The world is talking a lot about self-care right now – about how we need to take care of ourselves. We need to become the best version of ourselves. In a lot of ways, I agree. I agree with the intentions behind it, but the problem comes with the actions that the world associates with self-care.
A lot of times, the world is just looking for a temporary escape from reality or something that just satisfies a craving. Whereas we as Christians, that’s not our goal in taking care of ourselves. That shouldn’t be the end goal. So, the things that the world pursues, like having a spa day or going on vacation, reading a good fiction book, having some alone time – things like that produce that temporary escape – don’t serve us well as Christians. There are other things that we can be doing that are much better means of self-care that produce the goals that we are looking for.
The goal of self-care is to feel better, to be better, and to live a better life. As a Christian, those things look like having joy, perseverance, a really deeply rooted relationship with God, having a rhythm in your life, and having a community that surrounds you when you need it. Those are primarily things that the world isn’t necessarily pursuing. They just want a little bit of temporary stress relief, a great Instagram reel, or a vacation to look forward to. They’re not the same goals, and so we as Christians have to pursue self-care differently than the world does.
In this series, we are going to be talking about different things that we can do to have those end results. Different practices of self-care that produce the results that we as Christians are pursuing. The first one we’re going to talk about is Sabbath; taking a day of rest.
SABBATH
The first mention of the Sabbath in the Bible is in Exodus chapter 16, and it’s right after the Israelites come out of slavery from the Egyptians. It’s one of the first things that God commands them. To take a Sabbath, to take a day of rest, and to worship the Lord. I love this because they’ve just spent the last 400-plus years in slavery. They didn’t know rest. They didn’t know how to rest. They didn’t have the opportunity to rest this generation. It was completely foreign to them.
God steps in right there, and one of the first things He tells them is to take a break, to rest, to worship him. How sweet that God is taking care of their needs in that moment.
While Jesus came and fulfilled the law, and we’re no longer expected to satisfy those commands that the Israelites were, this is an invitation for us as well. An invitation to rest, to take a break, to worship God, to realign with our lives every seven days.
This is something that was new to me. Honestly, I didn’t ever practice Sabbath. I didn’t think it was practical. In this day and age, we tend to need all seven days to get things done. Six is not enough, right? So to take a day of rest just didn’t seem like something I could do.
I started practicing the Sabbath at the end of last year, having that weekly day to just quit working, not do anything that felt like work or a burden, but to take time to spend with God, to read my Bible, to go to church, to be with my family and really be intentional about having a day to rest.
Hebrews 4:9-10 says, “There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.”
We are created in the image of God, and when God was creating the world, He rested. On the seventh day, He took a break. In the same way that God rested, we’re invited to rest. We’re invited to take that seventh day and to take a break from our work.
This is an act of reliance on God. We have to learn how to rely on God on that seventh day, just like the Israelites. While they were in the desert, they had to rely on God to provide enough manna on the sixth day to have enough food for the seventh. We have to learn to let God make six days sufficient for our work when we are committing to that seventh day to rest. We are trusting God that six days is enough.
I was listening to The Bible Recap podcast last year, and this question stopped me in my tracks. It said, “Will God keep His promise to provide for me if I stop to rest as He has commanded me?”
That is so hard to do. It’s so hard to believe God for His promises as we follow His commands, especially in this area of rest where we could get a little more work done on a Sunday or a Saturday afternoon. We could get a little ahead for the week. We could plan out what the week is going to look like, doing some work to prepare well. But God says that He’s going to provide for us. So can we trust Him that as we rest, as we pause, as we take this break, that He’s still going to be sufficient, that he’s still going to provide enough in the six to make it through the seventh?
In the world, it does not seem practical. It’s not something that the world is doing because we think that we need that seventh day to catch up on errands, to go grocery shopping, to meal prep for the week, to plan out what the week’s going to look like and get ahead of our work schedule. But practicing the Sabbath is also an act of resistance.
Something that I’ve seen in myself by practicing the Sabbath is that I actually have to resist the work. On the seventh day, when I’m taking my Sabbath, I get an urge to work. I want to do the work. I want to start planning and preparing, and I feel like I have all these ideas of things that I could be doing, but I resist that temptation to work. What happened is that my discipline has been built up, so that in the six days when I don’t feel like working as much, I actually have the discipline to do the work when I don’t want to, instead of procrastinating or doing something else. I actually work harder. During those six days, I get more done because I’ve practiced discipline and resistance on that seventh day.
The last thing that the Sabbath provides for us is a day to reflect, reset, realign, and recover. Oftentimes, the week flies by and something exciting happens and we don’t have a chance to stop and celebrate. We don’t take a moment to recognize the good things because we’re going so quickly. So the Sabbath can be a day to celebrate and reflect on that. Or something hard happens in the week, and we never take the time to grieve and recover from that. To get our minds back to where they need to be to get through the hard stuff. The Sabbath is a great chance for us to do that, as well.
It is also true that we don’t spend much time in alignment between our mind, body, and spirit. When we are sitting in traffic physically, our minds are on all the projects that we need to get done, and our spirit is anxious, so we are in three different places at one time. The Sabbath is a chance to get everything in your life in one place. To have your mind and your spirit where your body physically is. To play with your kids for an hour and actually, intentionally be there, mind, body, and spirit, with them.
This is such a great practice in self-care. It’s the way that God designed us. He designed us to have that rest. So even though it’s not a command anymore that we are expected to follow or anything that has to do with our salvation, this is a sweet invitation and a gift from God to rest, to take a break, to realign, to resist the work, and to take care of ourselves.
Looking for more? Check out the latest blog posts below!
- How to Read the Bible and Actually Understand It
- How to Practice Self-Care as a Christian | Part Five: Gratitude
- How to Practice Self-Care as a Christian | Part Four: Community Support
- How to Practice Self-Care as a Christian | Part Three: Service
- How to Practice Self-Care as a Christian | Part Two: Scripture
