The Rest We Keep Forgetting to Take

Ask anyone who they're doing these days and you're likely to get one of two answers: (1) "I'm good." This is just the polite answer. It usually is automatic. People will say they're "good" or "well" (if they are grammatically careful) even if they are not. Or (2) "I'm tired" or some variation on how they might state their exhaustion.

There is a peculiar exhaustion that seems to impact every dimension modern life. It is not merely physical tiredness—the kind that comes from a long day’s labor and is cured by a good night’s sleep.

It is deeper than that. It is the exhaustion of a soul that has forgotten how to stop.

We check email at red lights. We answer texts during dinner. We schedule our “days off” so we can get things done. Usually our "days off" are more taxing than our workdays.

Even our rest has become a form of work.

I remember, as a child and even into young adulthood, believing that I had “kept the Sabbath” if I sat in a pew for an hour on Sunday morning. Check the box. Fulfill the commandment. Now go home and mow the lawn, catch up on paperwork, worry about Monday.

It took me many years to realize that the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy was never meant to be a spiritual transaction squeezed between errands. It was an invitation into something far larger—an invitation the author of Hebrews describes with a strange and beautiful phrase: "So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:9-10).

A sabbath rest still remains.

 

The Rest That Was Written Into Creation

To understand why this matters, we have to go back to the very beginning. In Genesis, God works for six days and then rests on the seventh. This is astonishing when you think about it. God does not rest because He is tired. The Hebrew word shabat does not primarily mean “to be weary”—it means “to cease, to desist, to stop.” God stops.

And in stopping, He blesses that stopping and calls it holy.

Notice what is missing on the seventh day in Genesis 1. Every other day ends with the refrain, “And there was evening and there was morning.” But the seventh day has no evening.

The text leaves it open, as if to suggest that this day of rest is not yet complete—that it extends forward, beckoning creation into it.

This is exactly what the author of Hebrews picks up on. He is writing to Jewish Christians who are being tempted to abandon their faith in Christ and return to the old covenant. And he says something remarkable: the true Sabbath rest that God intended from the beginning was never merely a day on the calendar. It was a state of being.

It was communion with God.

Israel’s Sabbath was a sign pointing to something greater, and that something greater has now arrived in Christ.

"For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not speak later about another day. So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:8-9).

The Greek word used here is sabbatismos—a word the author seems to have coined himself, transiterating Hebrew/Aramaic into Greek. It is not the ordinary word for rest (katapausis) that he has been using throughout the chapter. It is a special word: a keeping of sabbath. A sabbath-observance. The people of God still keep a sabbath, but it is a sabbath that has been transfigured by the resurrection.

 

Why Sunday?

If the sabbath was Saturday—the seventh day—why did the early Christians begin gathering on Sunday?

I want to address this because there have been movements (e.g. Seventh Day Adventism) and there has been a more common "Hebrew Roots" movement that has attempted to restore Saturday as a "sabbath" for Christians.

But for the earliest Christians, who chose to rest on the Lord's Day, This was not an arbitrary change made centuries later. It happened almost immediately, within the lifetime of the apostles themselves.

The reason is theological and profound. Christ rose from the dead on the first day of the week. "After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb” (Matthew 28:1).

The resurrection appearances in John’s Gospel occur on Sunday—both the day of the resurrection and, notably, “a week later” (John 20:26), which is again Sunday. Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended, occurred on a Sunday. In Acts, we read that "on the first day of the week, when we met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion with them” (Acts 20:7). And in Revelation, John tells us he received his vision ”on the Lord’s day” (Revelation 1:10)—a phrase that had already become a technical term for Sunday.

The early Christians did not see themselves as abolishing the Sabbath. They saw themselves as fulfilling it.

The seventh day was the day God rested from creating the first world. The first day—the eighth day, as the Fathers loved to call it—was the day Christ rose to inaugurate the new creation.

St. Justin Martyr, writing around AD 155, explains: “We all hold our common assembly on the day of the sun, because it is the first day, on which God, having transformed the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead” (First Apology, 67).

So Sunday is not merely a day off. It is the day of the new creation. It is the weekly Easter. It is a proclamation, embedded in the very rhythm of our lives, that death has been defeated and that God is making all things new.

 

Beyond the Pew

But here is where I want to press deeper, because this is where I struggled for so many years. If Sunday is truly the Lord’s Day—if it is a weekly participation in the resurrection—then attending Mass or a worship service is not the fulfillment of the day.

It is the beginning of it.

Think of it this way: if a beloved friend invited you to their home for a meal, you would not eat one bite and then rush out the door to run errands. The meal itself is the heart of the celebration, but the celebration is meant to spill out into hours of lingering conversation, laughter, and communion.

