This is a book review of Dan Allender’s book, Sabbath. This is done in cooperation with BookSneeze. You can see more of my book reviews here.

Dan Allender offers a dangerous and challenging call to our evangelical culture, which is fixated on numbers and speed and pragmatism. The concept of rest (true rest from our labors) is just as scandalous now as it was 4,000 years ago. Why slow down and drink in your favorite concoction of creation when there is so much work to be done? After all we have to keep the economic cog moving so we can afford that vacation don’t we? Allender’s book is part of a series of books in the Ancient Practices Series put out by Thomas Nelson Publishers.

The book is broken down into three parts:

1. Sabbath Pillars

a. Sensual Glory

b. Holy Time

c. Communal Feast

d. Play Day

2. Sabbath Purpose

a. Sabbath Play: Division Surrenders to Shalom

b. Sabbath Play: Destitution Surrenders to Abundance

c. Sabbath Play: Despair Surrenders to Joy

3. Sabbath Performance

a. Acting Out Sabbath in Ritual and Symbol

b. Sabbath Silence

c. Sabbath Justice

Conclusion: Deliver Us to Delight

Throughout his apologetic for his purpose in writing the book Allender justifies the practice of Sabbath by appealing to the OT model of 7th day rest. I believe given the New Covenant shift from theocracy in the Middle East to world-wide submission to the lordship of Jesus, this 1:1 relationship between the commands given to Israel and those given to the Church suffers from an over-simplified hermeneutic. That is, although the Sabbath is grounded in God’s Creation activity, the Sabbath (along with the priesthood, prophethood, kingship) should all be read typologically. That is to say, each of these institutions and principles were intended in salvation history to point to a greater reality. For example, David was the paradigm for how God desired the kings to lead his people. However, he was a failure–committing murder and adultery. His role was meant to point to something greater.

It is dangerous to point to point to David and the Messiah, see a continuity and discontinuity but fail t make similar distinctions between the Israelite Sabbath and the sabbath-rest found in Jesus–this is Jesus’ whole point in offering his hearers true rest in Matthew 11. For a fuller treatment of this hermeneutic defense see From Sabbath to Lord’s Day.

HOWEVER, with that said, I would strongly commend this book to you for your own spiritual vitality. The danger in reading a book that you disagree with on such a fundamental level is to throw everything out that the author says. I believe that would be a mistake with Allender’s book. What I did throughout is to substitute Allender’s thoughts on grounding the Sabbath in the Ten Commands and replacing it with the PRINCIPLE of sabbath–which I think is still very important for us. In fact, I found this is essentially what Allender argues for in his book. I have found in my own spiritual life–given my typological understanding of the Sabbath–that I have too quickly said, “Every day is sabbath rest because of Jesus.” This is true at the fundamental level of Christian doctrine. The problem too often is that this truth also (inadvertently) eschews the biblical principle of sabbath rest.

I have found myself working seven days a week and not taking time to enjoy my family and friends and creation–because every day is sabbath rest. I believe those who find themselves in my hermeneutical camp would do their souls well by embracing the principle of sabbath anew and seeking to intentionally rest once a week.

Allender makes the Sabbath appealing throughout his book as he makes the case very clear that true sabbath rest is not about hedging ourselves in so that we make sure we don’t work on the Sabbath. Such self-justifying works miss the intent of sabbath. Instead, he asks the probing and convicting question: What would I do for a twenty-four hour period of time if the only criteria was to pursue my deepest joy? This is probing because we do not often sit down to ask ourselves what makes us truly joyful. It is convicting because too often if we were to stop and ask ourselves, we would find that that which brings us most joy has no explicit reference to God in our thinking.

Here are a couple snippets to whet your appetite to read this book:

Delight doesn’t require a journey thousands of miles away to taste the presence of God, but it does require a separation from the mundane, an intentional choice to enter joy and follow God as he celebrates the glory of his creation and his faithfulness to keep his covenant to redeem the captives (4).

Sabbath rest is entered when we refuse to be bound by complexity or drowned by despair. We enter delight only as we gaze equally and simultaneously at creation and redemption, in spite of the darkness that surrounds us and constantly clamors to be truer than God (4).

We invent rules that seem orderly and sensible, if not righteous and moral, so that anyone who violates our code is somehow less than committed (22).

The core of delight is our capacity to worship, to create and enter beauty as a reminder and anticipation of God’s goodness (36).

Beauty cannot be purchased from a catalog or selected by the most sophisticated designers; holy beauty must be crafted from material that is loved (36).

We are not to work on the Sabbath because it takes us out of the play of joy. It is as bizarre as making love to your spouse, but getting out of bed during the process to cut your lawn or wash dishes. Such an offense would do far more than spoil the mood; it would be a direct assault on the integrity of joy, announcing that a mundane chore is more pleasurable than sexual joy with your spouse (61).

