The Sabbath was created by God at the very beginning of human history.Īre you struggling with an unfulfilled desire to experience God's presence in your life? Maybe part of the problem is how you spend your time. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it" (verse 11). The Fourth Commandment states, "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. The first is found in understanding that the seventh day is a memorial of creation and that observing the Sabbath day recognizes the Creator. Here are three reasons the Sabbath is important for Christians.ġ. Both in the Genesis account and in the Ten Commandments, the Creator of time states that He set aside the entire seventh day each week-Friday sunset to Saturday sunset-as a time of rest and focus on Him. In fact, the Sabbath isn't even on Sunday, which is the first day of the week. The Sabbath isn't an hour of worship followed by watching a football game, cleaning the garage or catching up on a work project. For more information on the Sabbath, read the free Bible Study aid Sunset to Sunset: God's Sabbath Rest. This is why the seventh-day Sabbath is relevant for Christians today. The first step in effective time management is to get in sync with your Creator. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. It states: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. The Fourth Commandment is ignored, shunned, even degraded. The truth, however, is that most of them don't. Many who regard themselves as Christians claim to observe the Ten Commandments. Or you can understand that God established the seven-day week, with the seventh-day Sabbath, as a way for you to be in sync with His timekeeping and in sync with Him. You can spend your entire life rushed and hurried and out of sync with time. He created the seventh day of every week for a special, vital purpose. And He also established cycles of marking time. Time, as an aspect of the physical universe, is a special creation of God. Then, "God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made" (Genesis 2:3).īefore the existence of the physical universe, there was no time as we measure it today. Rather, it came from the decree of God the Creator.Īccording to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God set in order the sky and earth as we know them in six days. The seven-day calendar, which begins on the first day of the week with the day we call Sunday and ends with the seventh day of the week, Saturday, wasn't developed out of any scientific study. Yet one ancient people has observed a seven-day calendar for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians had a ten-day week while the oldest Roman calendar observed an eight-day week. Yet this cycle of seven days might seem arbitrary. It represents seven rotations of the earth-and not just any seven but a particular cycle of seven. The week does not measure a particular heavenly event in the way the year and month do. Often, after church services everyone rushes home to catch the pre-game show, or get in an afternoon of pleasure seeking, or expend effort on a project around the house. Many people gather on Sunday morning for an hour of worship in a desire to include God in their weekly 604,800 seconds. These cycles supply a feeling of reassurance that time has meaning. We search for rhythms in daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly rituals and seasons. Rushing though these activities we spend the substance of life-every week-seven days, 168 hours, 10,080 minutes, 604,800 seconds. There are always demands on our time-our jobs, getting the kids to soccer practice, trying to keep up with friends and relatives, doctor appointments and fixing the leaking faucet. You and I spend our lives limited by these measurements of time. Years, months, even seconds are measured by tracking the movement of heavenly bodies day and night by the sun rising and setting. We measure time by the motion of the earth circling the sun, the moon circling the earth and the earth spinning on its axis. It's what you and I spend every second of every minute of every day.
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