Sabbath - Audio
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All right, do you guys have your lights up? No? No tree? Oh, what a bad person. A bad American. I got my lights up. Aaron got the inner house stuff up. I try to aim for a solid "B" on lights, because I don't want my kids to be disappointed necessarily by the lights, but I also don't want to put in the monumental effort and/or pay somebody to do the crazy stuff. And I do love the crazy stuff. In fact, we have attrition every year at one point or another, usually around the late teens and early 20s of December. Just hop in the car and we'll go look at the lights. You know, just stop everything and find, like, one of those -- I think there's a street in La Dara where they really go over the top, and you're just like, "Man, personally, I'm kind of like -- I'm questioning their motives. I'm a bad -- I'm a cynic." But the kids -- the kids are like, "Wow! That's amazing! It's beautiful!" You just sort of stop, and it's kind of like a reset for the season in some ways. And last week, we started the series, "What I'm Not Doing for Christmas." And we listed -- we were kind of looking at the way that Scripture kind of talks about anticipating God's coming salvation, and the way we said one of the things that we're not going to do is we're not going to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off, instead we're going to be resting. Which is really, really hard to do. This is the -- I mean, why is it that this is the most insane time of year when it really should be the most contemplative time of year? Well, how do we do it, though? I mean, let's just say that that's true that really what God's asking for us to do is to be resting in some way to prepare for the coming of the Lord, to prepare for his salvation. What does that look like? Well, today we're going to see God going out and looking at the lights. God's going to go look at the lights, and we're going to do it with him. We're going to kind of draw from that, like a rhythm or a practice for ourselves. Not even just for the Christmas season, but for life. It's something that we should be doing, but we don't. Let me read -- this is the TNIV version of Genesis 1.31 to 2.3. This is the creation story. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing, so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it, he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. It's actually a very deep, strange text. The first thing, just as a background, Yahweh in the Old Testament
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Fruitful rest