How to Connect With God

Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · March 24, 2024 · The Domino Effect series

Marc Jolicoeur closes The Domino Effect with two habits that help us love God: kneeling prayer three times a day, drawing on Daniel 6, and a weekly Sabbath rooted in Genesis 2. Both are gifts that draw us closer to God and help us love our neighbours.

More from Marc Jolicoeur · The The Domino Effect series

Topics: Prayer, Discipleship, Worship

Transcript

[1:00] Well, we've actually been hearing some stories coming back already for this last three weeks of people who have been practicing some of the things we've been talking about, people who have been doing things like taking their phone and throwing it in the closet for an hour. Doing things like calling somebody and actually setting up, like, an opportunity to have a meal with them, have a conversation with them rather than just shooting them a quick text, or some people who have been experimenting with fasting and some of these other practices. And it is early days, but we are seeing some indications that this has been helpful for a number of you. This has been a very unusual series for us, but I'm glad that I get to be on here today with you in the fourth and final week of The Domino Effect. And I think it's really maybe helpful that today is Palm Sunday, the day that people stood alongside and decided to cheer.

[1:49] Yay, this guy's our king. We get the opportunity to find out what it actually looks like in small ways and in big ways for Jesus to be our King. Hopefully you remember in the first week, Jeremy laid out a core scripture, what actually is the guiding force of all these things, and it's from Matthew chapter 22. People asked Jesus, "Hey, what's the greatest commandment?" And Jesus replied, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments."

[2:39] So just as a bit of a recap, again, this is week four of a four-week series, and we've been looking at different kinds of habits, different kinds of practices, some that we embrace, things that we do, and some that we resist, times that we avoid doing certain things. And they're all aimed at loving God and loving neighbors. So week one, Jeremy talked about having an hour off of your phone, and then he talked about the idea of curating your media, what you watch actually matters. Week two, Jeremy said, "Hey, I got an idea. How about you engage with scripture before you engage with your phone?" And then he also brought up the idea of fasting and how doing that once a week can be a very helpful pattern for us. And last week Jordan talked about the idea that we should have at least once a day a meal with other human beings.

[3:28] And then the idea of trying to engage once a week in a one hour conversation, a meaningful conversation with somebody in your life. And all of these habits, they all work together. They kind of build upon and build each other. I do kind of feel like maybe we saved the best for last when it comes to habits at the very least. And we got one daily and one weekly, and we're in the area of embracing, we're gonna embrace new habits that will help us love God better. And these two habits are three times daily kneeling prayer and weekly Sabbath. We're gonna hop right in 'cause I don't wanna waste any time. We're gonna start with this first one, three times daily kneeling prayer. Now that's kind of a clunky title.

[4:14] It doesn't really roll off the tongue, but we're gonna leave it up there for now because each of these little words actually kind of matter. So we'll start by just unpacking them as we go through. So we'll start with prayer. Everybody thinks they know what prayer is and you probably do, but let's at least not dance around it. We've spoken in this series already about the importance of actually being present to the people around us, not just being there but actually really being there, right? We talked about silencing the distractions around us, like our phones. And we also talked about highlighting the importance of engaging in actual meaningful conversation. So when we say prayer today, here's a very simple definition for it. Intentional conversation with the living God, intentional conversation with the living God.

[5:07] It's simple, but hopefully we can keep that in our mind as we go forward daily. There are at least two reasons why prayer for the Christian should be considered a daily habit. Number one, because of how much better we get at things that we practice. And number two, because of how much we value God. Now remember, we just defined prayer as intentional conversation with the living God. But you might ask, Marc, how does one get better at conversation? How does one become better at spending time with someone? Well, to me it seems fairly obvious that the more time we spend with someone, the better it tends to get. There's a good reason why a first date that isn't awkward is worth talking about.

[5:57] And that's 'cause most first dates are really awkward. The more time that you spend with someone, provided that you generally enjoy this person and you are able to get along with them, the more time that you spend with them developing a shared language, developing a shared history, that time becomes better. Those conversations become less and less awkward. And here's the key actually, eventually, not only are the conversations less awkward, but so too are the silences that you share. Eventually you come to a place where you can just be together. So we get better at prayer by practicing it. And we want to do that. We want to put in the effort. Why? Well, because we value God.

