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Delight In God's Sabbath
A four-week course on entering the rest of God (Hebrews 4:10)
Most people think of the Sabbath as a day in the week to rest from work, but there is much more we can learn of God’s rest in the Bible, in creation and in Him. As simple as the fourth commandment to rest sounds, rabbis have long recognized keeping the Sabbath is so difficult, no one has yet been able to do it. They also believe God’s rest is so important that if Israel perfectly keeps it just once, the Messiah will come. To keep God’s rest is to know His holy ways that enable us to share His holy nature, so we can see Him as He is (Hebrews 12:10, 14)
The goals of this four-week course are to better understand the nature of God’s holy rest that He provides in Jesus and to more practically live in it. We will use strategies from psychology to help grow our understanding of God’s mysterious and fundamental rest
Class Description
1. Delighting in God’s Sabbath - God called Israel to delight in the Sabbath in His way, not in her own way (Isaiah 58:13-4). God’s delightful way in His Sabbath is different from our ways. It is in the pure and unconditional boundary of God’s holy rest that we learn His pure and unconditional grace by which He conforms us into the image of His Son, Jesus. We will learn some Cognitive Behavioral strategies to help us enter God’s delightful rest (Hebrews 4:11)
2. Shabbat traditions Sabbath traditions and practices set the stage for us to learn God’s rest. Waiting on God is an inner quality of rest that prepares our heart for God to plant and grow His seeds in us. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) emphasizes the interaction between the stage or context of our lives and the values that direct and order how we live. We will use approaches from ACT to encourage our waiting on God as we practice Shabbat
3. Emotional integration God wants us to live before Him whole and complete, but it is our nature to experience our life as fractured and internally conflicted. God reconciles in His rest in Jesus, Who makes us whole in His acceptance of us. We will look at Dialectical Behavioral Therapy’s (DBT) approach of emotion regulation to reconcile conflicts in our thinking and emotions
4. Addiction and recovery Addictions like alcoholism are obvious examples of a house divided, of craving what is self-destructive. Addictions come in many shapes and sizes, but we all live in their shadow, at times practicing what we don’t want to and not practicing what we want to. God wants us to be “whole-hearted” as we walk before Him (Genesis 17:1), in our brokenness. We will refer to some practices of 12-step programs for treating addictions