Thou shalt work six days a week

Have we over-emphasized rest?

You never forget the first time someone walks out of your sermon.

I was probably 25 or 26, preaching at the church where I was a youth pastor, when I was given the fourth commandment as my teaching text: “Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). It was during the study for this sermon that I came to my current conviction that the literal 24 hour Sabbath is not something to which a Christian must adhere. I (generally) practice a literal 24 hour Sabbath, and I think it’s (generally) a good thing for all human beings to practice, but I do not believe Scripture commands this for all followers of Jesus Christ. If you want a longer argument on this, I’m afraid my sermon is no longer online, so you’ll need to read your commentaries on Colossians 2.

I shared my convictions with the support of our teaching team and that Sunday a woman got up from her seat, huffed, and stormed out of my sermon. Turns out she was a Seventh-Day Adventist and there wasn’t much any evangelical would say that would keep her in the room.

Our Sabbath Obsessed Christianity

It’s a funny story that points to the strange reality: people really care what you think about the Sabbath. They always have. Jesus Christ’s first major tie ups with his day’s religious leaders were about his lack of adherence to the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1-12, Mark 3:1-4, John 7:21-23). And I feel like an essay like this might get me in similar tangles.

It’s not just Seventh-Day Adventists that may get up and walk out of a very pedestrian sermon like mine. Your common evangelical today may have a few opinions about the Trinity, but subjects of Christian “practices” or “rule of life” like the Sabbath or solitude come up and you’ll find yourself wishing you had brought up the filioque to a sixth century monk instead.

Christians (and especially Millennial Christians) really, really care about getting their Sabbath, their “time to rest,” their day off, their “rhythm.” Scores of books have now been written on the subject as pastors and speakers implore us to reconsider our way of living. My generation, especially, is dogmatic about vacation and apparently really talented at taking it without their employer ever even knowing.

But it’s my growing conviction that we have over-emphasized the Sabbath. For all we have done to cultivate a culture of rest, a life without any “hurry” or “hustle,” I wonder if we forget that the Sabbath day—for how blessed and holy we must keep it—is one day.

Even if you are a literal 24 hour Sabbath Pharisee, I might remind you…it’s one day.

A full six days of work

When God commanded the Sabbath day, to protect it and keep it holy, he simultaneously endorsed working for the remaining six. As has been pointed out thousands of times, “work” is not a product of the fall of mankind; work came in Genesis 2 (Genesis 2:15) before the narrative of the fall from grace in Genesis 3:1. Work will remain in the New Heavens and New Earth as humans will build houses, plant vineyards, and “enjoy the work of their hands” (Isaiah 65:21-22). Work, therefore, is also a blessed thing and apparently we should be doing it a lot more than resting. Work was there at creation and will remain at New Creation. What I do not see in today’s Christian landscape is a thoughtful and passionate call to a true work ethic (I’m sounding very Protestant, aren’t I?)

So let me do the necessary “this is NOT what I’m saying” paragraph. I’m not advocating for burnout, seven day work weeks, terrible pay (churches: please pay your pastors a great wage!), zero vacations (liberally grant PTO and paid family leave!), no sabbatical policies (take one every seven years of full time service!). While I’m at it, honor your volunteers, do not make demands on their time and allow them to serve with joy and bless them regularly with food, gifts, friendship, and support. Take care of each other and take regular walks and write a song and read a YA novel that no one else likes and pray every morning and work out and eat right.

Please. Not kidding. Find healthy churches—they’re all over and your life is not worth working in a community that does not respect it.

A command to work?

For all that I have said, my concern remains that we have overemphasized rest in such a way that we call people to a life that is both impossible and unbiblical. We were never meant to have a life without toil—that is, until New Creation. But until then, our relationship with work will be fraught with trouble and rich with possibility.