What does it mean, then, to keep the Lord’s Day, not merely to attend it?

The author of Hebrews gives us the key: "for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:10). To keep the Sabbath is to cease. It is to imitate God’s own ceasing. It is a deliberate, weekly act of trust that says: the world will keep turning without my labor. The universe does not depend on my productivity. I am not what I produce.

This is genuinely countercultural. Our whole economic and social order is built on the assumption that our worth is measured by our output. The Sabbath is a weekly protest against this lie. It is a declaration that we are beloved sons and daughters before we are workers, that our value is received as a gift, not earned by achievement.

 

Learning to Cease

So how do we actually do this? Let me offer some suggestions that have taken me years to learn, and that I am still learning.

First, plan for rest. This sounds paradoxical, but it is essential. Sabbath does not happen by accident. If you drift into Sunday without any intention, you will drift right through it. Consider on Saturday evening: what will I not do tomorrow? What emails will I not check? What errands will I refuse to run? What worries will I set aside? Prepare in advance so that Sunday can be genuinely different.

Second, receive the day rather than fill it. Our tendency is to treat time as something we must fill with activity. Sabbath asks us to receive time as gift. This might mean a long walk without headphones. A slow breakfast. Reading Scripture without any agenda beyond simply being with the text. Sitting on the porch and doing—wonderfully, radically—nothing.

Third, worship as the heart, not the whole. Do go to Mass or worship. Do participate fully in the liturgy. But then let that encounter with the risen Christ shape the rest of your day. Come home and linger. Share a meal. Read something that feeds your soul. Pray with family. Take a nap without guilt.

Fourth, embrace the small deaths. Sabbath will feel, at first, like a kind of death. You will feel the withdrawal from your usual patterns of productivity. You will feel anxious about what is not getting done. Let this discomfort teach you. It is showing you where you have made an idol of your own labor. Sit with it. It will pass, and on the other side is freedom.

Fifth, extend hospitality and mercy. The Sabbath in Scripture was not merely for the head of the household. It was for servants, animals, foreigners, everyone. The Lord’s Day is a beautiful time to remember those who cannot rest—the lonely, the sick, the burdened. A phone call to someone forgotten. A visit to someone shut in. A meal shared with someone alone.

Sixth, don't be legalistic about it. Jesus had several confrontations with the Pharisees about the Sabbath, famously reminding them that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. If our "rest" degenerates into a rigid checklist of forbidden activities, we’ve missed the point entirely. If the true meaning of the Lord's Day is re-creation—about God renewing and transfiguring all of creation—then our rule-of-thumb shouldn't be a cold "do nothing at all." Instead, we should ask: Does this activity reflect my participation in the new creation?

If you love to garden, weeding the flower beds on Sunday might not be a "chore" to be avoided; it might be a life-giving way to connect with the beauty of God’s earth. If you love to bake, spending two hours kneading bread isn't "labor" in the anxious sense—it is a creative act that brings joy to your table. The boundary line is not determined by an arbitrary list of rules, but by the state of your heart. You have to ask yourself: Am I doing this out of anxiety, or am I doing this out of delight? Am I trying to get ahead for Monday, or am I resting in the sufficiency of today?

If an activity feeds your soul, deepens your relationships, or causes you to look up in wonder and give thanks, it belongs in the Sabbath. If it drains you, tethers you back to the matrix of production and consumption, or feeds the illusion that you are the engine that keeps the world running, lay it down. Let Sunday be a day of holy liberty, not heavy restriction.

 

The Rest That Remains

There is a deeper mystery here, and I want to end with it. The sabbath rest that “remains” for the people of God is not fully realized in any single Sunday. Each Lord’s Day is a foretaste of something greater. It is a rehearsal for eternity. It is the church training herself, week by week, for the great rest that is coming—the rest in which we will finally cease from every anxious labor, every wounded striving, every restless search, because we will see God face to face and know as we are known.

St. Augustine ends his Confessions with these words: “Lord God, grant us peace, for you have granted us all things: the peace of rest, the peace of the sabbath, the peace which has no evening” (Confessions XIII.35).

The peace which has no evening. Do you feel the pull of that? Every Sabbath we keep here is a small rehearsal for that eternal day when our labor will cease to be laborious, in pain and toil. Every Sunday we allow ourselves to truly cease is a whisper of the eternity in which our restless hearts will finally, wholly rest in the God who made them.

The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy is not a burden. It is a gift. It is God’s own way of protecting us from the tyranny of our own restlessness. It is His invitation, week after week, to remember who we are: not producers, not achievers, not consumers, but beloved children invited into the eternal rest of our Father.

The invitation still stands. The rest still remains.

Will you enter in?