Chill Out!
“What the heck is a day of rest!?”
Well, if Christianity didn’t look appealing before, perhaps now it will! Looking back in the Bible, we saw this concept invented right from the start by God Himself when He made the world. After building our world in a few days, He rested. Then He told us to take time in the week for ourselves to rest as well.
It’s funny that a God who could really make us do whatever He wanted decided that He wanted us to take time to rest. We view this idea as crazy in today’s culture. We are ALWAYS on the go. If we’re not somewhere then we were supposed to be half an hour ago and we feel that if we’re relaxing then there should be something better and more productive we could be doing.
Think of what you could do with one day to relax. You could enjoy family time or time with your spouse (if you have one of course), do something you love, or just have some time to do a whole lot of nothing. Who knows, maybe that would strengthen households and we’d maybe even see less divorce out of that one day a week when people can relax with each other and connect out of their busy schedules.
We’ve got so much more work to do now a days. As great as the internet it is, it’s screwed us up pretty good. Now we don’t even have to be at work to do work. We can have deadlines from our home. Our ongoing work schedules are stressing us out and stress can lead to a whole lot of other things.
Last semester I tried to incorporate this day of rest, or sabbath, into my life on Tuesdays. I only had two classes and then I was done by noon, so I would try to get home right after and then relax for most of the day at least from doing work.
Now I’m not saying it has to be like “don’t move a muscle” kind of rest. We see Jesus heal a man on the Sabbath in the Bible and all the Pharisees viewing Him as a sinner because of it. I think God just wanted us to take a break from life and spend some time with Him and relax. After all, if He had to take a break then by all means we should know that we weren’t programmed to run on full power.
These are my thoughts on the forgotten Sabbath. I think it’s more important than we realize. I might even go so far as to say that we NEED to make time for it. I will know more as I continue to read through my Bible but in the mean time this was on my mind and I thought I’d share it.
Take it.
Chew on it.
Think about it.
Here’s some ideas Taylor Keating put together about sleep in one of our band’s video blogs:
We’re making a CD based off of each day in Creation and this is the musical idea representing sleep that we have so far.
