Seize the Moment – Day 553
The Gift of Sabbatical!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Tuesday, September 21.
I will never forget the love and support my family experienced when my local church worked with us to take a fully funded, three-month sabbatical in 2019. This was a gift of God’s extravagant grace as I finished my tenth year as the Lead Pastor of FBC.
Leviticus 25:3-7 explains how all-encompassing the gift of sabbatical rest was intended to be for every aspect of the Israelite community:
Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, but during the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard. Your harvest’s aftergrowth you shall not reap, and your grapes of untrimmed vines you shall not gather; the land shall have a sabbatical year. All of you shall have the sabbath products of the land for food; yourself, and your male and female slaves, and your hired man and your foreign resident, those who live as aliens with you. Even your cattle and the animals that are in your land shall have all its crops to eat.
Never forget that the rhythms of weekly sabbath, the sabbatical every seventh year, and the Jubilee every fiftieth year, was God’s idea first! It is still God’s design for His people to be blessed by and experience His unforced rhythms of grace through rest.
Because rest is part of God’s rescue of His creation—from the rich landowners to the lowliest servants to rest from their labors, as well as for the land to replenish and the animals to be unburdened.
The fact that God’s people have never been able to faithfully follow these commands demonstrates our desperate need for God’s deliverance from the slavery caused by sin.
Seize the moment and prioritize God’s rhythms of rest to declare the easy yoke of Jesus.