God’s Sabbath time of rest

God’s Sabbath Time of rest>

The Practice of the Presence of God: Revisited>

God's Sabbath Time of Rest

We live in time. How we relate to time colors all our experiences in it. When we experience time as rushing, we feel urgent, anxious, or overwhelmed. When we perceive time as static and unmoving, we feel bored, frustrated or despairing. It is easy to assume we know all we need to know about time if we reduce it to the familiar face of a clock whose hours and days we learned to measure in childhood. But when we look beyond the mask we give it, we discover we are in the hands of time that is always elusive and beyond our ability to alter. We are more able to make peace with this untouchable time when we learn its nature and how to live on its terms

Time is one of life’s most basic paradoxes: its constant and unchanging presence is continually changing everything in it. This paradox can be called time’s inherent dialectic. The time we daily live reflects aspects of another time that is also always present but is rarely known or experienced: the time of God’s holy rest. The Sabbath explains a paradox that is central to the Christian gospel: the more we rest in God’s rest, the more He accomplishes in us and bears His abundant fruit. Many paradoxes of the gospel are reconciled in God’s holiness because His holiness establishes our true relation to Him. In Jesus, we are united with God by being transformed as saints, His holy ones. God completed creation on the Sabbath (Genesis 2:2), and completes us in Jesus.

This course explores how to live in the sanctifying and restoring time of God’s rest

Class 1: Time and the dialectic of change in acceptance - The challenging process of acceptance in both God and psychotherapy prepares us for deeper and more securely grounded change. God transforms us by accepting us in His holy rest

Class 2: Time and the Sabbath - Our relation to time’s pace and patterns will be compared to the patterns of God’s Sabbath time in creation and in the Biblical feasts

Class 3: Time of work and rest - Balancing times of work and rest is basic to good mental health. God’s Sabbath balances our work and rest on the fulcrum of His grace

Class 4: Time and anxiety - Managing anxiety well clarifies our easily confused relations to time’s past, present and future. God’s Sabbath anchors the past and future in a present waiting on Him

Class 5: Time and loss - Grief therapy heals as one's attachment to the past is reshaped by present comforts and resources. God’s Sabbath brings time in relation to Him, the God of all comfort

Class 6: Time and the rhythms of living - Psychotherapy identifies patterns of living to make sense of problem behaviors and their solutions. The Sabbath’s patterns or laws are considered as God’s law of freedom and liberty (James 1:25; Leviticus 25:10)

Class 7: Time and humility - Acceptance runs deepest in Christian humility, the good soil for God to plant good seed (Mark 4:20). The Spirit of Jesus is humility, whose fully ripened fruit is sacrifice

Class 8: Time of God’s rest - Jesus calls us to rest with Him (Matthew 11:28) so His grace can work mightily in us (1 Corinthians 15:10). This and other paradoxes of the Christian life will be explored in the context of God’s holy Sabbath time, whose nature is most fully explained and fulfilled in Jesus