us. Sabbath time is kairos time, but it is hard to fit this into our view if we are viewing everything as chronos time.
The truth is even though we see time as one of our most precious commodities, we squander it. We very rarely ask bigger questions about how we spend our time and instead it simply become a routine. Get up, get ready, go to work, come home, spend a little time with family, go to be. Repeat. Then by the time the weekend comes we feel pressure to get done everything that didn’t fit into the rest of our week. We quickly become overwhelmed by time instead of embracing it. 
What is your biggest regret? Its a tough question isn’t it. What is your biggest regret? I was reading a book lately where the response may not be what you expect, but deeply resonated with me - being in a hurry. When we keep worrying about having our schedules full and getting to what comes next, we miss something beautiful about being in the moment. We miss something in the relationships we have and the quality of our time. And we start to regret what we are missing. 
The book of Deuteronomy tells the story of what happened to the Israelites once they fled Egypt. In some places it retells the stories found in Exodus and Numbers. In other ways it is wholly unique. In the particular area we pick up at this morning is a retelling of Moses receiving and then relaying the ten commandments. This is one of the longer commandments - keep the Sabbath holy. To only work six days a week and on the seventh day set it apart - marked for God. No one is to work - even those who are currently slaves and the animals. And as the people rest they are to remember that God brought them out of the land of Egypt. 
The people needed a law, or a commandment in order to change their behavior. Their chronos time had been filled with toiling every day - that was their reality and even though they were now free it was hard to change that behavior. So they had to have a commandment that helped them change their mind about changing their behavior. They wanted to - it was just so foreign to them.
Is that true of us too? Are we so used to being busy that it is hard for us to imagine Sabbath rest? Hard for us to imagine changing our behavior? In the words of Pastor Mark Buchanan, “Busyness makes us stop caring about the things we care about”. If we keep up the pace we are going eventually we become too numb to care. So God gives us, as well as the ancient Israelites, a commandment to stop. To rest. To be.
That doesn’t make it any easier to live into, but at least the commandment makes us consider why God commanded Sabbath rest. And helps us to put on our radar to choose to follow this particular law. Here’s the thing - there is no thing as partial disobedience. You can’t partially break the Sabbath. You either follow the command to rest or you don’t. But let’s at least be honest with ourselves about where we are, what we need, and how we can improve. 
Let me be clear - we live in a very different time then ancient Israel. We live in a very different time from even the 1950s in America. So we need to figure out how to live into the heart of Sabbath today. The reality is for some people Sabbath isn’t Sunday. They have to work that day. So what day have you set apart to fill your spirit and worship God? What day do you have when you can simply be with your Creator? And what day do you have where you can rest without feeling guilty or like you have to get on to the next thing? 
The truth is Sabbath can do wonders to transform us, which is why God offers it to us as a gift. It can free us from our concerns and obligations. Sabbath can transform our relationships. It can free us from stress.
We know that we have too much stress. We know we live in a world where are are defined, not by how God sees us, but by our productivity and accomplishments. This stress and definition of self comes from the belief that we need to have too much to do. We need to keep ourselves busy in order to seem successful. And that is why we need the discipline of Sabbath.
Sabbath truly is a discipline. We’ve talked a little bit about why it is hard to do. So we need to make it a practice in our life, in order to transform our understanding of time and sense of self. Sabbath requires us to prepare. It requires us to get done what needs to be done so we can simply rest. It requires us to say “no” to continuing to work so we can say “yes” to all that life has to offer us. And when we allow ourselves to live into this rhythm of a weeks or a few months, we can see that Sabbath, when practiced properly, also effects the rest of our week, preventing us from becoming a workaholic. 
I shared with you last week a little bit about my practice of Sabbath, this week I want to share with you about a friend and his family’s practice. Sabbath is a time to say “yes” more often. To say yes, we have time to go to the park, or the museum, or the zoo when his son asks. Its a time to bake meals together and invite other people over to share them or say “yes” to the invitations they are offered to eat with others. Its a day to say “yes” to long walks in the sunshine or building snowmen. And the more they are able to say “yes” because there is space in their schedule to do so, the more the find themselves delighting in each other and the experiences they can have together right now, in this moment. For them, Sabbath is about relationships, especially with family, trumping all else, so they can celebrate the good gift God has blessed them with. 

What do you need to say “yes” to in order to reorient your time? What do you have to say “no” to in order to move away from the demands of chronos time? While our sermon series on this particular discipline is concluding this week, the journey towards reorienting our time is not. Let us encourage each other to embrace Sabbath rest in order to get our heart in the right place to worship God and find his rest. Amen. 

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