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

by A.J. Swoboda

Davidman’s book provokes an interesting question: If Martians came to Earth on our day of worship, what would they conclude we worship? Football? Youth sports? The great outdoors? Brunches with friends? Music festivals?

The difference between the church and the world is that the church worships the Creator God. The world worships anything else. In the end, it is impossible not to worship something. We all worship something. Some worship money. Some worship their jobs. Some worship their families. Others worship their churches. But the truth is we all worship something or someone. As was evidenced earlier, in the biblical story humans are prone to worship good things that God has made over God himself. However, we find that the biblical account consistently dethrones such “good” things that we tend to exalt in false worship.

Sports, food, and fun have a purpose; God celebrates these things. But God’s intention was never that we would replace him with these good things. No wonder we struggle to find time to come together for a day of rest. The day of worship, when Christians gather in the name of Jesus, is stuffed to the brim with so many activities that we neglect to do the very thing that we are called to do on that day—worship God. We have become like Noah’s ark. Noah sends out a dove, but it returns unable to find a place to rest. We are no different. We fly about in search of rest but find instead yet another day filled with chaos. We have no place to land and rest.

What have we crowded our worship out with? What are those things we are willing to “make time for” by sacrificing something else? Watching football and eating good food and going outdoors are not bad things. These are tremendously good things. However, in making the day of worship all about these good experiences, we crowd out the encounter that once brought Christians together as a body.

I once heard of a Nigerian village that received its first electric light bulbs. Each family was given one for their home. Every night families would turn their lights on. A problem arose. Families would sit inside and stare at the light bulb rather than sit at the community fire, where they had for centuries told and listened to their tribe’s stories. Nighttime had always been when their stories were passed along. Now, they stared at the light bulb.6 The problem with the light bulb was not what it did (emit light); the problem was what the bulb didn’t do (create meaningful connection). The light bulb took attention away from the time that was needed to pass along the cultural narratives of the people. The problem with a Sabbath as a mere day of activity is not that the activities are bad; it is that the activities replace the time-honored activity of passing along the story of Jesus to those around us.

Like rest in the ancient world, Sabbath-keeping in our present world is an embodied act of trusting God. When we worship and trust God, there is no one and nothing to fear. Fear, friend, is a disturbance in the force, a kind of invasive species in the garden of Eden. God never created humans to live with fear, other than a deep sense of fear and reverence toward God. The first encounter of “fear” in Scripture does not come until Genesis 3:10 and is clearly the result of sin, not God’s original design. Instead, we were created to live in abundant trust in the Creator. Sabbathing is a way that we defy fear by actively trusting God.

Even now, as our world seems to be falling apart at the seams, consider where Jesus is presently. Jesus is in heaven. What is he doing there? “He was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God” (Mark 16:19). What a compelling and disturbing image. Right now our world is marred by sin and evil. The church is undergoing incredible difficulties. War seems to be at our doorstep. And what does Jesus do? He sits. This is not laziness or apathy. This is Jesus trusting his Father. Jesus trusts so deeply that he sits and rests at God’s side.

To Sabbath is to enter into a different mode of time in which pressing matters do not become ultimate.

The beauty is that because Jesus has come, he is actively re-creating a world with Sabbath in it. His kingdom is one with rest and Sabbath built in. It has been said by Jewish rabbis that if everyone in the world kept a Sabbath at the same exact time, the Messiah would come.21 Christians, I want to submit, have a different perspective. The Messiah, Jesus, has already come. And we have nothing to wait for. Messiah has come—that is why everyone can begin to Sabbath now.

The devil does not Sabbath. He does not have time for that because his days are numbered.

At what point did we start basing our action and lifestyle on what the devil is doing? The devil never takes a rest. But that is why he is the devil. That should never be a framework for our lives.

Evil has been defeated, but evil continues to fight. Because Christ followers walk in the authority and power of Christ, we are not on equal terms with the devil. Our battle has already been won. Therefore, even though the enemy continues to fight, we have the opportunity to rest. It is kind of unfair, actually.

