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September 2 - September 11, 2025
Can you imagine a stressed-out Jesus? Snapping at Mary Magdalene after a long day, “I can’t believe you dropped the hummus.” Sighing, and saying to himself, “I seriously need a glass of wine.”
More than once we read stories about Jesus sleeping in and the disciples having to wake him up. I like this Jesus and want to follow him.
fixed-hour schedule. Basically, you write up an ideal day or week or month on a blank calendar. You start with all your top priorities: the spiritual disciplines go in first if you’re a follower of Jesus, then sleep, exercise, work, play, reading, margin, etc. And within reason you stick to it.
You copy all these details because you know the person you will eventually become is the cumulative effect of thousands of tiny, seemingly mundane, or even insignificant details that in the end function like compound interest and create a life.
When the spiritual disciplines (Bible reading, prayer, Sabbath, and so on) become an end in and of themselves, you’ve arrived at legalism. Therein lies death, not life.
Let’s say you want to bench-press your own weight but can’t. (A scenario I understand all too well.) You don’t have the power, the muscle, to do that. It’s not that you can’t do it; any healthy person can. It’s that you can’t do it yet. You just need access to more power. To that end, you need to work out.
A spiritual discipline is similar but different. It’s similar in that it’s “any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort.” It’s a way to access power. But it’s different in that not only are you exercising your own capacity to do the right thing (what we call willpower), but you are also opening yourself up to a power far beyond your own—that of the Holy Spirit. You are creating time and space to access God himself at the deepest level of your being.
All those little moments of boredom were potential portals to prayer. Little moments throughout our days to wake up to the reality of God all around us. To wake up to our own souls. To draw our minds’ attention (and, with it, devotion) back to God; to come off the hurry drug and come home to awareness.
Desert here doesn’t necessarily mean sand and heat. The Greek word is eremos, and it has a wide array of meanings. It can be translated desert deserted place desolate place solitary place lonely place quiet place (my personal favorite) wilderness
“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” because it was there, and only there, that Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers. It was only after a month and a half of prayer and fasting in the quiet place that he had the capacity to take on the devil himself and walk away unscathed.
Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
Jesus “often withdrew.” He frequently got away.
Jesus needed time in the quiet place. I repeat, Jesus needed time. And a fair bit of it.
Quiet is a kind of balm for emotional healing.
As easy as it is to blame the devil, could it be that we’re using external noise to drown out internal noise?
and the problem is more our absence than his, more about our distraction than his disconnection,20 then the solution is fairly simple: create an environment for attention and connection to God; and I know of no better place than the eremos.
human desire is infinite because we were made to live with God forever in his world and nothing less will ever satisfy us, so our only hope is to put desire back in its proper place on God. And to put all our other desires in their proper place below God.
I’ve had people laugh off the call to Sabbath with a terrible cliché: “Yeah, well, the devil never takes a day off.” Ummm, last time I checked, the devil loses. Plus, he’s the devil.
And all this is rooted in God. He rested. He stopped. He set aside an entire day just to delight in his world.
And then God blessed the Sabbath.
You get to the end of the week, and even if you love your job, still you’re worn down on every level—emotionally, even spiritually. The Sabbath is how we fill our souls back up with life.
Recently I read a survey done by a doctor who cited the happiest people on earth. Near the top of the list was a group of Christians called Seventh-day Adventists, who are religious, literally, about the Sabbath. This doctor noted that they lived ten years longer than the average American.19 I did the math: if I Sabbath every seven days, it adds up to—wait for it—ten years over a lifetime. Almost exactly.
And not only will you live longer; even more importantly you’ll live better.
Maybe that’s why God eventually has to command the Sabbath.
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.22 I love the opening word, “Remember.” It’s easy to forget there is a day that’s blessed and holy. Easy to get sucked into the life of speed, to let the pace of your life ramp up to a notch shy of insanity. To forget: Creator (not me), creation (me). Remember that life as it comes to us is a gift. Remember to take time to delight in it as an act of grateful worship. Remember to be present to the moment and its joy.
