Confession time. I haven’t taken a Sabbath day since my semester started in January. Now before I unpack that sentence, and any questions are asked, I will say upfront that I am not a Sabbatarian. I will not be defending that statement in the post or in the comments, so don’t try and start that conversation. I will say that I am an advocate of the Sabbath principle, and think at the very least we should acknowledge the Lord’s day as sacred time. By Sabbath principle, I mean that we should have a full day of rest, but I won’t tell you what that rest looks like, or what day it is on. Certainly, in Exodus, the Sabbath is grounded in creation, so I believe there is some part or idea about it that is to be practiced. I will also say that Sunday appears to have meaning in the New Testament and early Church as the Lord’s Day- a day set apart for the Lord. I won’t tell you what that should look like either, as it depends on you and your context.

That said, I haven’t taken a Sabbath since the semester started, and I’m reaping the results. This past Sunday, Pastor Daniel preached a sermon from his BC series through the Old Testament on “Sacred Time.” His text was Leviticus 23, where we find the various festivals and feasts that God commanded the Israelites to celebrate. Each of these feasts contain the Sabbath as their foundations, and so he began by teaching about the Sabbath. I’ve been convicted throughout the semester of refusing myself rest, but this weekend really hit it home. So I finally did something about it.

One of the themes of the Sabbath, and the feasts and festivals in particular is the idea of celebration and fellowship. As God would so have it, several of my friends from my alum, WVU, were in town this weekend. I took the opportunity to catch up with them and celebrate. I did absolutely no homework the last two nights. My grades and work have shown it. And that’s ok.

Let me see if I can paint a picture or two of the situation. I have been greatly influenced by the thoughts of Abraham Kuyper in regards to the sovereignty of God in all areas of life. By this I mean that no matter what the task or situation, we should seek to do it in a way that glorifies God. I reject the idea of a distinction between sacred and secular- and prefer to see all things as sacred. All things belong to God. Things can be distinguished as sacred or profane depending on use and motive. The natural question seems to be, then, how is not doing my homework glorifying to God? Certainly it should be done to the glory of God. However, doing homework in such a way that everything else suffers is equally profane than not doing my best at doing homework. Homework becomes an idol. So I decided to take a Sabbath in regards to homework so that other areas of my life could be brought back into balance.

I thought of it this way. One of the celebrations of the Israelites is the year of Jubilee. Every 50 years, they were to take the entire year off from work. This allowed not only the people to take a Sabbath year, but also creation- the land and animals were to rest as well. One of the reasons for the Babylonian exile, though obviously not the only purpose for the exile, was that the Israelites had neglected the Jubilee year for multiple generations. By way of exile, the land was finally able to enjoy its rest for 70 straight years. In the same way, by neglecting my rest from doing homework, I was spiraling towards an educational exile. Eventually, my body was going to crash, and would take the exile it needed. It wouldn’t have been pretty. So I decided to step in and take one before I got to that point. Two days definitely wasn’t enough to get the rest I’ve deprived myself of the past 7 or so weeks, but hopefully it was a step in the right direction of finishing the rest of the semester well.

So, there you have my confession. Agree or not, I finally got some rest that I needed through the practice of celebration and fellowship with some dear friends I haven’t seen in a long time. We celebrated God. We celebrated friendship. We celebrated celebrating. I pray I can maintain it through the end of the semester. I will take a lower grade over my body crashing on me any day of the week. If you think about it, pray for me this semester. And don’t forget to get some rest- whatever that looks like for you.