Hey church!

Have you ever experienced great difficulty or failure in trying to do anything else than obeying Sabbath rest on Sunday? Maybe you tried to study, catch up on work, go out shopping, catch up on house chores, etc…by doing such kind of work on Sunday we self-sabotage our Sabbath rest. This is against our best intentions. . After all who goes about their week thinking to themselves: “I’m planning to murder this week”, “I’m planning to commit adultery, ” etc? Yet we plan our Sundays according to what we should/will do as if we were planning to break Sabbath?[1] This sucks out the life and goodness of sabbath.

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Exposed by His blood,
Rici

Hey church!

Are you ready to worship God with everything you have? I hope you are.

I’ve started reading a new book for our new series on Sabbath. Most of us suck badly at Sabbath keeping…we badly need God to teach us the basics about Sabbath. Here’s something I read that is a perfect intro to our sermon this Sunday…I hope it stimulates and stirs your heart as much as it did for me.
(from Dorothy C. Bass’ Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time. P.1, Kindle version)
“We live not outside and above time but within it. Nature and culture craft its units – days, weeks, and years- and how many of these we will finally have is not up to us. Time is a given, and time is a gift. We receive it in increments that flow from the future into the past, a certain number of hours each day, a certain number of days each year, a certain span of life whose duration we do not know in advance. Making good use of the time we are given is important, to be sure, and datebooks and other aids help us to do this. But when our emphasis on using time displaces our awareness of time as gift, we find that we are not so much using time as permitting time to use us.”

BOOM!

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Exposed by His blood,
Rici