what a sabbatical.

you may have noticed i took a short sabbatical from the blogging world from june 3rd up until right now. my mind was overloaded and rest was needed and had. i didn't feel like there was anything i was learning that was really worthwhile to post. but i'm back in action! refreshed and ready to go for a new season of life.

here's a little snippet of what i've been learning this summer. i presented it as my independent study for project: columbia, so when you read this, know that there are many things in it that i wish i had time to develop more.

"I did my study on busyness and the Sabbath because it’s something that I continually struggle with, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly—it never ends, and it’s something that I continually wrestle with. So why am I a slave to busyness, and a slave to something that I have been freed from in Christ? Knowing that I am a slave to it, it’s still something that I like, something that I don’t necessarily want to be freed from. It gives me pleasure, it gives me worth, and ultimately busyness is something in which I find a part of my identity—my identity apart from Christ. That’s not what I was made for and I want to desire to live differently and live obediently to the holy calling of Sabbath and to rest and refreshment in the Lord. Because it is a direct disobedience to God.

I did a lot of study on the Sabbath and learned a lot from looking at this area that I purposely don’t ever think about (even though I want and need my soul to be continually rejuvenated). God gives us the gift of rest in the fourth commandment in Exodus. It is a privilege that I keep it, and I want to think of this as more of a gift, something that benefits me, rather than another religious duty or something that I should do legalistically. Because of the fall, work has been polluted and is described as a painful toil, but God, in his love, wants us to be able to work hard without being worn down by worry—thus the Sabbath. God knew when he was writing these commands that we need rest, and it shows how devoted our God is to loving us despite how foolish we are that we even need a command. The commandment requires rest both physically and spiritually. There is a gladness that comes from relief of the body and according to Genesis 2:3 (“So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”), there was an inactivity—a simple enjoyment of the world that God made, a delight and thanksgiving in his Creation.

One article I read talked about rest and work as a rhythm that God built into the world when He made it.

I wanted to look at my life and see what this means for me and my busyness that I hold onto. If I know the way God made it, that I am supposed to rest, to seek that out and to make that a holy priority in my life, then why don’t I do it? Ultimately it stems from my own unbelief in the gospel—an unbelief in the Lord’s promise to control my life despite my actions, and an unbelief in the Lord’s sovereignty. It also shows my lack of love for the Lord, because I am not obeying Him in this area, and shows my lack of trust that he will take care of me. God is sovereign over time. One article I read stated, “God sets boundaries of time for our activities, and our submission to those limits represents our trust in him to take care of us. One entailment of God as Lord of time is that we are to recognize time as a gift. We do not control the time we have—God has given it to us and can do with it as he pleases.” We can only humbly receive time from him, and we must be good stewards of it. So there is a tension between using that time wisely for good, and using it to rest. The practice of this in my life is hard. Wisdom is taking every opportunity and fully using the time granted us. It’s in Scripture to both make the most of evangelistic opportunities and also to seek God’s will and cultivate holiness. “To redeem the time means to fill it with divine purpose, not just with any and every activity.”

Another article talked about something called “holy busyness.” It is okay to be busy if it is a balance of working hard as a manifestation of trusting God and cultivating times of rest, but not if we are busy to justify ourselves. It must be grounded in the gospel: Who we are comes before what we do, and we must remember that our relationship with God precedes the activity we do for him. God has provided the gifts of time and work, and we can trust that each is sufficient for the other. Therefore, holy busyness foes not complain about not having enough time, for ultimately such grumbling is directed against God—He has given us our time. But when it comes to rest, we have to remember that God made us creatures before he made us Christians.

Our priority has to be relationship with God, and out of that should flow our activity. “Too much busyness today is not rightly oriented, even if it has good motives, because it has lost sight of the primacy of knowing God.” One question my mind continually comes back to is ‘Do I love my works/ministry/job/people (and even doing these things in the name of the Lord) more than I love Christ Himself?’ I think that hits the heart of the issue. I love what I am doing more than I love Christ, and that is why it is a struggle for me to rest."