A Day to Enjoy
By David Feddes

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. (Exodus 20:8)

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” according to the old saying. And that’s not the worst of it. All work and no play also makes Jack tired and frazzled and even godless.

When life becomes work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you suffer, and your relationship to God suffers. Life becomes a job instead of a joy, a burden instead of a blessing. You learn to work and worry your way through each week, to plan and perspire your way through each day. Even if you manage to squeeze in some vacation time, you’ve got so many places to go and so many things to do that you’re almost relieved when vacation is over.

Sometimes you have to leave the rat race to the rats. If you don’t want to take my word for it, at least take God’s Word for it. God says to us, in essence, “Relax and enjoy yourself, whether or not you think you have a right to. If you don’t have time to relax, make time. If you’re too busy for me, you’re too busy. Slow down. Make space in your life for happiness, and make space in your life for God.”

When God gave the Ten Commandments, his fourth commandment was an order to relax, to enjoy rest and refreshment. At Mount Sinai, the Lord told the people of Israel:

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 son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.

God commanded a break for everyone, even slaves and strangers.

Reasons to Rest

Why did God command rest on the seventh day? Well, for one thing, he created his world to be enjoyed. In Exodus 20, God gives the following reason for declaring a day of rest: “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 and made it holy.”

When God was making everything, it wasn’t just work, work, work. He paused again and again to look over what he was making and to appreciate his handiwork. At six different points in the creation story of Genesis 1, the Bible says that after making something, “God saw that it was good.” And then, when he had completed his work on the sixth creation day, the Bible says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31.) That’s a total of seven times, then, that God looked over what he was making to see how good it was. “By the seventh day,” says Genesis 2:2, “God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”

In other words, God didn’t create the universe just to give himself something to do. He made a vast variety of good and delightful things for his own enjoyment and for the enjoyment of his people. Why should he create so many things that are so good if nobody ever takes the time to appreciate and enjoy them? And why should you work day in and day out if you never relax and relish the fruit of your work? Enjoying God’s good creation, and patterning our lives after his pattern–this was all part of God’s purpose in telling his people to rest on the Sabbath.

Another reason for the fourth commandment is given in Deuteronomy 5. There God says, “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath” (v. 15). The Israelites spent 400 years as slaves in Egypt, 400 years without a vacation, 400 years with never a day off. Then God rescued them and set them free from slavery.

But why rescue them if they were just going to go back to slaving away 24 hours a day, seven days a week anyway? Why rescue them at all, if they were just going to be enslaved by their own schedules rather than by the Egyptians? God wanted to make sure his people took a day to enjoy their freedom and to remember who it was that had set them free. He also wanted to make sure they didn’t treat other people the way the Egyptians had treated them. God commanded the Sabbath, says Deuteronomy 5, “so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do.”

We see, then, why God commanded the Israelites to keep the Sabbath. He wanted them to enjoy the fruits of his creation and the freedom of his salvation. He wanted them to enjoy him, to relish the great privilege of having him as their God, of being set apart as his people.

Holy Party

If your life is too hurried and hassled and hectic, something is wrong. If you have no time to play and no time to pray, you’re working too hard. You’re toiling your way through life without enjoying it and without ever knowing the real point of being alive. You need the wholesome and holy joy that lies at the heart of the fourth commandment. You need space in your life to rest in God, to experience the pleasures of God’s creation and the joys of his salvation.

As the Creator, God is the inventor of pleasure, the giver of every good gift; he wants you to enjoy his gifts and to enjoy him. As the only Savior from sin and death, God wants you to let go of your own efforts long enough to let him work in you; he wants you to appreciate the joy and freedom that can forever be yours through faith in Christ. So if you’ve been having a hard time relaxing and rejoicing, the fourth commandment can help you make time to relish life and relate to God.

When God said, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy,” he gave the Israelites this holy day as a day to enjoy. Maybe when you think of a holy day, you tend to picture it as a sad, somber, solemn occasion where smiling is prohibited. But the Bible shows that a holy day is a day to enjoy, a day to celebrate, a day to party.

The book of Nehemiah tells about a very memorable holy day. After decades of exile in a foreign land, God’s people had returned to their homeland. They had begun to rebuild their city and their spiritual lives. They were growing stronger, but they still had a lingering sense of inadequacy and guilt over their sins. One day they all came together for a sacred assembly. They listened to the reading and explanation of God’s Law. When they heard what it said, all the people started to weep. They realized how badly they had failed and how sinful they were. But notice what happened next. The Bible says,

Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, “This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.”

Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

The leaders kept going around telling the people, “Stop being so sad! This is a holy day. A holy day isn’t just for crying and moping. It’s for rejoicing and feasting and celebrating.” It was fitting for the people to be saddened by their sins and failures, but God didn’t want them to get stuck at that point. He wanted them to rejoice in his forgiveness and in the new future he was opening up for them. When the people realized that, they stopped crying and had a party instead. The Bible says, “Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them” (Nehemiah 8:9-12).

