Loving God with Our Schedules (Deut 5:12-15)

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast. Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW is a community of students learning to love Jesus, to love others, and love our campus. We’re a group for the convinced and the unconvinced, the confident and the doubting, the struggling and the seeking. 

Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This fall, we’re focusing on the book of Deuteronomy and the Ten Commandments. Tonight’s message looks at the fourth command which commands us to love God with our time: our priorities, activities and schedules. Because the Lord has made us for rest with him, we need to receive the gift of rest he has secured for us. 

“Our patterns of work and rest reveal what we believe to be true about God and ourselves. God alone requires no limits on his activity. To rest is to acknowledge that we humans are limited by design. We are created for rest just as surely as we are created for labor. An inability or an unwillingness to cease from our labors is a confession of unbelief, an admission that we view ourselves as creator and sustainer of our own universes.”- Jen Wilkin

“The goal of the means of grace is receiving true life from God—abiding in Christ so that you bear good fruit … the goal in practicing sabbath is being open to God, not making your life better. Christians do not practice sabbath because we have read recent medical judgments claiming rest is actually beneficial. Rather, we practice sabbath, and other means of grace, because we recognize our need for God.“ — Kyle Strobel 

“The sabbath is an invitation to enter delight. The sabbath when experienced as God intended, is the best day of our lives. Without question or thought, it is the best day of the week. It is the day we anticipate on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday – and the day we remember on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness. Few people are willing to enter the sabbath and sanctify it, to make it holy, because a full day of delight and joy is more than most people can bear in a lifetime, let alone a week.” - Dan Allender