The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

by John Mark Comer

Not church or Bible reading, not even prayer. Sabbath is the anchor discipline of the people of God. So crucial that God lovingly commands us to remember to rest. That’s command one. Let’s do another.

Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God.26

Sabbath, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann so famously said, is “an act of resistance.”

Sabbath is a way of saying, “Enough.” Buying things isn’t always bad, but most of us have more than enough to enjoy a rich and satisfying life. As the psalmist said, “I lack nothing.”34

I have enough. What I really need is time to enjoy what I already have, with God. The Sabbath is like a guerrilla warfare tactic. If you want to break free from the oppressive yoke of Egypt’s taskmaster and its restless, relentless lust for more, just take a day each week and stick it to the man. Don’t buy. Don’t sell. Don’t shop. Don’t surf the web. Don’t read a magazine: ooh, that bathtub would be nice upstairs…Just put all that away and enjoy. Drink deeply from the well of ordinary life: a meal with friends, time with family, a walk in the forest, afternoon tea. Above all, slow down long enough to enjoy life with God, who offers everything that materialism promises but can never deliver on—namely, contentment.

Ronald Rolheiser, who I feel should get royalties on this book: 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.35 Oh man, that phrase, “cancerous restlessness.” He continued: 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 Sabbath is like a governor on the speed of life. All week long we work, we play, we cook, we clean, we shop, we exercise, we answer text messages, we inhabit the modern world, but finally we hit a limit. On the Sabbath, we slow down; more than that, we come to a full stop.

Because the Sabbath isn’t just a twenty-four-hour time slot in your weekly schedule; it’s a spirit of restfulness that goes with you throughout your week. A way of living with “ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer.” A way of working from rest, not for rest, with nothing to prove. A way of bearing fruit from abiding, not ambition. As Brueggemann said so eloquently: People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.

The Sabbath is the day I feel most connected to God. Most connected to my wife and family. To my own soul. It’s the day I feel most awake and yet most at peace. The day I expect joy. The day that sets the tone for my entire week. On Wednesday or Thursday I find myself saying under my breath, “I can do this,” because I know the Sabbath is coming. On Sunday or Monday I find myself thinking, I can do this because I’m living off the Sabbath.

Point being: this practice is so foreign and alien to our culture, even our church culture, that it might take you a while to dial it in. That’s okay.

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.

My family and I do this every week. Just before sunset on Friday, we finish up all our to-do lists and homework and grocery shopping and responsibilities, power down all our devices (we literally put them all in a box and stow it in a closet), and gather around the table as a family. We open a bottle of wine, light some candles, read a psalm, pray. Then we feast, and we basically don’t stop feasting for the next twenty-four hours. It’s the Comer way! And, I might add, the Jesus way. 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.

I feel free. Free from the need to do more, get more, be more. Free from the spirit—the evil, demonic spirit—of restlessness that enslaves our society. I feel another spirit, the Holy Spirit, of restful calm settle over my whole person. And I find that my ordinary life is enough.

Jesus that, if we’re honest, most of us disagree with or at least dislike. Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.1 Or how about this one? Sell your possessions and give to the poor.2 Wait, what about saving for retirement? Don’t you know about the social security crisis? Medicare? This sounds irresponsible. Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?…Seek first [God’s] kingdom.3

The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.4

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.5

the good news that the life you’ve always wanted is fully available to you right where you are through Jesus. Through him you have access to the Father’s loving presence. Nothing—not your income level or stage of life or health or relational status—nothing is standing between you and the “life that is truly life.”6

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.9 Sound like an evil genius from an Orwellian sci-fi movie? Nah. That was Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers. E. S. Cowdrick, a pioneer of “industrial relations,” called it “the new economic gospel of consumption.” Note his language: “gospel.”

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.

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 masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. In almost every act of our daily lives…we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who pull the wires which control the public mind.15

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

In a landmark study out of Princeton University, two great minds collaborated on a nationwide research project. Dr. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist, and Dr. Angus Deaton, a well-respected economist, spent months poring over the data from 450,000 Gallup surveys and concluded that your overall well-being does rise with your income, but only to a point. After that you either plateau or, worse, decline. Here’s Deaton in his own words: No matter where you live, your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000…and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.

John Rockefeller so famously said when asked how much money is “enough”: “Just a little bit more.”

Richard Foster called our culture’s view of things “psychotic” in that it has completely lost touch with reality. He wisely observed, “We in the West are guinea pigs in one huge economic experiment in consumption.”21

One cultural commentator called it “affluenza.”22 It’s like a disease promising to make us happy for $49.99, while in fact it’s a man in the shadows pulling our strings and stealing our money and, with it, our joy. This all reminds me of a line from Psalm 39: “In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.”