Big Idea: Sabbath is a day that helps us cultivate a spirit of worship throughout our lives.
Application: This week, as you stop, rest, delight, and worship as you Sabbath
- Practice: Sabbath Prayer
- Sabbath can slowly reshape the trajectory of our whole lives. This week, try a light, life-giving version of “fixed-hour prayer”: pause two to three times during your 24-hour Sabbath to rest in God’s goodness. This isn’t intercessory prayer, which is traditionally set aside on the Sabbath because it’s a form of work. It’s simply reorienting your heart to God in wonder and awe.
- The most ancient way to do this is to pray a psalm (such as Psalm 23, 37, 103, or 105), but listening to worship music, praying with a friend, or walking in nature all work too. The aim is to spend as much of the Sabbath as you can in conscious communion with God, receiving his love and giving yours back.
- Practice: Enjoy God
- Pick 2 to 3 activities that help you enjoy God and do them this Sabbath. Spiritual writer Gary Thomas calls this your “spiritual pathway,” the way you’re uniquely wired to connect with God. It might be stillness, a lively gathering of friends, time in nature, reading by the fire, or studying theology.
- To discern whether an activity fits, run it through the four movements of Sabbath:
- Stop: Does this differ from what I do on workdays? (A mechanic might garden on Sabbath; a landscaper probably shouldn’t.)
- Rest: Does it refill me emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually?
- Delight: Does it bring me deep joy in God?
- Worship: Does it draw me into God’s goodness and beauty, and stir praise?
- The goal of both exercises is to live in what Jesus called “abiding,” not just on the Sabbath, but all week long.
