Sabbath Rest

eDevotion

Encouragement for your daily walk with God 

It was the last day — the seventh day — the final day of creation and nothing was created. That’s because God had finished His creative work on the sixth day. The seventh day, God took a break. He didn’t have to. He wasn’t tired from the work, you know. Let’s say, He celebrated His completed work; He blessed it and called it the Sabbath. 

Adam and Eve were actually the last thing God created. That was the sixth day; so their very first full day of engagement with the world was on the Sabbath. It was that first seventh day that God released Adam and Eve to their vocation. They could not begin their work until God had finished His work. 

The same is true of Christ followers. Your greatest work will flow from resting in the finished work of Christ on Calvary’s cross. The more you rest in Him — trust His promises, surrender to His sovereign grace, obey His Word, rely on His strength — the more you will accomplish for Him. 

The Sabbath was to foreshadow the fullness of God’s redemptive work through Christ so that we could work for Him not for love, but from love, worry-free of condemnation. With wide-eyed amazement at the goodness of all He has created, we can fearlessly represent Him here on earth. 

Here is your assignment today, dear Christ follower: Be immersed in Sabbath consciousness. Christ is our Sabbath and has ended the need to strive for God’s acceptance. As with Adam and Eve and God’s finished work, Christ’s finished work is the beginning of our new life in Him. All productivity in the Christian life flows from resting in Christ’s finished work.

Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. 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 2.1-3