On the Freedom of Sabbath
By Caitlin Rhodes-Karahadian
In a world that is harried and hurried, frantic and frenetic, what if we lived lives punctuated by rhythms of joyful rest and trust? Would that not make us stand out from a divided, weary, and combative culture? Would a spirit of rest and trust not exist in contrast to the driven Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area?
When the Ten Commandments are given in Exodus, the people of God have just been liberated from generations of slavery. Oppressive, grueling, demeaning labor. God has just delivered them from their oppression, and He is now constituting them as a holy nation and a royal priesthood. God is teaching them how to live free.
In Deuteronomy, Moses is offering the Israelites final words before he dies. With the older rebellious generation having already all died in the wilderness, the majority of people listening to him now have grown up wandering in a barren land. However, the majority of them have never been slaves, never tasted that same bitter gall of exploitation and oppression.
But notice that as the Israelites are finally poised to enter the lush Promised Land, the giving of the Sabbath is not grounded in God’s rhythm of creation, as it was in Exodus. Look at the change in verse 15:
“You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”
This time, Moses grounds the giving of the Sabbath—the instruction to cease working—in a reminder that the Israelites had been slaves in Egypt. Could it be that just as the people of God were about to enter into the greatest fulfillment of their freedom they had ever known, they were at risk for falling back into slavery?
Could it be that just as we are set free to enter into the greatest fulfillment of our freedom we have ever known—living with the joy that we are freed people—that we too are at risk for falling into slavery?
Sean Gladding, the author of TEN: Words of Life for an Addicted, Compulsive, Cynical, Divided and Worn-Out Culture writes:
“The Sabbath also holds in check one of greatest idolatries, one of our greatest challenges: the fact that we make an idol of our work by drawing our identity from it, making it the center of meaning and value for our lives….”
When we idolize work, we rebel against God’s good design for a truly free life. We pursue our own flawed picture of freedom.
We find ourselves shackled to a corrupted version of God’s good gift of work. We work nights and weekends and check our email compulsively. The weight of our responsibilities and our to-do lists bears down heavy on our shoulders and steals our sleep.
But if we’re honest, our “work” isn’t even restricted to what we might do for an income. We manage to work at nearly everything. We inject toilsome labor into our pursuits and even our pastimes. We pursue distortions of gifts God has given us.
We enslave ourselves to pursuing “perfect” figures—perfect according to societal pressures—instead of aiming for physical stewardship of the bodies God gave us so that we might run the race that He has set before us.
As we desire connection and affirmation, which God created us to enjoy, we keep posting on social media and then keep checking back for the dopamine hit of likes and hearts and thumbs up. Yet we still feel empty and unsatisfied, craving more approval and connection.
This works-based thinking or achievement orientation can even creep into our spiritual disciplines. Without even realizing it, we might start to believe that by praying and fasting, we can twist God’s arm into giving us His approval. The truth is, our spiritual formation practices are a way of spending time with Someone who has already given us all His approval.
We need a practice like the Sabbath because we tend to drift off course. We drift into the distortion that we can get our hearts’ desires if we play according to the world’s rules. But no matter how hard we play the game, we still come up short. We still feel empty and unsatisfied.
We keep the Sabbath to live truly free. We keep the Sabbath to live according to the freedom God has won for us.
The Rev. Dr. Jim Birchfield once preached that the Sabbath builds the rhythm of life that we are to enjoy, the blueprint that God wove into His own work of creation: work, worship, and rest.
Work, worship, and rest.
As we worship God by resting, we trust God to be working in our rest. As we cease from our work, we are reminded that God is the One in control, that God is God, and we are not. And so we worship Him.
And so this, the fourth commandment, is the capstone of the first four commandments on the proper worship of God.
Now, when Moses gives the Sabbath instruction again in Deuteronomy, instead of telling the Israelites to “remember” the Sabbath as he did in Exodus, he uses a different word. We translate this as “observe” in English. But the word in the original language is far richer than our idea of simply observing a holiday.
