Sabbath Practice

Mark 2:23-28

After last week’s message on Sabbath Rest, one of our elders loaned me a book that describes in far more detail the things I was saying about the importance of sleep for your health, written by preeiminent neoroscientist and sleep expert, Dr. Mattew Walker. He concludes,

 

Sleep is of vital importance. It enhances our ability to learn and to make decisions, recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, and regulates our appetite.

 

Those are all pretty significant aspects of life, wouldn’t you say? So Let’s take another poll this week, though slightly different from last, now that you’ve had a week to consider the importance of sleep in your own life. How many of you did something different this week to try and get enough sleep, which is said to be between 7-9 hours a night?

Of course, last week the focus wasn’t on physical sleep but Sabbath Rest. Hopefully you walked away last week with some motivation to experience Sabbath Rest. So how many of you did something different this week to experience Sabbath rest?

If you didn't, I don’t blame you. We didn’t really talk about how you could. We talked about some important principles of Sabbath rest. We talked about how it is a gift from God. And we talked about how it is received by faith. And then we talked about how we are to “strive” to enter that rest. In other words, we were achowledging that God’s Sabbath given to us, is something we must work hard to enter. It seems paradoxical, I know. I hope, at the very least, that you walked away last week wanting to enter God’s rest; wanting to experience this rest for your soul. To help you in that, this week I want to spend more time talking about practicing the Sabbath. Because the reality of our need for it still exists. We need an answer to our soul’s weariness.

So, how do we practice it? We walk with Jesus. He is the Lord of the Sabbath.

This is what we see the disciples doing in this text from Mark 2. I chose this text because a window is open to see both activity of Jesus and the disciples on the Sabbath, and Jesus’ teaching on the Sabbath. Through this we can derive guidelines for practicing the Sabbath in light of its goal, as we walk with the giver of rest.