In “Chariots of Fire,” the 1981 movie rich with images recounted in countless sermons, Eric Liddell gains fame as a champion runner, and does so without ever -- out of Christian conviction -- competing on Sunday. He makes it to the 1924 Paris Olympics as a likely medalist for the British team, but when he learns that a Sunday race is scheduled between him and gold, he refuses to run. Team leaders, the British upper class, even the empire’s future king are called in to persuade Eric to run “for your country,” yet he stands his ground. “God knows I love m’country,” he tells us in emotional Scottish brogue, but God’s law to respect the Sabbath remains paramount.

Into this tense scene comes one of Eric’s teammates, who graciously volunteers to give up his slot to Eric in another, non-Sunday race. Arrangements are made, the value of diplomacy affirmed, and Eric and his country proceed toward Olympic glory, all without Eric having to compromise his conviction.

Christians revel in “Chariots of Fire,” and with good reason -- it’s a beautifully made film, it tells a great story, it favorably portrays a committed Christian. And many Christians relate to Eric Liddell in standing up for Christian principle. In fact, it was an observant Jew who pointed out to me that in this regard, observant Jews relate more to Liddell the Christian than they do to fellow Jews who are not observant. Which brings us to the poignant matter at hand: for all our warm feelings toward Eric Liddell in standing up for Christian principle, many (perhaps most) American Christians these days don’t abide by his particular Christian principle -- many of us, with the exception of attending a church service, don’t keep the Sabbath.

Yes, this is true, many would say. But such acknowledgment, followed by a pause, is then likely followed by a question: So what? To many a modern Christian, Sabbath is an antiquated notion taken seriously by serious Jews and certain older (or old-fashioned) Christians, but it’s really not that big a deal, is it? And besides, didn’t Jesus set Christians free from all that Old Testament legal baggage? You don’t have to be an antinomian liberal to discount the Sabbath. It’s just not worth the fuss, many might think, if they think about it at all.

A Big Deal?

I’ve personally struggled with what it means for contemporary Christians to keep the Sabbath. Just how important is it? Over the past decade a number of insightful thinkers have offered their understandings of the place of a Christian Sabbath (note the adjacent article). They speak of the “psychological and spiritual sophistication” built into Sabbath observance that we do well to appreciate. By them I’ve been encouraged to experiment with Sabbath-keeping, which for me is now a rest-in-progress. If you are not a Sabbath observer, I invite you to consider the possibilities. The meaning of the day is deep, the reasons for it quite powerful.

Consider, for starters, some biblical basics. It is not overstatement to say that, scripturally speaking, no discussion of work is complete without a discussion of rest. Keeping the Sabbath (a term meaning “to cease, to rest”) is, for goodness’ sake, one of the Ten Commandments. And judging by the space He gives it, God thinks pretty highly of the Sabbath: embedded in the midst of the Ten, about a third of the text of the Decalog is devoted to remembering the Sabbath day.

In the New Testament, yes, are places (like Colossians 2:16 and Romans 14:5-6) that tell of the freedom of Christians regarding the Sabbath. Such passages, however, speak more of when -- not if -- we are to keep it. By all appearances Jesus was a Sabbath-keeper. And though He modified the biblical teaching on it, His lessons are not about doing away with it, but clarifying the place it is to have in our lives. This was true of His life, and even of His death: remember that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are wrapped around a Sabbath. Even His most attentive followers in those torturous hours, the women of Luke 23, in their grief-stricken state still diligently prepared spices for His dead body -- and just as diligently delayed their trip to the tomb (“And on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment” (v. 56)).

Jesus, no question about it, combated the Pharisees’ legalistic approach to Sabbath-keeping, uttering those memorable words, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). But in following Jesus’ direction in retreating from legalism, have we gone too far? Have we taken this as a license to do as we please on the Sabbath -- even at the expense of God’s best for us? Is there a middle road between the enforcement of blue laws and the abandonment of what the Bible takes seriously?

At What Price “Freedom”?

Since Jesus’ day Christians have varied in the way and extent to which they keep Sabbath. But in our day we are not taking it as seriously as we did in even recent decades. Where once stores closed on Sunday, now it is one of the two busiest shopping days of the week. Where recreation used to be a pastime, now it’s an industry, and many people use Sundays to wreck creation. Where the 40-hour work-week formerly was the campaign of an entire labor movement, now evenings and weekends have become easier prey to the time-consuming workaholic. More and more people feel free to set aside any semblance of a Sabbath. Like Eric Liddell, many of us want to run; unlike Liddell, we can’t seem to stop.

We might inquire why it is that during this same era when Sabbath observance declines, there is a corresponding increase in discontent over how much more free time we don’t seem to have. If keeping the Sabbath is reduced to attending a worship service (“try to keep it to an hour, please”), that frees up much of an entire day in the week to do what we choose. Then why is it many of us feel there just isn’t enough time in the day, or the week?

We can give a host of reasons why this is so, but it clearly is so. Robert Banks, in The Tyranny of Time, tells it like it is: “Life is more hectic than we prefer it to be. We pause to regret this every so often but then rush off to attend to whatever is next on our list of responsibilities. But we treat it as a fact of life rather than as a condition that can be changed.”

In his notably perceptive book, Margin, Richard Swenson, M.D., points out that for all its contributions to modern life, “Technology does not answer our need for physical rest. Labor-saving devices help in some respects, but curiously, those cultures that have the most labor-saving devices are the most hectic and the least rested ... We forget to calculate that for every minute of time saved, our society offers hours of new activities, each with noise, expectations, and complexities of its own.”

