Keep the Sabbath Holy - 4th Commandment

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 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, neither you, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Exodus 20:8-11

I love Sundays at Camp. The whole day is different. We worship and enjoy God, we rest, we fellowship- the focus is on these things. One of the reasons we can do this is because we have worked and played hard on the other 6 days. Example: we have leftovers Sunday night because the kitchen has prepared enough food throughout the week so that they can have a night off.

I bet you have heard a lot of speculation on what you “should” and “shouldn’t” do on the Sabbath. But let’s look at it a little differently.

Look at the second sentence in this command: “six days you shall labor and do all your work.” What do you do during the six other days of the week? Do you get your work done so that you are able to rest and worship God on the Sabbath? Or do you leave things like homework to do on Sunday because you don’t have other activities scheduled?

Keeping the Sabbath holy is definitely about what you do on Sunday, but it is also about what you do the other 6 days in preparation for Sunday. Keeping the Sabbath holy is not an excuse to leave things undone that should have been done earlier. It is a special day.

You might wonder if it is ok to rest. Yes! Even the Lord rested on the 7th day. And you might be thinking to yourself that you have so much work to do, that you can’t possibly get it done in only 6 days.

I would challenge you to give resting on Sunday a try. We weren’t made to work and work and work with no rest; that is too hard.

The Sabbath is not a burden. It is just as much for our restoration as it is to glorify God.

In fact, Mark 2:27 says that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” He knew we needed it! It is a blessing. For those of you who have made it a habit to keep Sunday as a day of rest, I bet you can tell the rest of the week if you have a Sunday where you were not able to worship and rest.

So as you are making plans this week, be deliberate about the Sabbath- schedule your work for the other 6 days and plan on resting in, worshiping, enjoying, and glorifying God that day. You were made that way.

When was the last time you rested on the Sabbath?