Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you. Because Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
—Exodus 20:8–11
On our thirtieth wedding anniversary, I planted a wildflower garden for my wife, LaVon. It is about fifteen feet by fifty feet. In the middle of the plot, I erected a stone slab with the words “When I see wildflowers, I think of you” engraved upon it. The garden was meant to be an expression of my love for her.
Over the years, the weeds and grasses eventually took it over. So last year I killed all the overgrown foliage and reseeded the soil. The flowers began to come up this year, but so did some weeds. I needed to spend some time in the flower garden cutting back the new weeds and the grasses, but I could never find the time. By the end of the summer, the garden had become an overgrown jungle again, with nearly all of the wildflowers choked out by the weeds.
One day, as I stood looking at this mess, a thought raced across my mind: “This is a metaphor for your life right now. You’ve crammed so much into your life, said yes to so many things you should have said no to. Your life is out of control, leaving you exhausted, with no time to tend the garden that is your soul.”
Do you ever feel overcommitted, like there is no way you can get everything done? Do you feel like there are not enough hours in the day? Have you lost your joy in work you used to find joyful? Often think of quitting? Do you feel like you are physically or emotionally exhausted? In other words, do you ever wrestle with burnout?
For some of you, this is not a problem. You have a terrific “work-life balance.” But a recent Gallup study of 7,500 full-time employees found that two-thirds of people feel burned out some of the time.1 About a quarter report feeling burned out very often or always.
Concerning burnout, the bestselling author Brené Brown wrote,
Here’s a quote I once heard from a priest: “If you don’t want to burn out, stop living like you’re on fire.” In today’s world, we are surrounded by a culture of scarcity that tells us we’re not doing enough, that we don’t have enough and that we’re not enough, whether we’re a stay-at-home parent or a CEO….I’ve learned that I always have to be on the watch for burnout. Because when it creeps up on me, I don’t like the person I become.2
I wonder if you’ve ever felt the same. Burnout can have serious consequences for our physical and mental health, our relationships, our job performance, and our spiritual lives.
I spoke with a pastor this week who told me there was a time when he had become so overcommitted he felt it was taking a toll on his marriage. He asked his wife, “Do you ever think about leaving me?” She said, “I’ve already divided the furniture in my head.”
I’ve seen this, too, in so many of my congregation members. People who are burning the candle at both ends and have lost the joy in their lives. A couple recently told me that they were taking a weekend away, without children, leaving their work at home, for the first time since they began having children twelve years ago. They were excited but also emotionally and relationally exhausted.
Burnout—physical and emotional exhaustion—is correlated to depression and suicidal ideation. Among doctors, it is also correlated to increased medical errors. Medical errors result in approximately 250,000 deaths each year,3 and those who report having made medical errors are more likely to also report burnout and fatigue.4
Entire books have been written on the causes, consequences, and cures of burnout. But long before it was a focus of scientific studies, and before government agencies began to explore the unintended consequences of workaholism and burnout, our Creator recognized our need for rest, renewal, and recreation—our need for Sabbath.
We live in a time when having at least one day off per week is assumed, and for many people, two days off is the norm. But when we look at the ancient world, there is no evidence that any nation or peoples observed a required day of rest until the advent of the Ten Commandments. Work was limited by the number of hours of daylight and was expected to take place every day.
Exodus 1:14 tells us about the working conditions of the Israelite slaves in Egypt. It says the Egyptians made the Israelites’ lives “miserable with hard labor, making mortar and bricks, doing field work, and by forcing them to do all kinds of other cruel work.” The Israelites groaned “because of their hard labor,” the text reads (Exodus 2:23). Later, in Exodus 3:7, God says to Moses, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain.”
The story of God’s liberation of the Israelites from Egypt begins with God’s concern for the harsh working conditions they labored in. The insistence that the Israelites keep the Sabbath, and that they grant a Sabbath to their laborers and even their animals, was again a reflection of God’s concern about quality of life, particularly for those who otherwise would not have a day of rest.
God’s concern for workers is found throughout scripture. In Deuteronomy 24:14–15, we read:
Don’t take advantage of poor or needy workers, whether they are fellow Israelites or immigrants who live in your land or your cities. Pay them their salary the same day, before the sun sets, because they are poor, and their very life depends on that pay, and so they don’t cry out against you to Yahweh. That would make you guilty.