[6:44] So why three times? Well, an honest answer is because in the book that we've been drawing on quite a bit throughout this, The Common Rule, Justin says three times. But the good news is that that is not an arbitrary number that he just made up. There is, it's not a magic number either. There's lots of different Christian traditions that involve things like maybe praying seven times a day. Sometimes there's more, sometimes there's less. Some of the most fervent prayer warriors that I know have essentially one section of the day that they block off, but they do an awful lot of business in that one section. We are merely trying to lay out one kind of pattern that will hopefully lead us towards an increased awareness that actually God can be with us wherever we go.

[7:33] And if He's with us wherever we go, that means that we get to be with Him wherever we are. There is something maybe symbolic about the number three. It shows up quite a bit throughout the scriptures. Not least in, you know, the Trinity, we've got the patriarchs, you know, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. We tend to eat three times a day. I eat like seven times a day, but that's just me. But there's also scriptures, I think, that show us this as an example. If we look at Psalm 55, the psalmist says, "I will call on God and the Lord will rescue me. Morning, noon and night. I cry out in my distress and the Lord hears my voice." But this is when he's in distress.

[8:18] I think a very interesting example actually shows up in Daniel chapter 6. And Daniel is this young man who was taken from Israel, from Judea in particular, and he was brought over to Babylon with a captivity, with all of his people. But he seems like he was a pretty sharp guy. Seemed like he knew what was up. And so he actually became a pretty integral part of the government in Babylon. He was a big deal. People looked up to him. He had a lot of influence and a lot of power. And this angered some of the local Babylonians. The whole time, he never stopped worshiping the God of Israel. And he prayed regularly. Well, they decided, "I got a great way to mess this guy up. Let's tell the king to make it illegal to pray to anybody but him," because in this strange world you could actually picture yourself praying to this man that was actually walking in front of him.

[9:09] So they made it a law. And this is where we pick up in Daniel chapter 6, when Daniel learned that the law had been signed. Mind you, this is the law that if you break, you end up being broken by lions. When he learned that the law had been signed, Daniel went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room with its windows open toward Jerusalem. And he prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God. You don't get to do that unless it's already a pretty deeply ingrained habit. So Daniel is a very interesting paradigm that shows us just a little window into the kinds of ways that people, even around the time of Christ, the people of Jerusalem and Judea, how they would have thought about prayer as a practice.

[10:01] That's something that they regularly did. So three times daily kneeling, this is the part that is gonna be the strangest for many people to think through. Now, I don't want you to get hung up on the specifics, but part of the thing that we're trying to do in this series is be quite specific. So let me be quite clear: however you pray, whether you're riding in the bus or whether you're in the boardroom, whether you're at school or you are on the construction site, whether you are walking around or whether you're seated, whether you are praying out loud or whether you are praying in your own heart, regardless of your posture, God can, and God does, hear your prayers.

[10:46] God wants to respond to you. God is infinite. But you and I are not infinite, we are finite. We are limited and bounded. We are not merely souls with bodies, nor are we merely bodies with souls. We are embodied souls. This is who we are by design. What that means is you can't try to hack your system and allow your soul to somehow interact without it also engaging with your mind and your body.

[11:32] We're not made that way. In the book, Justin writes this, "One of the only ways to take hold of the mind is to take hold of the body." It's for this reason that we're gonna recommend for you being intentional with your posture for these times of prayer. I'm gonna keep the word kneeling up as the default recommendation, but we are aware, I'm aware, that this is not going to be a reality for everyone. For some of us, if we get down on the ground, we are not getting back up. It's just not gonna happen. There are physical limitations, some more severe than others. There are also location exceptions. You know, I was recently on an airplane. I'm gonna tell you, you're not gonna be kneeling on that airplane for prayer.

[12:18] It's not gonna happen, right? But one of the words of wisdom that Justin gives us in this book, The Common Rule, is this. He says one of the most important things to be done in the pursuit of habit is to focus more on the rule than on the exceptions. And I really take that to heart myself. Don't allow all the possible exceptions to this practice to discourage you from trying it. In fact, there are lots of different ways to kneel, right? You can kneel just all by yourself like this. You can allow a chair to be something that helps you in the process. Little pro tip, if you happen to have a tube lying around, you got a portable thing that makes it a little bit softer and pushier on your knees as you get down.

