Sabbath: Worship | Genesis 2:2-3
This message was preached at Sherwood Community Friends Church on Sunday, April 6, 2025. You can watch the video in full by clicking below. This sermon is adapted from the Sabbath Practice from Practicing the Way.
Intro
What is your Sabbath like?
I’m guessing it’s on Sunday, as that’s the best day of the week for most people.
But here’s what Sunday is like for a lot of Christians today.
You stay up late on Saturday night, watching a movie or TV, or going out… you overeat, maybe even have a drink…. You wake up Sunday morning in a haze and rush out the door to church in a hurry, that is, if you go to church. More and more people don’t.
After church, you go shopping or watch the game on TV or work around your house or in the yard, maybe you get ahead on email and plan out your week, or meal prep, or do homework, or whatever. Watch another movie at night. Doom scroll on your phone. Go to bed.
To clarify, that’s not a sabbath.
Now I do not say that with even a hint of judgment, because many times I have been guilty of the same. It’s just an honest appraisal, and it’s not a sabbath.
This is an unacknowledged offspring of the ancient practice from the Way of Sabbath. This is what we know as the modern, secular day off.
It’s more sabbish rather than Sabbath. How do we keep sabbath from becoming sabbish? From becoming just another activity on the weekend? Another spiritual discipline to check off?
As we’ve said throughout this entire Practice, there are four movements to the Sabbath–stop, rest, delight, and worship.
The danger of last week’s teaching on the Sabbath as delight is, as with all ideas, the enemy is constantly at work to warp good ideas from reality into a parody; we can be easily confused in our culture into confusing a Godward day of joy into a self-centered day of pleasure. Too many stop on Sabbath at delighting.
But in our final teaching, we come to what is arguably the most important of all four–the Sabbath is a day for worship. Now, where does this idea come from?
Let’s read one last time from Genesis 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. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation. ' Genesis 2:2-3, CSB
Notice God did two things on the Sabbath:
1. God “blessed the seventh day.”
We covered that in the last session. The word blessed can also be translated make happy. The Sabbath is a happy day. In fact, the conversations I’ve been a part of in some of our Friends Groups have revealed this for most people! The homes of those who grew up with a Sunday Sabbath recollect times of shared family meals, rest, and play. So much blessing!
A blessing in Genesis is God’s way of empowering life to create more life—overflowing, multiplying, and filling the earth with His goodness.
The Sabbath is blessed and it’s life-giving.
But secondly…
2. God “declared it holy.”
I know “holy” is a very religious-sounding word, but stay with me.
In the ancient world, the gods were found in the world of space, not of time. Meaning, they were found on a holy mountain, or a holy temple, or a holy cave.
You would expect God to make a holy place. But instead, God makes a holy day.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Sabbath “architecture in time” and said, “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.” Because for this God, the one, true Creator God, the entire cosmos is his temple, there is nowhere he is not.
So, if you want to find this God, you don’t need to climb a mountain or travel to a shrine. He’s all around you. You just need to set aside the time to come awake and alive to his presence.
But what exactly does it mean to make a day holy?
Holy
In Hebrew, the word “holy” is kedosh. And it literally means “be holy, removed from common use; subject to special treatment, forfeit to the sanctuary.”
We tend to think of holiness as a moral descriptor, a way of saying something or someone is good or evil.
And in a sense, it is. Contrary to our humanistic culture’s view, goodness or virtue has always been a minority position in society as a whole.
As Jesus said in Matthew 7, ' “Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it.
How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it. ' Matthew 7:13-14, CSB
The narrow way of Jesus is holy – it’s uncommon. Set apart.
But holiness isn’t just a moral world.
In the Torah, there are holy pots and holy pans and holy utensils for the Tabernacle. A fork or knife can’t be good or evil, but it can be “set apart for God’s special purposes” rather than just used for normal life.