Again and again in the Law of Moses and in the prophets, scripture calls for not taking advantage of the poor. Farmers were to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so the poor and immigrants could harvest the leftover crops and eat. Money and food were to be loaned to the poor without interest. Debts were forgiven every seventh year. In Deuteronomy 15:10, God says to the Israelites, “Give generously to needy persons. Don’t resent giving to them because it is this very thing that will lead to Yahweh your God’s blessing you in all you do and work at.”
In the New Testament, the apostle James offers these challenging words to those who enriched themselves while their laborers struggled:
Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces. You have lived a self-satisfying life on this earth, a life of luxury. You have stuffed your hearts in preparation for the day of slaughter. (James 5:4–5)
These and many other passages remind us that there can be no question about God’s concern for the poor and the powerless.
The question for us is how these concerns should be addressed today, in a free-market economy. Is the honoring of God’s concern for workers and the poor the job only of the individual? Or does society, through the making of just rules and regulations, play some part in protecting the vulnerable?
Here I’m reminded of Harvard professor Harvey Cox and his recent book, The Market as God.5 Cox argues that the market itself has become a modern deity, a golden calf, in whom many of us have put our deepest trust. By its providential care, it is said, all of these concerns will be resolved. As industry gets more efficient and profitable, even the poorest among us will see their buying power rise. The free market does work in mysterious ways, and I do think it is a better economic plan than many alternatives. But the market has no conscience, no sense of right and wrong, no compassion or kindness. Humans must inject these things into the system.
Which leads us back to the fourth commandment.
Our creator recognized our innate need for rest, renewal, and recreation. These were important for human flourishing. So to the former slaves, only recently liberated from their oppressive working conditions, God said:
Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you. (Exodus 20:8–10)
For the first time in history, a nation’s God proclaimed a universal day of rest. It was not a good economic decision. It represented the instant loss of 14 percent of labor, commerce, and production, as people and livestock stopped producing for one day in seven. But despite the economic loss, it represented an important leap forward for helping human beings to experience the good life. The idea was so compelling that other religions eventually embraced it. Nations and governments accepted it too.
The Sabbath is the gift of a loving God who cares for his people, who wishes for them a good and beautiful life. So let’s take an even deeper look at this command.
The fourth commandment begins, “Remember the Sabbath.” In the Hebrew Bible, when God remembers someone, it usually means that God is mindful of that person and will act on their behalf. Remembering is not a casual thing. It means keeping something front of mind as an expression of its importance. For example, at the Last Supper, Jesus tells the disciples to repeat the meal of bread and wine and to do this “in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).
The act of remembering is a way of signaling the importance of that which is being remembered. In Exodus 20, we read the theological foundation for remembering the Sabbath: Because Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Did God need to rest? No, but the verse makes clear that neither is God a workaholic. There is a time for resting and reflecting, even for God himself. God established this sacred rhythm and modeled it for us. The Sabbath was a day for God to stop and take in all the beauty of a creation he himself declared to be “very good.”
Among my many faults, one is that I seldom stop for long to celebrate the wonderful and blessed things that happen in my life. When good things happen in my family or in the church I serve, I’m always thinking about what is next; what needs to be done now and tomorrow and the next day. I don’t savor the victories for long, if at all. I’m lousy at stopping to smell the roses. But this way of living misses so many blessings. It lacks the space for gratitude and rejoicing, and it can be exhausting to go from one thing straight to the next. Sabbath is about stopping to savor, to enjoy, to reflect, to be in awe, to celebrate, to give thanks, and to be renewed.
In Deuteronomy 5, we find the Ten Commandments repeated. The chapter is set forty years after the commandments’ unveiling, as Moses nears death and the children of Israel prepare to enter the Promised Land. The versions of the commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy are virtually identical, but there are two differences in the command concerning the Sabbath. In Exodus, the fourth commandment says to remember the Sabbath. Deuteronomy says to keep the Sabbath. And the rationale for keeping the commandment is different as well.