[13:08] Obviously, kneeling, as I've mentioned, is not the only posture that one can take. When you're standing, you can engage maybe a window, you can engage in open space, how you hold your body, how you hold your hands. All these things will make you feel different, feel more open possibly to what's happening. But if you're in a seated position at the office, sometimes it can be helpful even to just kind of put your hands palms up like this, right? You can kind of bow your head a little bit. It's possible to bow your head quite low. You can do some kind of version of the prayer hands emoji, which we now have thanks to the iPhone and the Android devices. This is the way that I was taught to pray as a kid. You know, bow your head, close your eyes, fold your hands.

[13:55] And what's amazing, I mean, I was kind of told it's the way to pray, admittedly. It's not, but goodness gracious, it is a good way to pray. Something about it just changes the way that you're engaging with God in these intentional conversations with Him. Last thing is breathing. We are a pretty time sensitive bunch. I am a very time sensitive man. I know what I'm doing often down to the minute. And so when I rush into a conversation, sometimes I can be guilty of forgetting to say the thing that I intended to say or hastily saying something that I did not intend to say.

[14:42] I could listen quite poorly or I could just kind of have a general sense of anxiety about me. But if I just stop for a moment, take a deep breath in, deep breath out, and just realize where I am. We're not advocating for long times of prayer here, actually quite short. But we would recommend that you allow a moment, a beat, a before and after. And if you're able to take just a couple, you know, as deep as you're able to, breaths in and out, and remember that we're calling this a conversation with God, not just an opportunity to talk at God, right?

[15:28] So allowing some time to listen as well as talk. I think these are relatively simple things to think through in this whole process. There it is. Three times daily kneeling prayer. Now, one of the potential downsides to all this is that it could sort of negatively reinforce in you the idea that, "Hey, maybe this is just about me and Jesus." Not the case at all. In fact, you do have a personal relationship, a one-on-one relationship with Jesus. But this is not what this is about, all by itself. You engaging in this prayer habit is about way more than just you.

[16:16] In fact, in the book Justin says this. He says, choosing to practice these habits is not just a personal matter, it is a public matter of neighbor love. Remember, folks, this is one of those domino habits. If you change the way that you interact with God, it's going to change the way you interact with your neighbor, how you interact with your family, how you interact with your coworkers. It has downstream effects. Don't you think for a moment that it's just about you, but much more directly. These times of prayer don't actually have to be just with you. If you live with somebody, you could have a prayer time maybe before you head off to school or maybe at night before you head off to bed. These are things that you can practice in community.

[17:03] There's actually an example that Justin gives in the book of some people that he knows that share an office space. And so at lunchtime, whenever they're able to, they just carve out five minutes of their lunchtime and they get together for their midday kneeling prayer. You don't have to be alone in this. So what is the actual ask? Well, we recommend that three times a day, which includes first thing in the morning, some point around midday, and then lastly before bed. I think the first thing in the morning you'll notice pairs nicely with our scripture before phone, kind of a rhythm that we've got set up, and the evening. It really helps you kind of reflect upon the day, the time that you've put in, and allows you to invite God into the rest that you're about to move into.

[17:51] Midday is one of these kind of crucial realignment moments as you start to realize that you're not gonna get everything done that you'd hope to get done as you crash into your broken expectations and the sort of things that you wish you'd done but you hadn't. It's a great time to just allow God, Jesus, back in to say, "Right now, right here, I am Your follower." Now we know that there are gonna be exceptions to all these rules, the people who work the night shift, people who have different shifts. You can customize this to fit your patterns of life. But remember those words of wisdom: don't get so hung up on the exceptions that you don't invite yourself to practice the patterns. How do you remember to do these things?

[18:37] I have found myself that the morning and the evening with just a little bit of help is relatively simple. You know, maybe it's when you're brushing your teeth. Oh yeah, I know the next thing I need to do is do this. Midday is brutal. I work in a church. I am a pastor. And if my phone doesn't bing at 2:15 to let me know that it's time to pray, it is highly conceivable that I will have forgotten. So whatever it takes for you to build in these patterns, maybe it's getting a friend to call you at a certain time. Maybe it's getting your watch to ring you. I don't know. But it is worth slowly but surely setting reminders and plans so that these things get done. Now, in terms of what to pray, there are so many options.

