A Sabbath Rest Quotes & Sayings

Noah, who remained innocent and just, God decided to open a path of salvation. In this way he gave humanity the chance of a new beginning. All it takes is one good person to restore hope! The biblical tradition clearly shows that this renewal entails recovering and respecting the rhythms inscribed in nature by the hand of the Creator. We see this, for example, in the law of the Sabbath. On the seventh day, God rested from all his work. He commanded Israel to set aside each seventh day as a day of rest, a Sabbath, — Pope Francis

Making room for gleaning limits and disciplines our daily exercise of power. Any of us who possesses any significant power should ask each day what we might leave undone that day for the sake of others' creativity. But on a weekly basis we are commanded not just to leave margins around our exercise of power but to withdraw from it altogether. In the practice of sabbath, as of making room for gleaning, we once again play in the footsteps of the Creator God, whose work was not without rest and within whose sabbath all the rest of the story has unfolded. — Andy Crouch

Yes, the early leaders and the people generally of this great nation recognized the necessity for spiritual support if the nation was to endure. They gave humble expression to this conviction in the inscription, 'In God We Trust' found on the coins of the land. The holy Sabbath was a day of rest and worship. Religious devotion in the home was a common practice. Family prayer, reading of the holy scriptures, and the singing of hymns were an everyday occurrence. There is every evidence that 'our fathers looked to God for their direction. — Ezra Taft Benson

God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath. — John Donne

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life - achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest. — Oliver Sacks

In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God: the rest he invites us to enter more fully so that we might know him more deeply. "Be still, and know that I am God." Some knowing is never pursued, only received. And for that, you need to be still. Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It is both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It is a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God - actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God - the things of God's nature and presence we miss in our busyness. — Mark Buchanan

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath - our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us. — Wayne Muller

No Leslie, I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest. — Vladimir Nabokov

Pausing for prayerful listening, even for a few minutes, brings everything that is important back into focus. — Shelly Miller

God's creation is a life-giving inhale for all of us, and Sabbath is the exhale. — Shelly Miller

The Bible nowhere states that people before the law observed the Sabbath as a day of rest or worship. — David K. Bernard

Though not a remarkably precocious child in other respects, she seemed to have very clear and correct views on almost every subject connected with her duty to God and her neighbor; was very truthful both in word and deed, very strict in her observance of the Sabbath
though the rest of the family were by no means particular in that respect
very diligent in her studies; respectful to superiors, and kind to inferiors and equals; and she was gentle, sweet-tempered, patient, and forgiving to a remarkable degree. — Martha Finley

One day a week I seek to rest
from earthly toil and sorrow.
Revitalized, I find the strength
to battle new tomorrows. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Ambition. Yes, that is my God.

When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC.

You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old are tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realize hits like a Biblical thunderclap.

The God Ambition is a false God and has always been. — Eric Weiner

Every time we turn to Christ in faith it is like a moment of Sabbath, a little foretaste of eternal rest and glory. The gift of that moment lies not in what we do but what we receive. It is the holy time set aside to receive the greatest gift of God ever has to give, which is himself, in his own beloved Son. — Phillip Cary

I would advise anyone who is at the start of a rest ritual like the Sabbath, to take it slowly and grow incrementally into it. Recognize that it will be hard at first. It's a discipline but then it is a true and deep joy. — Erica Brown

A life built upon Sabbath is contented because in rhythms of rest we discover our time is full of the holiness of God. — Shelly Miller

it is extraordinary how few Christians make any concerted effort to keep the commandment of sabbath rest. We have somehow twisted Jesus' pithy rebuke of the Pharisees, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27) from a warning against legalism into a license for neglect. We seem to forget that in the very next breath Jesus asserts, "so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath" (v. 28), thus asserting his lordship over - not exemption from or indifference to - this very good gift from God to his image bearers. — Andy Crouch

A week filled up with selfishness, and the Sabbath stuffed full of religious exercises, will make a good Pharisee, but a poor Christian. There are many persons who think Sunday is a sponge with which to wipe out the sins of the week. Now, God's altar stands from Sunday to Sunday, and the seventh day is no more for religion than any other. It is for rest. The whole seven are for religion, and one of them for rest. — Henry Ward Beecher

God presents the Sabbath rest as a shelter we can enter. (Hebrews 4:1-11) — Charles R. Swindoll

Sloth, or acedia, is the unheralded, almost hidden, besetting sin
of our times - unheralded because it is misunderstood; hidden
because its symptoms are disguised or misdiagnosed; and besetting
us all to some degree because we have overlooked a mighty, Godgiven cure. It is, as the Church fathers taught, deadly. It strikes at the
very roots of our freedom - at human dignity itself. Sabbath rest
cannot be understood or appreciated apart from awareness of this
sin that undermines everything Sabbath was created to give to the
human person for his edification and development. — Charlotte Ostermann

We have somehow twisted Jesus' pithy rebuke of the Pharisees, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27) from a warning against legalism into a license for neglect. We seem to forget that in the very next breath Jesus asserts, "so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath" (v. 28), thus asserting his lordship over - not exemption from or indifference to - this very good gift from God to his image bearers. There is perhaps no single thing that could better help us recover Jesus' lordship in our frantic, power-hungry world than to allow him to be Lord of our rest as well as our work. The challenge is disarmingly simple: one day a week, not to do anything that we know to be work. — Andy Crouch

A country Sabbath is suggestive of rest and peace and quiet--sleepy blue skies, shadows golden and green, sunny fields, and the pink and snow of apple blossoms. June is at her height of radiant loveliness now. What a pity it is such a short time.

