Time is a precious commodity, a gift from God and it’s one of the few things in life that we had the most of the day we were born. And every day since, we have had less and less of it.
Far too often in my life and in the life of those I know, time has become an enemy, a source of stress and fatigue and craziness. We are over-scheduled and overwhelmed.
We want to slow down, rearrange, approach life at a simpler, more sane pace, but we don’t know how.
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And we can feel it. In our soul, we sense weariness. Like a battery depleting in our phone, we sense that our soul needs to recharge.
The difference between a phone and our soul, is that the soul doesn’t show us how much battery life we have.
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We’ve seen this on our phone:
An icon indicates there is 40% battery life remaining.
At 20%, a warning flashes: low battery!
At 10%, I hear an ominous alarm.
God said, “I can tell you the battery life for your soul. I can tell you exactly when you’ll be depleted, exactly when you won’t be able to handle the stress. I can precisely predict when chaos will overwhelm you and sanity will escape you…EVERY SEVEN DAYS.”
This is called the “Sabbath Principle” and we violate it to our detriment. God taught that every seven days we need to recharge completely! Every seven days, we need to do no work at all. We are designed to take a day every week to renew our soul, relax with God, recharge our emotions, our mind and our spirit. We are to worship and engage in only those things that replenish.
Even GOD did this.
Genesis 2:2 (after six days of creating everything) “God rested”
And He wants us to rest.
Psalm 23:2 “He lets me rest”
Psalm 23:3 “He restores my soul”
Notice how REST and RESTore come from the same root word.
As you look at your day, as you lay out your week, as you make plans for your weekend, ask yourself: Where is my Sabbath, my intentional, planned time to recharge this week?
If we don’t come apart from the craziness every week--we’ll literally COME APART!
Brad Johnson is Pastor of California Community Church, a non-denominational church meeting each Sunday in the Ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel, Agoura Hills.
www.californiacommunitychurch.com