[19:24] I would say that a whole bunch of you, you have no problem with what to pray. It's just the reminders of when to pray that maybe would be really beneficial. But for some of us, as we're kind of getting started, it may be really helpful to engage with something like the Lord's Prayer or maybe a Psalm or another passage of scripture. Maybe it's the same one for a long period of time or maybe it's something that you rotate through. In the book, Justin provides just this very simple kind of tripartite solution, which I believe is on the screen right now. It's very easy, just morning, midday and bedtime. Spirit, Jesus and Father. And it's just these very simple kind of one line prayers that you can allow. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but listen, as you're developing these habits, it is really important what you pray. It really, really is.

[20:13] But it's actually within certain bounds right now. It's actually much more important that you pray. So if providing a simple solution like this, something that will actually make sure that you start the pattern, then we're gonna go ahead and say, please feel free to just use this exactly as it is. In fact, if you go right now to MW Church slash habits, we've created a landing page essentially for this micro series, right? So the last four weeks, the sermons are there, the things that were preached as well as the graphic that you've seen a number of times that has the different patterns like this. They're also given in text form. So basically everything that you would need to be able to refer yourself to and refresh yourself on these habits.

[20:58] So three times daily kneeling prayer, boom. Believe it or not, even though I took almost 20 minutes to do that, that's the easy one, but don't worry, I won't be too much longer. That is actually really, really easy for you to practice this, right? Right now today you could start this place and you could be doing this this evening. It takes no effort. All you have to do is remember. This next one, this weekly habit. This is gonna take a little bit more effort to think through: weekly Sabbath. And when I say the word Sabbath, I don't know what you think of. I have a long history in the church and therefore I have a lot of different kind of love, hate, complicated feelings about the word Sabbath. Maybe you have different religious perspectives yourself and this word could be loaded for you or it could be completely meaningless to you. Frankly, what Justin uses in this book, and I think this is a good opportunity for us to use this just again as another simple definition, is Sabbath is a 24-hour intentional period of rest, an intentional 24-hour period of rest.

[22:04] Let's just keep that in mind as we move forward. Now, I personally have some mild trepidation when it comes to approaching this topic, and it specifically surrounds the use of the word Sabbath. We're gonna stick with the word for three different reasons. Number one, as I've already mentioned, Sabbath is the word that is used in the Common Rule book. Number two, Sabbath is a generally understood concept in the Christian tradition and in theology. And then number three, Sabbath is actually a word that shows up quite often in most of our translations of the Bible, at least most of our English translations of the Bible. It is however, this last reason that makes me most nervous with using the term. In just a moment, I'm gonna take us back to the very opening pages of the Bible to unpack the concept of where this day of rest came from.

[22:55] But before I do that, I want to just disambiguate, distinguish between two different conceptions of Sabbath. Now, if you were to just pick up the Bible and start reading through the Old Testament, which people who are on the Walk Through the Bible program with me right now, woo woo, what's up? You have done that. You're working through it. You just kind of got through the Torah. Congratulations. But it wouldn't take you very long. You'd be into the second book of the Bible, Exodus, and all of a sudden you'd start seeing the word Sabbath come up quite a bit. And here's one little example of it actually from Exodus chapter 31. It says, "Tell the people of Israel, be careful to keep My Sabbath day, for the Sabbath is a sign of the covenant between Me and you from generation to generation. It is given so you may know that I am the Lord who makes you holy.

[23:44] You must keep the Sabbath day, for it's a holy day for you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death. Anyone who works on that day will be cut off from the community." And just so you know, it's no joke. A few books later in the book of Numbers, we actually read of an extreme and thankfully isolated incident where somebody does in fact lose their life for breaking the Sabbath. So as the Sabbath is laid out in Scriptures, Sabbath is not like, here's a good idea that you should probably try and explore for your health. Right? Sabbath is a hard and fast command that has very strict instructions and very clear consequences for the ancient Israelites.

