Last weekend, I had the opportunity to share a few thoughts on Sabbath Wisdom to a group. You can download and read the whole presentation below, but you might be interested in some highlights. I would suggest that sabbath teaches wisdom that can impact our personal life, our relationships, our businesses and even our culture. Here’s a quick summary of at least three practices that Sabbath can teach us.

1. The importance of celebrating people, places and things. In the Exodus 20:8-11Exodus 20:8-11
English: King James Version (1611) - KJV
8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: ¹⁰ But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: ¹¹ For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.  

WP-Bible plugin appearance of the command, Israel is reminded that God paused after completing creation, proclaimed, “Very Good,” and set aside a day of celebration. Israel is called to take one day a week and replicate this pattern. But unlike the creation story, they are not look back at the end of their work. Their are on the start of a long journey.

In spite of this, they are commanded to rest and remember and celebrate every seven days. Just think if we developed regular patterns of celebration in our lives. We pause and celebrate the people and projects in our lives. We cheer them on. It makes sense to celebrate at the end of a project, but what if we acted like the ancient Hebrews and took a meal, an afternoon and maybe even a day to celebrate and encourage ourselves and the people around us. As we develop this idea and learn to how to remember and celebrate, we may learn how to encourage one another in the midst of our challenges and projects.

2. While we celebrate in the midst of our projects, we rest and remember one another. How did the Israelites remember? They told stories, they feasted, they acted out the stories in ritual. In a way, our birthday parties are a bit like this form of remembering. It is a ritualized form of personal, family and cultural memory. We sing to and focus upon one person in our midst. What if we applied this yearly time of remembering a person’s life and action, in friendships, in business projects, in marraige.

Instead of waiting for a yearly event, what if we took a meal or a meeting to rehearse the actions and story of a person in our life or on our team? Can you imagine the power of this for building constructive relationships? I’ve tried to model a variation of this for several years and have watched it opens doors for conversation, friendship and better teamwork.

3. The celebration extends outward. The Israelites were told to extend the Sabbath celebration to family, to animals, to servants, and even to strangers. We might do the same. Someone says, “I don’t have servants!” Well, we have people serve us in the restaurant, the grocery store, in our families and even in our workplaces.

What if we began to extend our attitude of celebration and rejoicing to these extending circles beyond us? The impact could be amazing. It could transform a workplace, a family, a culture, and even the planet (the Sabbath extends beyond people to creation). Isaiah envisions this power of extend hospitality to everyone in society include the most lowly and oppresed among us. Did he get this from Sabbath wisdom? I’m not sure, but his vision would be consistent with this spirit of Sabbath celebration

Those are a few ideas. If you’re interested in reading the full argument from a Biblical perspective, read this essay I wrote on Sabbath Wisdom.

The Wisdom of Sabbath

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