Heidi Franz Host 00:00
I sent an email to my aunt telling her all the things we had done over the weekend. She replied back, “What about the Sabbath?” My response was “Well, we’re not under the law anymore.” And I realized throughout these last few years that, no, we aren’t under the law, but God created the Sabbath for a purpose. But I could not figure out what a Sabbath looks like as a mom to four kids. My kids still had to eat, there were still diapers to change. We still had to do laundry. How do I Sabbath as a mom? This is the topic we’re going to discuss today.
Welcome back to Parenting to Impress. Your go-to podcast to learn practical ways to love God and love others and impress this on the hearts of your children. I’m your host, Heidi Franz, and I’m joined by my dear friend, Melanie Simpson. Two moms who have made a lot of mistakes but have found grace and truth along the way.
Melanie, the Sabbath has been a struggle for me. We have talked about it a bazillion times. I think some of it is my personality – I love to work. I find great joy in work. I think it’s the Enneagram 1 in me. I think it’s also having four kiddos. How am I supposed to get everything done?
Melanie Simpson Co-host 01:24
Right, we still have to eat, we still have laundry that needs to be done and I think, especially for moms of littles, they hear this idea of Sabbath, and they’re just like that sounds great, but how does that happen? Am I supposed to change diapers? I’m not supposed to wash bottles, really?
Heidi Franz Host 01:40
What does this look like exactly? This is what we’re going to dive into today, but I want to start first with what is.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 01:45
Sabbath. When we look at the Old Testament, that is the first place where we begin to see this idea of a Sabbath. And even in God’s creation, we notice in Genesis that after a period of six days, God took off the seventh day and rested.
Heidi Franz Host 02:03
Melanie, I think a lot of times we don’t know how to describe that to kids, so we have it as this idea that God took a nap, like God was tired when in actuality, I believe that the seventh day was spent by God enjoying what He created.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 02:21
Right, because we know He does not have exhaustion or fatigue. He is all-powerful. There is no fatigue or exhaustion in His attributes. It’s not a good judgment to say that God took a nap or that He kind of stopped. God doesn’t stop. Heidi, what does God share about the Sabbath in Exodus?
Heidi Franz Host 02:41
The 4th commandment God says to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. That’s Exodus 20:8. We think the 10 commandments are so important – we don’t kill, we don’t commit adultery, we worship God alone. Yet this Sabbath one, we’re kind of like eh, I don’t know really what that means. That doesn’t really apply to me. I’m just going to throw that one out when in reality, it is still something that God finds important.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 03:11
When you consider the whole of the 10 commandments, the heart behind them is God’s care for us. He created us, He knows us intimately and He knows what’s best for us. When we think about the commandment to Sabbath as God’s good for us, I think that helps us get a right picture of the Sabbath.
It is not God saying stop doing these things because you should just stop. It’s because there’s a good purpose for it. When we think of it as a promise from God that when you pause from your job, from your busyness, from your day-to-day routine and you rest in me, think about me, you worship me, you read your Bible, it causes us to depend on Him in a whole new way.
Heidi Franz Host 03:58
Oh, I love that. God created us to work. Adam was put in charge of the garden to care for it, to care for the animals. Colossians 3:23, “Work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord,” and there are many more verses about that. But God did not mean for us to work without rest.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 04:22
Right, or to work ourselves into the ground because we have made an idol out of ourselves.
Heidi Franz Host 04:27
Melanie, we were sitting in community group a few weeks ago and a friend said something to me that I cannot get out of my brain. She said, we tithe 10% or whatever the percentage is, with the understanding that we are giving back to God and God is going to provide for our needs. It is the exact same way with the Sabbath. We give God a seventh of our week with the understanding that He is going to allow us to get done what we need to in six days. We’re giving the seventh to Him.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 05:06
In Mark 2:27, Jesus is telling the Pharisees the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. In other words, God sees His created humans and knows that we are prone to overworking. We need that rest. It is then out of His goodness, His kindness, that He makes space for us to acknowledge Him and, like you said, with tithing, it’s a way of demonstrating our faith in Him and demonstrating our trust in Him. Our money doesn’t become an idol. Just like our time doesn’t become an idol.
Heidi Franz Host 05:45
So, this is where I want to get practical. What does it look like for a mom to Sabbath? I don’t have the answer to this yet. I am still working on this.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 05:57
It’s a really interesting question to think about because, like you said, we are still figuring it out for ourselves, and I don’t think that this is an area that is prescriptive in Scripture.