[24:31] And in some ways, really, for a variety of Jewish denominations to this very day, Sabbath is more than a practice, it is a boundary marker. It's similar to things like circumcision or kosher dietary laws. It is a way of clearly defining who is in and who is not. And in this sense, Sabbath is more of a moral or ritual obligation than it is a spiritual discipline. Now, my goal here today is not to tease out our relationship to the Old Testament law. We have done that before. We will definitely do it again. If you're itching for something right now, I would refer you to Pastor Jeremy's message in August of 2023, which was brilliantly named The Sin of Shellfish, the Sin of Shell-selfishness.

[25:20] It's worth looking at. I mostly just wanted to key you in enough so that you know that when you come across something like the Ten Commandments or somebody saying, "Thou shalt honor the Sabbath and keep it holy," that what they're saying by Sabbath and what we're talking about right here by Sabbath may not be exactly the same thing. Today we're gonna be talking about Sabbath as a spiritual discipline, not as an ethical requirement. It's not a responsibility, but it's an opportunity. Okay? Sabbath to us is a gift. And as I mentioned, this gift is actually spoken into reality at the very beginning of creation. It's woven into the fabric of human experience.

[26:07] You may remember last week that as Jordan was teaching, He led us into the creation narrative from Genesis chapter 1 that had this major climactic moment where the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, in His shared likeness, created humanity. In His image He created us, men and women, He created us together. But way before that, He created days, and He created the sun to rule the day. And He created the moon to rule the night. There was evening and there was morning, and there was evening and there was morning, and again and again and again and again. And then at chapter 2, verse 1, we read: So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. On the seventh day, God had finished His work of creation.

[26:55] And so He rested from all His work, and God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy because it was the day when He rested from all His work of creation. Church, we rest because God rested. God didn't need to rest. But we absolutely do. We spoke about this earlier, right? It's the same thing coming up again. God is infinite, but we are finite. And this finitude, our limitedness, it is expressed to us by God in the concept of the week.

[27:46] A seven-day week might be an instance of what theologians call special revelation. Something that is kind of in contrast to, general revelation. So general revelation is something that you can just observe in nature, versus special revelation is something like the Bible, something where God has to speak into it and say, "This is what you need to know." Why am I saying that? Well, because there is actually in nature no such thing as a seven-day week. Finds nothing in observable nature. So like, we know that a year, at least we think we know that a year is the amount of time that it takes for the earth to go around the sun, right? And then we know that, a month, roughly speaking, is the amount of time that it takes for the moon to go around the earth.

[28:35] And then a day, roughly speaking, is the amount of time, not roughly, pretty accurately, is the amount of time that it takes for the earth to spin around 360 degrees on its axis. But a week has no astronomical or cosmological explanation for it. Exactly. It is kind of strictly just a hand-me-down from the Judeo-Christian perspective, it's from the Bible. And to illustrate this, on the screen, I'm gonna put a calendar from, Republican Rome. You won't be able to see this very well, but you can look it up online if you'd like. This is essentially the kind of calendar that would've been used for the couple centuries before Christ and a couple centuries after Christ for people who were in the Roman world. Now it's got a lot of details. The main thing to draw out, it actually has a pattern of eight days kind of laid out for a week.

[29:26] If you see in the far left columns, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H is how they're laid out. So every eighth day there's a different pattern that happens, but the pattern that happens is not a Sabbath, it's what they call a market day. So every eighth day people who lived outside of the town would kind of make their way into the town and that's when everybody would be able to do commerce together. So it's like Aaron's day, or if you live outside of like Moncton city core, it's Costco Day. That's where this happens. Yeah, that's good. So don't misunderstand me. There were, there's lots of time off. If you can see, there's actually a number of different festivals that are kind of in red. These are opportunities for the people of Rome to have pagan festivals, right?

[30:11] Holidays, holy days that are worshiping other gods. So we don't really wanna talk about the kinds of things that are probably doing on those holy days, but so there's lots of rest. But those days were more like vacations. They actually have no repeatable pattern. You can't really say you're working through the week. So the point is that the idea of regular repeated patterns of rest followed by work, like the patterns of morning following evening or of springtime following winter, this pattern of week and weekend that we've all come to kind of expect in our culture. It's neither natural nor universal, but it's actually a specific innovation of Christianity, rooted in the revelation of God through the Bible. And it's all actually because He loves us and He wants to be in a deep and abiding relationship with us.