Growing up, I remember my parents had a set of fine china and gold silverware. In fact, my mom still has it and this is a picture of it. She keeps it to this day in a hutch with glass windows, displayed in her dining room for all to see. It is only brought out for special occasions – Easter, Thanksgiving or a birthday celebration.
And whenever it was time to set the table, I would often rush to my mom and ask if I could do this! What an honor it was for me to be able to handle such an important task of putting out the fine china. Of course, we also had a whole other set of plateware that was for everyday use, much cheaper, more hardy, easy to replace, etc.
But this china was holy. It was set apart for my family’s special purposes, not used for our day-to-day.
What my mom’s fine china is to daily plateware, the Sabbath is to the rest of the week–holy. Set apart.
But for what? Or better said, for who?
Turn over to Exodus 16…Now by this point, the Israelites had been wandering around in the wilderness for a little over a month after leaving Egypt. They were tired and frustrated and honestly, complained quite a bit. The Lord heard their complaints, and this is what he said:
'“I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions. 'On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.” Exodus 16:4-5, CSB
“In the morning there was a layer of dew all around the camp. When the layer of dew evaporated, there were fine flakes on the desert surface, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they asked one another, “What is it? ” because they didn’t know what it was. Moses told them, “It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Gather as much of it as each person needs to eat. You may take two quarts per individual, according to the number of people each of you has in his tent.’ ” So the Israelites did this. Some gathered a lot, some a little. When they measured it by quarts, the person who gathered a lot had no surplus, and the person who gathered a little had no shortage. Each gathered as much as he needed to eat. Moses said to them, “No one is to let any of it remain until morning.” Exodus 16:13b-19, CSB
On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, four quarts apiece, and all the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He told them, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Tomorrow is a day of complete rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you want to bake, and boil what you want to boil, and set aside everything left over to be kept until morning.’ ” So they set it aside until morning as Moses commanded, and it didn’t stink or have maggots in it. “Eat it today,” Moses said, “because today is a Sabbath to the Lord. Today you won’t find any in the field. For six days you will gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.” Exodus 16:22-26, CSB
Notice the phrase “a holy sabbath to the Lord.” It’s said twice in those last few verses.
Considering our other definitions of holy, It can also be translated “set apart for the Lord” or “dedicated to the Lord.”
The sabbath is an entire day that is set aside, not just for rest or delight, but for God.
Worship
Sabbath is a day for worship.
A lot of us hear the word worship, and we think of singing, and that is an example of worship. But worship is so much more. We know this here at Sherwood Friends. To worship is to orient and reorient your entire life around God our Creator.
Paul says this in Romans:
'Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship.' Romans 12:1, CSB
One way to express true worship is by singing, which we have done here today. But there are so many more ways:
Giving our time like we all are doing by being present here today
Giving our resources as we do with our tithes and our offerings
Giving our attention and affection to God through prayer and scripture reading
Yielding our will over to God, bending what we want in favor of where he guides
Anything we do to center God, and to direct our heart in love to his glory, his goodness, is a form of worship.
Yes, Sabbath is a day to stop, and rest, and refill our tank. Yes, Sabbath is a day of delight – to celebrate. But stopping there is a disservice to the fullness of Sabbath.
Above all, it’s to contemplate the good news that God has given his life to us in Jesus, and now it is our joy to give our life back in worship. It’s to deepen our communing with him in the deepest reality there is.
Worship is the final and most important movement of Sabbath.
Progression
There is a progression that our souls go through on the Sabbath when practiced with intentionality.
First, stop… Then, rest… Then, as energy comes back, we begin to delight… and while delighting, one almost can’t help but burst into spontaneous worship and gratitude and praise and wonder and awe at the goodness of God.
Some of you know I have been doing some endurance training recently and in February, I ran my 1st 5k in 2 years. A 5k is 3.2 miles, but if I would have stopped short at 3 miles and said “I’m good” - I would have missed out on the pinnacle of the race! I wouldn’t have crossed the finish line. I wouldn’t have received my time and my ranking. I wouldn’t have had random strangers cheering me on at the end. I would have missed the best part!
