Organizing Our Week Around the Lord’s Day
By Contributing Writer, Jeannette Paulson
On a Lord’s Day while in Burma a pastor put a note on his motel room door with instructions not to clean his room. When the cleaning lady asked why, he told her that he serves the God that gives one day of rest in seven. She was amazed and commented that his God was very generous; she had a day of rest every 3o days.
It is not my purpose here to give a theological defense of the Lord’s Day. If you want a careful Biblical defense, I recommend Stuart Bryan’s The Taste of SABBATH: How to Delight in God’s Rest.
Currently, nearly every Sunday we meet with our small group in a house of friends. When we come in after church, the house is orderly, and we can smell the wild rice soup or the stew in the large roaster pan. We take a few minutes to slice bread and toss the tomatoes, avocado and peppers into the salad, and then we sit to enjoy our meal while we talk and laugh. After eating we break up to pray. There is no rush, and the fellowship is sweet.
But this day of sweet fellowship and rest did not just happen. Our friends have their house picked up. They have the meal ready. They had to clean and shop the day before. They had to organize their week around the Lord’s Day.
I love to page through my lovely cookbook called A Return to Sunday Dinner. I love reading the testimonials of older people who fondly remember the Sunday dinners of their childhood. Each menu has easy time saving and do-ahead tips.
In “The Secret to taking a Sabbath Day of Rest” Loren Pinilis gives several Scripture verses that convinced him to take a Sabbath rest, and he shares how that decision affected his entire week:
To properly take a day off, I had to buckle down and work harder the other six days. And I had to trust that God would bless my six days of work, making them fruitful enough to accomplish what I felt I needed seven days to do.
What are we telling our children about God by the way we organize our week? By taking a day to rest, we are saying that it is God who finally provides; we are saying that God gives rest to his children.
Tags: homemaking, Sunday
Wonderful post! I rest on Saturday, but I completely agree with what you said. God knows us best, and he knows we need a rest each week. I’m in Israel right now, and it is amazing to see how the people work very hard to prepare for Sabbath, shopping, shutting down their shops early. When you walk the streets on Saturday, it looks like a ghost town! These people know how to rest.