Sabbath: Stop | Exodus 20:2-11
This message was preached at Sherwood Community Friends Church on Sunday, March 16, 2025. You can watch the video in full by clicking below. This sermon is adapted from the Sabbath Practice from Practicing the Way.
Flip through any popular magazine, scroll on your favorite social media app, or watch any commercial on your free streaming service and you will see all sorts of advertisements–a couple drinking coffee and reading the morning newspaper in bed, a man lounging on the couch playing the guitar, a group of friends on the beach for a picnic…
What exactly are they selling? They are selling sabbath.
The word sabbath is shabbat in Hebrew and it literally means to stop, or cease, or be done. The marketing departments of companies the world over know that you ache for this kind of a life – but that you don’t have it. And they are offering to sell it to you.
The irony is, you can’t buy sabbath! And you don’t need to. All you need to do is stop.
This primal human ache for sabbath, a life where we are at peace in God, and live with joy, is nothing new. We find this ache all the way back to Jesus’ day.
Matthew 11
One of Jesus’ most famous invitations is from Matthew:
”28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” [Mt. 11v28-30]
Pastor Eugene Peterson paraphrases it this way:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
“Are you tired” has become a rhetorical question in the modern age. Of course you are! Low-grade exhaustion is the new normal.
Part of the reason for this is body-based. Up until very recently in human history, most people slept ten to eleven hours a night. Can you imagine?
Now, the average in Western nations is just over six. Cue up all of the latest research from neuroscientists on the devastating effect of insufficient sleep on our mind and body.
And while there are seasons of life when that’s unavoidable, it’s become chronic for far too many of us. We are diminished in our whole person because we are so tired.
But it’s not just our bodies that are tired. It’s, in Jesus’ language, our “souls.” Even when we go on vacation and catch up on sleep, there’s a psycho-spiritual exhaustion that does not go away in the modern world as a result of:
The hurry, busyness, and chaotic pace of modern life.
The noise pollution
The always-on work culture.
The rising cost of living, more and more people working multiple jobs to stay afloat.
The digital age - the phone that never stops buzzing, the constant stream of alerts, the churn of a 24/7 news cycle, full of outrage and fear.
The polarization of politics.
Radical individualism, and with it the epidemic of loneliness, what some call the greatest health crisis of our time.
It’s just too much to carry. Is it any wonder we’re tired?! And this problem of chronic exhaustion isn’t just an emotional problem, or even a medical
problem, at its core, it’s a spiritual problem.
Love
Why? Because we follow Jesus, who said the greatest commandment in all of Scripture is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself.
For Jesus, love is the end goal of the spiritual journey. It is the metric by which we chart our progress. But the more exhausted we are, the more difficult it is for us to love, or to bear any of the fruit of the spirit. You may be familiar with the parable of the sower found in Mark 4.
A seed-sower goes out to sow seed. As he does, there are four different scenarios that Jesus points out. Of course, there is the good soil. Seed falls on good soil and the circumstances are just right so that a huge crop follows. But Jesus also talks about a few scenarios where the seed cannot ever get to producing a crop.
In one instance, the seed falls along the path and it’s snatched up by some birds-indicitive of the person who hears the word of God yet it’s snacthed away by the enemy before it can take root.
Next we see seed that falls along rocky soil, representing someone who has received the word of God with joy, yet as soon as persecution or trials come, they abandon it because it has no roots.
Then Jesus points out this situation. “Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns came up and chocked it, and it didn’t produce fruit.” [Mark 4:7]
Later, when Jesus is explaining this parable to his disciples, he says this about the seed among the thorns.
“Others are like seed sown among thorns; these are the ones who hear the word, but the worries of this age, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.” [Mark 4v18-19]
The hard truth is…
If love for God and obedience to God are two sides of the same coin, as Jesus seemed to teach, it’s hard to love God when you’re worn down. When we’re tired, when we have been wound up from the worries of this age or chasing wealth and other things the world tells us we should chase, it chokes out our ability to love God. We’re more prone to sin. Scientists tell us that a lack of rest erodes energy from our pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain that exercises impulse control.
Not only is it hard to love God. It’s hard to love people, too. As a general rule, tired people are not loving. Most of my worst moments as a human, as a friend, or co-worker or wife or mother, are when I’m exhausted, stressed, and in a hurry. I’m more irritable, impatient, selfish. I forget my growth and maturity as a human and I default to my base survival instincts. This is not how it’s meant to be.
Jesus’ and Exhaustion
Jesus’ will for your life is not for you to be chronically exhausted, sleep-deprived, unhappy and living with no margin. That’s the enemy’s will for your life! Not Jesus! It’s the enemy who is anti-sabbath.
