Speaker 0 00:04 Hi and welcome to that makes total sense. The podcast where we talk about faith, finance and everyday life in a way that makes total sense. I'm your host Alexis city. On this podcast you'll hear the personal stories of friends I'll be interviewing who are doing familiar things in new and innovative ways. We'll answer questions specifically about money and our relationship with it and we'll explore faith and Bible teaching together. In all of these. It's not about changing our convictions as much as it is about messing with our methods. We'll have a lot of moments here together where we pause and say, that makes total sense.
Speaker 0 00:44 Hi everybody. Welcome to that makes total sense. I am Alexis B steady. So originally when I wrote this article and I submitted it to family Christian, I called it or it was called six things I've learned from observing Sabbath, which was great. And then I found myself thinking about like recording it for the podcast and I was kind of going over the points in my head and as I was doing that, I found myself naturally replacing the word observe with the word celebrate. And I thought that was really cool. And so maybe it was because like we were in a little season of celebration. We had a birthday this weekend in our house. And so now I'm kind of like, man, I wish I had called it seven things I've learned from celebrating Sabbath instead of six things I've learned from observing Sabbath. So anyway, here, so here it is.
Speaker 0 01:40 So I told you this week and we had a birthday, we celebrated, um, the birthday of our third child, our one of our sons. And it was super special because yes, all of the birthdays of our kids are special and our loved ones and, and we love them. We love celebrating. But yesterday was February 29th and our son was born on February 29th and so this was, he was turning a, this was his eighth year, it's his eighth kind of birthday, but really it was only his second birthday or his third if you count the actual day that he was born. And so it was super fun. We took him to the indoor skydiving place cause they were actually running like a promotion, like a special for people with a leap your birthdays. And then my mom even sent over a coupon and we didn't get to do this, but um, there was a promotion at the olive garden, I think it was where they were giving away for free desserts for everybody who has a leap your birthday and the kind of the language on their promotion was we're making up for all of these birthdays that you've missed and we're celebrating this one.
Speaker 0 02:47 So you get three for the missed birthdays and then you get one for the one that you're celebrating. So anyway, so it's super fun, you know, kind of a lot of, kind of a lot of gimmicky but fun stuff for really pure birthdays. And I was kinda thinking about that and thinking like, obviously we celebrate him every year. We celebrate his birth every year. The fact that he's turning a year older, but most years we're forced to pick a day. We either have to do it like before on the 28th of February or we have to do it on March 1st and we still celebrate. But that also got me thinking, we actually celebrate his birthday. We don't just observe it. Like I'm thinking we observe president's day, right? I've never been to a president's day party. I've never had a president's day piece of cake. But like the mail won't run and the banks are closed.
Speaker 0 03:36 And so if you, because there were in observance of president's day, sometimes even kids are off of school. Yes, maybe best buy will try and have a sale to get you buy a new TV or refrigerator. But most of the time things like that we observe, um, we don't celebrate like we do birthdays. And again, that kind of took me back to the Sabbath and going, man, I've, I've spent a lot of years, which all kind of go into kind of with using this language with myself of like, I observe the Sabbath in a certain way. But really I think it's, it's kinda cool because another lesson that I feel like I'm learning about it, um, that I think God is teaching me is that we can celebrate Sabbath. Um, and it's a good to celebrate because it's good to celebrate coming into his rest. So I love this scripture from Matthew.
Speaker 0 04:24 It's a chapter 11, 28 through 30 and most commonly like kind of the way if we've memorized it, it probably is something like come to me all who are weary and heavy Laden. I think that's how I've seen it most and heavy Laden and I will give you rest. And of course that's Jesus speaking. But I also love the way the passion translation puts it and it says, are you weary carrying a heavy burden? Then come to me, I will refresh your life for I am your Oasis. Simply join your life with mine. Learn my ways and you'll discover that I'm gentle, humble, easy to place. You will find refreshment and rest in me for all that I require of you will be pleasant and easy to bear. And I love the way that that translation puts it. Plus the word refreshment makes me think of birthday cake.
Speaker 0 05:23 So there you go. That's the seventh lesson. If you kind of go from, uh, from, from the end there, there's the seventh lesson lesson. Sabbath is about celebration. Maybe not merely observant. Sabbath is about celebration. So there's number seven now we'll start back at the top in with number one. So, um, I've actually noticed the reason that I wrote this article a while back was that I feel like when we kind of see trends that I've noticed, and I don't mean tryna in a bad way, I just feel like it's trending, meaning it's kind of coming to the surface kind of that a lot of people in this evangelical Christian Church space are kind of taking another look at Sabbath. And I feel like they're revisiting and kind of looking again at what it might look like to observe or celebrate Sabbath. I think there are a lot more people now who are starting to consider what it would actually look like logistically to take a day off during the week and dedicate that just to worship and, and rest and, and kind of refocusing on God.
