The Sabbath PracticeSampel

Day 4: Worship

For many Western Christians, Sunday has become what Eugene Peterson called a “bastard Sabbath” — the illegitimate offspring of the Sabbath and a secular day off. Sabbath isn’t just a day to sleep in, relax, and do whatever brings you joy. It’s all of those things, but also more: It’s a day for worship.

In Genesis 2v2-3, we read that God made the seventh day “holy.” In Hebrew, the word holy is quodosh. And it literally means “unique, special, or uncommon.” A theological definition would be “set aside for God’s special purposes.” It’s a similar idea to having something like a special set of dishes for Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s set aside—not for everyday use.

That’s what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week—holy. Set apart.

But for what? Or better said, for whom?

In Exodus 16, we read, “Tomorrow is to be a day of sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord.” That phrase, “a holy Sabbath to the Lord,” can be translated “set apart for the Lord” or “dedicated to the Lord.” The Sabbath is an entire day that is set aside, not just for rest or celebration, but for God. Put another way, it’s a day for worship.

A lot of us hear the word worship and we think of singing, and that is an example of worship. But worship is so much more. In the biblical sense, to worship is to orient and reorient your entire life around God, our creator, our center.

It’s to lay your entire life before him in love and to deepen your surrender to his love.

One way to do that is through worship by singing, but there are so many more ways—giving our time, our resources, our attention and affection to God, yielding our will over to God. Anything we do to center God and to direct our heart in love to his glory, his goodness, is a form of worship.

Yes, it’s a day to stop and rest and refill our tank. Yes, it’s a day of delight to celebrate. But to stop there would be warping a God-centered day of joy into a self-centered day of pleasure.

The Sabbath is a day of worship—a day to contemplate the good news that God has given his life to us in Jesus, and now it is our joy to give our life back in worship. It’s to come back to what the Quakers call our “holy center” in God. It’s to deepen our communing with the deepest reality there is.

So what does it look like for you to lay your entire life before God in love?

May the God of rest fill you with his peace and presence as you rest in him.