In Exodus, the rationale for Sabbath-keeping is tied to God’s resting after creation. We are, in turn, invited to rest, celebrate the goodness of creation, and in doing so be renewed. In Deuteronomy, the rationale for the Sabbath is to remember the Exodus and God’s deliverance of Israel: “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, but Yahweh your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. That’s why Yahweh your God commands you to keep the Sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15).
In essence, in Deuteronomy the Sabbath is a day for God’s people to remember what he did for them and to give thanks for it. They are to keep the Sabbath and, as they do, to remember and give thanks for God’s love, mercy, and compassion shown in his deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
In both cases the Sabbath is not just about resting. It is about remembering, reflecting, celebrating God’s work in creating the world with all of its blessings, and pondering God’s deliverance and our identity as his people.
The command goes on to tell us that we are to treat the Sabbath as holy. The word “holy” here is the Hebrew word qadash. It usually means something is set apart for God. Again we learn that the Sabbath was not only about rest. To set it apart as holy means treating it as a day given to God. While our entire lives belong to God, God has claimed one day in seven as being specifically his.
Jews observe the Sabbath from Friday at sunset to Saturday at sunset. That’s because the Jewish day begins at sunset, following a pattern established in the creation story of Genesis 1:5 (NRSV), where we read, “God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” This refrain is repeated throughout the creation story, leading Jews to count days as starting at sunset.
Early in the church’s history, Christians gathered to worship on Sunday, the “first day of the week,” because it was on that day that Jesus rose from the dead. For us, Sabbath celebrates not only God’s work in creating the earth but also God’s redemptive work in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Every Sabbath is meant to be a celebration of Easter and Christ’s triumph over evil, hate, sin, and death.
But just as we’ve done with the name of God, we have done with the day that God claims as his own. We have profaned it.
There was a time when committed churchgoers attended worship every weekend unless they were sick. But today our travel schedules, our workloads, our kids’ soccer schedules, our golf and recreation schedules all leave little room for pausing to pray, celebrating God’s blessings, reflecting upon scripture, and joining together with other Christians to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and savior” (2 Peter 3:18). We have taken a day intended to be holy, and we have made it ordinary. Even when we do take time to rest, reflect, and recreate, we often leave God out of our Sabbath observance.
In the chapter on the first commandment, we learned about our tendency to edge God out. Observance of the Sabbath is another area where we do this.
What has happened to our day of rest that was set apart as holy? We’ve overprogrammed it, along with the rest of our lives, so that we don’t have an hour to worship, pray, commune with other Christians, and feast at the Lord’s table. We’re too busy.
One thing I’ve learned from my friend Rabbi Art Nemitoff is the idea of planning one’s entire week around the Sabbath. This practice is central to Judaism. Observant Jewish families long for the Sabbath all week. They look forward to it. They order their lives around it. As the sunset approaches on the Sabbath—the Shabbat—they have already prepared for the day. It is a day holy to the Lord.
Several years ago, I was able to enjoy a Shabbat dinner with the Nemitoff family. They gathered their children and a handful of friends and shared a beautiful meal that began with a blessing giving thanks to God, “who brings forth bread from the earth.” This was followed by meaningful conversations about life and faith. I left that night thinking, “I want my Sabbath celebration to be more like that!”
The commandment continues:
Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you. (Exodus 20:9–10)
The Sabbath was not just for the wealthy but also for the poor. It was not just for the parents but also for the children. It was not only for the Israelites but also for the immigrants in their midst. And it was not just for people but even for the animals (and the fields, and the fruit-bearing trees, and all of creation). The Sabbath was God’s response to our relentless pursuit of hurry, busy, going, doing. God knew we needed this.
Listen to what God says about the commandment in Exodus 31:13–14:
Tell the Israelites: “Be sure to keep my sabbaths, because the Sabbath is a sign between me and you in every generation so you will know that I am Yahweh who makes you holy. Keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who violates the Sabbath will be put to death.”
It is surprising to find that the death penalty was prescribed for violating the Sabbath. (In fact, it’s one of the very things that caused Richard Dawkins to take issue with the Ten Commandments in the article I cited earlier.) Why such a harsh penalty? At minimum, it seems intended to make clear that God was serious about observing the Sabbath. God knew there would always be commerce to transact, money to be made, work to be done, and his people would be tempted to pursue these on the Sabbath. But God said, “No, not on this day. You are to rest, to give your employees rest, your children rest, your animals rest.”
