Rest!

My favorite time of the week is here.

The work week is over. Marty and I generally work six days a week. He works full time, I work full time but my hours are spread throughout the week as needed. Either way, by Friday we're exhausted. It gets a little harder every day to think straight or perform to the very best of our abilities. Being tired does that! Even aside from work, we're two very busy people and by Friday evening we're about worn out.

Did you know that at one time days were measured from sundown to sundown instead of midnight to midnight? According to that first manner of time telling, on Friday evening we to say goodbye to the sixth day of the week and enter into the seventh day as the sun prepares to go down. The Sabbath. And we're ready to rest.

On Fridays, even as we're winding down, we're done with our paying work week. I went out and did my banking and grocery shopping earlier in the day. We were ready to welcome in the Sabbath. We don't do any of this because we HAVE to. We do it because we WANT to. We look forward to the Sabbath because we rest, we mend, we recuperate. We take our worldly cares about bills and work and everything else that we're bombarded with during the week and we hand all those cares over to God. We hand over our problems and issues and trust that if He created the world, he can handle our petty little problems for a day.

Now is the time to slow down, to regenerate, to focus our time and attention on the Lord and on each other. To love God and love our neighbors, just like Jesus said to do.

It's not that we HAVE TO keep the Sabbath; it's a choice. God doesn't want us to do things out of obligation, he wants us to do them out of love for him. 

Jesus kept the Sabbath. The apostles kept the Sabbath. The early church for a few hundred years after the resurrection kept the seventh day Sabbath. God never changed it. Man did. Rome wanted to have a religion that was large and inclusive, so they took the statues that the pagans were worshiping and they renamed them, "Mary" and "Saint Peter", etc. They took the day the pagans were worshiping, Sunday, and called it, "The Lord's Day". We make a choice every week to follow what God's traditions are, not man's. I can't even describe the blessings we've received for doing this. And the peace we've found.

God doesn't want us worn down and worn out, tired and depressed. Satan does. 

All Satan has to do is plant a seed of doubt in our minds and he wins. In the Garden he asked, "Did God really say you couldn't eat that?" In this modern, hectic, exhausting world Satan asks, "Did God really say to rest on the seventh day?"

Just... rest.

Happy Sabbath!

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