Sabbath [Exodus 20:8-11]

You can WATCH the full sermon HERE , otherwise keep reading! Boy, it is good to be back. You know we’ve been going through this series on the ten commandments - and this week we’re talking about sabbath. Now some of you might not know, i haven’t been here very much over the last few weeks. I was in Texas, and then I was in Chicago, then I was over in Waterford for my dad’s retirement and then I had a wedding out in Frankenmuth. Even last week - I was here, not preaching but leading worship because I had a light weekend with just one wedding in town. I haven’t preached in a month, but I’ve taken zero vacations in that time - I might be the world’s worst authority on sabbath. I come from a long line of workaholics, and I think if I didn’t have pesky things like children and a loving wife - I’d probably just set up a cot in the corner and stay here all the time. I love my job, I love working. And so as we get into this - I just want to own it, I’m terrible at taking a break, I’m truly terrible at slowing down. But actually, let me say it like this - I am someone who has wrestled with this concept, I have grappled with the issue of sabbath and explored God’s word on the topic. I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way when it comes to sabbath, and I think if I can get you to lean in for just a few moments this morning, we’re going to discover some things that will literally change the rest of your life. 

Now how many of you, show of hands, how many of you grew up in the church world and had an idea of sabbath? If you’ve never been to church before, or if you’re new to this whole Jesus thing - buckle up because this is going to get weird. If you go back a couple generations, Christian influence in society was really strong - and sabbath was this idea that you don’t work on Sundays. Restaurants weren’t open. Stores weren’t open. The whole world shut down for one day a week. Nobody really talked about why we do that - it was just the rules. It was sort of the height of legalism. Don’t ask questions, just do it. No work on Sunday. Well, what counts as work? Don’t ask questions that disrespectful. [pause]. And maybe that sounds crazy to you - but if you talk to people who were raised that way, you can get some pretty crazy stories. I know people who were not allowed to watch TV on the sabbath. I was talking to a friend about this last week as I was getting ready for this message and he said his parents wouldn’t let him go to the ice cream truck on Sundays. Because if you’re enjoying a spongebob shaped ice cream on a stick - it’s disrespectful to God, or something. Not allowed to mow your lawn. I had a friend try to argue with his parents that he couldn’t do his homework on Sunday, because it had the word “work” in it. I don’t know what you want me to do - Jesus said. When I was in seminary, I went to Israel, and we were there for a couple weeks, staying in hotels. And every hotel had a normal elevator and what they called the “shabbat” elevator. And I never heard of this, but this is absolutely true - Jewish people, when they celebrate the sabbath, certain orthodox groups consider touching an electrical switch to be “work” - so that elevator would go automatically up and down to all the floors, so they wouldn’t have to touch a button. But if Sabbath is about pushing buttons or ice cream trucks or mowing lawns - I think we’ve lost the plot a little bit. And yet, I already said this - but I’m going to say it again: if you can figure out what sabbath is truly about, it will change your life. 

So if you want to grab a bible, we are going to be in three places this morning - but we’re going to start in Exodus chapter 20. I haven’t said it for a while, but we are a BYOB church - bring your own bible. And if you don’t have one - there’s a whole pile on the bookshelf in the back, and if you don’t have one at home, please take that bible with you - that is our gift to you. Another great way to follow along is on your phone. And if you’re on the bible app, or google or whatever - make sure you change the translation to the NIV, New International Version, because then the words will match exactly what I’m saying and it will be easier to follow along. Exodus, chapter 20, verse 8 starts out [read v.8-11]. Six days you shall labor, but the seventh day is a sabbath. No work. But I want to focus in on verse 11 there - they reference the creation story. God made the heavens and the earth in six days, and then he rested on the seventh day. If you’re not familiar, that is the very first chapter of the first book at the very beginning of the bible. The creation story, God made the entire universe - Day 1 he made this, Day 2 he made that, Day 3 he made the rest of it. Six days, and then on the seventh day he rested. Now, I want you to think about this for a second - WHY did God rest? And I think when we’re little kids we think, “well - because he was tired! It’s hard work creating the entire universe! God needed a break, he needed to rest.” But adults - we know that God is all powerful. For him the creation of the universe was as simple as speaking. The all powerful, all knowing wonderful creator who spoke the earth and everything in it into being - does not get tired. So why did God rest? [pause] For you. Day 6 he created man and woman, Day 7 - he taught these brand new baby humans on their very first day, how to rest. God put into the fabric of existence a rhythm of rest. 6 days work, one day rest, and repeat. He did not rest because he was tired, or because he needed a break - he rested to show us how to rest. Work hard. Stop working. And repeat. He created that rhythm and then he blessed it - this is how my new creation is going to flourish, this is how they are going to thrive under my care. They’re going to work. 6 days they’re going to work, and then they’re going to rest. For one day they’re going to rest. Because I made them and I know the rhythm that is good for their soul. 