I also wonder if the death penalty was a metaphor, a way of pointing to the impact of not resting: If you are unwilling to stop and rest, your health will deteriorate, your relationships will suffer, and in a thousand other ways you will pay the price. If you die of a heart attack at age fifty-five because you seldom took time to rest and reduce your stress, or if you end up divorced because you never made time to rest, renew, and play with your family, was it worth it? Failing to observe the Sabbath results in a kind of death penalty for each of us: exhaustion coupled with the loss of joy, of relationships, of gratitude, and of so many of the things that are meant to enrich our lives.
So the Sabbath is a gift, and it is a rule to live by. But the challenge of rules, even good ones, is that we can get so focused on the rule that we end up missing its intent.
When we’re told not to work on the Sabbath, we naturally want to know, “Okay, so what constitutes work? Are we allowed to cook? To clean? Can we mow the yard?” By the time of Jesus, the teachers of the Law had spent a great deal of time studying what constituted work and therefore could not be done on the Sabbath. Eventually a list of thirty-nine categories of forbidden activities was developed. Here are a few examples of activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, based upon the prohibitions found in the Talmud:
Adding fresh water to a vase of cut flowers (for this is a form of sowing)
Separating good fruit from spoiled fruit (for this is a form of harvesting)
Cutting hair or nails (for this is like shearing your animals)
Braiding hair (for this is like weaving)
Rubbing soap to make lather (for this is like scraping animals’ skins)
Switching off an electric light (for this is like extinguishing a fire)
Visitors to Israel are often struck by the fact that on the Sabbath, the elevators at their hotel are programmed to stop on each floor automatically. It’s inconvenient if you’re going to the top floor, but it keeps you from needing to push the button of your floor, which is considered work.
These detailed prohibitions related to the Sabbath are referenced throughout the Gospels, creating a clear tension between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day. This tension sprang from the very different way in which Jesus interpreted and applied the Law.
In Mark, Jesus’s first act of public ministry occurred on a Sabbath, when he entered the synagogue and began to teach. As he was teaching, a person with an evil spirit began to scream, and Jesus cast out the evil spirit (Mark 1:21–25). It was the first of many times he healed on the Sabbath—an act that was prohibited except in life-or-death situations.
Matthew 12:9–14 is another great example:
Jesus left that place and went into their synagogue. A man with a withered hand was there. Wanting to bring charges against Jesus, [the religious leaders] asked, “Does the Law allow a person to heal on the Sabbath?” Jesus replied, “Who among you has a sheep that falls into a pit on the Sabbath and will not take hold of it and pull it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! So the Law allows a person to do what is good on the Sabbath.” Then Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he did and it was made healthy, just like the other one. The Pharisees went out and met in order to find a way to destroy Jesus.
For those who were teasing out rule after rule of what constituted violations of the Sabbath, Jesus’s interpretation of the command must have been very frustrating. Others found it liberating. In explaining his view, he said, “The Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
Notice, however, that Jesus doesn’t say, “The Sabbath is not important” or “You don’t have to observe the Sabbath.” Jesus removes the nitpicking over definitions, but he never sets aside the Sabbath itself. The Sabbath is clearly important to Jesus. He routinely enters the synagogue on the Sabbath. He ministers and teaches on the Sabbath. He helps others on the Sabbath. And presumably, he rests and renews with his disciples on the Sabbath. Jesus moves from a Sabbath observance built around rules to one built around people. This included rest and renewal, and for Jesus, it seems also to have included gathering for prayer in the synagogue. He saw that the intent of the Sabbath was to bless God’s people, and he spent his Sabbaths doing just that.
Of all the remaining commandments in this book, this is the one that most convicts me today. To be clear, the commandment enjoining us to honor parents and the ones forbidding murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness, and coveting all mean more than meets the eye. As we will see, they have much to teach us when read through the eyes of Jesus. But it is the command to Sabbath that speaks to the emotional, spiritual, and physical exhaustion many of us feel. It is the command I’ve felt most challenged and encouraged by.