If we leave ourselves and our calendars open to all the options of our high-tech age, they can easily fill up all our days and nights. They can encroach not only on our discretionary time, but on time we give to the bare necessities, things like sleep and food -- and spiritual well-being. As much as we passively resist, our calendars will be full and our rest inadequate for the foreseeable future -- until we take deliberate steps to change. Sabbath observance can be one of those steps. It will not eliminate stress, but it can help manage and reduce it. Along the way, too, we can discover it is far more than a stress-management technique.

Working (and Wresting) the Biblical Angles

Is there a correlation between the stress of a contemporary lifestyle and ignorance of an ancient one?
Dennis Prager tells how Sabbath observance was an ingrained part of the week in the Orthodox Jewish home where he grew up. After finishing his yeshiva schooling he decided to travel and, for a time, intentionally stop practicing Judaism, including Sabbath-keeping. He allowed himself to do things he had never done on a Friday night or Saturday: eat out, travel, shop, whatever suited him. Then one night on the road, it suddenly occurred to him that it happened to be a Friday night. While no great revelation to most people, it struck him so forcefully because he then realized that for him it had come to feel just like Thursday or Tuesday -- in other words, all the days had run together, with one no more or less significant than another.

We’ve probably all had this feeling to some extent, such as on a Monday morning back at work after a rushed weekend out of town. But Prager is referring to a particular religious sense to the feeling, and in doing so brings us back to the Fourth Commandment, which begins, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” “Holy” includes the idea of separation, of distinctness. The command is telling us to make the Sabbath different from other days. “We can only solve the problem of time through sanctification of time,” writes Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel, and the Sabbath, in his profound words, is “a sanctuary in time.”

As we’ve noted, it is a biblical command to work, even as part of the wording of the commandment to keep the Sabbath: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work” (Exodus 20:9). This gives meaning to our work. It ascribes biblical significance to our labor.

And it is a commandment to rest: “... but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work ...” (20:10). Much space can be given to the meaning of work and why we should do it. But what is the meaning of rest?

An answer comes by way of a remarkable trait of the Ten Commandments. In the two biblical listings of them, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, the wordings of various commands are essentially identical, except when it comes to the directive on Sabbath, specifically the reason given for keeping it. Each passage has its own reason, and each is significant for us.

Why keep the Sabbath? According to Exodus, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth ... and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this. “Things created in six days [God] considered good,” Heschel reminds us; “the seventh day He made holy.” Or as Eugene Peterson puts it, “There are some things that can only be accomplished, even by God, in a state of rest.” God rested, Karen Mains explains, not because of weariness, but because He was satisfied with His creative work. The world had been created, and it was good, worthy of a memorial -- in the form not of a plaque on Eden’s gates, but of a weekly reminder to rest. And God invites His creation to observe it.

Exodus tells us to keep the day holy because God set the example for us by creating for six days and resting on the seventh, and so we imitate God when we work -- and when we rest -- by this pattern. Moreover, in the Jewish tradition, says Prager, to keep the Sabbath is no less than a public affirmation that God created the world. Every time we keep the Sabbath we are making the statement that we are following the model of God, the God held up in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the One who made all things.

A second profound reason for Sabbath observance is given in Deuteronomy 5:15. Speaking to the recently liberated people of Israel, God says: “And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there ... therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”

Do we recognize the significance of this? To be a slave is to be forced to work, prohibited from rest. Resting is the one thing slaves could not choose to do. So then, for the Israelites to cease from work was to make the public pronouncement that they are no longer in bondage. It is a declaration of liberation; it proves you are free and not a slave.

For this understanding I owe Dennis Prager, who goes so far as to say that if we cannot find one day of rest in the week, we are essentially slaves. We may earn a six-figure income and claim an abundance of material goods as our own, and in these ways are notably unlike the people subdued into making bricks from straw. Nevertheless the similarity remains between the ancient Israelite in Egypt and us, that if we are forced (or force ourselves) to work and do not choose to rest one day a week, we are not free. We are refusing to recognize that, as Prager puts it, “There’s something holier than making a living.”

The Pleasure Is Ours

We can find deeper meaning, then, in the statement of Jesus that “The Sabbath was made for humankind.” Far from being an obligatory regulation forcing us into rituals we don’t find as valuable as mowing or malling, God’s Sabbath command is for us, a gift for our benefit, and we dismiss it at our own loss. Isaiah encourages us, “If you ... call the Sabbath a delight ... if you honor it, not going your own ways ... then you shall take delight in the Lord ... ” (58:13-14).

I well know that if Sabbath-keeping is not an established habit, it is not easy to make it so. Just as it is counter-intuitive but true that you can be more productive by each week working six days and resting one rather than working seven, it is also oddly true that the discipline it takes to get into the persistent work habit we also need to get into the consistent rest habit.
For those wanting to develop a meaningful Sabbath observance, we offer the resources listed in the adjoining article. Keep in mind that many of us have gone through a long process of having our schedules invaded by activities that would crowd out meaningful rest time, and any reversal of this will be a process that itself takes time. Even if you make wholesale deliberate changes immediately, getting accustomed to even good change does not happen overnight. Also, Marva Dawn advises that Sabbath-keeping does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. If you begin by keeping only a slightly larger portion of the day than you did previously, you are going in the right direction. Be patient with yourself.

In “Chariots of Fire,” after plans are made for Eric Liddell to run in a non-Sunday race, there comes the time for the race to begin. In the moment just before the starting gun sounds, an American athlete, who had already run his race, approaches the Scotsman. He knew of Liddell’s convictions, and in a private show of support hands him a note. It simply read: “It says in the Good Book, ‘He who honors Me, him I will honor’” -- a quote taken from 1 Samuel. In the race Liddell went on to victory -- and on from there eventually to live out his life as a missionary to China. His Christian convictions obviously went beyond Sabbath observance. But they also included it, and can encourage us to see the value in including it in ours.