(This is Part 2 of “Creating Rest and Cultivating Worship”.)
Now that you have repented, thanked God, prayed for your pastor, for the sermon, for your brothers and sisters at church, for the visitors, for the lost who are seeking Jesus, and have asked God to use you in whatever way He would choose to in the morning, we need to look at some pesky things that threaten to thwart our worship.
Beware of the little foxes:
Satan will try his very best to thwart your planned sabbath rest. So be on the lookout for “the little foxes”.
They will come. There is not much you can do about them. But you CAN change the way you respond to them. After all, the Bible says to “be ye angry, and sin not”. It is possible to have chaos happen in your hallowed Sunday morning and not lose your religion.
The worst Sunday morning I had looked like this: a sweet gentleman from church had borrowed our minivan to pick some people up for church. While he was driving down the highway the hood latch came loose, and the hood flew open and shattered the windshield. Just as he was pulling into the driveway to tell us, the dishwasher overflowed onto the water-sensitive laminate floor of the rental property we had just moved in to. After church my in-laws were flying home and we would did not know when we would get to see them again. In driving to get them on the road, I was pulled over for my cracked windshield. I don’t know if that day was a “little fox” or a raging wolf.
But a typical little fox at my house looks like children bickering. Sometimes I have to ignore it and wait. Sometimes it looks like “go to your room until we call for you to come to the car.”
Marital strife is another one. When Jason was first pastoring a church, we might have a perfectly fine week Monday thru Saturday, but it was on Sunday morning that we would be at odds with one another. We solved that by having minimal Sunday morning contact. This means that as he studies, it is my responsibility to get the kids up and going. But by now my kids know the routine, and it is a lot easier.
But the real solution to the little foxes is grace. It is a held tongue and a heart that recognizes who the real culprit is behind our Sunday morning drama. Your worship is not worth your anger.
Guarding your physical rest:
With the rest of the world marching to the drum beat of a different band, it is very easy to lose one’s sabbath day to a whole host of things. Our family has somewhat instituted the old “Sunday Blue Laws” for ourselves.
What this means is that we try to stay home. We only shop if our ox is in the ditch, so to speak. We say “no” to baby showers and bridal showers most of the time. We say “no” to sports practices, and rarely have partaken in a Sunday afternoon-between-services Little League game or Boy Scouting activity.
And we do our very best to say “no” to work.
As in, paid employment, cutting the lawn, etc.
We try to make our Sundays a hallowed day of no outside commitments, beyond church. Everything has a cost. We have had kids’ sports teams and Boy Scout troops that didn’t understand the way we do things, and some worked very well with us, even if they did not practice the same way that we do, and others did not. It has been similar for employers; and in at least one instance my husband left a job over needing time off to preach a revival. And yet the Lord has always taken care of us—in that instance, with a much better job.
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Our physical and spiritual rest must be deliberately and carefully cultivated by US. It is never just going to appear. We need to be looking for ways to “Remember the Sabbath Day, and keep it holy”, because it is God’s best for us.
May we all look to make choices to serve our great Savior, who so richly deserves it.
Love,
Sandra
Amen!!! Agree 1000%, Sis! Love you!