It’s funny, but growing up I always thought the “Sabbath” was some legalistic rule that only Jews still followed. In fact, the neighborhood that I grew up in as a kid had a pretty high population of Orthodox Jews living there. I can remember on Saturday morning watching families walking to church and feeling sorry for them because they couldn’t drive their car. I had heard that they couldn’t even watch TV on the Sabbath. Sounded like a perpetual weekly grounding to me!
In my mind Sabbath was some sort of punishment.
In reality, the fourth commandment, to take a Sabbath, a day each week and not do any work was a gift from God to His people. In Egypt, the Israelites were forced to work every day without a break being treated as objects to be exploited, not people. Many people think part of the reason the Sabbath was commanded was to remind them that they aren’t in Egypt anymore, that their value doesn’t come from how much work they can produce.
Their significance comes from the God who rescued them, the God who loves them.
I think once again we need to be reminded of this truth. So many of us are virtual slaves to our culture mistakenly thinking our value is in what we can produce. So we work harder and harder. Sleep less and less. And we, in fact, produce a crazy amount of stuff, but the irony is this “full” lifestyle leaves us feeling quite empty.
Why?
Because God cares more about who you’re becoming than what you’re accomplishing.
