Daily Devotion
Beating the Rat-Race
By Kim Anderson
"I'm overwhelmed!"
"I'm just exhausted."
"My life is crazy right now."
Sound familiar? All too often this is not a temporary condition. It is our normal state. Americans in general and Christians in particular seem to feel that being too busy is a virtue. We are beating the rat-race – sort of. And the corollary of that attitude seems to be that our extraordinary busy-ness justifies sloppy, shallow living.
But this is not what we have received from God. His routine is:
"Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh is the sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work..." (Deut 5:13, 14)
The initial giving of the Law cites as the reason for this command that we are made to imitate God's work of creation:
"…for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day..." (Exodus 20:11)
Deuteronomy 5 goes on to give a further reason:
"Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm..." (Deut 5:15)
We are made for rest in the midst of work. Further, God has purchased a holiday for us one day in seven as a part of our freedom from slavery to sin. The Sabbath is a constant reminder that where merely human strength cannot bring our work to fruition, God's might can - even without us. God's people ought not to be slaves of the urgent.
But we ought not to be slaves to a slate of Sabbath-Day do's and dont's either. The rhythms of God's work and the dance of our Sabbath worship ought to be teaching us music that we can embellish, rather than merely repeating. Sadly, our anything-goes age has forgotten most of the steps, so here is a brief of the dance.
In worship we:
1) Come near and know our unworthiness
2) Confess our sin and receive forgiveness
3) Respond with thanks and praise
4) Receive God's nourishment in Word and Sacrament
5) Go out rejoicing in God's strength and commissioning
So rightly, the Sabbath could properly contain so much:
1) Reflection, journaling, scrapbooking
2) Letting others off the hook in various ways, including letting yourself off the hook (He has), napping
3) Singing, making music, writing thank you notes or calls
4) Feasting, discussing the Scriptures and their applications in our day, exercising hospitality, seeing a movie or reading a book that will flesh out the implications of God's Word...
5) Planning the coming week in light of the Biblical admonitions we received from worship, laughing
We are not called to the rat-race, but to a dance. God invites us to learn the steps of His dance in little weekly lessons, so that when we come at last to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, we will spin and dip with the best of them. Leave the rat-race. Join the dance!
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Can God change your life?
God has made it possible for you to know Him and experience an amazing change in your own life.
Discover how you can find peace with God.
You can also send us your prayer requests
Revised from the March 7, 2006 article on www.mother-lode.blogspot.com titled “Liturgy for Living”. Copyright by Kim Anderson, released for CBN publication.
In the course of her career as a mother, Kim Anderson has home-schooled her three children; trained kitchen table lobbyists for Concerned Women for America; founded a homeschool college prep cooperative and provided international educational consulting with her husband; and produced summer-stock Shakespeare and award-winning independent film with her children. Active in her local church, Kim's passion is to develop a Christian arts community. Kim blogs about family life at www.mother-lode.blogspot.com
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