[31:03] And even though this pattern is woven into our society, right, we have this weekend conception, It's actually no longer a given that you or I will live with a dedicated day of rest, with a Sabbath. There are many, many reasons for this, and I just want to consider briefly a few of them. One, the nature of work has changed. This has never been universally true, but for a lot of people, they've been able to go to work and then they've been able to come home from work. They didn't have a little device in their pocket that could draw them back into work at any point in time, or they didn't feel like their mind was constantly at the office.

[31:48] Again, this is not universal, but for a lot of us, the nature of work has changed. The economy has changed. Again, this has not always been the case for all of humankind, but within living memory, for a lot of us, it seemed possible for one person to have a full-time job, whether that meant 40 hours or 80 hours. And with that time, they could sustain a family household income. But for a lot of us, this is by no means the reality right now, right? A couple people working a couple jobs and trying to still make ends meet. The nature of economy has changed. And then lastly, and this is a surprising one, but one that does resonate with me, the expression of status has changed.

[32:35] There's actually a quote in the book, where Justin speaks to this. He says, "We used to demonstrate our status, so like our level of importance, how we feel about ourselves. We used to demonstrate our status by showing our leisure time. Look at pictures of me on vacation. Check me out on the boat in the lake. Now we do so by showing how busy we are. Look how important I am. Look how I can hardly get everything done that I need to get done." All of these different things are in the stew, and many, many more, that are making it hard. Even though we have the conception of the weekend, it's hard for us to carve out an actual day of rest. The bottom line is, regardless of the external or internal pressures that you may feel, actually living out this gift of Sabbath, it has become a counter-cultural lifestyle.

[33:29] It's not easy, and nobody is gonna do it for you, not your employer, not your friends, nobody. Now, just before I give us some very practical details and help you think through what it could look like for you, I put the graph up on the screen here. Just maybe we've seen this before, and it may be surprising. So the top, we have the things that we're embracing, the things that we're moving towards doing. And the bottom, we have the things that we are resisting, we're moving away from doing. And for a lot of you, you're thinking, how is Sabbath on the embrace side? I mean, this is a lot about resisting work, and you know who you are 'cause you're the people who actually like to work. But Sabbath is about more than just not doing.

[34:15] It's about a lot more. In fact, it takes an awful lot of effort to plan what a Sabbath can look like. And then frankly, even in the execution of it, it's not about laying in bed all day. There's a quote in the book that I found was very helpful. It's from a rabbi named Abraham Heschel. He says this, "A man who works with his mind should Sabbath with his hands, and a man who works with his hands should Sabbath with his mind." And I would dare say that man and woman would work just as well together. Sabbath rest is like a diamond in some respects. It's manifold, and as you turn it, it will look differently to different people in different seasons and in different ways. So yes, Sabbath very likely would include a nap. I know that mine did yesterday.

[35:01] But if you're rolling into Sabbath to the point where you can't get outta bed in the morning, then you actually, that may be some indications of some broader issues in your life that you're gonna need to take a look at. Sabbath can also include enjoying hobbies that you may have. Maybe it's woodworking, maybe it's, playing tennis or something. It could include reading. Maybe it includes playing a game, whether that's a board game or a video game. It may include watching a movie. Heck, it may include watching two. But if you find yourself regularly binge watching eight hours of that day, you might wanna ask yourself, how do you feel after this activity? Because that's part of it. Is the things that we do on Sabbath are actually intended to fill us up rather than deplete us. Now at this point, you may be asking yourself, how is any of this, what you've just talked about, a matter of spiritual discipline?

[35:54] How will any of this help me connect with God? You haven't even talked about reading the Bible. Fair enough. This may seem overly simplistic, but I just wanna lay this out quickly for you. And this is, as I understand it, rested bodies are more ready to hear the voice of God. Rested minds are more ready to understand the voice of God. And rested souls are more ready to obey the voice of God. If we are stretched razor thin, if we have nothing but noise, if we have no margin, it's a long way for us to go, church, to be able to respond to the things that God is calling us to do.

[36:44] So practically speaking, real nuts and bolts. Now, what could a Sabbath look like? Number one, you need to find or carve out a 24-hour period. For some people it's like, "Oh look, there it is. How easy." But for an awful lot of us, the word "carve out" is probably more likely. We're gonna have to create some space in our calendar. We have to move some things around. And I want you to think about the idea that exceptions should not be the thing that deter from the rule. Maybe all you can get to is 12 hours, maybe it's 18 hours. Start with what you can do. Number two, consider what the day should look like. If you don't, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, as they say, right? You can't just expect that it's going to happen.