And we’ve gotten away from it, as a culture, haven’t we? I think we messed it up. We didn’t talk about sabbath for the right reasons, and so it slipped into silly legalism and then people didn’t understand how valuable it was, so they abandoned it. But sabbath is a rhythm written into our souls. Let me show you what I mean. This is an actual Wall Street Journal article that came across my feed from June 14th, 2026. This article is 20 days old. [Put it on the screen]. If you can’t see it, we’ve got a headline on the screen from the lifestyle and travel section of the Wall Street Journal. The title of the article says, “I take 24-hour Micro-Retreats. Here’s Why You Should Too.” But check out the tagline, “science suggests you don’t need a long vacation to recharge. A 24 hour break that interrupts your routine - and puts you into a flow state - can be hugely restorative.” Man, I love it when science discovers something God told us a long time ago. I did not have “rebranding sabbath as a 24 hour micro retreat” on my bingo card, but here we are. Science claims that it’s hugely restorative, which is awesome - because God claims the same thing. It is a rhythm that we abandoned as a culture decades ago, but we are still drawn to it, i don’t think this author is a Christian, but we are drawn to it because it is the rhythm God laid down for us at the very beginning. 6 days of work, 1 day of rest.

Now here’s something people don’t normally talk about when they talk about Sabbath. If you want to rest well, you also have to work well. I think a lot of people focus on the one day of rest, but we can’t forget that first part. 6 days of work. If you don’t have a robust understanding of what work is supposed to be, you might have a phenomenal day of rest, you might be sabbathing so hard - but ten minutes into your Monday morning you will be completely drained because you are approaching work the wrong way. Work was created by God to be fulfilling, to give us purpose and satisfaction in our life. Now you might be thinking, “nah, pastor JJ, you don’t understand. My job is pointless, My job is the worst. It’s not fulfilling, it can’t be fulfilling.” But there is a difference between a crappy job and having a crappy time at your job - and that difference is your mentality. Even a job you hate can bring you purpose and meaning if you look at it with the right mentality. Purpose can bring passion to a job. Maybe you have a job you hate, but it brings home a paycheck and puts food on your table. That is an honorable and holy thing. You can face that job with passion because you understand it has a purpose. This is a silly example, but there’s an old simpson’s episode where the dad, Homer, works in a nuclear power plant. And his boss put a sign up above his little console where he works, and the sign says, “Don’t forget, you’re here forever.” It’s like the epitome of a meaningless, depressing job. But at the end of the episode, he puts up pictures of his daughter over the sign and it covers some of the letters and the final piece reads, “Do it for her.” Passion follows purpose, if you can reclaim purpose, you can bring passion to your work. Or maybe your job doesn’t have a paycheck at all - you’re recently retired or you’re a stay at home mom. And sometimes, after the ten thousandth meltdown and fifth time cleaning up puke or poop or whatever the boys melted into the couch cushion - the job of parenting can feel incredibly draining. We’ve got a lot of homeschool moms in this church and I have heard some of you beating yourself up. I wasted time on a degree, I feel like I’m not contributing enough, I’m not useful enough - and it’s like, woah, “you are doing some of the most important work in the kingdom of God, raising the next generation.” No matter how you spend your day, reclaiming purpose in your work is how you can restore passion for the work. I know people who are janitors and mechanics and garbage men and they feel like their work doesn’t matter. I actually have a lot of friends who struggle with retirement, because it’s like they lost their sense of purpose. Well, I’m retired and all I do is go out and mow the lawn, or empty the garbage in the Sunday school rooms. And I try to tell them, look we’ve got a volunteer cleaning team at this church. I go away for a month, attendance actually went UP, and there were no complaints. The cleaning team takes a month off, and I guarantee there will be complaints, so who is really more important? It doesn’t matter if people are paying you for what you do in a day or not - God made you to have six days of purpose, six days of work - one day of rest. It’s a rhythm God has designed us to live into.