While Scripture does not elaborate on any level whether there will be a Sabbath in hell, my gut tells me that even if there were, the people there would not be willing to enter into it. If one rejects the love and mercy of Christ at the cross, they will have no logical reason to receive a day of rest extended to them by God. It is not that it is not offered; it is that it is not taken.

In my experience, practicing a Sabbath opens one up to serious spiritual attack. I began to experience the dark side of work and adrenaline addiction when we started to Sabbath years ago. To this day, around 3:00 p.m. on the Sabbath, I bear what I call a “Sabbath depression.” My brain starts craving stimulation, and my mind becomes sad as my body is not being pumped full of adrenaline.

Boredom can be fertile ground for the devil’s best work. It is when we feel bored that we are most tempted to look at questionable materials or think about questionable things. I think our rest wakes the devil to action. He does not want us to rest in the presence of God. He wants to get us busy, up and at ’em. This is precisely why prayer needs to be an integral part of any Sabbath-keeping. We should not expect the Sabbath to be a day free from the devil’s attacks.

the Sabbath allows space to detach from the influences and voices of the world. We often do not even know how attuned to these voices we have become. Before we know it, they reverberate in our spirits unthinkingly. For a couple of years of very intense ministry, my wife and I found it difficult to sleep at night. The combination of work, community, having a child, and financial pressures seemed to make closing our eyes at night difficult. It was around this time that we discovered Netflix. We found that Netflix was the easiest way in the world to fall asleep at night. Just turn on a show and fall asleep. But while it eventually caused us to go to sleep, our rest was not very good, and we would wake up almost sad in the morning. Plus we would stay up watching more shows than we should. After a few years of this habit, we decided that we needed to stop watching Netflix, an excruciating decision. Almost immediately upon canceling our subscription, our sleep became better, we woke up more rested, and our hearts and minds were more at peace. What was most surprising to me was how difficult the silence at night was at first. All these thoughts would come to my mind—disturbing thoughts that I would have normally crowded out by watching something. I can no longer binge-watch a program to help me feel better or laugh my way through a melancholy period.

If worship is living our entire lives in submission to God, can you identify areas of your life where you might be withholding worship from God?

There is perhaps no single thing that could better help us recover Jesus’ lordship in our frantic, power-hungry world than to allow him to be Lord of our rest as well as our work. Andy Crouch, Playing God

Vulnerability is a scary thing to look at. We can even feel repulsed by it—perhaps you feel that way thinking about God breastfeeding. But the vulnerability of others (particularly in Jesus) has the capacity to awake us to our own vulnerabilities.

While God is all-powerful, God still models a life of vulnerability by resting for a day during the week of creation. God does not simply demand vulnerability and humility. God becomes humble. He rests. He sends his Son, who embodied vulnerability and humility. God always does what he asks. God rests one out of seven days as an act of vulnerability for us. What an act of humility! When the God of the universe certainly could be running around doing more important things, God does what is needed by humanity and the rest of creation.

The Sabbath creates much-needed time for quiet, silence, and intimacy with Jesus.

We desperately need obscurity. But our modern world is intent on keeping us from silence and solitude, scheming against moments of quietness and prayer. Silence is scary. Obscurity is difficult. Having a day of rest that may include silence can feel like a very long day. All of these thoughts and fears will run through our minds. But all we need to do with the things that arise from the silence is quietly bring them to Jesus as they come up. Doing so does not magically fix everything right away, but bringing them into the presence of Jesus generates a kind of lightness and transparency. With Jesus, we can hold the pain of the silence with his strong hands of grace.

We have developed an allergy to silence and obscurity. We have created within ourselves such a need to do and accomplish and make that effectiveness becomes the rudder of our entire existence. Silence terrifies us. After having been silent, we have nothing we can tell people we have done. We just were. Silence goes against what Henri Nouwen calls “the security of having something valuable to do.”8 Spending time in silence allows the things that crowd our existence to empty out.

