Sabbath Sanctuary: Sabbath Thoughts

“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves” {Ps. 127: 1-2 NASB}.

“The point the Psalmist is making is that we should not carry our cares and anxieties to bed with us. Beds were made for sleeping, not for worrying.”[1]

“Of all the thoughts of God that are

Borne inward unto souls afar

Along the Psalmist’s music deep

Now tell me if that any is,

For the gift of grace, surpassing this—
He giveth His beloved sleep.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Those whose spirits are stirred by the breath of the Holy Spirit of God go forwards even in sleep.” Brother Lawrence

 “God is my portion and my joy,

His counsels are my light;

He gives me sweet advice by day

And gentle hints by night.” Issac Watts

“O Lord, we have a busy world around us. Eye, ear, and thought will be needed for all our work to be done in the world. Now ere we again enter into it, we would commit eye, ear, and thought to Thee. Do Thou bless them and keep their work Thine, that as through Thy natural laws our hearts beat and our blood flows without any thought of ours for them so our spiritual life may hold on its course at those times when our minds cannot consciously turn to Thee to commit each particular thought o Thy service, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” Dr. Arnold 

“All experience goes to show that the quality of our night’s rest depends in large measure on the frame of mind in which we go to bed and compose ourselves to sleep. I shall conclude by saying this—and it is something of which I have continually to keep reminding myself: Every man who calls himself a Christian should go to sleep thinking about the love of God as it has visited us in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” [2]
Rest well this Sabbath.





[1] John Baillie, Christian Devotion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), 100.[2] Ibid., 107.
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Sabbath Sanctuary: Winter Into Spring

Snow. Cold. They just keep hanging around. One day it’s warm, shining with the promise of spring, and the next day it’s winter putting up a fight till the end. Sometimes, trials and wilderness seasons feel that way.

Though it seems never-ending, seasons always run their course:

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven {Eccl. 3:1}. 

No winter lasts forever and no spring skips its turn. Hal Borland  

Rest in God this Sabbath whether you are in the spring of life or in the winter of a trial. Resting in God does not mean to be discouraged; it is a day to rejoice.

Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all. {Marva J. Dawn}.

Sabbath Sanctuary: Am I A Soldier Of The Cross?

Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love {1 Cor. 16:13}

Isaac Watts (1724)

Am I a soldier of the cross, a foll'wer of the Lamb? And shall I fear to own His cause or blush to speak His Name?

Must I be carried to the skies on flow'ry beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas?

Are there no foes for me to face? Must I not stem the flood? Is this vile world a friend to grace to help me on to God?

Sure I must fight, if I would reign; increase my courage, Lord; I'll bear the toil, endure the pain, supported by Thy Word.

Thy saints in all this glorious war shall conquer, though they die; they see the triumph from afar by faith's discerning eye.

When that illustrious day shall rise, and all Thine armies shine in robes of vict'ry through the skies, the glory shall be Thine.

Am I a soldier of the Cross? I. Watts. [Holy Fortitude.] Appended to his Sermons, published in 1721-24, in 3 vols., vol. iii., and intended to accompany a sermon on 1 Cor. xvi. 13. It is in 6 stanzas of 4 lines and entitled “Holy Fortitude.”

Resting in the Passion of Rabbi Jesus

The disciple that Jesus loved was reclining next to Jesus…He leaned back on Jesus’ breast {John 13:23, 25}

I heard a minister on television this past week speak about passion. He suggested that many Christians are not succeeding in life because they do not know what their passion is. Find your passion and your life will change. There is much wisdom is this and it struck a chord in my heart. 

What is my passion? What sets me on fire? I love to read, I love to write, but are they my passion? Do I live and breathe reading and writing? Some who know me would argue that they do, but I am not so sure. I love Jesus with all my heart; but is He my passion? How do we find our passion?

Just after hearing the minister speak on passion, the next day in my devotional from Brennan Manning’s The Rabbi’s Heartbeat, I was awed at the grace and mercy of God. The chapter is entitled Recovering Passion and he speaks about his challenge in finding his passion.

If you have lost your passion, or are trying to discover it—read the account of John reclining on the table with his head on the Master’s breast in John 13.

“We must not hurry past this scene in search of deeper revelation, or we will miss a magnificent insight. John lays his head on the heart of God, on the breast of the Man whom the council of Nicea defined as ‘being coequal and consubstantial to the Father…God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.” (Manning, p. 96)

Sometimes it hard to imagine that you or I could lie on the breast of Jesus—but He is beckoning us to do the same.

“Fearing that I would miss the divinity, I distanced myself from His humanity, like an ancient worshiper shielding his eyes from the Holy of Holies. But as John leans back on the breast of Jesus and listens to the heartbeat of the Great Rabbi, he comes to know Him in a way that surpasses mere cognitive knowledge. What a world of difference lies between knowing about someone and knowing Him!” (p. 96).

John discovered in this encounter with Jesus, by experiencing Him, listening to His heartbeat, that he is loved. As Manning so poignantly affirms, God allowed a young Jew in the rags of his twenty-odd years, to listen to his heartbeat. It was in this experience that John discovered who he was and that Jesus the Great Rabbi loved him.

How do we then recover our passion?

“The recovery of passion begins with the recovery of my true self as the beloved. If I find Christ I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. This is the goal and purpose of our lives. John did not believe that Jesus was the most important thing; he believed that Jesus was the only thing” (p. 97).

In order to have a passion for Jesus, we must be hungry for it.

There have been times when I preferred slivers of glass to the pearl of great price. B. Manning

The world offers many allurements, but we must not fall in their trap. Jesus is calling us. Only Jesus can give the peace we need—it is freely ours if we will rest in Him.

The paltriness of our lives is largely due to our fascination with the trinkets and trophies of the unreal world that is passing away…our capacity to be affected by Christ is numbed. B. Manning

Manning began this chapter with a story of a young Jewish boy who had been dedicated to the Lord by his parents. This boy was ensnared by the world, much like the prodigal son parable we know so well. The parents attempted, to no avail, to convince the boy to give up his ways. Their wisdom fell on deaf ears.

“But one great day the Great Rabbi visited the village and asked to be left alone with the boy. To leave their son alone with this lion of man terrified the parents, but they left him. He then picked up the boy and held him silently against his heart” (p. 95).

The next day, the boy began going to synagogue and allowing the Word of God to penetrate his heart. He grew up and helped many people. The end of the story and what the boy answered to the change in his life; touches my heart deeply:

Mordecai grew up to become a great man who helped many people. And when they came to him he said, “I first learned the Word of God when the Great Rabbi held me silently against his heart” (p. 95).

By this, we know we are the passion of Jesus, His heart beats for us. What then should our passion be? Maybe our passion is not what we do; maybe our passion is a person—Jesus Christ. Once we know deep down in our spirit that we are Jesus’ heartbeat and He is ours, and we rest a while longer on His breast, He will instruct us what to do. His passion will beat in our heart. If Jesus loves people—if they are His passion—they should be ours too. We will each have a different calling and assignment, but our passion should be the same.

Rest. Recline on the breast of Jesus and hear His heartbeat. It beats for you. You are loved.