I am here in my old room--my little absolute kingdom. Here I read, write and dream. My favourite pictures adorn the walls, my well read books are on their shelves and my clock ticks me cheerful company. — L.M. Montgomery

Love always precedes repentance. Divine love is a catalyst for our turning, our healing. Where fear & threat may gain our compliance, love captures our heart. It changes the heavy burden of the "have-to's" of imposed obedience to the "get-to's", a joyful response to the genuine love of God. It is in the security of this love we find Sabbath (rest). — Michael M. Rose

As a moral and social institution, a weekly rest is invaluable. It is a quiet domestic reunion for the bustling sons of toil. It ensures the necessary vacation in those earthly and turbulent anxieties and affections, which would otherwise become inordinate and morbid. It brings around a season of periodical neatness and decency, when the soil of weekly labour is laid aside, and men meet each other amidst the decencies of the sanctuary, and renew their social affections. But above all, a Sabbath (one day of rest in seven) is necessary for man's moral and religious interests. — Robert Dabney

In its character, therefore, the Sabbath is not cessation from activity but cessation from a particular kind of activity - namely, the six-day labor that is intrinsically good but has suffered the curse after the fall. God did not rest because he was tired; rather, it was the rest of completion, the rest of a king who has taken his throne. Representing the consummation, this sabbatical pattern was the way not only of hoping for the new creation but of experiencing it and participating in its peace. — Michael S. Horton

Our Lord tells us that the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27): it is a witness to our creatureliness, to the fact that we can rest because the government of all things is not on our shoulders, and our Lord is King over all creation. — Rousas John Rushdoony

If you can't take a nap, if you can't take a day off, heaven's going to drive you nuts. — Mark Driscoll

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest. — Walter Brueggemann

The Sabbath is a token between God and His people. It is a holy day, given by the Creator to man as a day upon which to rest, and reflect upon sacred things. God designed it to be observed through every age as a perpetual covenant. It was to be regarded as a peculiar treasure, a trust to be carefully cherished. - Our High Calling, p. 343. — Ellen G. White

Money gained on Sabbath-day is a loss, I dare to say. No blessing can come with that which comes to us, on the devil's back, by our willful disobedience of God's law. The loss of health by neglect of rest, and the loss of soul by neglect of hearing the gospel, soon turn all seeming profit into real loss. — Charles Spurgeon

The whole love of the "Law" has been lavished on and has cherished the Sabbath. As the day of rest, it gives life its balance and rhythm; it sustains the week. Rest is something entirely different from a mere recess, from a mere interruption of work, from not working. A recess is something essentially physical, part of the earthly everyday sphere. Rest, on the other hand, is essentially religious, part of the atmosphere of the divine; it leads us to the mystery, to the depth from which all commandments come, too. It is that which re-creates and reconciles, the recreation in which the soul, as it were, creates itself again and catches the breath of life-- that in life which is sabbatical. — Leo Baeck

ATTITUDE 1: FOLLOW THE GOLDEN RULE ATTITUDE 2: REQUIRE AGREEMENT ATTITUDE 3: SOW ONLY GOOD SEED ATTITUDE 4: BE A SERVANT-LEADER ATTITUDE 5: DELEGATE AND EMPOWER ATTITUDE 6: WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN ATTITUDE 7: BE SLOW TO JUDGE ATTITUDE 8: BE FAIR IN DISCIPLINE ATTITUDE 9: MAINTAIN PERSPECTIVE ATTITUDE 10: OBSERVE A SABBATH REST ATTITUDE 11: HAVE A VISION ATTITUDE 12: NURTURE JOY ATTITUDE 13: MIND THE SEASONS ATTITUDE 14: BE VIGILANT — William C. Oakes

The day of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called Sa-bat, meaning "heart-rest." It was believed that on this day, the woman in the moon, Ishtar, as the moon goddess was known in Babylon, was menstruating, for in Babylon, as in virtually every ancient and primitive society, there had been since the earliest times a taboo against a woman working, preparing food, or traveling when she was passing her monthly blood. On Sa-bat, from which comes our Sabbath, men as well as women were commanded to rest, for when the moon menstruated, the taboo was on everyone. Originally (and naturally) observed once a month, the Sabbath was later to be incorporated by the Christians into their Creation myth and made conveniently weekly. So nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation. — Tom Robbins

My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest
a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side. — Angela Carter

Graciousness, courtesy, compassion-this is hesed. Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed "a year of complete rest" (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on. — Richard J. Foster

I am no preacher of the old legal Sabbath. I am a preacher of the gospel. The Sabbath of the Jew is to him a task; the Lord's Day of the Christian, the first day of the week, is to him a joy, a day of rest, of peace, and of thanksgiving. And if you Christian men can earnestly drive away all distractions, so that you can really rest today, it will be good for your bodies, good for your souls, good mentally, good spiritually, good temporally, and good eternally. — Charles Spurgeon

The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God's people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as "hands" in the service of a command economy. Rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness. All of that is implicit in the reality and exhibit of divine rest. — Walter Brueggemann

The seventh day of creation is the most eloquent and insightful as to the nature of God. From a literary perspective, the Sabbath forms the pinnacle of the story. Like the dramatic kiss of a soldier returning from war, this is the moment we're not meant to miss. In choosing rest as the grand finale, God reveals himself as one driven by neither anxiety nor fear but one who finds gladness in both the work of creation and the creation of work. — Margaret Feinberg