15-5

Be Still

Be still, is anybody good at that? I'm terrible at it. Even when we went on vacation, our days were filled with things to do, places to see, and a little rest while sitting on a train going to the next place. It's true, Sabbath is a foreign concept to most of us. What is the Sabbath? "Sabbath is not so much about a day off as it is a "day up"-a day to remember that He is God and we are not. Without Sabbath, we forget who we are and lose sight of who He is, leaving us to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. When there is no Sabbath in our lives we become intoxicated by the lie that the sum of our lives depends on our effort alone. We get to the place where we truly believe that the outcome of the story fully depends on us."

After all, remembering the Sabbath is one of the 10 Commandments! "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."

So "apparently, Sabbath rest is not just a suggestion for the betterment of your life and mine, but an essential, nonnegotiable command, an intrinsic part of the rhythm of life. Clearly, Sabbath is about ceasing from labor, but at its core Sabbath is about a whole lot more than sleeping in or catching a nap. Sabbath rest is about a state of mind, a deep-seated belief that God is the creator and sustainer of all things-an acknowledgement that He is sufficient and that He can be trusted. Because one of the symptoms of sin is short-term memory loss, we quickly forget that He set in motion the entire universe before we arrived on the scene. We need to get our memories corrected and our trust renewed by stopping long enough to remember that His name is I AM and our names are i am not."

"To remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy is for us to say: Everything doesn't hinge on me. If I stop doing my part, the whole world will not fall apart. I am not in control. God made the world in six days without any input from me, or my assistance. God doesn't need me to accomplish His work. I am little. God is huge. I trust him." We do all of this by being still. "But how do we find stillness when finances are tight, tragedy overwhelms, the kids seem out of control, nations are at war, relationships are strained, and there's just too much left to do at the end of the day? The only place true stillness of the soul can be found on planet earth is in super-close proximity to the God of all Creation."

When we are closest to God, that is when our lives seem the smallest. That is when our problems seem small. "We go to sleep and God goes to work. And we wake up to see what God has done. Oh, we still go to work when we wake up, but as we go we carry the spirit of Sabbath rest with us, believing that we have been invited into an already-in-progress Story in which God was doing just fine long before our little feet ever hit the floor."

If we rely on ourselves, we will never slow down, we will never get enough done, so we will always be busy and stressed. By ourselves, we can't even keep the ten rules God gave to Moses, much less manage everything we need to manage to "run our lives." But "Paul writes of a new mystery when he exclaims, 'It is Christ in you, the hope of glory.' He does not say it's Christ and you that brings the hope of a glorious life, but Christ IN you. In other words, Sabbath is not about God and me operating as a dynamic duo. Sabbath rest is about me realizing that He is the only one capable of doing anything eternal in and through me."

Enjoy the Journey