ArticleBlog | The Lord of the Sabbath: living and preaching the fourth commandment
The Lord of the Sabbath: living and preaching the fourth commandment
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 26.09.23
Given all the negativity in the gospels surrounding the practice of keeping Sabbath, plus the fact that Jesus seemed to make a virtue of actually breaking the Sabbath,1 it seems odd that many of us have been writing and speaking about it so positively over the last decade or so. Producing books about Sabbath has become a veritable cottage industry, to the extent that Sabbath-keeping is, these days, practically a central tenet of evangelical spirituality.
Recognising Sabbath Guard Rails
My own discipline of taking a Sabbath day began over 30 years ago when I was ordained for pastoral ministry. Such was the relentless busyness of the church (and the insidious pressure to make things grow), taking a Monday off was not a ‘nice to have’, but a matter of life and death. Indeed, had I not been so rigorous about it, I am utterly convinced I would have burnt out after the first five years of working life. I had seen a number of my contemporaries crash, and I knew that if I didn’t take action myself, I would soon join them. In fact, by the time I came to write about it in The Day is Yours,2 Sabbath had become something of a red flag in my life. In other words, I knew that if I couldn’t keep Sabbath then there must be something deeply troubled at the core of my being. I was coming to regard the word ‘busy’ with the same disdain as a four-letter word. These days I don’t even use the word busy. I prefer to use the word full. I have a full day, not a busy day. You could say it is just semantics; I say it marks a revolution in the way we approach the time we have been gifted.
In advocating Sabbath in our preaching, it is important to reflect Jesus’s ambivalence. ‘The Sabbath was made for man,’ he said, ‘not man for the Sabbath,’3 which means that the moment we start obsessing about the fine details, we’ve missed the point. On the other hand, just simply telling people to take a day off to recharge their batteries is not helpful either. A day off is what Eugene Peterson calls a secularised Sabbath’4 because its purpose is not to enter into rest, but only to recover from work, in order that we might re-join the rat race with renewed vigour. Anyone who treats Sabbath like this soon realises that the tiredness simply accumulates.