Upon Adam and Eve’s fall, the Lord God tells the man:

“¹⁷ Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

-Genesis 3:17-19

Work was given to mankind before the fall in both creation accounts (Genesis 1:27-28, Genesis 2:15) and mutated after it. Nevertheless, the Lord’s command to rest and work remains in the people of God when it is instantiated in the Ten Commandments. Notice the command does not end at “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” (Exodus 20:8). That’s not the full command; that’s just the first sentence of actually quite a long command. The commandment continues: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work…”

Interestingly, the commandment for humans to work is not connected to our “creation mandate” to “rule over” the animals (Genesis 1:28). Instead, God connects the labor commandment to his creation activity, not ours: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:12, c.f. Genesis 1:1-31).

God made the earth in six days (whether you take this literally or not does not really matter to our interpretation here). It seems a lot can get done in this time and a lot of “co-creating” and dominion needs to happen in a similar time frame. Lots of cultivation. Lots of work! Our motivation to work hard comes from participating in God’s creative power.

God, then, is to be met in both our working and our resting. Two “shalls” appear in the Fourth Commandment: “You shall keep the Sabbath” and “Six days you shall labor.” It’s an older word not used much, but “shall” is a command, and there are two of them for two different activities in one “command.”

To mis-teach the Fourth Commandment is to say that we meet God in the Sabbath after a long week of hard work where he is absent or hard to find. No, we meet God everywhere all the time—and especially in our working and resting. He worked six out of seven days and then rested. We’ll know him as we imitate him.

What if you are also a human doing?

You’re probably heard this trite axiom of which I do not know the origin: “You’re not a human doing, you’re a human being!” This is meant to make you feel shame about how much you work so you’ll take a day off. It’s law, not gospel. The good news of the gospel is, as Jesus tell us when he gets in trouble for breaking the Sabbath and not keeping it holy: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

The one day we’re given to rest is for our benefit—for us to rule over the Sabbath, not for the Sabbath to rule over us. The Pharisaical tendencies of well-meaning evangelicals will sound more like a law and less like gospel. The freeing invitation of Jesus Christ is this: you will meet God is your resting and your working. Who you are and what you’re commanded to do is both in working and resting. Thou shalt work six days—and work hard with honor, integrity, humility, and courage—and thou shalt rest on the seventh day. Don’t make any of your employees work seven days and you don’t work seven days. But while you’re working work hard and while you’re resting rest well.

One of our values on our staff team at Imago Dei is “work ethic.” What we mean by this is an emphasis on the word ethic. Growing up, “work ethic” always means “just work super hard.” But that is not its etymology. When we emphasize the “ethic” part of “work ethic,” we see the biblical command clearly: when you are not resting, contribute to the co-creative flourishing of God’s kingdom. Preach the gospel, start a business, pack groceries, sell insurance, perform surgery, write a song, clean the kitchen, study for an exam—work! And also rest. Be ethical in how you work, knowing that God is in the midst of your work week just as much as in the midst of your Sabbath, if you so choose to take one.

After all, God is not waiting for you to perform a specific kind of spiritual life so that you might meet him. He is to be found in your very breath and his kingdom is (quite literally) “in your midst” (Luke 17:21). If we live, as Dallas Willard has said, in “a God-bathed world,” then He’s not hard to find. Our working and resting is inside a world saturated with the Almighty. We can work hard for most of our life and expect God to shape us and meet us in it.

Our grandparents and us

Sometimes I wonder if my generation overcorrected our grandparents. Certainly previous generations were guilty of ignoring their families and sacrificing self-care at the altar of “the Lord’s work.” But what if we are now sacrificing the Lord’s work at the altar of self-care?

Consider some of the enormous contributions our forerunners have made to the kingdom of God. I often read lives of saints and remarkable men and women of God and I am in awe. Ignatius of Loyola is laid up in a medical bed in the 16th century after taking a cannon ball to the legs. In his disabled body, he commits his life to Jesus’ service in the local church. He enters the priesthood and that’s not enough. He founds the Jesuit order and dedicates his life to the flourishing of a new “society of Jesus” that goes on to be one of the greatest educational and spiritual formation outfits in the history of world religions. Or Hudson Taylor, who spent 54 years of his life in China as a missionary, founding a society by the name of the China Inland Mission. “The society that he began was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries to the country who started 125 schools and directly resulted in 20,000 Christian conversions, as well as the establishment of more than 300 stations of work with more than 499 local helpers in all 18 provinces” (you can thank his Wikipedia page for the summary). Or George Müller, who pastored his whole life while also caring for 10,024 orphans in addition to starting 117 schools that educated over 120,000 students. Each of these leaders also wrote books, preached sermons, and managed an insane number of staff.

