My wife and I have been reading through the bible this year—a couple chapters a day. We don’t read it together, and we’re not perfect about reading it every day, but we try to stay around the same sections—that way when something we read stands out to us, we can both talk about it later that night.
Recently we’ve been reading through Leviticus and Numbers…thrilling stuff. But this theme kept on sticking out to us, something that God kept telling His people: “Keep my Sabbaths holy.” The Sabbath was one day a week that every man, woman, and child in Israel stopped working, and took a day to rest and remember what God had done for them. Of all the things that God could make a soapbox out of, He keeps coming back to the Sabbath.

As I was reading about the Sabbath at first, I glossed over it, telling myself: “That’s in the Old Testament—that isn’t a command we’re required to hold onto today.” “We’re too busy to take a day out of the week to rest.” “We’ve got four kids 8 and under—even if we tried to rest for a day, just taking care of them would be a full day’s work.” “In our culture, resting for a day doesn’t make sense.”

But then I started thinking about when God first gave this command to the people of Israel. They were wandering in the desert, scavenging for food, sojourning through other nations and cultures, and surrounded by thousands of other Israelites, like a walking refugee camp. They had some decent excuses too—and God still told them to keep the Sabbath holy.

Let me ask you: How many times this week have you told someone you’re tired? I say it regularly…because I am tired. And I’ll think that if I just get a little bit more work done at church, or at home, then I can rest. But I don’t. I just keep working. And I get more tired. And ultimately I lose focus, lose energy, and get caught in this cycle of being busy with things that ultimately aren’t that important.

And so we decided—what if we spend one day a week being not busy with what’s really important? Each other…our family…our faith. What if God wasn’t setting up a arbitrary rule about rest, but what if He set up the Sabbath for our good, so that we could rest, recharge, and remember that God, not our work, is the source of our life, that He’s our provider, and that He’s the one who orders our lives and give them meaning. Maybe the Sabbath is more important than we think.

So we tried it. And it was good. Maybe it’s something you could try, too. One day each week where you rest, recharge, and remember what God has done and what God is doing for us.