Speaker 0 06:34 And I think it's really, really beautiful. Um, but for me it's actually also pretty familiar because way back in college, I'm going to say almost, not quite, almost two decades ago now, um, a small group of my friends and I, we started kind of experimenting. That would be my word. I bet you can ask them and they would probably kind of each have a different way that they looked at it. But for me it kind of looked like this experiment of what would it look like to observe Sabbath. Um, I didn't have any background, any background in, in not just Sabbath observance or celebration, but really kind of this like logistically kind of practical part of faith. It wasn't that I didn't go to church or you know, read my Bible or things like that, but, um, it was just like this look looked and felt very, very different from anything I was used to.
Speaker 0 07:29 And so this group of us, we just kinda started reading the Bible and we were studying the Bible, the places where he talked about it and we started kind of asking out loud of ourselves and of each other, um, what about these practices? Like what would it look like if we kind of started doing it? Like, are they relevant still? Was this something just for old Testament times or Bible times or what did that look like? And so a lot of us actually, I mean, I would say I became curious enough, I think a lot of us did to actually try and, and just give it a shot. So this is now probably 18 years ish later. And my husband and I, we've got four kids and we're still holding to some measure of Sabbath celebration or observance. Um, and actually, so are a lot of our friends from that group.
Speaker 0 08:22 So we're not like quite as orthopraxy as, um, a lot of the people that we know. Um, but we have been kind of more so than others. And we've also ebbs and flows, float a lot with this over the years. And I think that that's okay. I'm becoming more and more comfortable with kind of this idea that God is okay with us. Um, wrestling with, um, with his word and what it means to walk that out. And I don't think that he's, you know, upstairs in heaven scratching any sort of tally marks next to our names because you know, Oh, she gets an E for effort. There are, Oh, she dropped the ball there. But I do think that he roots us on when we're attempting, you know, and in our way when we're attempting to learn something new about him by actually pursuing his word in indeed, you know, and, and, and how we live in what we do in our works.
Speaker 0 09:20 And also, you know, in our thoughts and our meditation, um, in our emotions and in our words, you know, in our actual words and when we speak that out. So anyway, here we go. And that spirit here are kind of the original six things that I have learned over the years personally from observing Sabbath. The first one is that Sabbath is peaceful in the Jewish community, which is where my husband and I have had the opportunity that real privilege and blessing to, to minister some, the traditional greeting for the Sabbath in the Jewish community is Shabbat Shalom. And you've probably heard that. And the phrase literally means Sabbath piece, but it's actually so much richer than just that phrase, Shabbat Shalom or Sabbath piece, because Shalom can mean a lot of different things. It's kind of a multifaceted word. It's used for hello and goodbye, but it also carries the connotation of wholeness or of being complete.
Speaker 0 10:26 The very first Sabbath that we read about in the Bible came at precisely the moment when God was finished with creation in Genesis two one through three. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 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. What he made was whole. He'd finished right, he completed his work and his first order of business when he was done was peaceful rest. So with the Sabbath, at the end of that first week, God said goodbye, which I love. It's, you know, he said goodbye to the work of creating and hello to the act of fellowshipping with his creation, which I just think is so beautiful.
Speaker 0 11:28 But I know that in my life, peace doesn't always come that easily. There is always something to worry about or something I can think about or something that I think I can do about that thing that I might be thinking about or worrying about. But Sabbath is a good day to just let all of that go and embrace the peace that God has for us to quit trying to work, to quit trying to create some sort of solution for that thing and just fellowship with God and just be with him and be in peace on that day in that space, in that time. Number two, Sabbath is a gift. And I know you guys are familiar with this story but it is one of my favorites, one Sabbath afternoon, right? Jesus is walking through these fields with his disciples and some of them plucked off some of the heads of grain and ate it for a snack.
