This past week I met friends for dinner. They live two hours away, were in town, so we met up for dinner on Tuesday night. We picked out a restaurant that we all liked.
A couple hours before we were to meet, I got a text from them saying that they just looked up the restaurant, and it was closed that day. My first thought was, “Why would a restaurant be closed on a Tuesday evening?” But as I thought about it further while working on this week’s emphasis on sabbath, I thought, “I bet the owners and employees appreciate the day off.” Some establishments close on Mondays or Tuesdays because the weekend is so busy.
I have a friend who works at Chick-fil-A, and he is very grateful for Sundays off. I don’t know if those business are closed because they are trying to implement sabbath in their lives, but clearly whoever makes those decisions knows that by closing their doors, they are forgoing the opportunity to make money. That’s one of the reasons why sabbath is so counter-cultural, why sabbath is resistance.
In addition to a business closing for a day, there are many ways we can apply the principle of Sabbath.
In fact, Jesus continues this emphasis. Not the rule, but the heart of sabbath. In his sermon on the mount in Matthew 6 verse 24, he teaches, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Sabbath is a radical concept in our world because it resists against our human cultural tendency to depend on money. Or on what our work will get us. Or to depend on how valuable we feel when we work. Our identity can be found in our work rather than on Christ.
The prevailing cultural impulse is to make more and more money. Or to feel like you are valuable because you work hard. So we work like crazy. Work on your day off, work on vacation. Because of our pastoral role, Michelle and I have wrestled with this for years. Especially since the onset of the smart phone, texting, and being online all the time.
When I started at Faith Church, I did not have a cell phone. Our internet here at the church was dial-up. I was the youth pastor at the time. The previous pastor and I shared the dial-up line. If one of us was online, and the other person didn’t realize it, and we dialed-up to check our email or go on the internet, we would bump the other person offline.
But we could go back further than that, way further. Imagine being a pastor in the days when they literally rode horseback from house church to house church. If you needed them for pastoral care, you had to physically go get them, and only if they happened to be in your town. You could also write letters to them, but that could take weeks to get a response.
Now, the texts, emails, phone calls, etc, are nonstop, right there in my living room, in my office, all day long. That is the reality of pastoral ministry in 2025. That is the reality of life in 2025. All that to say, not just pastors, but basically all of us are always on-call. In my years as pastor, rarely do I go to the hospital in the middle of the night. Super rare. What is far more prevalent is answering texts, calls, emails, messages, all the time. For some of you, your work is like that too. For nearly all of us, life is like that.
How, then, do we truly apply sabbath to our ultra-connected world? For one, we can turn our devices off. I want you to do try it out. Not just silence them. Turn them off. Seriously, get out your device and turn it off. See what it feels like to be uncontactable, unnotifiable, for next hour. When I preached this at my church, I asked everyone to turn their devices off right then and there. Maybe that’s a habit you could try. For a meal, for a Bible study, for a worship service. Just turn your devices off and be present.
Do you turn your devices off on a regular basis? Or do you keep them on all the time? I turn my off every night before bed. Yes, that means my church, family, and friends cannot contact me in the middle of the night. If they need me, they are welcome to come to my house and get me. And we do not have a land line phone anymore. 99.9% of situations can wait. Does that sound harsh? I don’t mean it to be. I don’t think it actually is harsh, though I understand how it might sound that way, given our connected culture. But remember that before the advent of the telephone, what I do was the norm, and people were okay.
The act of turning off my phone has done two things. 1. I can sleep better, knowing that I don’t need to worry about the phone. 2. It helps me break my connection to my phone. I have it with me all day long, which is not healthy. I need to break the connection to the phone. ((Bonus #3 benefit: turning off my phone daily is also good for my phone, especially in its battery life. My phone is five years old and still functioning fairly well.))
Practicing sabbath is more than turning off your phone regularly. Jesus has more to say. To learn what he has to say, check back to the next post!
Engaging Scripture 