Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

by A.J. Swoboda

Yet with all this progress, we are ominously dissatisfied. In bowing at these sacred altars of hyperactivity, progress, and technological compulsivity, our souls increasingly pant for meaning and value and truth as they wither away, exhausted, frazzled, displeased, ever on edge.

“That God rested on the seventh day, and blessed and sanctified it, is the first divine action which man is privileged to witness; and that he himself may keep the Sabbath with God, completely free from work, is the first Word spoken to him, the first obligation laid on him.”17 Humanity had only God’s goodness to celebrate, nothing more. Work had not even begun.

The Sabbath teaches us that we do not work to please God. Rather, we rest because God is already pleased with the work he has accomplished in us.

To be a Christian was, and is, to reorient one’s entire life and death around Jesus Christ.