Think of your life energy as a power bar, like on your phone. 100% is what Jesus called “life to the full,” 0% is dead. We usually don’t rest until we’re dangerously tired, down to 20 or 30%. And when we do rest, it’s often not long enough to get all the way back to full, but just to keep going.
But what do we miss out on when we don’t wait for the 100% charge?
It’s what the NT calls the “fruit of the spirit” – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. The best stuff all comes when we’re rested – wisdom, insight, hope, vision for the future, grace for other people’s shortcomings, for our own energy to do our best work, and so on… If you missed it, back in October, we did a deeper dive on what it means to produce fruit according to Jesus’ words in John 15. We’ll link that in our next newsletter for you to revisit.
But you see, this is why rest is essential to an apprenticeship to Jesus. Because if the end goal is to become a person of love in God, we can’t do that if we are chronically exhausted.
So, is there a practice from the Way of Jesus to reorient us away from exhaustion and toward “life to the full”? Yes, it is the practice of sabbath.
Sabbath
As mentioned earlier, the word sabbath, or shabbat in Hebrew, most literally means to stop. When we stop, we can then rest, delight, and, yes, even worship.
Based on that, you can frame the Sabbath in four movements – stop, rest, delight and worship. In the following three weeks, we will talk about rest, delight, and worship. Today, we are focusing on what it means to stop.
If you have your Bible with you, open to Genesis 2… read with me…
Genesis 2
”So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed. 2 On the seventh day God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation. [Gen. 2v1-3]
Notice, God sabbathed.
Yeah, but I’m a type-A, high capacity person–God sabbathed.
Yeah, but I’m more a doer, and I have a lot going on in my life right now–God sabbathed.
Yeah, but I have little kids at home and I’m starting a business–God sabbathed.
Yeah, but there’s paperwork I have to get done, taxes to file-God sabbath.
God the Creator stopped. And in doing so, he built a rhythm into the fabric of creation. We work for six days, and then we sabbath, we stop, for one.
It comes as no surprise that every single society in the history of world civilization has been built around a seven-day week, even though, the week is the one unit of time that’s not tied to the movement of the stars–the day is tied to the earth’s 24-hour rotation, the month to the moon’s lunar cycle, and the year to the earth’s journey around the sun. The seven-day week is not. It’s built out of God’s own life rhythm.
The last time a serious attempt to change the seven-day week was made was in 1793, in the French Revolution, when they attempted a ten day week to up productivity. The result? Productivity plummeted, and worse, there a rash of suicides and spread of mental illness.
Our generation is re-living the French Revolution all over again, not due to a government law to elongate the week, but to a kind of vast conspiracy of modern life that is throwing us out of any kind of rhythm at all.
The smart phone, electricity, the alarm clock, the car, and more have created a world where we go and we go and we go and we never stop. But God created the human body and the planet itself to live in a rhythm.
We are reminded by the teacher in Ecclesiastes that there is a rhythm to life.
“There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven: a time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to tear down and a time to build; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to avoid embracing; a time to search and a time to count as lost; a time to keep and a time to throw away; a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.” [Ecc 3:1-8]
There is a rhythm between day and night, waking and sleeping. There is a rhythm between the noise and activity of spring and summer and the quiet and dormancy of fall and winter. There’s a tidal rhythm between the land and the sea that’s over all the earth.
Within our own bodies there’s a rhythm of the breath as we inhale and exhale. When we lose this sense of rhythm, of pace, of back and forth, we lose a part of our humanity. You are not a machine; you have a soul, and it was not created to move 24/7.
When we live without sabbath, we go against the rhythm that God the Creator himself built into our body, and into the fabric of all creation.
This is true on the “negative side” – when you don’t sabbath, you suffer the consequences: burn out, stress, trashed immune systems, brain fog, frayed relationships, distance from God, etc.
But it’s also true on the positive side – when we do sabbath, we reap the reward. There was medical study on a large community of Christians who practice the Sabbath. The study found that not only are they much happier, on average, than the general population, but they live eleven years longer than other Americans. One doctor pointed out that if you add up the time devoted to sabbath over a life, it’s right around eleven years. He theorized that for every day you sabbath you literally add a day to your life.
This 6 days on-1 day off rhythm is built into to the fabric of God’s world. If you fight it, you will face the consequences. Which is why, later in Scripture, it’s commanded by God.
Turn to Exodus 19. Exodus 19 is home to the Ten Commandments. Read number four, verse eight…
Exodus 20
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: You are to labor six days and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates. For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.” [Ex. 20v8-11]
The Sabbath isn’t just a good idea. It’s one of the ten commandments. In fact, it’s the longest of all ten commandments. If you were to make a pie chart, it’s around 37%! Why such a heavy emphasis? If we can recall, just a few months prior, the Israelites were in forced labor under the oppression of the Egyptians. They were not given days of rest. No vacation days. No weekend getaways.