Speaker 0 12:27 And I'm like, this is always been like, I don't know, I'm like, this is weird. And then I have a good friend who is telling me, have you ever actually done that? Cause it's really good to just pick off that head of weed and do it. And she said it's really tasteful now. Now that I've been diagnosed with celiac disease, that's not really an option for me. But you know in the kingdom, here we go. So they picked off the head of grain and ate it for a snack. They're kind of just eating as they're walking. And then Jesus became the target and his disciples became the target of outrage, basically, because there was some of the religious leaders that were under the impression that the disciples, by doing that, we're actually in direct disobedience to God's laws about the Sabbath. Now they're walking with Jesus doing this.
Speaker 0 13:18 And Jesus is not the one who says anything. Um, it's the religious leaders. I mean, I'm, I'm guessing maybe Jesus is picking some off too. I don't really know. But, um, he, he's, he's not the one who specing about it. So some of the religious leaders are fussing about it and Jesus opens his mouth and sets them straight. And we've seen him do this a lot in the gospels. And what he does here is he really tells a story that's found. I, I should've looked it up. I think it's in Chronicles, but, but, um, but you can find this where King David and his men did something that Jesus frames as being even more controversial. Right? So the story was that David and his men were fleeing from Saul actually. And they were really hungry because they, um, you know, have you, if you've read the story, remember the story.
Speaker 0 14:12 It's not like they were gearing up to go into battle. It's kinda like they were just fleeing. Like they just split and they didn't really have anything. They didn't have any rations or anything with them. Like, you know, a proper military would have. And so they're really hungry and they go into the temple and are basically like a high priest. Can we have something eat? Cause we're really hungry. And of course the priest is like, I don't really have anything. I've got this showbread but like you're not really supposed to be eating it but you can, you know, I guess you can eat it. And so and so they ate it and they retired and they were worn out. And Jesus is kind of retelling the story that obviously the religious leaders would have been familiar with. And then he says this famous quote, this famous verse Mark two 27 the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath and that got me thinking the Sabbath was made for man. The Sabbath was created by God as a gift for us.
Speaker 0 15:17 I will admit though that early on in this journey that I kind of described previously, I concentrated a lot more on the responsibility that I felt to do things. The kind of in quotes the right way rather than focusing on the present itself. I was a lot like the Pharisees of Jesus' day. I, I'll admit it, I'm not proud of it, but I was, but part of it was stemmed from this, this feeling that it'd be kind of like if someone gave you a brand new car and you get all depressed instead of excited like you, you would be super excited if someone gave you a brand new car. But it would be like instead of that responding with like depressed or kind of this feeling of like a heaviness because you're looking at this new car thinking, Oh great, now I've got to maintain this thing. Now I've got to change the oil, not, I've got to make sure the tires.
Speaker 0 16:10 And you're like, this sounds crazy. Yeah. I mean the car is going to have to be careful, but that should not take away from the joy that you get from receiving a brand new car. But that's kind of honestly how I felt when I Risperidone kind of received this gift of the Sabbath was it felt a little burdensome. But I will tell you from, from my experience, the Sabbath is a gift from God. And the blessings that come with that gift definitely far outweigh any burdens that we might perceive come along with it. So maybe that's just me, but I'm just kinda throwing it out there. You know, some things that, that I have had to learn and kind of work through on this journey. So number one, Sabbath is peaceful. Number two, the Sabbath is a gift. Number three, the Sabbath is about rest.
Speaker 0 17:06 Okay? Captain obvious here, the Sabbath is about rest. But when we first started delving into Sabbath observance, um, like I said, way back in college, it felt more like work to me at times than it did rest, especially at the beginning. So I'm just gonna throw it out there and my friends who were with me then know this to be true. Yes, I socialized a lot. Okay. And I played more than I really cared to admit at this point. But even with all of the socialization and the parties and the playing, I, there was still part of me that always felt like there was this work to do. Kind of hanging over my head. And I feel like a lot of college students feel that way. Like yeah, there's a lot of um, you know, time with friends and stuff like that. But in the back of your mind, you're probably thinking, I totally have a test at 9:00 AM, you know, or I've totally got stuff I could could be doing.
Speaker 0 18:00 Or if I don't go do my laundry, I'm going to be wearing the same clothes for the next three days, you know, cause I won't have another chance to do it. So, you know, I always had homework to do, exams to study for, you know, laundry mat was a real thing. Dishes for sure. Um, group projects, stuff like that make in the midst of all of that, making time for rest. And really what I felt like making time to do nothing, making time to do essentially nothing felt like work to me. But one of the things I learned was that planning for the rest part, it's not just part of the process, it is part of the process, but it's also part of the enjoyment. So when I started preparing earlier in the week and building my schedule around the idea that I was going to be resting for a whole day, it made the resting easier for sure.
