“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
– Isaiah 58:13-14
I’ve been thinking about these verses off and on for years. It’s an “if”… “then” situation: IF you do these things, THEN you will find joy, etc.
photo courtesy of ©Depositphotos.com / magann
What does it mean, really, to “call the Sabbath a delight”? What does that even look like? It doesn’t really sound like just taking a day off to do nothing… (Tho there are days when that sounds utterly delightful…) And does it look (or have to look) the same for everyone? I don’t think so.
But if there are things we need to do in order to find joy, and calling the Sabbath a delight is one of those things, I think it’s logical to assume that calling the day a delight might actually involve something more than looking up from your book and saying to the Sabbath, “oh, hi, Delight – how are you?” as she strolls through the living room on her way to the kitchen to get a snack. No, to truthfully call something delightful means that it needs to be and is actually delightful – and creating a day that qualifies may take some intentionality and forethought.
God created the Sabbath; let’s imitate Him and create them, too.
