The significance of the Sabbath
Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
“Now began long ago,” writes Christopher Ringwald in A Day Apart. “We love the present, it is our home. In the here and now we live; we cannot break free. Yet one day [each week] we break into forever.”
He’s writing about the Sabbath.
Even those of us who are Sabbath keepers need to regularly remind ourselves of its significance. That’s because the significance of the Sabbath can be lost in the family and church traditions we build around it.
Those who aren’t Sabbath keepers—when they really get the Sabbath concept—tend to think it’s simply a great idea.
Ringwald tells the story of Becky, a woman who was almost a Jewish believer when she met her future husband, Tom, a Jew. They have raised their children in the Jewish faith, with the Sabbath a highlight.
“They get to spend that day with their family and friends. They know they have both parents for 25 hours [Orthodox Jews close Sabbath an hour after sunset on Saturday evening]. I hope they realise that it’s not TV or video games and tapes that make life valuable but people. You know, a mother of Eli’s classmate said to me, ‘We could never turn off the TV for a whole day,’ and I said, ‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’”
In simple, practical terms, particularly for building relationships, the Sabbath is so beneficial. But it’s much more than this.
Back to Ringwald: “We revere time on the Sabbath. It’s a festival in and of time, freeing us from the shackles of clock time and thrusting us into the freedom of divine time.”
And something else: “We are closer to God on the Sabbath since we do as He did. We stop, we cease, we let be.”
The Sabbath was never meant to be merely another day.
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