Silence is giving space to see what is at the bottom of our souls.

As well as silence, Sabbath gives us time to simply be with God. The number of times that the Gospels describe Jesus as simply reclining at the table with his disciples has always been staggering to me. We may think that the Sabbath day is a waste of time and we are not getting anything out of it. But we can never be truly human without living in communion with God.

William Temple wrote that when we frame our entire lives on the love of God, we will be able to enter into rest. Before that, we will always struggle to rest.

Sabbath offers us a weekly return to the loving grace of God from the frenetic, works-based ways of living we have grown accustomed to. The Sabbath is part of the process of becoming holy, sanctified, transformed. It returns us to God and sanctifies us from those forceful realities that ultimately seek to take us away from the love of God.

this return to the love of God on the Sabbath can be a painful journey. Silence and presence often are painful. On the Sabbath, God helps us sort out our intentions and desires that lie in the foundations of our lives. Sabbath, for me, is God’s creative way of entirely undermining my overdeveloped drive to work,

Our false desires and motivations often come to the surface on the Sabbath. You may find that as you enter into the Sabbath, all sorts of odd and even disgusting desires float to the surface of your mind. It is okay. Offer those false motivations to Jesus and invite him to help you understand them and live more contentedly. Sabbath, in fact, is contentment. It is a day that we sit in contentment and gratitude for God and for what we already have. We cannot attain and accumulate more on the Sabbath, so we have to come to terms with what we already have. The Sabbath reminds us that the opposite of less is not more; it is enough.

Sabbath is renunciation. It is self-restraint. It is a day of radical self-inquiry to repent and turn from the ways of destruction that we have been doing unthinkingly all week long, so that we might heal in God’s rest. Sabbath invokes us to be skeptical of all our desires.

Is it wrong to use the day of rest to turn to the living God in repentance? Of course not! Repentance is not work. Sin is work. Sin is the productivity of seeking that which God does not desire. Sin is also seeking productivity at a time when God does not desire.

This connection between jealousy and rest is seen in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ: “When a man desires a thing too much, he at once becomes ill at ease.” Our unencumbered and uncontrolled desires to possess more and more and more will eventually lead to a place of complet...

Many of you who read this may be at a place in your life where a need for rest runs so deep that you are burning out. Perhaps boundaries have been broken for so long that the fringes of your life have become burned. The need for a Sabbath, and even perhaps a sabbatical, is intruding on you. Do not resist this moment. There are moments in all of our lives when God, by his sovereign and good grace, almost seems to force us to enter into Sabbath rhythms whether we want to or not. David reflects on the heart of God for his own life: “He makes me lie down” (Ps. 23:2). Sometimes our wills are open to the Sabbath. Sometimes the Sabbath is forced on us.

One of God’s greatest gifts is leading us into a scenario in which we are unable to resolve everything on our own. Unfixable situations are God’s gift, for they force us to rest.

Legalism regarding work or rest is dangerous. We must remember that Jesus did not descend to humanity and die on a cross that we might worship the law. We worship him.

The other extreme is to spiritualize the Sabbath, turning it into some kind of abstract, nonrooted idea—not something actually to be practiced but rather something that symbolizes a deeper reality.

It is important that we take an actual day a week to rest. A parallel may help: I love my wife dearly. Our weekly date night is a special, scheduled opportunity to nurture our relationship. While I love my wife every second, a weekly date night embeds that love into both of our lives. The same applies to tithing. All of my money is the Lord’s; still, I give him a portion of it. The same goes for the Sabbath. Every day is God’s day, but I actualize that reality by setting aside one day to pray and play with God. When Scripture invites us to “keep” a Sabbath—when we Sabbath-keep—we must remember that the word keep in Scripture never means hiding it away. Rather, it entails continuing in something, keeping it active, putting it into constant use. Just as love must be kept, so must the rest of God.