But on a weekly basis, our church is committed to sending you an email (called The Gym) about the Spiritual Practices that includes a Sabbath family guide. This guide is designed to help your family, your Community Group, your Fighter Group, or your group of friends intentionally and thoughtfully curate one day a week so that you can keep the Sabbath holy. It includes questions like:
How will the Sabbath day feel different than a regular day?
The Sabbath is not Saturday 2.0.
The Sabbath is not a luxury.
The Sabbath is not a day off.
It’s not less than a day off, but it is more than a day off. Consider how the author of Hebrews describes the rest of the Sabbath as something you have to “strive” to experience: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:0-11). You might want to consider taking care of your groceries, answering all of your voicemails and emails, and checking-off your to-do list the day before so that, week after week, your family begins to anticipate the Sabbath day as the most joyful day of the week.
What do you need to say “no” to in order to keep the Sabbath day? Do you need to hide your cell phone away in a different room for 24-hours? Do you need to hide your laptop in a different room for 24-hours?
What do you need to say “yes” to in order to keep the Sabbath day? Another way of phrasing this is by asking the question: what will fill my soul with joy, thaw my heart out so that I can feel the presence of God again, and demolish the barriers between my family members so that we can deeply connect? Do you need to spend lots of time reading the Scriptures together as a family? Do you need to make popcorn and watch that really good movie together? Do you need to buy that expensive bottle of wine or that craft beer bomber that you have had your eye on for a while now?
The goal is to be shaped in the image of our creator, who on the seventh day deliberately stopped creating and, like a mother who holds her newborn baby, held the created cosmos in his arms, gazed deeply at his wonderful handiwork, and without a single shiver of modern anxiety declared that “it is good.” And furthermore, the goal is not just to live differently one day a week. Ultimately, Sabbath helps us live differently seven days a week.
Consider this testimony from A.J. Swoboda: “One day a week, my family turns all the screens off, lights some candles, prays, and invites the God of the Sabbath to bring us rest. This practice, which, again, we do far from perfectly, has saved my marriage, my ministry, my faith, and, I might even say, my life.”
Could it be, dare it be, that the Creator knows better than our psychologically overworked, spiritually nervous and emotionally malnourished generation of workaholics?
Ultimately, the most effective strategy that Frontier Church has for helping you integrate this practice into your life is Fighter Groups. There is nothing more helpful than committing to a small group of people following Jesus together, and to ask and listen to how others are being formed by the Holy Spirit through the practice of Sabbath.
