173 - How We Sabbath
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Resources from this episode:
The Work & Play Weekly Checklist (Free Download!)
Show Notes:
God created the world in six days, and on the seventh day He completely rested and enjoyed his work. He created this cadence for all of us to work six days and to rest one, and then repeat. We have a hard time doing this, don't we? I do. It's hard. It's not surprising why of all the 10 Commandments, this one was the longest with the most emphasis in the Bible.
He designed us to do life this way. And when we do, life is refreshing and when we don't, it's exhausting. So today, I am gonna share with you simply how we practice the Sabbath and hopefully give you some practical things that you can do, too.
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I am so passionate about what we're talking about today. I don't do it perfectly, but I want you to know that me and Will love the Sabbath. We love honoring it and we have hearts for it and we also fall short a lot. So just wanna put that out there first.
But man, so much of the Sabbath has been lost in our culture and also so much of having a regular Sabbath in our lives has to be planned really well for it to actually work. I love what our pastor said about the Sabbath recently. He said, “If you wanna be counter-cultural, like really counter-cultural, take a Sabbath every week, honor the Sabbath, get quiet.” I also love what he said—I'm gonna leave a link to this whole sermon in the show notes because it was really good. But he said, “When you buy a phone, let's say Apple iPhone, you get instructions and it says, you know this, we do not recommend that you put this phone in water, it will stop working. Right? Or if you get a car, the instructions for the maintenance and care for the car will say, Get the oil changed every once in a while, right? Every 5,000 miles, 3,000 miles, something like that. And if we were just to say like, ‘Nah, I'm good.’ I'm not gonna read those instructions so I'm good, I'm just gonna put my phone in the bathtub with me. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it. Or you know what? I'm just gonna drive my car 10, 15, 20,000 miles. It's really okay. Like I don't really need those instructions. What do you think are gonna happen? The thing's gonna break. Your phone is not going to work. Your car is not going to run properly. Like it's going to break down at some point. And so much of what God teaches us about having a Sabbath is part of our instruction manual as humans.
It's like, hey, if you want to be a healthy human being, you’ve gotta stop, you’ve gotta rest and you have to soak in the presence of the Lord. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality is a book by Peter Scazzero. Very good. I love that book. Recommend that. I'll leave it in the show notes. And in this book the author talks about four reasons that we stop and have a Sabbath.
It's to literally stop. It's to cease working. It is to rest. It is to delight in the Lord and his creation and to contemplate, to, to think on what Jesus has done for us, what Christ has accomplished for us and who God is, just to stop and kind of take in who He is and all that He's done and all that he's done for us so that we don't have to constantly do.
There's so much that I could say about Sabbath. I feel like I could talk for an hour, but I wanna get practical. I wanna get practical and just share kind of what we do, what our Sabbath looks like and how we, how we prepare for our Sabbath. How we practically have a Sabbath with for little kids, which is a really hard thing to do. But I just wanna say this because a lot of people are like, well when when's the right day to have it? Is it Saturday? Is it Sunday? Is you know, is this an Old Testament thing? Does it even apply to the New Testament? I just wanna say a few things—
Speaking to those kind of heart issues in the church, Jesus made it very clear that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And so in the New Testament as you read, there's a few times where he's gleaning grain, you know, from the field and things like that, and the Pharisees are like, “You're breaking the Sabbath.” Or he heals someone on the Sabbath and they're like, “You're breaking the Sabbath.” And Jesus is like, “Listen, the Sabbath was made for us. Like, this was a gift for us.” We're not supposed to be legalistic about this. Right? That was his heart. But I also wanna point out that Jesus honored the Sabbath. He practiced the Sabbath like the Son of God was a Jewish boy who grew up into a Jewish man and he honored the Sabbath.
And this is something that was put in place since the beginning of creation. God rested on the seventh day. So this isn't like an old covenant thing that's antiquated and we no longer do it. This was literally set as part of our design from the beginning, from the first seven days of creation. And then God tells his people honor the Sabbath and Jesus honor the Sabbath.
