That Monday is\u00a0widely considered to be the first day of the week – and Sunday the last –\u00a0is confirmation of the triumph of the secular over the sacred. That most people dread Monday is confirmation of the seculars’ inability to do for the soul what the sacred does.<\/p>\n
God designed that we begin our week in repose – in\u00a0a state of rest, silence, and quiet – with our minds focused on Him as the source of every good and perfect gift. To take God seriously when He says, “Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy,” is to resign yourself utterly and completely to dependence on Him. No productive labor is to take place on that day, and yet the One who commands us to cease from labor is the One who created us to produce. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the command for man to produce and to reproduce comes prior to<\/em> man’s fall in the Garden, not after. Work – productive labor – is not a curse. Dreading it is.<\/p>\n Yet because God created man in His own image, man works just as God worked. Yet God is not dependent upon that which He creates as is man. We depend upon what we produce to sustain our lives (as any economist will tell you). And so to keep us from becoming too dependent upon that which we produce, God asks us to stop producing for a 24 hour period each week, partly I think to prove our dependence upon Him and not upon that which\u00a0 our hands can produce, and partly to keep us from killing ourselves. Your local cemetery is filled with the corpses of CEOs, managers, sales professionals, housewives, and ministers who ignored the Sabbath command.<\/p>\n The fact that we have honored Monday by moving it to the first day of the week, at least in our minds and attitudes, indicates the value we place on our own labor as a priority. The actual first day of the week, however, is the one on which our Savior was raised from his own Sabbath rest of sorts, having three days earlier finished the work His Father sent Him to accomplish. It is this same first day of the week we honor as the Christian Sabbath. What does it say about our faith that Monday is more important to us than Sunday? After all, the same sniffles that keep you out of the pew on Sunday would never keep you out of the plant, or office, on Monday!<\/p>\n What difference would it make to your week if you began looking at Sunday as the first day of the week rather than the last, and Monday as the second day of the week rather than the first? Rather than viewing Sunday as the finish line – a goal to be worked toward all week – we view Sunday as God intended: as the starting line, with everything that follows in the secular rat race that begins on Monday following from and being shaped by the way in which we honor God by remembering to keep His Sabbath holy.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the end of Creation week God not only rested, He also reflected. How much of the curse of dreading the beginning of another work week might be lifted if I used the Sabbath in the way God did: to pause and to look back on all of my productive labor the previous week and pronounce it, “Good”? How much more might I anticipate the opportunity to be productive in the coming week if in dependence upon God I simply paused on the Sabbath to value the productive quality of the previous week, and by virtue of my rest \u2013 my ceasing \u2013 express my total dependence on God to sustain me, not only on the Sabbath, but every day?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That Monday is\u00a0widely considered to be the first day of the week – and Sunday the last –\u00a0is confirmation of the triumph of the secular over the sacred. That most people dread Monday is confirmation of the seculars’ inability to … Continue reading