Home	Our Hope
Bible Study		March 1, 2020
The Sabbath For Beginners

Introduction

The Christian world is such that most Christians have little idea how to keep the Sabbath. When they consider keeping the Sabbath, it can seem like an impossible change in lifestyle.

The Jews we read about in the Bible were raised from birth with Sabbath keeping. So, when they reached adulthood it was nothing for them to continue that. It isn't that way for Christians who begin keeping the Sabbath as adults.

Christians are more like the first generation of the Israelites who left Egypt - they struggle to understand why the manna only comes on six days out of seven.

In this short study, we'll look at how to begin keeping the Sabbath.

Some Background

It's important to understand that keeping the Sabbath does not make you a better Christian than someone else. We all grow as God leads us in the areas where God leads us.

Understanding that sanctification is a process and the Holy Spirit takes people through that process in different ways, it is not for us to judge a brother in areas where the Holy Spirit has not taken him. This is true of the Sabbath as well.

The Steps

So, God has called you to start keeping the Sabbath. That's an important first step. This change must be God's will in your life and it must be God's timing that causes you to take each step.

There are three more steps:

Not doing gainful employment on the Sabbath
Not causing others to work on the Sabbath
Preparing for the Sabbath

Allow God to also choose the order of these steps. For the Israelites leaving Egypt, God had them start with preparation day. For people who work 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday, not doing gainful employment may be God's first step. For people whose employment requires working on the Sabbath, it may be a different step.

Not Doing Gainful Employment

Gainful Employment doesn't only apply to whatever paid employment we might have. It includes other activities that are required to keep you and your family fed, clothed, housed, and so on. This would be things like home maintenance, car maintenance, and lawn care.

Sometimes an employer must require employees to work on weekends. For hourly staff, the employer prefers not to do this because it costs more. For salaried staff, the employer prefers not to do this because the employer likes weekends off as much as anyone. So most employers don't treat this lightly.

If these are unexpected events and rare, they can be considered as one of those circumstances that happen. If they are on-call or expected occurrences, some people have chosen not to accept pay. Again search your heart and pray. God may lead you out of situations like these.

Not Causing Others to do Your Work

Don't do things that encourage or require others to do your work on the Sabbath. Part of the message in the 4^th Commandment is that we cannot rest by having others do our work for us. An example of this would be having someone paint your house on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath is for all men. The 4^th Commandment includes visitors to Israel who were not Jews.

Preparing for the Sabbath

Most Christians don't recognize that God gave a special purpose to another day in addition to the Sabbath. When the Israelites were coming out of Egypt, God provided twice as much Manna on the day before the Sabbath so they could prepare for the Sabbath. That day came to be known as "the day of preparation" or just "preparation day."

In the same way, we should prepare for the Sabbath before the Sabbath. This tends to apply mostly to meals and home chores such as cleaning.

God told the Israelites not to start a fire on the Sabbath. This didn't mean they couldn't have a fire on the Sabbath and would need to freeze on the Sabbath. It meant they needed to start the fire on preparation day and could maintain it on the Sabbath. For this reason we do not have a problem with heating food on the Sabbath that was prepared before the Sabbath.

This may be the most difficult step of all for modern Christians. We generally don't worry about what we will eat the next day because there is always something in the freezer that you can throw in the microwave to thaw and then cook. This step requires a change in thinking, to where we plan for the future. This is a good thing to have in our lives anyway. It's also a message to us that we should prepare in this life for that future Sabbath rest.

Exceptions

There are exceptions, special cases where the Sabbath cannot be observed and these are perfectly acceptable. This is an example that Jesus gave:

Those who work in the temple (and tabernacles) do not profane the Sabbath

It's also important to understand that there will be circumstances where, despite your best intentions and even your plans and preparations, when you cannot keep the Sabbath. Jesus talked about this many times in many ways because the teachers of the law in his time had come to see the Sabbath as rigid rules that must be upheld. That was not what the Sabbath was meant to be. Some of Jesus' examples were:

David and his men were running from Saul and were hungry. They were allowed to eat the consecrated bread that only the priests were to eat
Even the Pharisees knew that, if their ox fell into a ditch on the Sabbath, they were allowed to work to get it out
While traveling on a Sabbath, Jesus' disciples were unable to prepare. They became hungry and it was acceptable for them to eat the grain by the roadside

The Sabbath is not a Death Pact, where you "do, or die trying." That's what the Pharisees had made it into, though. Instead, Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

We need to be careful not to drift in the wrong direction, though. A good heart will do it's best to keep the Sabbath; a bad heart will find excuses everywhere for not keeping the Sabbath or find ways to re-interpret Sabbath rest to make their lives more convenient. Because conflicting circumstances are normally rare, we should find that we are able to keep the Sabbath most of the time.

What to Expect

You should expect to have trouble with family and friends who are not keeping the Sabbath. They might think it is pointless, that you are inconveniencing them, and they may go so far as to pressure you to break the Sabbath.

Church people may do all of these things and worse. Some of them may say that you are becoming a Jew or that you are no longer a Christian. They may even quote misconstrued Bible verses. More than anything their actions are a statement about the modern church. The early churches kept the Sabbath as they were taught to by the apostles. In our time it is a foreign idea.

In this study we haven't put forward all the arguments why Christians should keep the Sabbath. The Bible is actually quite clear to those who want to hear.

Conclusion

If God has called you to keep the Sabbath, we welcome you in your big new adventure. At first it will seem like a big change, both in thinking and doing. In time it will become very normal.