Here’s my question: can we imagine this kind of work coming from a Western Christian culture that obsesses over rest? Can you start a university while demanding more PTO? Is it possible to even imagine a Millennial Pharisee founding anything remotely close to the Jesuit order or the China Inland Mission? Will the nations be evangelized while we guard our precious private life? Will those who demand a four day work week be able to scale a ministry that could potentially serve 200,000 students and 10,000 orphans?

You might think it’s impossible. But the Fourth Commandment would remind us even the cosmos were created in six days. We might be able to do more than we think with God’s creative power.

A few of the nearly 120,000 students in George Müller’s schools

The truth is that this kind of work with these kinds of numbers is emphatically not coming from the West right now, but it is coming from nearly every other corner of the global church. From the Philippines to Rwanda to Iran, churches are being planted at unprecedented rates and global rates of growth stick to 1%-2% annually, with the expectation that the number of Christians across the planet will reach 3 billion by 2050. At that time, Christian population numbers in the Global South will dwarf the number of believers in North America and Europe. In the West, it is a different story of rapid decline.

As I mentioned in a previous essay on my skepticism of sociological research, the tide of American Christianity can change at any moment through the mighty hand of God. In fact, the “vibe shift” or “Quiet Revival” may be the start of such an act. I pray that it is and sense the tide turning for sure. But even so: will this change be cultivated with a group of young believers who are constantly trying to protect themselves from a burnout that may never actually happen?

No schedule can save you

We want it to be about schedule. I’ll admit that I want it to be this simple. It’s not. What is really going on—and something I think the blessed Fourth Commandment is getting at—is our broken relationships. The answer is not in an amount of time, but in a disposition of our humanity before God, self, others, and the rest of creation.

This is, after all, the fracture created after the fall. In our inability to take God at his word, our relationships break. We do not relate with God in trust, and we likewise do not relate with one another in love. We also do not have a healthy vision of work because it brings us daily stress and pain along with an infinite future with no end in sight.

We spend our young years hustling, our middle years adjusting, and our final years regretting how we hustled and didn’t ever fully adjust. It’s the same story and the book is written by the same overly ambitious person. “I used to work all the time,” they’ll say, “but not I’ve found balance through healthy Atomic Habits and Spiritual Practices.” That book has been written a million times and sold a lot of copies. It’s also painfully predictable, profoundly unhelpful, and ultimately boring.

The truth is you can Sabbath or not Sabbath and still find yourself with an unhealthy attachment to your career or a spouse or you future. Have all the rules of life you want, take a sabbatical, rest and go to your kids’ soccer games—do it! But in all of these efforts your profoundly broken heart will follow you. Because the problem is not the work, it’s us. And the salvation from burnout is not in habits, practices, rhythms, schedules or anything we can do—as much as we want this to be true, it’s not. The Sabbath won’t save you. Nor will your work. Only God, fully invited in to both Sabbath and work will allow us to live in peace. Christ is our peace (Ephesians 2:14). Only Christ in you can give you “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). As Jonah reminds us in the belly of the fish: “Salvation belongs to the LORD” (Jonah 2:9).

Knowing God at work will probably mean we will be motivated to do remarkable things with a divine vision—we’ll be inspired and encouraged to do truly great things. And, knowing God at rest will also mean we’ll be OK if it all disappeared, failed, or never came to fruition. After all, these Ten Commandments brought Israel out of slavery, through a generation of wandering, a season of nation-building, a generation of exile, and hundreds of years of wrestling. I think they can bring us through, too.

It sounds impossible to live this way—to live with God, saved from the curse and blessed by the gift of rest and good works he has prepared for us. But if existence itself was created in six days, I feel like this (and more?) is possible in a similar amount of time.