Category: Sabbath

Law as Destiny

11/7/2018

God has shown me how to pray and meditate on the Ten Commandments in several different ways, offering wonderful new learnings and deeper understanding. Recently God invited me to pray the Commandments over myself as prophetic declarations.

“You will have no other gods beside Me.”

“You will not make for yourself false idols.”

“You will not take My Name for emptiness.”

“You will remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”

“You will honour your mother and father.”

“You will not murder.”

“You will not commit adultery.”

“You will not steal.”

“You will not bear false witness against your neighbour.”

“You will not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour.”

For good measure I proclaimed over myself, “You will love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength and, yes, you will love your neighbour as yourself.”

What a revelation and what sweet relief. For ‘Keeping the law’ read ‘Aligning with your destiny’. How can the law be a burden? It is a part of becoming who we are destined to be.

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Time Lord #2

7/1/2017

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Anyone who has read even the minimum of material on this site will be aware that I meditate regularly on the Ten Commandments. I humbly thank God for giving me this task, as it is a source of continual blessing and refreshment and, from time to time, offers what seems to me a deep insight into God’s ways.

I have shared before on God as Lord of time. Recently, God gave me a revelation on how time is structured through the Ten Commandments.

No doubt you have heard or read testimonies that the Ten Commandments are necessary to social order. Most people would accept that we are all better off if there are restraints on anti-social behaviours like murder, theft and bearing false witness. Families, and therefore society, work better if we honour our parents and keep faith with our spouses. And we are all better off if we don’t give way to destructive thought patterns like envy. The Commandments also provide us with rules for spiritual order: put God first, be mindful in the way God’s Name is used, and keep God’s Sabbaths.

This separation of the Commandments into three distinct areas of relationship – God, family and community – can be misleading, because all the Commandments are inter-related: our relationship with God is governed by all of them, and so is our personal and social happiness. Nonetheless, it is useful to group, ungroup and regroup the Commandments as a way to learn more about them.

It is while I was considering the Commandments as laws to ensure the health of human societies that I had the revelation of the Commandment to remember and keep the Sabbath as a law that maintains the fabric of time. As with the physical laws – like the law of gravity, which helps keep us and our belongings usefully anchored to the surface of the Earth – the Ten Commandments govern the proper operation of human endeavour. Unlike the physical laws, they do not work independently of us, we have to co-operate with them: we have to keep them, to keep them working properly.

We can see how failure to keep the Commandments has led to a progressive breakdown in spiritual and familial relationships and in civil society. Similarly, we have a sense that time is passing faster and faster and faster, and that there is never enough of it. Quite simply, time is not working the way it should because not enough people are keeping the Sabbath.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, because time depends on it.

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Time Lord #1

18/1/2015

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Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘God is not in things of space, but in moments of time’. Sometimes I am blessed with the experience that there is no space where God is not present, but it is an insight into time, not space, that I wish to share with you today.
At a seminar I attended recently, participants were encouraged to bring everything to God, including every problem, no matter how small. I realised I rarely took work problems to God.
I am very conscious of how God helps me in my work, for which I am deeply grateful. I express that gratitude often, but seldom do I discuss with God specific work issues in detail. I will take people problems to God, when I want to overcome hurt or my own judgemental attitude, for example, but for the most part I am still tempted to believe there are some things I can handle on my own, and that there is no need to ‘bother’ God about them.
Yet in the seminar I was hearing that the God who keeps count of the number of hairs on my head is vitally interested in every aspect of my life and eager not only to help, but to companion me every step of the way. Of course, I already ‘knew’ that. ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’ is one of my favourite hymns!

Oh, yes, I knew it. I just wasn’t living my life as if I knew it!
The notion of resting in God by taking everything to God had immense appeal. It was a big effort to attend the seminar as I was very tired, so I needed little persuasion to allow a problem to present to my mind in the belief I could shift the burden of it.
What surfaced was a problem endemic to the nature of my work: time. I work to deadlines, and the stress of trying to meet them is partly due to a sense that there is not enough time to get the work done. I realised that, in a deeply debilitating way, I was living out of a sense of poverty, of lack.
I should have known that God was the solution. It’s obvious. Did God not create time? Is God not the Lord of time? And did I not have this demonstrated to me every Sabbath, the day which Heschel describes as ‘Spirit in the form of time’?
Not only does God own the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps 50:10), God owns time. God makes time and so God can freely give it away. There’s plenty more where that came from! And so it was that God blessed me there and then with all the time I need – not necessarily all the time I want, but there is time enough, God assures me, for all that needs to be done.
It is now a week since the seminar and there have been several occasions each day to remember this promise and rest in it. And my lifestyle is changing. I know there’ll be plenty of time for all that needs to be done, so I check in with God that what I’m doing is exactly that - what needs to be done. I’ve always appreciated the Sabbath as a sacred blessing, a gift. Now that God has also gifted me all the minutes in every day, they’re too precious to waste!

What a Friend we have in Jesus,
  All our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
  Everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
  O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
  Everything to God in prayer!

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Keeping the Sabbath

14/7/2013

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'Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.' Hmmm. The whole issue of holiness seemed just so big and inscrutable that it was with quiet relief that I was able to put it to one side and turn instead to the task of determining exactly when I should be keeping the Sabbath.
I had a vague understanding that in the Jewish faith the Sabbath was celebrated from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. (I was later to learn this understanding was very vague indeed!) I knew the Sabbath was not celebrated in the Anglican Church and instead the 'Lord's Day' was kept on a Sunday, but was often referred to as the Sabbath. Was there a choice in this? Was one day as good as another? Reading the Bible it seemed to me there was no choice. The Sabbath was created holy by God and it was our job to remember it and keep it holy.
To resolve the issue of timing I decided to see if I could feel the Sabbath. I was prepared to keep it and so it was in the vessel of willingness that I launched forth into the week, alert for any subtle changes that might be interpreted as clues. I was certainly not prepared for what happened. From noon Friday I began to sense a pull, a kind of suction, drawing me into a vortex of . . . what? Whatever it was, I knew I was entering the Sabbath, and it was wonderful! When I fetched up on its shores at around dusk that Friday, I wept. Thank you, God! O thank you! To be so blessed, and to know it, to live it. What a gift!
Much later I was to come across Rabbi Abraham Heschel's beautiful little book, The Sabbath, in which there is a story that confirmed my experience:

Once a rabbi was immured by his persecutors in a cave, where not a ray of light could reach him, so that he knew not when it was day or when it was night. Nothing tormented him so much as the thought that he was now hindered from celebrating the Sabbath with song and prayer, as he had been wont to do from his youth.
Beside this an almost unconquerable desire to smoke caused him much pain. He worried and reproached himself that he could not conquer this passion. All at once, he perceived that it suddenly vanished; a voice said within him: "Now it is Friday evening! for this was always the hour when my longing for that which is forbidden on the Sabbath regularly left me." Joyfully he rose up and with loud voice thanked God and blessed the Sabbath day. So it went on from week to week; his tormenting desire for tobacco regularly vanished at the incoming of each Sabbath. (Pages 21-22)

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IT IS WRITTEN
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
Psalm 19:14

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Hi! As you'll gather from my first blog entry, 'The beginning of happiness', God called me to keep the Ten Commandments some years ago. Thank you, God! Here you'll find some musings about the journey. I'd love to hear about your journey with the divine, too. - Lyndal Wilson

Law as Destiny

Time Lord #2

Time Lord #1

Keeping the Sabbath

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