The Sabbath & Our Ambitions
How do our ambitions interfere with God’s command to observe the Sabbath?
Different from the first six days in God’s creation story, Genesis 2's description of day seven is different. The term “the seventh day” is mentioned three times, not just once as the other days. Resting once a week on the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments. The Sabbath is a day of “not doing,” but it is much more than simply a day of rest and idleness. What most Christians miss is how resting and not doing lead to God-honoring worship. To be more specific, it is when we practice “the fear of the Lord.”
”The phrase “fear of the Lord” is emphasized in the book of Proverbs, describing the foundation of our relationship with God - awe! Awe stops our actions and focuses our attention solely on God. In our earthly experiences, awe is temporal, situational, and rare. But for us, serious followers of Christ, awe should be our constant posture and reality.
Awe will help us clearly see God’s creation that surrounds us. Awe will help us witness God’s work, and the Sabbath will help us understand how all our work is done in the context of God’s work. Ambition is when we interfere with that revelation and shift our focus from God to ourselves. Therefore, the Sabbath is our deliberate act to interrupt our ambition in our work each week. Through rest and not doing, it reorients our attention, our listening, our eyes, and our thoughts to God’s comprehensive and majestic work. Awe will help us give thanks for God’s graciousness in including us in God’s work. There is absolutely no room for ambition, especially the ambition to work for God in our lives. Ambition is about our identity.
When we are crucified like Christ, as described in Galatians 2:20, we no longer live, but Christ lives in us. Christ is our eternal Sabbath, which means that the Sabbath is no longer just a day of the week but a 24/7 reality within us. That is why we are not anxious and worrisome about tomorrow. When we practice 24/7 communion, there is no room for ambition or any desire to prove anything to bolster our identity. We rest in awe, and we gratefully follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our work, faithfully moving forward without knowing exactly where we are going. This is the journey of discipleship.