Speaker 0 18:53 But it also like grew my anticipation, if that makes sense. So I started to get excited about taking the day to rest instead of being anxious about the stuff I wasn't getting done cause I was planning better. I was uh, reaching, trying to use my time better and now my kids have felt the same way. You know, when we start cleaning up the house and saying, you know, we're getting ready for Sabbath. Like they know there's going to be a time when it, when it's just going to be resting and relaxing that that's coming up. And kind of the signal for that rest is the fact that we're prepping for it. You know, we're trying to get the house ready, we're trying to get meals ready, you know, things like that. But I think that were built. I think that God built us in such a way that anticipation is actually part of the joy and the prepping and the planning and the process is actually part of the joy.
Speaker 0 19:52 So I know you remember like when you were a kid and you were getting ready to go to a birthday party, I remember for hours before the party kind of feeling those butterflies in my stomach and that just kind of extended the joy that I would have when I was at the party. Or even now when I'm planning for a vacation, we're looking forward to it. We're talking even as a family about how much fun it's going to be, right? We go to the grocery store, we get the supplies. It extends that joy of the actual event because you know the events pretty short in comparison to how long we might take to plan it. And I think that Sabbath is the same way that it is restful and it is a short period of time. But even the prepping and planning can be part of that joy in the process if we let it.
Speaker 0 20:40 Number four, Sabbath is Holy. And I'm aware that Holy, um, feels very churchy. It is kind of a churchy biblical word, but we, many of us know the definition of it. It just means to set something apart. And so the Sabbath being Holy just means that the Sabbath is intended to be a day that would look different from every other day of the week on our calendar. And again, this is kind of about the lessons I have learned, but I really struggled with this especially at first. And what I struggled with in this, in this aspect of Sabbath being Holy, is I went through a period where I felt like if I was doing my best to observe this Sabbath, that somehow that made me Holy and maybe made me holier than thou made me, made me holier than you if you didn't do that. And unfortunately, I acted like that sometimes.
Speaker 0 21:42 Um, and I hate to admit it, but it's true. But Jesus, Jesus seemed to in, I wouldn't say tired at his own voice, but his voice didn't get tired any and he doesn't get tired of his, but it's like he was continually communicating to us that we can't make ourselves Holy. We can't make ourselves solely by anything we do or anything we wish or anything, only he can make us Holy. So I say, go for it. Make the day look different. It's good to do that. It's okay to do that. And some people take the day off of social media or they don't check their work email. There are some families who don't cook and they eat leftovers or some families who make it different because that's their day to go to a restaurant. Um, in the Jewish tradition, it's super common to set aside the day by having a nice family meal together. There's a special bread and candles and blessings and all of that is really, really good. It was just that for me, I had to remember and kind of continually take stock of the idea that the day is Holy, the Sabbath is Holy and we are Holy. But we are Holy because both of those things are Holy because God said so. Not because we've done anything to earn that title of Holy, including, um, our efforts to make the Sabbath be set apart or look Holy in our lives. Number five, Sabbath is for worship.
Speaker 0 23:29 We've already talked about how God gave us a Sabbath as a gift. It's an act of his love and a beautiful, and I would submit maybe even a perfect response to God's love is to worship him too. To show him our love back. And I think that that's beautiful worship. Also though is, is used for saying like worshiping in a corporate setting, right? Like we went to a worship service this morning. It's, it's Sunday when I'm recording this. And that's kind of where some of the Sabbath is for worship idea can get a little tricky because then the question is, will, when do you do it? Um, you're going to worship. Yes. I think we should be worshiping all the time. I think we should, you know, we should have an independent times of worship as well. I'm worshiping God. You know, when we see flowers and things like that, when we're talking about Sabbath and we're talking about Sabbath being a special time for worship.
Speaker 0 24:31 And so that begs the question, when, when do you do this? When do you worship? You do it on Sunday? Do you do it on Saturday? You don't Wednesday and you're no stranger to this. You know that there are whole denominations that have formed out of disagreements about this very question. When do we worship? When do we celebrate or observe Sabbath, um, and individuals if left on her own. Sometimes our own convictions. We can get pretty dogmatic about that same question. But after all of these years, my question, and maybe what I would submit to you is maybe it doesn't matter when as much as it does, how John four is one of my favorite chapters right now. I come back to this and find myself returning to this chapter over and over and over again. And this is where we see Jesus revealing his identity to the woman at the well, a Samaritan woman.