Yet God called them out of Egypt so they could stop be together with him, worship him, delight in him, and rest in him. And in order for them to have the freedom to do those things…God first had to stop their working. This is why, before sharing the 10 commandments, just a few earlier verses, we are reminded of who God is to the Israelites:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.” [Ex 20:2]
God stopped their working so they could Sabbath. In God’s view, it’s just as or more important than not lying or stealing or killing.
And it’s the only commandment we brag about breaking! Even in our current society, few people brag about how many lies they told that week or how many affairs they had, yet many of us brag about how many days in a row we worked, how many emails we did over the weekend, etc.
But this is not the Way of God.
Now, Christians have long debated whether or not the sabbath is still a binding command on followers of Jesus. And there are good people on both sides of the argument. But for me, it’s not helpful to ask whether we “have” to keep the Sabbath. You can work with it, or against it, but it just is.
Even if the Sabbath command is no longer binding, it still stands as wisdom. Lots of things aren’t commanded in Scripture, but they are essential to becoming a person of love.
As Wayne Muller put it: “The sabbath is not a burdensome requirement from some law-giving deity – “You ought, you’d better, you must” – but rather a remembrance of a law that is firmly embedded in the fabric of nature. It is a reminder of how things really are, the rhythmic dance to which we unavoidably belong.”
Again in Mark, this time chapter 2, we see a confrontation around this topic. When Jesus’ disciples were out picking for some food in the fields, the Pharisees said,
“Look why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” [Mk 2:24]
Jesus famously responded, in Mark 2:27,
“The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.”
Here, he was speaking to a generation that had the opposite problem to ours; they had hundreds of rules around the Sabbath that warped God’s intent behind the day. First-century Jews needed to hear the second half of that line–“The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.”
But our problem isn’t that we have too many rules for the Sabbath. It’s that we don’t have any. So today, I’m going to highlight the argument that most twenty-first-century Christians need to hear in this verse and it’s the first part of Jesus’ words – “The Sabbath was made for people.”
This is a gift that God gives us. An invitation to stop. And this gift came long before the Sabbath is a command. It’s a gift, from the Creator to you and me and all of creation… from a generous, joyful, loving God.
Hence the command: remember the Sabbath. What is it we remember on the sabbath?
Remember
We remember there is a creator God. We live in his world, and it is good.
We remember there’s a rhythm to creation that existed before us and will continue to exist after us.
We remember that we don’t stop when we’re finished. because we’re never finished. It’s never enough. We stop when the rhythm God built into our bodies says stop.
We remember we’re not what we do or what we have or what other people think of us. Many people fear stopping because of what emotions may come up – who am I if I’m not producing or performing? Sabbath is a weekly act of identity formation, we position ourselves to remember–
I am God’s loved one.
We remember that our life with God is not a “right,” but a gift.
We remember that the world is full of evil and injustice, yes, but it’s also full of goodness and beauty and truth.
We remember that we owe it to God to be grateful and full of joy in his world.
Day and Spirit
Sabbath is more than just a day. It’s a way of being in the world. The practice of sabbath is a day of rest by which we cultivate a spirit of restfulness in all of life. A practice by which we undergo a dramatic shift, from restlessness to restfulness.
From/to:
Hurry/Peace
Busyness/margin
Burnout/sustainability
Noise/quiet
Distraction/clarity
Isolation/solitude
Crowds/community
Grasping/gratitude
Do you see it?
Conclusion
But Sabbath isn’t just an aspirational idea. It’s a practice. It’s actually a key habit out of which so many other good habits flow. Sabbath, like all of the spiritual formation practices, is a means to an end.
The end isn’t, “I practice sabbath.” It’s not even to be well-rested and happy. It’s to participate in the love and life of God himself. To center our entire life around him, to live more deeply in him.
Not just on Sabbath, but all week long.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman said, “People who sabbath live all seven days differently.”
That’s why the Sabbath is on day seven, not on day three or four. It’s not a break in the middle of the week so we can get back to the real business of work. It’s the apex, what the entire week is all about.
You do not have to live a sabbath-less life of non-stop exhaustion. You, right where you are, no matter your stage of life, can adopt the practice of Sabbath. And you don’t have to buy it or order it online or earn it or have the perfect space for it. All you have to do is stop.
Over the next 3 weeks, as mentioned, we will do a deeper dive into what we are to do in our Sabbath day or our Sabbath moments in the forms of resting, delighting, and worshipping. But, before we can enter into any of these, we must first stop. As the worship team makes their way up here, reflect for a few moments on what work God is asking you to intentionally stop one day a week or in Sabbath moments during the week.