I am reading Dan Allender’s Sabbath as part of my involvement with Thomas Nelson Publishers’ program called BookSneeze. I was going to rush through it to get my review done and my new book in the mail–how ironic, right? The book is about resting in the midst of the hurried-ness of life.

We are surrounded by noise, speed, power, freneticism. As I write this, a song is pumping through the speakers at work. Quiet makes customers nervous. Is it that we have been rushing for so much of our lives that we are uncomfortable with ourselves? We need stimuli to keep us from fully engaging with the humans around us. Instead, we fill our eyes, ears, nose, and throat with distractions. If we can just get from the bed in the morning back to the bed in the evening without having to confront or be confronted then I am happy.

While I disagree with some fundamental assumptions regarding Sabbath Allender has used, I have found the book extremely helpful. Here are some excerpts:

We seldom honor the reality that we own time; we are far more inclined to use time to gain advantage and control. The oddity is that the more we treat time like an extension of a machine, called a clock, the more we are bound to time as if it is the boss and we are the slave (p.53)

I was finishing another writing project as I worked on this book. I took several days while I was overseas to write. I wrote for four hours every day and was near completion, when on the way back I was interrupted by a meal service and the tray was put on my table before I could close my computer. I held my laptop above the tray and saved the document, and then closed the computer down. Apparently, I did something wrong. When I opened it after lunch, my entire document was gone. I did everything I knew to do to retrieve it, and there was nothing but a blank page. Irrespective of the cause, my first thought was, I’ve lost all that time; when will I get the time to do it over? I have wasted precious time, and it is gone. Several deep presumptions exist in those sentences. I own time; and it owns me. It is mine to use; and when I waste it, as if I could, it is my fault. There was no thought that in rewriting the work, it may improve far more than a mere editing of the first document (p.53; emphasis original)

When we see time as a machine, then when it appears to break, we can do little but vent our frustration and wait for the expert to help us, rather than to submit and honor the One who has created time for our delight (p.54)

If you’re like me, rather than letting the presumptions he mentions sink deep in my psyche, I start wondering what he did with that document so that it did not save! And then presuming that I could have retrieved it for him. How busy we are!

With the turkeys, hams, and roasts calling our name in the coming weeks, I just received a helpful article from Team Beachbody with eight practical tips to fighting the tendency to indulge and go haywire in self-control. Too many times have I used the excuse that “Hey, it’s the holidays” when I want to let go and let bulge. Of all the tips, I find the first one has been a help to me. Too often I don’t see myself gaining weight in the mirror. BUT when I put on that suit that fit a few months ago and it is a little uncomfortable, I know I fell off the wagon.

Here are the eight tips.

1. Buy clothes that fit right now.
2. Write it down. We try to write down everything we eat, right? We spend hours each month staring at a food diary, adding up our calories, and seeing if we got the correct balance of macronutrients. And then the holidays happen, and our little book ends up in the bottom drawer.
3. Keep exercising. Most fitness trainers will tell you the slowest point of their year is between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Sure, their clients schedule workouts with the best of intentions, but then they cancel them for parties and gift shopping.
4. Eat before parties.
5. Get junk out of the house. The majority of people don’t get into the car at midnight, drive to the store, buy the ingredients for cookies, bake them, and then stay up to eat them. But if those homemade cookies that Linda in accounting made for you are already on your kitchen counter, you better believe you’ll find a way to justify it. Frankly, at 12:30 AM, after a rotten day, for most of us there’s nothing like a few cookies to drown our sorrows. The secret is to get the enticements out of the house.
6. Offer to prepare healthy fare. This suggestion won’t be well received by those of us who’d rather spend Thanksgiving sitting around watching football than toiling in the kitchen, but if you do the cooking, you have the control.
7. Choose wisely and proportionally. Something occurs during a holiday meal. It’s like a Las Vegas buffet—we feel like we have to eat some of everything. We feel almost like those foods will never exist again, and this is our last meal on the planet. This year, why not try to eat only your favorites, as in two or three items, and keep the portions to the size of your palm? If you’re still hungry, try to fill up on veggies (preferably ones that aren’t drowned in butter or cream-of-mushroom soup). If you want dessert, lean toward a small slice of pumpkin pie (220 calories) as opposed to pecan (a heftier 543), leaving out the hydrogenated nondairy whipped topping if possible. If you’re going to have an alcoholic beverage, go with a flute of champagne (100 calories) as opposed to that rum-laced eggnog (with more than four times more calories, at 420). Just a few wise choices will save you a ton of calories, and probably a significant amount of heartburn as well.
8. Don’t beat yourself up. Quite possibly the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up over a bit of holiday indulgence.

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