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Thursday, September 27, 2007

How to Experience the Perpetual Sabbath

What is more important? Thinking of God daily, whenever you get a spare moment to meditate on him or talking to him moment by moment as you would to a friend?

Or is it more important to be fixated on a 24-hour period when we have to refrain from secular activities, have to or should worship with others, pay your tithes and offerings, visit people in hospitals or prisons--well maybe that's not so bad--attend choir practice, young people's meetings, special hour of prayer during mid-afternoon, and all the other trappings of rigid Sabbath keeping?

Do people who need to work on Sabbath every other Saturday or every 4th or 6th Saturday to support their families or themselves, are they breaking the Sabbath commandment? Are those who routinely show up in church on Sabbath morning and pat themselves on the back that they are upstanding Sabbath-keeping Adventists necessarily more heaven-bound than those unfortunate souls who have to punch the clock during some Saturday mornings to not be a burden on society, their families or their God?

Or maybe all these activities are not that bad provided you really want to or need to. But to feel you have to, now that's not living life to the fullest. Perhaps if we asked God to really enable us to keep the Sabbath holy, not as a means to salvation, but as a means to spending quality time with him, that would not be so bad after all.

Why just consider one 24-hour period holy to the Lord? Why not observe and enjoy the perpetual Sabbath that has no end and no beginning. I'm speaking of a conceptual day of rest and ceaseless worship of God in all you do and say.

When the sun sets on Sabbath evening, I thank God for the blessings of the traditional Adventist-Jewish Sabbath and thank him for the beginning of the ongoing reality of his Perpetual Sabbath rest.

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