Heidi Franz Host 06:09
There’s not a list of do’s and don’ts.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 06:11
With Jesus fulfilling the law and knowing that He is Lord of the Sabbath, we are free from the minutiae that the Jews would still hold to as requirements for the Sabbath, and so there is freedom in Christ. Because of that, and that’s wonderful, praise God for the freedom, I think it becomes an issue of trial and error, of agreement between you and your spouse, of ages and seasons of parenting. When my children were little, on Sunday, our Sabbath, we got up, had breakfast, went to church, then we would come home, and have lunch, and the day was really meant to be just a day that was different than a regular day – Monday through Saturday. This meant we didn’t do school, and we didn’t have necessarily specific chores, but of course, things still needed to be tended to. We would go for a walk, maybe, or spend some more time reading books, and playing, so it just was meant to look different than the other days.
Heidi Franz Host 07:08
Absolutely so. For you guys, Sunday was your day as Sabbath. We go to church on Saturday night, which makes things a little wonky. For us, the Sabbath is Saturday night when church starts, from five o’clock until Sunday five o’clock in the evening. So, we use those 24 hours, starting with church, we spend time with friends, we rest. We wake up on Sunday morning and have a slow start. But I think the question to ask is what can we do to make this 24-hour period look different? Right?
Melanie Simpson Co-host 07:46
So that can be as simple as prepping some meals the day before so that you’re not maybe as tied to the kitchen as you would be on a regular day. Just being okay with having a cold breakfast or sandwiches for lunch so you can throw them in the fridge the day before. And I kind of do want to touch back on a point because – if you are a member of church staff or, with our family, law enforcement, we had to work on Sundays a lot of times and that’s okay. You still would be prayerfully considering another day that you could push pause and have it look different than your other six days of the week. What are some other things that you do, maybe to have the day look different?
Heidi Franz Host 08:25
Because I like to work, for me, Sunday is taking a break from my normal work. So I maybe will go out and work in the garden, or I will maybe go and plant flowers because that is refueling to me. It’s a different work. It’s not mind work that I do when I’m working on ABCJesusLovesMe or Parenting to impress.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 08:54
I can’t remember who it is, so I can’t credit it, it may be Justin Earley, but he said restorative rest, Sabbath rest can often be thought of as the opposite of what you normally do. So if your job requires a lot of brain, thinking, and stuff, then working with your hands might be more restful than for the opposite. If somebody does a lot of physical labor then doing a crossword puzzle or reading a book is restful. My sister’s job requires her to have lots of conversations, highly relational, and lots of brain power, and emotional things going out, so for her doing a puzzle is really restorative. She does it by herself, people can come in and out and join in, but it’s more herself and it’s just this very specific focus instead of the 15 million things that she has going on normally in a day.
Heidi Franz Host 09:37
I completely understand that. I think one of the things that we have to be careful of is that we don’t swing the pendulum all the way to the other side, where it becomes this list of do’s and don’ts. I can’t do this and it’s almost an anxiousness of if I do this wrong, but instead of just being still. I have a friend whose family has been practicing the Sabbath for several years and they really Sabbath. I mean, they turn their phones completely off, and they watch no electronics. And for us, we enjoy, as a family, watching a football game.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 10:18
Well, because during the week you guys hardly consume any media, so that makes sense.
Heidi Franz Host 10:23
So I have to be careful that I don’t judge our Sabbath based upon her convictions.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 10:30
How many times can we say this? Keep it between the ditches. The other side of that pendulum is the sheer slothfulness of a Sabbath where you don’t do anything. You stay in bed all day. All you do is watch movies all day. I don’t mean that in I’m not trying to shame somebody about that, but I would just say Sabbath is meant to also be a time where we reflect upon the goodness of God, we give gratitude, we worship him. It’s okay to do some of those things, but I don’t think that we can rightly have a view of God when we spend the entire 24 hours distracted by other things. I do think that the heart of the Sabbath is to recognize that we are created beings and that we have an opportunity in that 24 hours to rest from what we do and to point ourselves and redirect our attention back to the one who gave us life.
Heidi Franz Host 11:24
Yeah, I like that. I have found that Sundays are one of my favorite days to work out. I don’t have to hurry.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 11:31
I was going to say you’re not bound by your schedule on a Sunday.
