The Sabbath Practice
An ancient way to find rest for your soul
The Sabbath is a 24-hour time period set aside to stop, rest, delight, and worship. It is the best day of the week. In our era of chronic exhaustion, emotional unhealth, and spiritual stagnation, few things are more necessary than the recovery of this ancient practice.
What to expect
Each Practice comes with four session videos, weekly exercises and readings, and additional resources to help your group create life-changing daily rhythms as you apprentice under Jesus together. The sessions are about 30 minutes long and include time for group discussion at the beginning.
Our Practices are perfect to use with small groups or to run course-style with a larger group, but they can also be modified for a churchwide Sunday teaching series, small cohorts, and many other contexts.
Preview Session 01Week by Week
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The word “sabbath” means “to stop.” In Genesis, God worked for six days but then rested on the seventh. In doing so, he built a rhythm into the fabric of creation. When we live in alignment with this ancient rhythm, we find peace and joy, but when we fight it, we fracture our souls.
Practice: Set a time to rest, develop a beginning and ending ritual, and pick one to three Sabbath activities to begin our practice.
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We hear about Sabbath rest and we imagine sleeping or taking a day off to chill. But Sabbath rest is a form of resistance. There are powerful forces — both external and internal — that war against a Sabbath spirituality. To sabbath will require that we resist.
Practice: Make a list of what you will not do on the Sabbath, and explore a prayer exercise.
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Sabbath is not an onerous day for dour religious duty, but a life-giving day of delight — a weekly party. It’s a full day set aside to celebrate our life with God in his world. And it’s designed to be done in community, not alone. Few things are more provocative in the modern world than communities of joy.
Practice: Throw a Sabbath feast with our community and pick one to three of our favorite activities to curate joy.
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Sabbath isn’t just a day to stop, rest, and throw a feast in community. Ultimately, it’s a holy day — set apart for and dedicated to God himself. Early Christians called it “the Lord’s Day.” It’s a weekly day of worship by which we cultivate a spirit of worship all week long.
Practice: Identify one to three of our sacred pathways (ways we deeply enjoy God with our personality and stage of life), and learn to spend the day in worship.
Recommended Resources
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The Companion Guide
Each session will use the Sabbath Companion Guide. We created this guide to help you and your group build new daily rhythms.
The Guide includes weekly Reach Exercises, assigned readings and podcast episodes, and reflection questions. You can purchase a beautiful printed version, or download the digital guide for free when you sign up to run the Practice.
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Recommended Reading
For the Sabbath Practice, we recommend picking up Sabbath by Dr. Dan Allender. Each week, you’ll be assigned readings in the Sabbath Companion Guide.
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Sabbath Meditations
Sabbath is a time to stop, rest, delight, and worship. Download this free book of meditations to read aloud or contemplate on your Sabbath.
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Rule of Life Podcast
In the Sabbath series of the Rule of Life podcast, John Mark Comer, Bethany Allen and Bryan Rouanzoin dive into the countercultural act of Sabbath in today’s world.