keeping the sabbath

I would have to say that where I come down is somewhere on both sides of the debate of whether to keep the sabbath. I agree that keeping the Sabbath is not burdensome in the least, but I also agree that it is left to the individual believer to decide how or if to keep a Sabbath.

A fair amount of it ties back into the Christian segmentation of the Mosaic law into civil, moral and ceremonial law. While that's a breakdown I've heard before, I'm not convinced it's a division reflected in what Christ did on the Cross; rather, it seems to me to be a description of the function of different aspects of the law.

Nowhere in the Torah is a distinction made between those three types of law: you find "moral" law, like the proscription on homosexual intercourse, incest and bestiality mixed in with other laws on how to make clothes and where to go to the bathroom. First-century Jews in fact regarded any effort to say one part of the law was more important than another as heretical, which is why the one scribe tried to trap Jesus by asking him which of the commandments was the greatest.

Since the Torah finds its fulfillment in Christ and we are freed from its sting and free to live by faith -- Paul quite specifically warns the Galatians against subjecting ourselves to live under part of the law, since we then are obligated to follow all of it -- I have to say that God does not require us to keep the sabbath. It's up to each of us to decide how, if and when we do so.

It's also worth noting that the sabbath existed long before its observance was required. All the way back in the creation story, God blessed the seventh day because on it he rested from his work. So even though we're freed from the requirement of keeping the sabbath, we're not free from the blessing of keeping the sabbath (if we keep it).

So what is the blessing? Well, as an outgrowth of this discussion, my wife and I started keeping a sabbath about a month ago. We keep ours on Sunday. Since it's essentially arbitrary which day you begin your week on, we start ours on Monday. Our reasoning was more or less what I've described above.

We started brainstorming reasons God might have had for putting the sabbath in the law he gave Moses. One reason we came up with is the standard reason you'll hear in churches: It's to remind us that we can't supply all our own needs, no matter how hard we work, and so we need to have faith to take one day off in seven. The second chief reason we thought of us is that it builds family.

Think about it. If you have one day in seven where you, your spouse and your children are all together, it gives you time to focus on what's really important in life. We might still do stuff around the house, or run a few errands, but we're doing them together and in each other's company. We keep the computer off all day, and we don't make long-distance calls to family members, because it's our sabbath. We know it's *our* day as a family.

We've been loving it. In fact, I've noticed that we're getting frustrated with each other a lot less.
So even though I don't think a sabbath is required, I do think people who choose not to observe one, or even to split it across two days as many of us in America do, are missing something. (Incidentally, we use Saturday to get a lot of solitary stuff done around the house. That's when I do my work on the garden and the yard, for example.)