Heidi Franz Host 11:34
Yeah, and so I enjoy that time of being able to exercise its freeing of my mind also.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 11:41
So thinking about moms of littles even into the early elementary years. I don’t know that it’s realistic to sit here with teenagers in my house and say, well, you should have the bowls of cereal filled out the night before and sit on the table with saran wrap over top, and then the milk should be pre-portioned. That just seems harsh and restrictive.
Heidi Franz Host 12:03
Well, we need to be careful that it doesn’t become legalistic.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 12:05
Yes.
Heidi Franz Host 12:06
I would say what are you feeling? What the Holy Spirit tells you to do, that’s what you need to do.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 12:13
Be willing to experiment with it and try different things. Don’t be afraid to change.
Heidi Franz Host 12:18
Absolutely, and it is going to change as your kids get older. It’s going to look different. Our Saturday nights and our Sundays look so much different now, when my kids are all teenagers, versus when they were six and under. I would encourage you, as moms, to listen to the Holy Spirit, because there have been times on Sundays when I have walked to the laundry room and said no, I’m not doing this, this is not what God has for me. There have been other times that I have walked to the laundry room and I’ve thrown in a load of laundry on that Sunday because that’s just what needed to be done and I had complete peace about that.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 13:15
I think it’s helpful too to remember that in Hebrews, chapter four, it talks about how the Sabbath, Sabbath rest here on earth, is a foreshadowing of the eternal rest we have with the Lord. In a world that is so hectic, so chaotic, so busy, what a gift of the Lord to be able to sit in just a foretaste of what is to come, which is just meditating on the Lord, thinking about scripture, maybe worship praise and worship music, something that helps you focus on God, because that’s how we’re going to spend eternity. We’re going to spend eternity worshiping and serving one another with full hearts, with joy, and without the imperfections that we carry with us now. I think if we have our perspective right, which is like you’ve said, Heidi, it’s not the law, we are not bound to these things. It is not a checklist of do this or get it wrong. If we hold it with open hands, we are prayerfully asking the Lord to help us know what is best for our families and to remember it is just a chance to experience the goodness of the Lord.
Heidi Franz Host 14:11
That just opens it up in a whole new way. We’ve talked about moms with littles. Now let’s talk about moms with kiddos, who are committed to a lot of things. It’s the volleyball tournaments on Sunday, it’s the softball tournaments, it’s the baseball tournaments. It’s all the activities that are happening on Sunday. The problem is they’re also happening Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. What is a mom to do with that?
Melanie Simpson Co-host 14:43
We’ve touched on this before as well. At the heart of it is you and your spouse being on the same page about what is the goal of raising your children. If it is to first love God and love others, that might mean that you need to make some adjustments in how much you participate. The other side of that coin, though, is I know a very precious family that their son’s participation in a travel soccer league is just a season. I think it’s maybe two or three years that are going to require this. In the scope of a lifetime for this child, who has a solid foundation in the Lord, is meeting with other believers during the week at different times, and has a family life that is encouraging and is helping him, they have decided that it is okay to take these two to three years and help pour into his career, they think, as a soccer player. I don’t know whether I agree with that or not. I haven’t really thought about it that much, but I believe wholeheartedly that this family has submitted this to the Lord and that the decision they’ve come up with.
Heidi Franz Host 15:41
I invite you to listen to a podcast where we specifically talk about this topic with a youth group leader. Melanie, in summarizing what we’re talking about. I don’t know that anybody has developed the perfect Sabbath because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all.
Melanie Simpson Co-host 16:15
It’s going to look different. On this side of heaven, we can’t have perfection Exactly, which is great, right? Because that drives us to think about and meditate on when we will have perfection.
Heidi Franz Host 16:25
Absolutely. But I do think what we are saying is that it is not about legalism on either side of the ditch.
It’s not about legalism about what I can do, just like it’s not legalism about what I can’t do. It is going to look differently and it really comes down to your heart’s motive and what you’re doing. Do you trust God? I’m going to put this personally because this is where I’m battling: Do I trust God that I can get done what I need to in six days and I can give him my seventh? We would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave comments on the blog or on social media, or connect with me on LiveChat, because I would love to talk through this topic with you further as I’m deciding what this look like in my life as well.
Announcer 17:21
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