Also I gave them My Sabbaths to be a sign between Me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them." Ezekiel 20:12
Sabbath
The Weekly
18
I LOVE the Sabbath! It is the hinge on which our whole week exists. Before you make assumptions about my personality type or life circumstances, I think you should know I move quickly. Why walk when you can run? I am a highly productive, highly motivated, efficient, homeschooling, working mother of 5. It is for these very reasons that I needed to learn to keep the weekly Sabbath. My life depended on it. I'm not joking.
God gave as the fourth law "to remember the sabbath and keep it holy," but most don't understand its purpose or what it should look like post-Jesus. You may think it is boring, all about going to church, irresponsible, selfish, lazy, or worse, legalistic. But at the core, God gave us the Sabbath rest for us to admit our frailty, actually rest, and in so doing recognize him as LORD of our lives- much like a tithe of our time. He commands it and he delights in our obedience. Obeying God's command to remember the Sabbath is why I can be so productive every other day of the week. Isaiah 58: 13-14 gives us a detailed description of how we can be blessed by a weekly Sabbath.
Desist (cease, abstain, stop) from your own ways and seeking your own pleasure! It is a way of offering back to God something he gave in the first place (your time) and giving him your attention. This is why Jesus helped the Pharisees re-interpret the Sabbath, but he didn't do away with it. They had made it a rigid list of don'ts. Jesus loved the Sabbath. He healed on the Sabbath, walked, talked, and dined with his friends, taught about his father, and when he got hungry, gleaned wheat. When he was questioned about why he healed or gleaned wheat, his reply was, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” Jesus taught that the Sabbath is about stopping our same ol' same ol' and giving God one full day to mutually delight, love, speak, play, restore, and direct. It is for OUR good.
"If because of the Sabbath, you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth.”
By: Julie Cloninger