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How the Sabbath Is Missional
In our culture of hustle and grit, we’re oriented toward doing. The compulsion to do more infects every aspect of life—knowledge work, youth sports, civic action, and church. Our lives are measured by what we accomplish for our bosses, our families, and even for God.
I’ve spent decades in missional movements, serving in an evangelistic college ministry and then in a church that sends church planters and missionaries around the globe. Those movements have cultivated in me a deep desire to see the gospel go near and far. I’ve learned a lot about doing for God but little about resting in him. The practice of Sabbath—a 24-hour day of rest devoted to the Lord—has rarely been talked about.
Like our culture, these church contexts have mistaken rest as a means to an end. We only stop our work long enough to recover, then get back to the real work of sharing the gospel, planting churches, and sending missionaries. This misses that God’s design for the Sabbath is inherently missional. It’s an act of witness, resistance, and justice. So when we rest for God, we join him on mission.
Act of Witness
In the Old Testament, God called his people to be a living testimony of his power and work. They testified through the habits, rhythms, and rites they embodied. A key practice at the heart of Israel’s covenant was the Sabbath. One day in every six, Israel was asked to do nothing but to rest, delight, and worship God. The Sabbath was an act of witness to the surrounding nations about the kind of God that Israel served. They no longer needed to wring productive value out of every day. They served a God who provided seven days’ provision for six days of work.
When we rest for God, we join him on mission.
The same is true for the church today. The Lord’s Day is a gift to the missional church because resting forms us into the kind of witnesses God desires—those who aren’t frazzled, hurried, and burned-out but the most well-rested and peace-filled folks in a frantic, overwhelmed, and overscheduled world. In a culture that rushes around at a breakneck pace, those who live with God’s governor on their lives stand out. Sabbath witnesses. It sweetly tells the tired and weary about a God who invites them to come and rest rather than go and achieve.
Act of Resistance
Years before I’d heard the Sabbath discussed as a practice for 21st-century Christians, singer-songwriter Josh Garrels planted a Sabbath seed in my mind with these lyrics:
My rest is a weapon against the oppression
Of man’s obsession to control things . . .
How do good men become a part of the regime?
They don’t believe in resistance
For the missional church, Sabbath is an opportunity to step into a divine “Nope.” As Walter Brueggemann describes, it’s a defiant resistance to this age’s principalities and powers, a courageous submission to the “One True King.”
In Exodus, God instructs his people to practice the Sabbath to mimic him (Ex. 20:8–11; see Gen. 2:2–3). But in Deuteronomy, God tells Israel to practice the Sabbath as a reminder of what he saved them from (Deut. 5:15). Practicing the Sabbath reminded Israel they were no longer under Pharoah’s rule but under Yahweh’s.
Later, in Nehemiah, we see “Sabbath as resistance” enacted socially: “If the peoples of the land bring in goods or any grain on the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or on a holy day” (Neh. 10:31). Israel practiced consumer boycotts before they were cool. Refusing to buy and sell on the Sabbath showed they weren’t beholden to a worldly economy of greed but to God’s Jubilee.
Still today, practicing Sabbath declares that the church won’t be captivated by the world’s narratives, assumptions, or destructive ways. We won’t overextend by picking up an extra time-and-a-half shift on Sundays. We won’t allow our Lord’s Day attention to be monopolized by TikTok or Meta. We won’t crush our kids’ souls by squeezing in SAT prep on Sunday afternoons. Instead, our Sabbath-keeping will weekly proclaim that we resist man’s kingdom and submit fully to God’s.
Act of Justice
Societies in the ancient Near East had no paid time off or overtime. In the context of Egypt’s oppression, God institutes the Sabbath as countercultural relief for all people, not just those at the top of the org chart. He commanded that everyone in the household experiences his rest (Deut. 5:14). Every person (and animal) was given the shalom of Sabbath restoration. To rob anyone of rest was an injustice.
Today, the least-of-these still experience rest-robbing, just at the hands of different pharaohs. In our 24-7 culture, no boundaries ensure all get the rest that they need and that God commands. Technologies have drastically improved, but paradoxically, they demand more of us than ever. The desktop worker is on the hook for emails at dinner; the DoorDasher cuts another bedtime short for a delivery; the stay-at-home parent feels crushed by unrealistic online portrayals of child-rearing.
God’s Sabbath may seem like a drag on the unhinged, always-on world. But God provides rest as justice for individuals and churches who obediently cease from work and worship him. Further, God provides rest as justice to these churches’ communities when church members cease activities that require work from others. A. J. Swoboda notes, “Sabbath for the poor, the underemployed, and the stay-at-home mom becomes a litmus test of the health and justice of a society.”
Do Nothing for God
The God of mission who rescued and redeemed you is also the God of rest.
The God of mission who rescued and redeemed you is also the God of rest.
You no longer have to anxiously toil but are free to taste his rest every week. So close your laptop, turn off your phone, and leave the dishes for tomorrow. Worship him by giving unhurried time to his Word and prayer. Rest your body by taking a nap. Delight in a good meal with those in your church family. Enter into God’s Sabbath rest, the fullness of which you can begin to taste now through these ordinary means. Paradoxically, it’s in our not-doing that God is at work in both us and the world.
So if you want to be missional, then once per week, remember to do nothing for God.
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