Deuteronomy chapter 5 is another reading of the ten commandments, and they put it like this, [read v.12-14] - that’s all the same as over in Exodus, but check out the next line, [read v.15]. Exodus says, “hey, remember the creation story. Remember that God gave us a rhythm.” But over here in Deuteronomy it says, “remember Egypt.” We talked about this at the start of the series, but I think it’s worth repeating. Sometimes people think the ten commandments are about restricting rules and restricting freedom and fun - but the truth is that the people of God had JUST gotten out of slavery and didn’t know how to be real people yet. In Egypt, they worked seven days a week. They had quotas of bricks that they had to fashion out of mud and straw in the hot Egyptian sun - their whole life, their whole value was wrapped up in producing. If you make bricks you are valuable, you are worth something - if you don’t then you are not. For four hundred years the people of God were slaves, and so now God has to reteach them how to be his people. And we know that sabbath is about rhythm, the 6 days of work are important, but it is just as important to stop. That’s actually what the word means. Sabbath is based on the hebrew word Shabbat, which literally just means STOP. And here’s the crazy part - it is an act of defiance in a world full of slaves to stop producing and still be loved by God. Let me say that again, because it’s a great line - it is an act of defiance to stop producing and still be loved. God wants us to live a life of work - because he knows that work can bring our life meaning and purpose and fulfillment, but the core of sabbath is the idea that we can stop working and STILL be loved by God. We do not earn God’s love, he gives it to us freely - and if you struggle to sabbath, it might be because you struggle to believe that God will actually love you even if you accomplish nothing today. Sabbath is resistance. Sabbath is a release from Egypt. Egypt has no rest, and it’s all about your output, how much you contribute, how much value you have, how much you create. But sabbath becomes a weekly practice of trusting that God, not our striving, but GOD sustains the world. This is how God had to retrain his people. They came from a world where they were expected to produce every day in order to earn their value - but God says, “No, I love you. And you have value, even when you rest. Even when you do NOTHING to earn love, you still have it.” 

And maybe we’re not making bricks in the mud thousands of years ago, but we have our own slavery today - don’t we? When I was living in Flushing, we had a dental hygienist we really liked. Great place, we took the kids there, and they did adults too - just a whole family practice. And I remember at one point I noticed the hygienist had some family photos in picture frames on the windowsill. And I commented, “oh, you’ve got some boys.” And she said yep, they all do two sports each. And then she launched into this massive tirade about how exhausted she was with her kid’s sports schedule. She told me about how they have tournaments every weekend - sometimes the boys would have different tournaments in different cities and her husband would take one to one hotel and she would take the other kid to a different town. And I was curious, and so I asked - wow, that sounds kind of expensive to be traveling that much. And she said the most heartbreaking thing. “Oh, we consider these our vacations. They get to go and squeeze in some fun places for these tournaments.” And I heard her exhaustion. I heard her weariness. And I want you to listen very carefully - I’m not picking on travel sports. This is not their fault, it’s my fault. This is the church’s fault. A couple generations ago the church failed to teach people about sabbath. We didn’t help people understand its value, its importance. We reduced it down to a list of fun things you’re not allowed to do on a Sunday afternoon - and we sucked the purpose out of sabbath. And so then the next generation came in and said, “well these rules seem really silly - let’s get rid of them.” And the enemy was waiting. As soon as we stopped protecting this day of rest, the world swooped in and said, “if you’re not going to use this, we are going to take it away.” I don’t blame travel sports for exhausted parents and burnt out kids - I blame myself. We didn’t tell you how important it was to set apart a day and just STOP. Sabbath is an act of defiance, it is an act of resistance. We have to push BACK on a world that will try to steal the rhythm God has written on your heart. And I do want to mention, I am so encouraged by some of the movement I have seen. The younger generation is pushing back on that exhaustion. They’re looking at their friends and older siblings and the burn out and they’re saying - no thanks. They are looking for rest. They are searching for it. Some of them are even reclaiming some of those rules we got rid of a generation ago because we forgot why they were so important. We’ve got a lot of talented kids in sports in this church - but they’re carving out a time for rest, they’re carving out space for God. Even some of our folks who travel, I get texts with pictures of people watching the livestream of our church wherever they are. Slowly we are reclaiming sabbath, and I mean this genuinely, I’m really proud of the growth we have seen.