Lord of the Sabbath

All through the Old Testament a holy day was supposed to be a day of special joy and feasting in worship and gratitude to God. But eventually, what had been designed to be a joyful feast was turned into a grim ritual. By the time Jesus was born, the religious leaders had turned the day of rest into a day where you had to work hard just to keep track of all the dos and don’ts. The Sabbath became more a day to endure than a day to enjoy, more regulation than celebration.

But when Jesus came, he fulfilled the Sabbath and showed what it meant to live in the real spirit of the fourth commandment. The purpose of his teaching, Jesus told his disciples, is “so that my joy will be in you and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). Jesus and his disciples took such a joyful and carefree approach to life that they managed to infuriate the grim-faced religious authorities. These experts thought that the Jesus crowd was having too much fun, and that Jesus wasn’t nearly choosy enough about who hung around with him. And so they scorned him as “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners”‘” (Matthew 11:19).

But Jesus took their insult as a compliment. He’d come save sinners. He’d come to give his people joy and rest, not to add to their sorrows and burdens. He’d come to set off celebrations, not to pile on regulations. And so, to those who were worn to a frazzle trying to carry the burdens laid on them by legalistic leaders, Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30). Jesus revealed himself as the source of ultimate rest and refreshment to which the ceremonial day of rest had been pointing.

Jesus’ approach to life deeply offended the sticklers, especially when it came to the Sabbath. One Sabbath his disciples were hungry, so they picked some heads of grain and ate them. The Pharisees were outraged and said, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” But Jesus defended his disciples’ behavior. And then he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28).

Special Days No Longer Required

When people came to Jesus, they found in him the joyful rest that the Sabbath represented and foreshadowed. After Jesus returned to heaven and his gospel began spreading, God helped the church to see that the ceremonial aspects of the law and the special feast days had been pointers and hints of God’s eternal rest, but that the full reality had come in Christ. This meant that the ceremonial foreshadowings were no longer necessary. Circumcision and kosher laws and animal sacrifices, which had once been such important requirements for the Jewish people awaiting God’s salvation, were now obsolete, because Christ was the fulfillment. The same was true of the special feast days and sabbaths.

When certain people tried to force new Gentile Christians to observe all the old laws, the apostle Peter spoke up in the Spirit of Christ and said, “Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are” (Acts 15:10-11). Peter made it clear that the old ceremonies were no longer binding for Christians, whether Gentile or Jew. What counted was God’s grace in Christ.

The apostle Paul made the same point over and over in his writings. When people got hung up on observing certain days as though their standing with God depended on it, Paul wrote: “You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you” (Galatians 4:10-11). In another place, he wrote, “Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival … or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ” (Colossians 2:16-17).

The early church was led by the Holy Spirit to focus on Christ and not to get hung up about special days or seasons. They were living in the Spirit and fulfillment of the fourth commandment, not according to the ceremonial letter of the law. They were no longer under any strict requirements regarding the seventh day. But they didn’t say, “Whew! That’s a big relief! We don’t have to spend a day worshiping or resting in God any more. Now we can get on with our own business.” No, the Bible says, “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:46-47). They didn’t worship one day a week as a duty; they worshipped every day of the week as a delight. They spent time with God and with each other, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. They were in love with Jesus Christ and with each other.

The Lord’s Day

As the church became more ordered and structured, Christians found it helpful to designate one day in particular that all of them could plan on meeting together for worship. They needed an agreed-upon time when all of them would try to make it. However, to eliminate any misunderstanding that they were still observing the legalities of the Old Testament Sabbath, the church chose not the seventh day but the first day of the week (Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:2) as the agreed-upon day of worship. They sometimes referred to it as “the Lord’s Day” (Revelation 1:10), because it was on the first day of the week that the Lord Jesus rose from the dead. The Lord’s Day was not intended to be just like the old Sabbath, only on Sunday instead of Saturday. Worshipping together on Sunday was a matter of good order, not a legal requirement.

All this is made clear in the New Testament, as we’ve seen. In the course of church history, however, there were times when people tried to legislate special seasons of required observances or turn Sunday into a ceremonial Sabbath again, with all sorts of dos and don’ts. But church leaders, such as Augustine and John Calvin, reminded the church of what the New Testament said about this. In discussing the fourth commandment, Calvin points out that salvation in Christ means we stop depending on our own efforts and rest on God’s grace in Christ. Calvin writes:

“…believers ought to lay aside their own works to allow God to work in them… We must be wholly at rest that God may work in us… This is not confined within a single day but extends throughout the whole course of our life, until, completely dead to ourselves, we are filled with the life of God. Christians ought therefore to shun completely the superstitious observance of days.”

