FREE Corner Code Click For Details Editor’s Note:  The whole concept of Sabbath presents multiple dilemmas for the pastor.  You want to preach it to your flock because you know God’s given it for a purpose; yet, you yourself can’t rest on the same day that makes the most sense for your congregation to rest.  You want to preach Sabbath but you don’t want to yoke them with the burden of a legalistic expectation.  And perhaps above all—you want Sabbath for yourself; but as a pastor you have an incredibly difficult time protecting that consistent day each week to rest in God.  Mark Buchanan understands well the spirit of the Sabbath and has refreshingly captured it in his book, The Rest of God.  Here he shares inspiration for the pastor to look anew at Sabbath.  Certainly you need it.  God wants you to have it.  May he lead you in taking hold of it!  After all, Jesus said that Sabbath was made for us.  But pause.  Turn the coin over.  God not only allows us to rest in him; he expects us to.  Sabbath is our opportunity to remove ourselves from pretending to be the Center of the Universe—and to reaffirm that we aren’t and that God is.  May nothing keep us from Sabbath! Pastors Need The Rest of God, Too by Mark Buchanan The world [and that includes pastors] is dying for the rest of God.  I certainly was.  I became a Sabbath-keeper the hard way:  either that, or die.  Not die literally—at least, I don’t think so—but die in other ways.  It happened subtly, over time; but I noticed at some point that the harder I worked, the less I accomplished.  I was often a whirligig of motion. My days were intricately fitted together like the old game of Mousetrap, every piece precariously connected to every other, the whole thing needing to work together for it to work at all. But there was little joy, and stunted fruit. To justify myself, I’d tell others I was gripped by a magnificent obsession.  I was purpose-driven, I said, or words like that.  It may have begun that way.  It wasn’t that way any longer.  Often I was just obsessed, merely driven, no magnificence or purposefulness about it.  I once went forty days—an ominously biblical number, that—without taking a single day off. And was proud of it. But things weren’t right.  Though my work often consumed me, I was losing my pleasure in it—and, for that matter, in many other things besides—and losing, too, my effectiveness in it.  And here’s a secret:  for all my busyness, I was increasingly slothful.  I could wile away hours at a time in a masquerade of working, a pantomime of toil—fiddling about on the computer, leafing through old magazines, chatting up people in the hallways.  But I was squandering time, not just redeeming it.  And whenever I stepped out for a vacation, I did just that: evacuated, vacated,

spilled myself empty.  I folded in on myself like a tent suddenly bereft of stakes and ropes and poles, clapped hard by the wind.  The air went out of me. Click here to read more. Click here to respond to this article.

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