My kids had hamsters when they were growing up. Have you ever watched a hamster on a hamster wheel? Their eyes are focused straight ahead, and they run faster and faster. I wonder what it is they imagine they’re running toward, what it is that motivates these cute little animals to strain themselves as they do.
They are a perfect metaphor for where many of us find ourselves. We get on the hamster wheel and we run. We’re not even sure what the end goal is anymore, but we run. We are weary and exhausted, but we keep running.
I have a terrible habit of saying yes to things, and a very hard time saying no. Recently I was asked to attend a meeting in another city. I flew there and spent two days participating in this gathering—a gathering that I knew before committing to it did not really require my presence. The people at that meeting could handle what they were doing without me. But I loved the people and didn’t want to say no, so I rearranged my schedule and added no small bit of stress. (My regular work still needed to be done, only now it would be done late into the night.) When I boarded the airplane home, I thought, “This meeting would have ended with the exact same results whether I had been there or not.”
My daughter and son-in-law run a fresh-cut-flower and vegetable stand at the farmers’ market in Lawrence, Kansas, about forty-five minutes from my home. It is held on Saturday mornings, which are usually when I get caught up on work and complete the final revisions to my sermon in preparation for the first of our weekend services, Saturday night at five. Recently my daughter said to me, “Dad, did you know JT and I have been running our stand at the farmers’ market for four years now, and you’ve never been to see it?” I could tell she was disappointed—she had every right to be—and had been holding this inside for some time.
Being a dad is one of the most important things in the world to me, and I desperately want to be a good one. I apologized to her profusely. “I’ll be there next weekend,” I said.
All week it ate at me. The next weekend, I rearranged my schedule and was there with her. It required saying no to some things, but in doing so, I was saying yes to things that were more important. My presence said to my daughter that I heard her, I cared about her and her husband, and they mattered more to me than my work.
I’m sharing this story because my hunch is that some of you reading this book are, like me, overcommitted people who have a hard time saying no. And often it is your health, your family, and your faith that suffer for it. I think God wants to say to those who struggle with this, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” We should work hard during the week and give our best. But one day in seven, we’re meant to get off the hamster wheel.
Recently I read Mark Buchanan’s excellent book The Rest of God. He notes, “The root idea of Sabbath is simple as rain falling, basic as breathing. It’s that all living things thrive only by an ample measure of stillness.”6 I heard many people say something similar during the shelter-in-place orders imposed during the novel coronavirus pandemic. While fear, anxiety, and uncertainty were in the air, there was this remarkable sense I heard again and again from members of my congregation that a silver lining was the time they were spending at home, eating meals around the dinner table, reading, playing games as a family, taking walks. No one wanted the pandemic to continue, but I heard many people express their hope that the newfound rest they experienced, and the relinquishing of hurry’s control in their lives, might become a new normal for them.
God takes delight when you show up for worship on the Sabbath, when you pause to remember who you are and whose you are. And God loves to see you play with your children. It is not wasted time. It is part of what you were made for. God wants you to have dinner with your friends, to hold your spouse, to sit on a porch swing and read a good book. And God is pleased when you take some time alone to think, pray, and read.
I want to ask you to do something right now, here in the margin of this book: Write down four things that renew you—that bring you joy—that you may not have done in a while. Or maybe they are things that you know you haven’t done enough of lately.
What if you turned off the television, social media, said no to work on the Sabbath? What if, instead, you used this day as if it were holy to God, revering him in worship, and then did these things that renew you—this next Sabbath? And what if you committed to remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy with greater intentionality from this time on? How would it impact your life?
I can tell you how: If you remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, your faith will grow deeper, your stress will be lowered, your mental health will be improved, and your workweek may even be more productive. If you are married, your marriage will be stronger. If you have kids, your relationship with them will be better. All if you would simply (say it out loud) remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
I see how hard you work, how many things you do, how weary and tired you often feel. I long to give you rest, to see you recreate and be renewed. My Father gave the Sabbath as a gift for you. You need it. It is not optional. But only you can decide to make this a part of your life. You must also know that he considers the Sabbath his day, a day when he longs for you to honor him with your presence, your prayers, and your worship. Remember the Sabbath and keep it as holy, and you will find that the Sabbath will bless you.