I think it's more of just, hey, this is how to have a healthy life. Here's the fun fact, too. Did you know there's no scientific rhythm for pointing to like a weekly cadence other than the fact God created it? Like our months are based on the cycles of the moon, right? And our years based on like the rotation of the earth around the sun. A day is like one rotation of the earth. There's no scientific thing for seven days. And there is one culture somewhere again, my pastor said this, where they tried to do like a 10 day week and it just totally was a disaster. They went right back to seven days a week. This is just how God made us—work six days rest one day.
The seven day cadence is just how we were made.
Okay, so my heart in sharing this with you is to get back to the Sabbath because it is a gift to us. Not out of legalism, not out of the heart. But because our culture has veered so far from truly resting and stopping and thinking about what God has done, that we're burning ourselves out.
And I think that this truly is a counter-cultural thing that we can do that will bless you and bless your family so much. Okay, so these are the three ways we prepare for our Sabbath.
One - I personally prepare for it ahead of time during my week.
So I try to have my laundry caught up before that day. And I also make up in my mind, if it's not caught up, I'm not gonna do my laundry on the Sabbath. I try to finish any loose ends around the house that are tidy up so that I feel like I can truly rest. I prepare food ahead of time or we plan to order out. Or I'll do like a crock pot meal. I always use paper plates on a Sabbath so there's less cleanup.
And I communicate with will beforehand, any plans or expectations that we have for our Sabbath day and for like our weekend in general. One phrase that we like to use a lot, what are your hopes and dreams for today? Will and I always look at each other on like a Saturday morning, What are your hopes and dreams for today? And we ask each other that.
But it's helpful to just communicate about that. Okay? Secondly, you have to schedule it into your calendar for the month. So like a look at my whole month and we'll mark down our sabbaths. Usually for us, we like our Sabbath day to be Saturday. And then Sunday is church and like a lot of work preparing for the week. So meal planning, prepping, laundry, folding, prepping for the week. That works well for us. A lot of our friends who practice Sabbath will do Sunday. They'll go to church and then they'll just kind of like hang out and veg all day Sunday and they'll do a lot of that planning stuff on Saturday and they have like games and stuff like that on Saturday for their kids.
So I don't think that it's a big deal whether it's Saturday or Sunday. I think it's more about practicing the Sabbath regularly. Okay. So we schedule it into our calendar for the month. We set boundaries ahead of time. What is this gonna look like? We don't do a ton of just like constant tv, but we plan movies as a family.
We try to put our phones away. I try to take social media breaks, I try to leave my phone in another room and then we follow a loose schedule. And this actually was adapted from a friend of Will's. I don't even know if he's a friend of him. I, I wish I could give this guy credit right now. I, I have no idea who this schedule came from,
okay? But Will saw it posted on Facebook, I think by a friend or a mutual friend of a friend somewhere. And they said this is what we do when we Sabbath and we have honestly just tried to copy this. So I'm just gonna straight up read it to you. Now, this is not original and I cannot give credit cuz I don't know who this came from.
But please contact me if you listen to this podcast and you want credit. Okay, so Friday night, this is what this family does, 5:30 on a Friday night, they start their Sabbath pizza movie celebration and dessert. And at 7:30 on Friday night they have a family dance party. And at 8:30 they read books or hang out, play games, whatever. Okay? They also put their phone away. They put their phones away until Sunday, starting Friday night. Saturday is their Sabbath. 7:00 in the morning, their kids are allowed to go downstairs and watch. He said that their eight year old gets the two year old out of the crib. And at 8:00 on Saturday morning the parents wake up once people are crying, which made me laugh. 8:30 they do pancakes and reggae music. 9:30, he and his wife do yoga. 10:30, everybody gets outside into the woods. Noon. Super easy lunch, paper plates, always one o'clock nap times for the parents and the toddler and the baby. And then the older kids do art hub for kids or some other activity while everybody sleeps.