But all of this comes together - rhythm and resistance, purpose, passion and rest - all of it hits fulfillment in the person of Jesus. Matthew, chapter 11, that’s in the New Testament if you want to flip to it (this will be our last jump). Chapter 11, verse 28 Jesus says, [read v.28-30]. This is the last teaching I want you to catch this morning, but it’s easily the most important one - real rest comes from Jesus. It is a gift given when we connect to our savior. There is a difference between sitting on the couch doomscrolling and finding rest in Jesus’ presence. Some people have replaced rest with numbing your mind. We just melt into the couch and overstimulate ourselves with a tv show and social media and ten other things all at the same time. That’s not restful! You can sit on the couch and do nothing but watch a screen for ten hours a day and still be completely exhausted at the end of the day - because there is a difference between numbing your mind and finding true rest in Jesus. Verse 29 says “take my yoke and you will find rest for your souls” - there is a rest that is deeper than just resting your body. And I think the key to understanding that is this concept of a yoke. If you don’t know - a yoke is like piece of farm equipment used to connect the work animal to the plow. And if you had two work animals you could get one of these, [show a two person yoke]. Now I want you to imagine this for a second. If two people are yoked together, and one goes faster than the other - what happens? The faster person spins around the slower person. Or if you walk slower - that’s going to pull the other person off course too. A yoke is an invitation to walk in step with Jesus, to adopt his rhythm for a healthy life. Some of you are trying to go faster than Jesus, and you’re just running in circles around him. If I just strive a little more, if I just do a few more good deeds, if I just accomplish a little bit more so he will love me and forgive me. And to those people - you need to slow down. Walk in step with Jesus. On the other hand, some of you are moving too slow, and Jesus is trying to pull you along. For a lot of folks, it’s very paralyzing. I’ve got so many messed up things in my life, if I try to start fixing things - it’s just overwhelming. I’ll just take the easy route out - I’ll just numb my mind instead of searching for actual rest. But Jesus wants to pull you off the couch into a healthy rhythm for your life. If you want true rest, rest that goes deep into the weariness of your actual soul - we have to walk in step with Jesus. Use the rhythm that he has given us. 

Jesus is the Lord of the sabbath. Your ultimate rest is fulfilled in your relationship with him. In Jesus there is nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing to prove. When we come to Jesus, we rest in his forgiveness - he gives us the gift of true, holy rest. And when Jesus was here, he spent a lot of time tearing down the rules of sabbath. There’s one story where he heals a man’s hand on the sabbath - and they get mad at him. For performing a miraculous healing - that’s losing the plot. There’s another story where his disciples are walking through a field, picking heads of grain off the wheat and snacking on it - and they get in trouble for “working.” I’ve never walked through a field of wheat, but I’ve walked through apple orchards. And you grab an apple and eat it while you’re walking - that is not the same as harvesting apples as a job. And there’s this great line Jesus used in Mark chapter two, [Mark 2:27]. And I guess that’s what I want you to leave with today. God created the sabbath FOR you. And this is not about legalism or guilt, I’m not trying to make people feel bad - but I want you to realize how much you are missing if you don’t take the sabbath seriously. Sabbath is a gift. It’s not a restriction. It’s the way to live a healthy life. He made it FOR you. 

And so I have one challenge for you, one thing for you to work on this week: I want you to Take a Holy Sabbath. But each of those words is very important. First - TAKE. You have to TAKE your sabbath. The world is not going to hand it to you. If you don’t protect it, carve it out, the world will remove it. It means you have to say no to some things, even good things, in order to say yes to the rest that God gives you. Take your sabbath. Reclaim your rest. Wrestle it away from a world that is trying to steal it from you. Take Holy Sabbath. Second - the word HOLY. In hebrew that word is Kadosh which simply means “set apart.” You have to take this time, but then it has to be set apart. It has to be different than how you spend the rest of your week. Set it apart for God. And that can look a lot of different ways - sometimes it’s literal rest, like take a nap. Or spending time with family. Spending time by yourself. Listening to worship music. Reading your bible. Spend time in prayer. Even serving someone in God’s name - there’s a hundred different ways to set apart your time for God. First - take it, second - set it apart for God and third - sabbath. That means STOP. You have to stop. Ancient Jewish people used to sabbath from sundown to sundown - they would eat these big meals together, then the next morning they’d go to services, and then the whole afternoon was for turning everything else off. They would read scripture together, go for walks, play board games. Intentionally accomplish nothing. Say no to stuff. Don’t be productive. Don’t get anything done. Play games. Enjoy the world God gave you. Enjoy the people God put in your life. Just stop. And I want to say - to live that way requires planning. If you’re going to do nothing on Sunday or whichever day you can take your sabbath - then that means you need to do all your work stuff on the day before or after.  That’s my challenge for you this week - and it’s going to be really hard. Take a Holy Sabbath. Reclaim a “set apart for God” stopping.

In just a moment, we’re going to sing our last song - but I’m going to end with a small request. If you go after this challenge this week - would you come tell me about it? Like, in a couple of weeks - come tell me how your sabbathing is going. What did you change and how did it affect you? Because I hope you know, I am preaching in the mirror before I’m preaching to you this week. It’s so funny, I feel like the way the scheduling fell down, I was supposed to be out of town for this commandment, We’re doing commandment number 4 on week 6. It’s like God was saving it for me. And I know personally, I have let the world steal my sabbath. Or I have settled for mind numbing exhaustion rather than intentional rest that restores my soul. So I’m really going to work on it this week, and I’d love to hear how God uses sabbath to change your life too. Let’s pray.