Are you tired, overworked, burned out? Has life become devoid of imagination, a series of chores on a to-do list? Does the telephone make you cry out “What now?” Have dance and play and doing things just for the sense of adventure disappeared from your life as if they are reserved for the young, the foolish and the ignorant?
Then here is a book for you.
Every book I have read before regarding Sabbath has dealt with the questions of which day of the week we should call Sabbath, what is legitimate activity on the Sabbath, the relationship of Sabbath to the new covenant community and other similar matters that demand our study.
None of them, however, have dealt with the soul-rescuing purpose of the Sabbath. But Mark Buchanan, pastor of New Life Community Church in Duncan, B.C., has written The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath, which clearly does. For that reason alone it needs to find its way into the hands of Christians everywhere who kill themselves with activity, who find busyness a virtue and act as if God cannot accomplish His purposes if they are at rest.
The real strength of this book is that it addresses the heart of those who have stopped resting—physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally. And addressing the heart is what a book for the terminally busy must do. Buchanan creates a desire for what our overscheduled lives have taken away and for which we long to have back. He shows us that getting it back is possible.
This address to the heart is crucial; Buchanan instils hope. You cannot read this book without coming to see that rest really is possible, necessary and therapeutic in the way that God intended Sabbath to be. It makes you want to try.
This is a well-balanced approach to a desperate need in western society and the western Church. Each chapter deals with a specific aspect of Sabbath rest (attitude, work, play, listening, paying attention) and ends with what Buchanan calls his “Sabbath Liturgy,” a suggestion for putting the principle into practice. Very helpful.
For those who fear that a book promoting Sabbath must by necessity be legalistic, fear not. This book is not about the enforcement of a standard of behaviour upon the saints. Far from it. It is about liberty (“Rest, it turns out, is a condition of liberty”). But you need to read the book to see how beautifully Buchanan sets it out.
In some ways it is wrong to see this book as a promotion of Sabbath at all. The Sabbath debate has many preconceived notions and theological baggage attached to it. The Rest of God does not address them. This book is for all sides of the Sabbath debate. In fact, Buchanan accomplishes in this little volume what a few hundred years of wrangling have not; a middle road and a desire for Sabbath rest.
It is not hard to see I like this book. The criticisms I have are so small they are not worth mentioning. I would not want a negative remark to keep the Sabbath-less from reading and rereading this book, to their own good and to the good of those who associate with them.
Ken Davis is senior pastor of Thistletown Baptist Church in Toronto.