Three o'clock is bonfire outside and read or play music or play games. Five o'clock pick up pizza or takeout, five 30 kids' movie night while the wife takes a bath. This is my favorite part. Kids' movie night with dad while the wife takes a bath. Seven 30 kids are in bed, eight o'clock, grown up movie time and he puts, yes, I watch two movies every Saturday. One with the kids and one with my wife. And then 10 o'clock is bedtime and then the phones go back on Sunday.
I mean, okay, let me just pause here and say, how helpful is this to you? Does this overwhelm you or is this helpful? Cause for me it's really helpful for me to see a Sabbath typed out like this, like hour by hour, what does it look like? What are the things that are life giving for our family? What are the boundaries we're putting in place? Like no phones playing outside, you know, what are the things that we love to do? I just love, love this approach. And Will and I oftentimes will just look at that schedule and then we'll try to plan something similar, but we'll swap out the things that we love. You know, we might plan something different. We don't really love reggae music, so we might do some, some other kind of music. I don't think Will ever does yoga, but I like yoga, you know, so we'll just kind of plan whatever works for us. But it's just really inspiring to see that listed out in a schedule format.
And that's my last encouragement is to follow a loose schedule that you, that you, your family is really excited about. That includes rest. And a few things that I love to add because going back to emotionally healthy spirituality, I love to add some things where we as a family will like pray together or maybe read a scripture or maybe I just by myself will go off in the woods and really have time with the Lord and think about what he has done for me,
the work that he's done for me so that I don't have to, and I can rest in him. So the three ways we plan for our Sabbath is to, one, prepare for it ahead of time during the week that I feel like is my job, to make sure all the household stuff is caught up. Number two, schedule it into your calendar for the whole month so that you and your husband know the days that you're gonna practice Sabbath and rest.
And then number three, you set boundaries ahead of time and follow a loose schedule that you're really excited about and you're on the same page about. And those are the three practical ways that we plan for our Sabbath. Now for my old faithful listeners, I did an episode on the Sabbath, episode 25, which I will leave a link to in the show notes,
but this is kind of an updated one because we have more kids now and I feel like there's some different things that we've incorporated into planning for a practical Sabbath. And I just wanted to share those things with you. I think also when we're resting as moms of little kids, you have to know that obviously you still have to feed your kids, you still have to bathe your kids.
There are parts of life that just have to go on that are very work feeling, But if you can eliminate some of those other things that you do during the week, just to give yourself a break from those things, it is so worth it. A couple of resources that have really helped me as I have learned about the Sabbath is two books, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality,
which I've already mentioned, and the celebration of discipline. I am gonna leave links for those in the show notes. They have been so helpful for me as I've learned about just how important this practice is as a believer to other resources. I'm gonna leave Invitation to Solitude and Silence. I've heard really good things. I just have not read that book yet.
And then the sermon from our church on the Sabbath, I'll leave that in the show notes as well. So I know I've mentioned a few times that the Integrated Life Audio course is coming back available December 1st through the 10th. And that's still true, that's not going anywhere, and I'm really excited to re-release that because it's been almost two years since I have released it to you.
So I'm really excited about that. Mark your calendar. However, I do wanna say this, I am gonna be sending out a survey and I really hope that you guys participate to anyone who buys my course and listens to all of it. I really want feedback from it. I'm considering remaking it into two different courses next year. I, I just want it to be something that serves you.
And so this is just kind of a behind the scenes update for my podcast listeners. Only that this audio course in this format may or may not come back as it is because I'm gonna base what I do in 2023 moving forward on the feedback. Does that make sense? I hope so. So I would love for you to enjoy it as it is.
It's 18 episodes. It's just like this podcast, but it, it's an audio course more comprehensive from start to finish. All about my work, all about my home life, all about my faith and kind of the rhythms and systems I have in place to do those things well in my life. But I might be remaking it. I, I don't know.