By worship I don’t necessarily mean singing at church (though that’s a great example); I mean whole-life orientation toward God.
anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.
The Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments with a “why” behind it.
Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
We have so much crap we don’t need; we, like Egypt, have to build our own supply cities. We call them storage units, and they are a $38 billion industry in the US alone,29 taking up 2.3 billion square feet, enough for every single American to have over seven square feet to themselves.30 Meaning, we could practically house our entire nation—in our storage units. Pharaoh would love the USofA.
There are twenty-eight million slaves in the world today, more than were ever trafficked in the transcontinental slave trade of the eighteenth century.31 The odds are, your home or apartment is full of stuff they’ve produced: a T-shirt, a pair of kicks, that clock on the wall, those bananas.
when economists draw up an image of our global economic system, they draw a pyramid. Some even call it the “Global Wealth Pyramid.” Notice, at the top is 0.7 percent of humanity, weighing in with 45.9 percent of the world’s wealth.
Often, when I hear about overwhelming injustice in the world or even the growing socioeconomic disparity in my own country, I’m deeply troubled and think, What in the world can I do? Well, one thing I can do is do nothing, one day a week.
At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and say, “I’m good. I don’t need another pair of shoes, another decorator item for my bookshelf, another toy for my garage, another day at the spa.” I have enough. What I really need is time to enjoy what I already have, with God.
So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.
True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
The day I expect joy. The day that sets the tone for my entire week.
To begin, just set aside a day. Clear your schedule. TURN OFF YOUR PHONE. Say a prayer to invite the Holy Spirit to pastor you into his presence. And then? Rest and worship. In whatever way is life giving for your soul.
We sleep in Saturday morning. Drink coffee. Read our Bibles. Pray more. Spend time together. Talk. Laugh. In summer, walk to the park. In winter, make a fire. Get lost in good novels on the couch. Cuddle. Nap. (The Jews even have a name for the Sabbath nap—the Shabbat shluf! We shluf hard on Sabbath.) Make love. Honestly, I spend a lot of time just sitting by the window, being. It’s like a less stressful Christmas every week. And something happens about halfway through the day, something hard to put language to. It’s like my soul catches up to my body. Like some deep part of me that got beat
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It could be that you believe another gospel. Another vision of what the good life is and how you obtain it. Let’s call it “the gospel of America.” (For those of you outside America, I apologize; just roll with it.) This gospel makes the exact opposite claim. In a nutshell: the more you have, the happier you will be.
Happiness is out there; it’s just one PayPal click or outfit or gadget or car payment or mortgage away.
One Wall Street banker said this: We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.
E. S. Cowdrick, a pioneer of “industrial relations,” called it “the new economic gospel of consumption.” Note his language: “gospel.”
In 1927 one journalist observed this about America: A change has come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.
it’s easy to forget that most advertising is a form of propaganda, one that plays not to our pre-frontal cortex but to a deeper, less logical part of us.
After the war, it was actually Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who first used Freud’s ideas in America. An intelligence officer during the war, he found himself in need of a job. His theory was that if the Nazis could manipulate people in wartime, then surely business owners and politicians could manipulate people in peacetime. He called his new idea “public relations” and became the so-called “father of American advertising.”14 Never heard of him? Most haven’t. He predicted as much in his book Propaganda: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
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advertising is propaganda.
but it is a multibillion-dollar industry that is intentionally designed to lie to you—to get you to believe that if you will only buy this or that product, then you will be happy. Or at least happier. To do this it has to bend over backward to make us think our wants are actually needs. Those four thousand ads we see a day have been intentionally designed to stoke the fire of desire in our bellies.16
As Western wealth and technology continue to rise, many psychologists point out that our happiness is not increasing at pace. In fact, some studies indicate that as a nation’s wealth goes up, its happiness goes down. Or at least levels off.
The journalist Gregg Easterbrook, in his book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, noted this: Adjusting for population growth, ten times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from “unipolar” depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything except happiness.18
