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Gather friends for a meal that everyone is involved in making. Come prepared. Take a nap or sleep longer the night before—no one goes home early from a good feast. Feasts are eternal reminders that food “will always be more delicious than it is useful.”9 So pay attention to calories and nutrition during other times in the week so you won’t have to at the feast.
The rhythm of feasting and fasting forms hearts at rest with God rather than hearts that restlessly crave the things of this world. It makes the life of prayer easier. Fasting teaches my heart to hunger for the deep things of God. Prayer is the daily feast on those things.
We don’t often think of rest as a discipline. In fact, my guess is that even Christians who know their Bibles see a day of rest or Sabbath as a day designed primarily for recovery from or a precaution against exhaustion.
The Sabbath was made for more than just recovery or preventing exhaustion. It’s more than just a way to focus our energy toward more productivity. “The Sabbath,” says Abraham Heschel, “is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”
The Sabbath is God’s weekly invitation to experience a sustaining spiritual vibrancy that many Christians, for one reason or another, have refused to accept. My hope is that you won’t.
“not only did drudgery give way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, but the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.”
We need a way to silence the inner murmur. “Come to me,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.”
God’s rest was an act of fullness, joy, and delight. If God rested even though he wasn’t tired and asks his image bearers to rest as he rested, do you think maybe there’s a deeper reason for rest than just exhaustion?
Abraham Heschel points out that the first holy object in the history of the world was not a place or something humans accomplished, but a day.9 The first holy thing was not something we did but something to receive and participate in. That is counterintuitive to our modern thinking.
the next day, they didn’t get up and go to work because it was the seventh day, the day of rest. Only after that did the humans get to work. The first human act was not to work in order to rest but to rest, and from that rest they began their work. Isn’t that surprising? “The Sabbath is the inspirer,” Heschel says, “the other days the inspired.”10
Our daily rhythms of prayer are small sabbaths—ways of saying to our soul, “Nothing is so important that it can’t be regularly set aside to receive what God has for me today in his Word and in prayer.”
what we learn on the unconscious level drives our behavior and our emotional life more than what we know intellectually.
our fears and insecurities come out in times of rest and stillness, so it’s no surprise that many never want to stop. The ghosts and goblins come out when we are not busy proving ourselves. We are at the mercy of what we fear others might say or think of us—or what we might think of ourselves. We have to persevere very purposefully through some Sabbath days until our souls learn, little by little, to find their rest in God.
“Holy simply means set aside,” says Dan Allender, “not lost in the sea of everything else.”
Dan Allender compares preparing for the Sabbath to anticipating an honored guest: “Welcoming a guest moves from the heart to the hands. We must polish the brass, wash the linens, and clean the floors before our houseguest arrives. How would you prepare your home if an honored guest was about to arrive? You would make all the necessary preparations with the joy of anticipation. No mundane activities would take your attention away from your guest’s arrival.”
That means that our Sabbath days now both remember the Garden and rehearse the new creation.
It’s as if he had a work journal so that by the end of the week he could step back, look over his notes, and say with a deep breath, “It’s all very good.” So I began to do this myself. Each morning in my prayers, I would take a few minutes to write down what was good from my labors the previous day. What worked? What was worth celebrating? What was fruitful? What are the reasons to give thanks? Where was the Lord present? How was my work participating in what God was doing?
letting what’s eternally true in Christ (peace, reconciliation, and joy) inform for a day what is momentarily and experientially untrue now has a way of healing and restoring. Something of the kingdom breaks in and heals us.
When the Father sees me, when he sees you, he says, “It is good.” Do you believe that? Practicing the Sabbath is the rhythm of strangling that “inner murmur” with worship and joy.
our actual character does not match our beliefs about what our character should be. The two need to be reconciled.
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We need to gather regularly with other Christians to sing, pray, read, and hear God’s Word, to receive the Lord’s Supper, and to be sent back into the world full of peace and good news.
one of the most common commands in Scripture is to sing. Have you ever noticed that? It’s surprising that it’s not more common to read commands to offer sacrifices, to give our money or time, or to do some other act of service. That’s what we’d expect because that’s how our relationships often function. They are transactional. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. But God’s relationship with us has never been transactional.
God is who he says he is, then singing is the most rational thing. To sing is to join ourselves to ultimate reality—to join ourselves with everything that isn’t asleep. Singing is a declaration that we are awake to reality, awake to God and to our life with him. To not sing is to be out of sync with reality, to miss something fundamental not just about ourselves but about all of creation.
Which means we come with our emotions: “sing,” “make a joyful noise,” “with thanksgiving.” Then the psalmist says, “bow down . . . kneel before the LORD, our Maker,” come with your will. “Today,” he says, “if you hear his voice,” listen, come with your mind. The invitation to worship is an invitation to our whole selves.
There is more going on in corporate worship than we often think, and there are deeper realities we ought to be alert to when we are with Christ and with his body in worship.
The central reality of corporate worship is the real presence of Christ—the doctrine that in worship Christ is really present with us by the power of the Holy Spirit. “When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 5:4). When we gather together, Christ gathers with us in power. This power is not subtle; it is his creative, transforming power.
The potential for delight and transformation is infinite.
We have been called to a body. If you’ve ever wondered what God wants for your life, here is at least a partial answer: to be deeply connected and involved in the body of Christ. You won’t be satisfied until you are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “If we were dependent entirely on ourselves, we would probably pray only the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer [Give us our daily bread]. But God wants it otherwise. The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”
Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism : Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary
“New Sentences: From ‘Nicotine,’ by Nell Zink,”
How God Changes Your Brain
