Sabbath: Keeping God's Sabbath Exodus 20:8-11; 31:13-17; John 5:1-23
By David A. deSilva
How, then, do we honor the Sabbath? The early Christians decided that Sunday and not Saturday was to be their day of worship. They did not gather merely to rest after one week and gear up for the next. They were not committed to a never-ending cycle of working within, and profiting from, the way things are. They chose as their day of worship, so one early author puts it, the eighth day of the week - the first day of the New Creation, initiated with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And we gather here today not merely to remember that God is bringing about a new creation. Just as the Israelites sought to imitate God by resting with Him on the seventh day, so we are to imitate God by participating in the ongoing work of God every day.
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Jesus explained to His opponents that "the Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing; for whatever He does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all that He Himself is doing."
Jesus is not our Savior only, but also our example. He is the Son, but we are His many sisters and brothers. We, too, are called to listen to the Father, to allow the Father to show us what He is doing, and to jump into God's work - which takes us back to the places of prayer and to the value of obedience. In prayer, we are ourselves remade as Jesus heals us, restores us, and empowers us. The new creation takes shape within us. In prayer, God reveals to each of us what He is doing and how we may serve His vision for our families, our friends, our enemies, our communities, our world. We are given the privilege of witnessing to God's new acts of creation.
Paul sums up the heart of discipleship so clearly: "He died for all so that we who live might live no longer for ourselves but rather for Him who died for us and was raised for us." When we understand that Jesus' death was for us, we will understand the appropriateness of living for him, and until we use our lives to serve Jesus we fail to understand His death for us.
Let our Sabbathkeeping be measured not by resting from work, not by engaging traditional acts of piety, but by setting aside our own work - our own desires, agendas, prejudices - to serve God's vision for the new creation. Paul lived this way and transformed the Greco-Roman world. What might we do for God if we put God's vision in the center of our lives! As the Father shows us how He is moving people toward reconciliation, toward healing, toward justice, toward life, let us follow the Father's prompting. Keep this Sabbath, and we will find rest.