Speaker 0 25:41 And in that chapter, in his conversation with her, she's asking questions about where do we worship you or your people say it's here. My people say it's there. And he says, so she's not asking when she's asking where, but his answer is very profound and he says, the day is coming when it won't matter which mountain you worship on because worshipers are going to come and worship the father in spirit and in truth. And he says that in fact God is seeking worshipers just like that, who will worship him in spirit and in truth. And I think that that's really profound because it sets our focus back on him and it takes it away a little bit from those details of when and where and in what way and how. And it just puts the focus on worshiping him and it puts the focus on seeking him in truth and recognizing that he is spirit, which I think speaks to us, that his boundaries aren't the same as ours. And number six, the last one, cause we did seven at the beginning. Sabbath is for healing.
Speaker 0 27:05 If Jesus was known for anything among the religious leaders in his time, I think one of the, the main things he was known for was disrupting their status quo. And he drew attention to the fact that he was disrupting their status quo a lot. Right. And one of the things that he did that was drew a lot of attention and was disruptive in a lot of ways were the way that was the way that he healed people. So I'm going through the gospels right now. I've been reading like a chapter a day of the gospels for a couple of months, few months, and I was, I have been astonished going back through these, just kind of reading them over, you know, one after another after another and how many of these healing encounters Jesus had with various people in the gospels took place on the Sabbath. So like don't take my word for it, you know, go to your favorite Bible app or whatever and look this up and see if, if it doesn't surprise you too, because I just think it's been, it's crazy.
Speaker 0 28:13 There's so many of these moments that happen on the Sabbath and much of the time, if not most of the time, you'll notice that these, a lot of the religious leaders who were present when he's doing this or who have heard about it, get really mad at him. They actually become furious and a lot of cases, and it's not necessarily that what they're presenting is that it's not necessarily because of the fact that he has healed someone. It's because of the fact that he has done it on the Sabbath. They're angry because they're insisting that he's doing work on the Sabbath, which is totally against all of the regulations that they had and every way that they had to observe or celebrate the Sabbath was not to do work. And so there he's doing the healing work that he was doing. They're chastising formate him for it, but he wasn't imagine that. I'm like, Jesus. He wasn't super concerned about their chastisement. What I see in those is that it was more important to Jesus that the people became well and whole and healed.
Speaker 0 29:22 And I think Jesus may have seen the Sabbath as the perfect platform for that kind of miracle because the Sabbath is an earthly picture of entering into God's eternal rest, even beginning with our salvation, but also continuing with our healing. Um, in the passion translation, Hebrews four nine through 11 says, so we conclude that there is still a full and complete rest waiting for believers to experience as we enter into God's faith, rest life. We cease from our own works just as God celebrates his finished works and rests in them. So then we must give our all and be eager to experience this faith rest life so that no one falls short by following the same pattern of doubt and unbelief. And so we get Sabbath. And in Hebrews, there's all sorts of this beautiful word, word, picture, language of things that we've seen in the Bible, things that we've seen in the old Testament being a picture being, a snapshot, being a shadow, being a preview of what we'll experience a when Jesus comes, when we meet him.
Speaker 0 30:38 And then also eternally when you know there's a new heaven and a new earth and things are made whole and right and well again. And I think that Jesus healing on the Sabbath is so beautiful because the Sabbath is that picture for us of wholeness and wellness and healing and rest. And so I think sometimes the Pharisees obviously didn't understand, a lot of the religious leaders didn't understand his point, didn't understand what he was doing. Um, but I don't want for us to miss it either because Jesus came not only to save us, but to make us well and to help us enter into his rest. So there it is, six plus one, seven things that I've learned over the years, even this weekend from trying to celebrate and observe and seek God out in his Sabbath. I am definitely no expert, no theology degree here, just almost a couple of decades of trying to dig in and walk this whole faith thing out by trying to follow Jesus and trying to do what I can to imitate him.
Speaker 0 31:50 So the bottom line is that if you want to observe or celebrate Sabbath, it doesn't need to be intimidating. It doesn't need to be overly complicated or overly religious or all about the rules. We can look at it as a present. The Sabbath is a present that our good father gave us so that we can enjoy it with him. So Shabbat Shalom. So thank you again so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss an episode. Share the link with your friends. You can visit
[email protected] and until next time, this is Alexis Piseti remembering to do well for ourselves so we can do good for others.
Speaker 2 32:36 <inaudible>.