Like the apostle Paul and Augustine, Calvin insisted that Sunday not be seen as the equivalent of the Old Testament Sabbath, only on a different day. “For,” Calvin wrote, “we are not celebrating it as a ceremony with the most rigid scrupulousness … Rather, we are using it as a remedy needed to keep order in the church.”

Let me summarize what we’ve seen so far. Even in the Old Testament, the Sabbath was given as a day to enjoy God and to enjoy his benefits. A holy day was to be a happy day, a feast day. The Sabbath commandment in its original form was for the Israelite nation in particular: it set them apart; it reminded them of God’s original creation of the world and of how he delivered them from Egypt; it foreshadowed an eternal rest that was yet to come. But in Jesus, the Old Testament foreshadowings became reality, and the ceremonial dimension of the law was no longer required. When the church decided (as a practical matter, not a legal demand) to designate when Christians would gather for public worship, the first day of the week was chosen, because it was on a Sunday that the new creation began, it was on a Sunday that liberation from bondage to death took place, in the resurrection of Christ.

Different Views

Today there are sincere Christians who think that the Sabbath must still be observed on the seventh day, Saturday, as the letter of the fourth commandment requires. Others Christians think Sunday should be the day, but they still believe Sunday observance is as strict a requirement as the Israelite Sabbath. However, both of these views appear to be mistaken. If we get bogged down in asking Saturday or Sunday, or in asking about various dos and don’ts, we won’t come up with right answers because we’re asking the wrong questions. The ceremonial, legal aspect of the fourth commandment comes to an end in Christ.

The observance of special seasons and days, what you eat on Fridays, what you do or don’t do on Saturdays or Sundays–these things are not the basis on which God judges us. They are not the basis on which we should judge others. If you find that observing certain seasons or adopting certain guidelines for your devotional life helps you to focus on Christ, fine. But don’t pretend they are the substance of the gospel. Paul’s New Testament letter to the Romans says, “One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). The letter of the law must give way to the Spirit.

Sabbath Spirit

So what does the Spirit of the Sabbath commandment mean for us today? First and foremost, it means that we rest in God, that we depend on the provision of God our Creator and not just our own efforts, and that we receive salvation through faith in Christ our Savior and not our own works. Is that your situation? Have you found in Jesus your joy and peace, your delight and your security? The New Testament letter to the Hebrews says, “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God… Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:9-10). Jesus Christ is that rest. He is the Lord of the Sabbath, the one source of rest for all who trust him. He says, “Come to me and I will give you rest?” How are you responding to that loving invitation? Are you resting in him by faith? That’s the deepest meaning of the fourth commandment.

Once you rest in Christ, he brings you from the letter of the law into the Spirit. The fourth commandment no longer lays a legal or ceremonial requirement on us. But does that mean we don’t need to think about making time for worship and rest? Did Christ bring us from the letter of the Sabbath law into the Spirit so we could become totally absorbed in work and in our own affairs, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no space for God and no time to enjoy ourselves? Did Christ bring us from the letter of the Sabbath law into the Spirit so that bosses could work employees till they drop? Of course not!

If you’re a business owner or managers, and you’re filled with the love of Christ and the Spirit of Christ, you won’t drive your employees ruthlessly. You won’t demand all their time and energy. Instead, you’ll respect the days an employee needs for worship, and you’ll make room for an employee’s personal and family life as well.

The Spirit of the fourth commandment also affects your personal life. Here are a few questions to consider: Are you the servant of a gracious God, or the slave of a demanding schedule? Do you regularly take time just to rest and enjoy God’s goodness? Or do you think everything is going to fall apart if you stop working for a moment? Can you take a vacation without constantly scurrying from here to there, and without always asking, “What time is it?” or “How much does it cost?” Do you make space in your life to enjoy the fruit of creation and the freedom of salvation? Do you set aside time each day for personal prayer and Bible reading? Do you celebrate God’s goodness with other people in the church on a regular basis?

God originally commanded the Sabbath as a day to enjoy, and though we no longer live under the ceremonial requirements of the Sabbath, the Spirit of Christ prompts us to enjoy God and his goodness to us. We’ve seen that the first Christians, rather than legislating a particular day, could be found worshiping God every day and enjoying frequent meals with fellow believers. Much the same thing happened in John Calvin’s time. The Sabbath day was not treated as a legal requirement, but did that mean nobody went to church any more? No, the fact is that worship services were held almost every day, attended by a great many people. That’s what can happen when you enter into God’s new creation in Jesus Christ. The Spirit of joy and rest and worship spills over into every day and into every aspect of life.

Prayer: Thank you, Lord, for the good gifts of your wonderful creation, and for the miraculous joy of your eternal salvation. Help us truly to rest in you, to rejoice in your love, and to relish every good gift that comes from above, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

By David Feddes. Originally broadcasted on the Back to God Hour and published in The Radio Pulpit.