Who is the Sabbath For?

All this week at her blog, Amy Julia Becker invited guest bloggers to answer the question, “Who is the Sabbath for?”

So I began to wonder if this fourth commandment was a hinge command, a command that both linked to the first three commandments in our relationship to God and a command that linked to the following six commandments in our relationship with others. It made me wonder whether the Sabbath was somehow integral to loving God and loving neighbor, somehow integral to my life as a Christian.

But I continued to struggle to “keep” the Sabbath. And I continued to wonder—what sense are modern day Christians to make of this ancient Jewish practice? We don’t even observe it on the same day anymore, and plenty of Christians disregard it altogether, and plenty of non-religious people in our culture get plenty of rest on Sundays. As a Christian, what makes the Sabbath different, both from the Jewish practice of it and from the secular practice of it?

Read the intro to the series here.