Shamar, in the Hebrew, means to keep, to watch over, to guard—or to conform one’s action or practice to.
Shamar is used nearly 70 times in the book of Deuteronomy alone. By the sheer repetition of this word, we see that as the people of God are poised to enter the Promised Land, Moses is very concerned with their practices.
The command to keep the Sabbath instructs the people of God to conform their actions and their practice to a regular rhythm of ceasing from their work, and resting in God.
Every week, when we Sabbath, when we cease from work, we practice putting down what enslaves us. Every time we put it down, it loses its power. Meanwhile, our strength to resist its pull increases.
So what does it look like to practice the Sabbath? Answering that question is a wonderful process of discovery that happens between you and God.
Even prior to answering the call into occupational ministry, my Sabbath was not on Sunday. Through trial and error, I’ve learned that my Sabbath is most restorative when I protect it to be as unscheduled as possible, with spacious expanses of time. My life is very scheduled, and so Sabbath-keeping is a marked exception, a time when I get to live according to a different rhythm, at a much slower cadence than my usual frantic pace.
You might be wondering, okay: What can I do on my Sabbath, whenever it is? What should I not do? But if we practice the Sabbath to live truly free, then having a very rigid set of rules would be counterproductive.
The Sabbath is an invitation to spend quality time with God—so how to spend your Sabbath with Him becomes a conversation for the two of you, or for you and your family to have with one another and with Him.
If you’re looking for a place to start: What do you find occupying most of your mind and attention during the week?
Perhaps even enslaving you?
How can you put those habits and practices down on your Sabbath, and engage practices that bring you rest and life and joy and trust in the Lord?
The way we worship God with our Sabbath is inseparable from how we relate to His people. We keep the Sabbath to live truly free—and we also practice the Sabbath to free others, as we see in verses 13 and 14.
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 or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
Keeping the Sabbath means that we are not only to cease from our work, but also to avoid shifting our work onto others.
And actually, the Hebrew grammar here is fascinating…that your servant may rest “as well as you” is actually a specific grammatical structure that expresses equivalence among humans.
It’s the same structure that is used in Leviticus 19:18: “You must love your neighbor as yourself”—in other words, “You must love your neighbor in the same manner, to the same extent as you love yourself,” and “that your servant may rest in the same manner, to the same extent that you rest yourself.”
In his book on the Ten Commandments, Sean Gladding hits us with this truth:
“By giving them the Sabbath, God tells God’s people, ‘Don’t become pharaohs. Don’t do to people what was done to you. Remember, you were slaves in Egypt, and I set you free.”
This is about God shaping a people who would constantly be aware of anything that was keeping them and others enslaved, oppressed, or in bondage of any kind,” Gladding writes, “So that, as a community, they made sure that their common life meant everyone could flourish.”
So today, as the people of God, let’s dream about what it would look like for everyone to flourish. Let’s ask: Who is under my supervision or management that could benefit from resting as well as me? Do I employ anyone in or outside of my home? Who is my neighbor? What would it look like to pay laborers more than minimum wage, to pay them so generously that they don’t have to work seven days to make ends meet?
What would it look like to establish a culture of rest for those I supervise or work with? How could I set the expectation that my team will not send work emails after work hours—or, at the very least, that I won’t respond if they do?
I remember finally telling a former boss that I would not be coming into the office on weekends anymore, that I knew myself and I knew that in order to give my best quality work, I had to have time off. My boss respected that boundary.
And my work product actually did improve, by the way. We were simply not made to work seven days a week.
Rev. Caitlin Rhodes-Karahadian lived in Beijing for ten years, initially working as a journalist and then as the first hire at a greentech startup before being promoted to its management team. She received her Masters of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theology Seminary and is ordained as an ECO pastor. She and her husband, Joel, are planting West Valley Neighborhood Church in Cupertino, CA.
