Discover God’s NearnessSample

How to Sabbath

Amy Seiffert is a speaker, author, and coach who takes seriously her call to help women discover grace. Her latest book, Starved, invites the body of Christ to change our spiritual diet so we can move from tired, anxious, and overwhelmed to fulfilled, whole, and free. Come and be inspired as Amy tells us about the spiritual—and not-so-spiritual—habits that build her up.

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“I can do this because sabbath is coming.” This has been an important mantra for me toward the end of the week when I am running out of steam. I know I can go hard for six days because then we rest.

We’ve been practicing the sabbath for over 15 years. Through births of babies, job changes, health diagnoses, and season changes, a day to rest has been a welcomed and safe harbor for our family ship.

The beautiful thing about taking one day every week to rest is the way God wove it into the fabric of humanity from the beginning. God worked hard for six days creating, making, and doing, and then he rested. Did God need to rest? Was he tired? Spent? No, not the all-sufficient, all-powerful God. He’s the One everything else needs. But he chose to rest so his image-bearers would bear his image in this way, too.

When we practice a weekly rhythm of taking a day to put work away, close the laptops, and put down our phones, we practice a kind of resistance. We resist the productivity and consumer-driven culture we live in. We’re saying God is our provider and our identity comes from his work on the cross, not ours.

On a practical level, our family doesn’t have many rules for our sabbath except these: nap, eat yummy food, get outside, and stay off social media. Other than that, the way we sabbath, who we invite over, what football game we watch, or how we move around in the day depends on the season we’re in.

My favorite picture of the sabbath is when Jesus lifted the day out from underneath the sediment of rules and healed a man on it. So it seems sabbath is for healing—healing the hurry of our culture, healing the nagging message that our worth is tied to our work, and healing the menacing pull to see people for what they can produce for you instead of who they are as an image-bearer of the Most High.

—Amy Seiffert, Bible Teacher, as told to Rapt Interviews