While the world presses into us on all sides, shabbat sets our feet in spacious places. So Jesus says, 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).

For your encouragement, here are some things about shabbat I have learned that continue to deeply influence my growth in the kind of knowledge of God that leads to delight.

To build a sanctuary in time requires a start time (and a stop time).

The Jewish community does this exceptionally well. Following the Genesis pattern of evening and morning forming a day, they light candles on the evening of their Sabbath as a definitive starting point. As a definitive ending point to their Sabbath, they perform another ritual, this time extinguishing candles to say goodbye to Sabbath and welcome a new week.

The principle of shabbat from creation is this. Just as we need a day seven to complete our six-day work week, we need a start time for stopping on day seven.

It is not as easy as it sounds for at least three reasons.

First, the world is against you ceasing from work and entering into rest. It wants to squeeze you into its frantic, distorted shape. Second, our work never ends. We have to stop at a chosen time rather than wait until we finish. Third, we have become the Lord of our time. We are used to doing what we want when we want.

Shabbat, like every spiritual discipline, requires self-denial. We submit our work and time to our Master and then intentionally enter into his rest.

Shabbat is a weekly reminder that we must surrender.

This can be painful, especially at first, because it exposes and dissolves our artificial urgencies. Often, we are ruled by the tyranny of the urgent at the expense of the important. Like me, I’m sure you’ve learned that the most essential things in life are the most easily postponed.

The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, “What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?” And he said, “I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

But God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God (Luke 12:15-21).

These words are for every disciple, but I can tell you that as we age, we become more painfully aware of how true they are. We experience the anxiousness of the world’s barn-building mentality and how it crowds out God’s priorities. Take care, says our Savior, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

Not only does shabbat expose our artificial urgencies and misplaced priorities, but it also reveals to us the most essential things in life.

On the subject of postponing important things, C.S. Lewis observes that the future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. As Lewis often does, he puts his finger right on the pulse. What does he mean? We think of eternity as an indefinite or endless future. But the future, by definition, is a temporal part of time.

Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future. While gratitude looks to the past and love to the present, things like fear, avarice, lust, and ambition always look ahead to the future. “I’ve got to build another barn.”

Shabbat teaches us how to focus on the holy present.

It counters that spirit of restless activism that characterizes our over-anxious, over-busy, and over-filled lives. It liberates us from the tyranny of the urgent and our never-ending to-do lists. When shabbat starts, we stop to become wholly present in the holy present. There and there alone is where grace, knowledge, and pleasure dwell. Knowing God becomes our highest priority and greatest good.

The late Henri Nouwen, writing about the spiritual life, notes: “Jesus is the obedient one. That means He is total ear, totally open to the love of God. And if we are closed, we are surdus. That is the Latin word for deaf. The more ‘deaf’ we get, the more absurdus we become, and an absurd life is precisely a life in which we no longer listen and are constantly distracted by all sorts of voices and lose touch with the truth that we are the beloved.”

What we long for is an affirming word from a loving Father, “Well done my son, my daughter.” We search for it in our work, striving to be noticed, to impress, to be appreciated. Here is the irony. God is speaking affirmation into your life, but you have become deaf because of your busyness. Your existence is absurd.

Shabbat moves us from absurdity to obedience. How? It causes us to stop and listen. The root word for obedient in Latin is the same word from which we get to listen. Uniting obedient response with hearing is a very Hebraic way of thinking: Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

When you come to a real crisis in your faith, all you want to do is hear the voice of God. My beloved wife of thirty years, Jeanette, died three months after being diagnosed with an unusual illness. I was undone. God was distant, obscure, and enigmatic to me. All that I had done, everything I had taught, preached, and written, meant nothing to me. I simply wanted to hear the Spirit say, all is well.

Blessed be his Holy Name, he did just that.

A journey from absurdity to obedience, from deafness to hearing, is what shabbat teaches us. In our great Creator’s rest, his Spirit reveals how the world seduces us and how he transforms us. We stop and listen to what is most deeply true. We stand in the presence of a holy God who heals our selfish bent toward this world and the brokenness that results from our idolatries.

Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! (Psalm 46:10)

He will come if you build this kind of shabbat in response to his invitation. And after your precious time of shabbat ends, you will go forth into the world renewed in the power of Jesus’ Spirit.