On the Sabbath, We Act like God

In his Confessions, Augustine doubts we can really experience our present moment. Our objective “present” is merely an imperceptible moment with no duration. He believes our lived experiences are almost entirely built on the psychological tension of our past and future. How we experience our days is defined by how we relate to what’s happened and what’s coming. The heartache within a fallen world is that this tension defaults to regret about the past and worry about what’s coming rather than gratitude and hope.

By the end of each week, we look at what we didn’t get done or we did poorly, and the obligations and expectations coming. Regret and worry. How we often relate to our time only exacerbates this dynamic.

In our culture of achievement, time is optimized to squeeze out double the productivity with maximum efficiency. In our culture of well-being, we need time for self-improvement and self-enhancement. But time bears witness that our physical and mental decline outpaces our self-improvement strategies. Our successes don’t survive our death. Achievement culture manufactures new regrets by resetting the bar every week, and well-being culture manufactures new worries by making the self a project that’s never finished.

At some point, we all take something like a Sabbath. Some relief is needed. We practice self-care or self-medicate. We scroll mindlessly while at our jobs or institute a four-day workweek. As a friend of ours says, “Five beers on a Friday night is a world looking for Sabbath.” These secular Sabbaths provide means of escape but never healing.

A biblical Sabbath is different. It’s not an escape route or a coping mechanism. Nor does it simply provide a means of rest that we might become better versions of ourselves. Practicing Sabbath is a way that we become like God. In turn, we begin to see our days and our weeks in the way that God sees them.

Become like God

Annie Dillard, in her book Holy the Firm, tells a story of reading by candlelight while camping. She noticed a shadow fall across her page, looked up, and saw a moth fly directly into the candle’s flame. She watched the wings ignite like tissue paper, legs curl up, body shrink, and head disappear in the fire.

Practicing Sabbath is a way that we become like God.

As she kept watching, something unexpected happened. The moth didn’t simply die—it changed. Its body, swallowed by wax, shifted beside the wick and became a second one—bringing a second flame. Now there were two flames. Two lights. One candle. “The moth’s head was fire,” writes Dillard. “She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within.”

Fire has that quality of turning things into its likeness. Fire doesn’t just destroy; it also transforms. The moth, for at least two hours, received a new vocation, maybe even a higher one: She gave light.

At Pentecost, God’s presence descended like fire—not to destroy but to dwell. Tongues of flame hovered over the disciples’ heads. Not like the moth-made wick, but more like the burning bush. God’s presence—a consuming fire—set on a bush, but the bush remained unchanged (Ex. 3:2). God’s people were animated and awakened, rather than consumed and destroyed by the presence of God’s Spirit on them. In the incarnation, God became like us. At Pentecost, he began the work of making us like him.

At Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. The fourth commandment, the one about the Sabbath, is longer than all the others. This is how your workweek should look: Six days you shall labor, and on the seventh you shall rest.

What’s the reason behind this command? “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth . . . and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex. 20:11). Take a Sabbath, says the Lord. Why? Because it’s what I did and I want you to be like me. What began at Sinai as a command to imitate becomes, through Christ and his Spirit, a life to receive.

Let us suggest that taking a Sabbath is a profound way to allow Jesus to speak to us and transform the experience of our days—our past, present, and future.

Experience the Week Through God’s Perspective

As Augustine explains, our worldly experience of the week is mainly regret (past) and worry (future). We didn’t accomplish what we intended, didn’t keep up with expectations, didn’t follow through on our responsibilities—and next week will likely look the same.

Our Regret

When we rest, we take a look at our week through the perspective of Jesus, who calls to himself all who are weary and burdened. “I will give you rest,” he says (Matt. 11:28–30). With Jesus, regrets are met with mercy.

We all have an impulse to see ourselves as merely the outcome of our behavior and performance. But Jesus’s welcome is not for those who have overcome failure but for those burdened with it.

At creation, God ended his workweek by saying, “It is good.” Everything he did was good. In God’s mercy, we can say this each Sabbath day. Every good thing is a gift and every failure is forgiven. We can rest. It is good.

Our Fears

In Mark 4, Jesus is sleeping in a storm while his disciples are fearing the worst. He wakes up from his sleep and says to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” and the disciples are struck that the wind and the sea obey him (vv. 35–41). He asks his disciples, Why are you so afraid? Where is your faith?

We can read this story as simply a rebuke against our fears that surface when we contemplate our days and weeks ahead. But I wonder if we can also see that our fears, at least our fearful responses, are incompatible with reality.

At creation, God ended his workweek by saying, ‘It is good.’ Everything he did was good. In God’s mercy, we can say this each Sabbath day.

It’s remarkable that Jesus instructs the storm. “Be still!” He seems to be personifying the storm, treating it as a responsive agent rather than a mechanical system of cause and effect. Creation isn’t a conscious being that responds with obedience, but neither is it an autonomous system outside of God’s governance.

Even Job portrays God setting limits on the sea as if addressing a willful entity. God says, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther” (Job 38:8–11). All things were created through Christ and for him, and he holds all things together (Col. 1:16–17).

Our vocations and industries we navigate each week can feel like complex systems we’re at the mercy of. They blow with expectation and overwhelm with obligation. Our days feel at the mercy of autonomous mechanical systems outside God’s hands. But Jesus wants us to see reality as it clearly is. He wants us to rest and see our coming days and weeks from his perspective. He isn’t anxious, and he can speak “Peace!” even amid storms.

This reshapes how we move through time. We can begin to anticipate the Sabbath. Regardless of how the last week was, the Sabbath always comes. Relief and rest in Christ are near. And as the new week begins, we live from that rest. We draw from its strength. We remember its grace.

Sabbath, then, becomes the center of the week—its center of gravity. Even in the hurry and hustle of our workdays, something deeper begins to hum within us: a Sabbath heart. His grace covers our previous week, and his presence and power will be with us for what’s ahead.