[37:30] Consider what the day is gonna look like. Number three, you have to actually prepare for it. If you need to have certain food in the house, make sure you have certain food in the house. If you're intending to watch that movie, make sure you can have access to that movie. If you're hoping to play tennis with somebody, make sure that person's available to play tennis with. Also, you have to, like for example, if Wednesday's the day you're taking and that's your laundry day, that's not your laundry day anymore. So now Tuesday's your laundry day. You have to figure out and plan what this will look like. It will not just happen. And I didn't put this on there, but hopefully it bears the saying. We'll call it 3.5. Actually practice your Sabbath. After that, evaluate it. How did that work? What worked? What didn't?

[38:17] What seemed like it replenished me? What it turned out was actually for the worse. How could I do better in my planning next time to make sure that I actually have clean clothes on Thursday? And then last, this is sort of a meta thing, not just in a row, but something for us to really keep in mind. And it ties with what I said about prayer. Aim to practice it communally. This is not a message against culture, but goodness, wouldn't it be easy if all of a sudden everybody had Saturday as their Sabbath? Right? This is not the case. We have to live where we are. Sometimes we're in Jerusalem and sometimes we're in Babylon. So that doesn't mean that we should be living fully individually. If you have people in your household, can you align your Sabbath with the people in your household?

[39:04] If you have people in your neighborhood, can you align it with the people in your neighborhood? How can you try to have this be a communal expression of how God wants to bless you? Those two things: three times daily kneeling prayer and a weekly Sabbath. And you have no idea how many more things I want to say. Ah, but I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna stop. I wish I was in each and every one of your small groups this week, for those of you who gather. I'm so excited to hear the kinds of things that you're gonna wrestle with, the kind of scriptures that you're gonna bring up, and ways that you're gonna walk through this. These practices, they do something. Each and every one of these practices do something. The business world is coming alive to this fact. Health practitioners are coming alive to this fact.

[39:50] Social media influencers are coming alive to this fact. You do these things and it will impact your life. But that's not why we are telling you to do these things. Ultimately, these are to be things that draw you closer into communion with God and then make you more able to love and respond to the people around you. Matthew 22, love God and love neighbor. These are the greatest commandments, guys. I grew up in the church and I had so many times where what I wanted to do was love God. I was like, I just, I wanna love You more. I want to feel love for You, and I couldn't manufacture it.

[40:40] You can never manufacture feelings of love. But what we can do is we can actually day in and day out, not just Sunday, but Monday through Saturday, put ourselves in positions where God can reveal His love to us and then speak and reveal His love through us. Now in a, I'm gonna do something here that I'm putting myself on the ledge. Literally, I'm gonna invite you, for those of you who are able and willing, to just really briefly, for about a minute, practice kneeling prayer with me. All the exceptions that I said earlier completely stand. If you're not able, feel no pressure. If it feels like you have to take another posture or you have to take another posture, or you don't want to pray at all, it's entirely your prerogative.

[41:28] But I've been in those chairs and I do understand that this can work if you turn around and face the chair behind you. So for those of you who are willing, I'm just gonna invite you right now briefly just to take a posture of prayer. We're just gonna take a moment to breathe and invite Him into our space.

[42:18] And if you're comfortable, I'll get you to pray this. Heck, even if you're uncomfortable, I'll get you to pray these words after me. Jesus, I was made to join You in Your work in the world. Please order the rest of my day in love for the people that You've given me to serve. Now, just allow me to pray this over you. Holy Spirit, would You take these simple acts, these simple acts of obedience when we do them and when we fail to do them? And would You do with them much more than just what we can do on our own, just by doing things with our body, by putting things on our calendar, by saying yes to certain things and no to other things.

[43:09] We are not living as though we can manufacture Your presence. We are merely asking You, Lord, to meet us where we are as we create space, as we embrace, and as we resist. We pray all these things in the name of Your Son Jesus Christ, and together we say Amen. Please stand, for those of you who are able to do that, as we close the service here together.