The practice of Sabbath is the same. For many of us, we’ve picked up on the practices of stopping, resting, and delighting. But we don’t finish out that last quarter of a mile to experience the pinnacle of the day by simply being in worship to our awe-inspiring Father.
For most, Sunday is by far the best day to sabbath. For over a thousand years, Sabbath and Sunday worship were synonymous. Only recently were they separated. But they go intrinsically together.
And the tragic way the Sabbath has been co-opted by the weekend, from a day of worship to a “day off,” goes to the very heart of the matter. The Sabbath is holy, but we have to keep it holy, with intention and resistance to our culture. In the Ten Commandments, we read…
'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: ' Exodus 20:8
The Jews don’t talk about practicing the Sabbath, but rather they just keep the Sabbath. Meaning, keeping it holy, set apart, sanctified.
You see, we can either sanctify the Sabbath, and keep it holy, set apart, special. Or we can, in the language of Scripture, “profane” the sabbath, meaning, we can devalue it, dishonor it, treat it like just any other day, for doing as we please.
Ezekiel recounts how the Israelites responded to God’s command to keep Sabbath.
'I also gave them my Sabbaths to serve as a sign between me and them, so that they would know that I am the Lord who consecrates them. “ ‘But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness. They did not follow my statutes and they rejected my ordinances — the person who does them will live by them. They also completely profaned my Sabbaths. So I considered pouring out my wrath on them in the wilderness to put an end to them. But I acted for the sake of my name, so that it would not be profaned in the eyes of the nations in whose sight I had brought them out. ' Ezekiel 20:12-14, CSB
Do you keep the Sabbath holy? Or do you profane it? I know for me, well, I have been honest before, from this very stage, of my own struggle to keep the Sabbath set apart.
Ultimately this isn’t about a day, but about our life.
All the practices are means to an end, to grow more and more into the likeness of Jesus. The sabbath is a day of worship by which we cultivate a spirit of worship that carries into all the days of our life.
Is your life holy? Is your life set apart for and dedicated to God?
Or is it profane? Common. Following the broad path that’s all around you?
As Ezekiel recounted, this was the tale of the Israelites. They could not wrap their minds around what it meant to keep a day set apart, uncommon, unique from all the others. Let’s go back to the wilderness of the manna we read…
Yet on the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, but they did not find any. Then the Lord said to Moses, “How long will you refuse to keep my commands and instructions? Understand that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore on the sixth day he will give you two days’ worth of bread. Each of you stay where you are; no one is to leave his place on the seventh day.” So the people rested on the seventh day. Exodus 16:27-30, CSB
Followers of Jesus to this day disagree about whether or not the Sabbath is still a binding commandment. But that’s not really the point, is it? As one of the Ten Commandments, and all the commandments of Scripture, they are put there to guard you from death and guide you into life.
Keeping the Sabbath is arguably just as important as not lying or stealing or killing. It is of life or death importance.
Our culture is killing itself through overwork, overconsumption, over-activity, over-entertainment, over mediad, over and over and over.
Few things are as desperately needed today as a recovering of the practice of Sabbath. The sabbath is a means by which we enter into what Jesus called “the kingdom of God” which we’ve been diving into in our Sermon on the Mount series. It’s a day when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Back/forward
Theologians point out that the sabbath looks both backward and forward in time.
It’s an aftertaste of the Garden of Eden and a foretaste of the New Jerusalem.
'After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb! All the angels stood around the throne, and along with the elders and the four living creatures they fell facedown before the throne and worshiped God, saying, Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and strength be to our God forever and ever. Amen. ' Revelation 7:9-12, CSB
When we gather for the Sabbath meal, around a table, with the multi-ethnic family of God, not just friends, but kin, brothers, sisters, bound together around Jesus, the host and honored guest, and we eat and drink together, and we give thanks and sing and laugh and dance and celebrate and revel in the sense that all is well – that’s not just a sign of the kingdom to come. That is the kingdom already here.
