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

by A.J. Swoboda

It is not as though we do not love God—we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore.

Sabbath forgetfulness is driven, so often, in the name of doing stuff for God rather than being with God. We are too busy working for him.

time poverty and burnout have become the signs that the minority church remains serious about God in a world that has rejected him.

The result of our Sabbath amnesia is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want.10 Our time-saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life much easier and interconnected. As a result, we have more information at our fingertips than anyone in history. Yet with all this progress, we are ominously dissatisfied.

To keep a Sabbath is to give time and space on our calendar to the grace of God.

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.

Not only did a day of rest orient Adam and Eve’s life around God; it also orients our hearts, bodies, and minds toward the Creator. Sabbath reminds us that “our time” was never our time in the first place. All time is God’s time. And the time we have been given is to be used faithfully in worship of him.

Sabbath baptizes our week into the grace and mercy of God.

Among patriarchal societies, no other sacred text held such a high view of women as the Hebrew Bible.

We worship the God who invented the weekend.

“eternity uttering a day.”

Sabbath is a moment of eternal glory momentarily breaking into our finite, present world.

We should learn from France—God’s rhythms can never be tinkered with. As H. H. Farmer once said, “If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.”

The Sabbath day is a holy day. Interestingly, the only thing God deems as qadosh, or “holy,” in the creation story is the Sabbath day.

The intrinsic goodness of creation speaks to an important practice of Sabbath living—the need of humanity to reflect on and delight in the goodness of what God has made.

The Sabbath is celebration, a day of rejoicing over the goodness of what has been made and who made it.

As we were made to eat and breathe and walk, we were made, from the foundations of the world, to rest, or to Sabbath, in God.

If we choose never to rest, as we are built, it will catch up to us. We cannot dodge our needs.

We can violate truth, but by doing so, we will suffer the consequences.

Sadly, we love living in ways that God never created us to. God gave us a world of delight to work and play in, but over time we continued to ignore his way. God had to institute Sabbath law because humanity had failed to live the intent of God’s rest.

The climax of creation is not humanity, as we have so arrogantly assumed. Rather, the day of rest is the climax, when creation all comes together and lives at peace and harmony with one another.

Sabbath is a scheduled weekly reminder that we are not what we do; rather, we are who we are loved by.

While a biblical Sabbath is different from a vacation, it is not just a “day off” either. It is possible for one to not be at work physically but still be at work in one’s heart. Culturally, it is assumed that when we are not at work, we are free to do as we please. But in reality, our jobs and bosses do not really allow us to disengage from work even in our off hours. It is presumed in the modern workplace that we will all continue to work at home. This is exacerbated by the fact that, as we will discuss in a later chapter, we often do not Sabbath because technology invades every part of our life. With our computers in our pockets, what should be a Sabbath day turns out to be a day at home where we are thinking about work. This problem has been identified as a cultural crisis in France. Because of the modern rhythms of work that are mediated through personal computers and phones, people, in the words of one cultural commentator, “leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash—like a dog.”46 More often than not, our “days off” are days where we are spatially at home, but emotionally and mentally at work. Do these “days off” constitute a Sabbath day?

Sabbath is to be cherished as a delight in itself, not something we use to get elsewhere.

We sell ourselves short by celebrating for celebration’s sake rather than for God’s sake.

God makes all things new. God does not make all new things.

The Bible’s depiction of the new Jerusalem is surprising: heaven will look a lot like earth.

Their task was to bring about God’s desires through their vocation. Our task is and will be no less.

Our curse became his crown.

After sin, work that was originally entered into as an act of worship became the thing we worshiped.

I think God knew humanity would sin. And I think God knew we would be prone to worship our work, which is why God initiated rest and Sabbath before the fall. In sin, humans are prone to worship the good things of this world over the Ultimate, the Creator.

Work is not the problem—it is our replacing God with work that is a problem.

However, we have come to find that Sabbath never just happens. In our 24/7 world, I have never once seen someone accidentally keep a Sabbath. Sabbath is an action of great purpose, one that demands feisty intentionality. It requires us to live in a rhythm that squarely opposes the dangerous pulse and the habits of our world.

Sabbath rest assumes work. That is, the Bible has a word for Sabbath minus any work: laziness. Likewise, the Bible has a word for work without a Sabbath: slavery. Rest is not truly possible without work, and work is not done appropriately without rest.

God “works.” When humanity works, we are imitating God.

The lesson of this paradox is beautiful: work is never actually complete without rest.