I love that. On the sabbath we are practicing for eternity.
Here’s Abraham Joshua Heschel again: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world, unless one is initiated into the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come… The essence of the world to come is Sabbath eternal, and the seventh day in time is an example of eternity.”
And what makes the Sabbath joyful isn’t just good food, around a table with family and friends, and time off work to rest and delight, or even gathering together here as a body… it is God himself, the Trinity at the center of the universe who radiates joy. He is what we crave deep in our being, whether we put the name God to our ache or misdiagnose our desire for God as a desire for something else.
Anyone who has ever tasted of true delight–as the Creator intended for the creation–knows the chasm of difference between delight and simple pleasure.
Delight is meant to draw your whole being to God in gratitude and joy. Pleasure is just trying to make your body feel good. You don’t walk away from pleasure feeling profound gratitude, you just walk away wanting more pleasure. But there is a kind of delight that is virtually indistinguishable from worship.
Conclusion
As we draw this 4-week study to a close, the question isn’t: Do you worship?
The question is: Who or what do you worship?
And, if we become like who or what we worship, as the wisdom has long said, then what kind of person is your worship forming you into?
You will worship something. You will orient your life around something.. put your faith, hope, and love onto something… find your identity, community, and sense of meaning and purpose in something… pursue it, sacrifice for it, discipline yourself for it…
The question is simply, what?
And no matter how good or noble a pursuit is, no matter how justified it is, the moment we elevate a created thing to place reserved for the Creator, we immediately ruin it, and in doing so, ruin ourselves. Because nothing can bear the weight of our worship other than the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
On the Sabbath, we come back to our “holy Center” in God… this point, deep within all of us who are “in Christ,” where our spirit is in communion with his spirit, where we’re not even sure whose who anymore… where we draw on the life at the heart of the Trinity itself. And give our life back in return.
The progression of sabbath builds from stopping, to resting, to delighting all to reach the culmination, the pinnacle, the climax of the day-
Worship.
When Jesus has come for a rest at a well, he meets a shamed Samaritan woman. As he asks her for a drink, she is skeptical of him. She resistently questions him. She lives with her own sort of shame that keeps her from God and worship. Her society also said there was only one place to worship God.
You can read their full interaction in John 4 but I imagine this is what she was feeling:
Jesus! I want what you have but the world I live in restricts me. It keeps me bound from being with you the way my spirit longs for. But even more than the world around me, the world inside me is my bigger struggle. I am damaged and my soul aches for something that I don’t have. I thirst for more. How can I possibly ever have you at my center when my entire life pulls me further and further from you?
Jesus responds.
'But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.' John 4:23-24, CSB
Friends, if we cannot even set aside one day as a full day of Sabbath worship to God, then how can we ever expect that every day would be a day of worship in his presence?
Open Worship
We are going to take time to be in a place of worship in his presence. If you feel led, right from your seat, just declare worship to God. It can be a name of God. It can be an attribute of God. For you watching online, you can put yours in the chat to encourage each other.
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For some of you, this study has been challenging because you don’t see a way that you can legitimately practice Sabbath for an entire day every week. My encouragement to you is what I heard Manny Garcia, the Indiana Yearly Meeting Superintendent, say in a workshop 2 years ago at annual sessions. He encouraged those of us in the room that if we simply could not take a full 24 hours to carve out a portion of the same day every week. Maybe you start with 8 hours. And in those 8 hours, follow the same progress-stop, rest, delight, worship. See what God does with your obedience to honor and keep the Sabbath holy.
I’ve seen a recent statistic that says about 44% of you will forget today’s sermon by tomorrow, and another 48% by next week when we arrive for church together. The hope is that you have already started to put into practice the rhythms of stop, rest, delight and worship over the last 4 weeks so that you can reap the life-giving benefits of Sabbath and this isn’t just another message that gets dismissed quickly.
