Just like many of our favorite TV shows have a story arc that weaves its way through multiple episodes, so the first four chapters of Matthew's Gospel have an overarching meta narrative. It's easy to miss because we rarely read large chunks of scripture at a time and many of us are not that familiar with the Old Testament, but if we look closely we can see that Jesus is retelling and recreating of the story of Israel through his own life.

For many Western Christians, Sunday has become what Eugene Peterson called a “bastard Sabbath”—the illegitimate offspring of the Sabbath and a secular day off.

Whether you practice Sabbath on Sundays, Saturdays, or another day of the week, it’s essential to remember God commands us to “remember the Sabbath by keeping it holy.” To keep it “holy” means to sanctify it, set it apart, and dedicate it to God for his special purposes. Sabbath isn’t just a day to sleep in, relax, and do whatever brings you joy (it is, but it’s more): it’s a day to worship. To reorient your entire life back to its center in God.

In our final week of Sabbath, we elevate the Sabbath from a restful, joyful day off to a holy day of worship and delight in God himself.

Sabbath

The Sabbath is a 24-hour time period set aside to stop, rest, delight, and worship. It is the best day of the week. In our era of chronic exhaustion, emotional unhealth, and spiritual stagnation, few things are more necessary than the recovery of this ancient practice.

Timothy Keller has said, “Because the world is full of ugly things, we need the Sabbath to feed our soul with beauty.”

Jesus himself said plainly, “In this world, you will have trouble,” but he also said his desire for his disciples was “that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.” Sorrow is inevitable in this life, but joy is not. In the Way of Jesus, joy is a gift, but it’s one that must be chosen and cultivated, day after day, as an act of apprenticeship to our joyful God.

Previous generations often thought of the Sabbath as a somber, serious day full of religious duty and legalistic rules. Today, many people think of it as a day to chill, relax, or sleep. Both generations miss the essential truth – the Sabbath is designed by God as a day to give yourself fully to delight in God’s world, in your life in it, and ultimately in God himself.

Sabbath

The Sabbath is a 24-hour time period set aside to stop, rest, delight, and worship. It is the best day of the week. In our era of chronic exhaustion, emotional unhealth, and spiritual stagnation, few things are more necessary than the recovery of this ancient practice.

The idea of rest sounds wonderful, but in reality, rest is a radical, countercultural act of resistance to the powers and principalities of a world at war with God and his kingdom of peace. To practice Sabbath is to draw a line in the sand against all external (and internal) forces that would encroach upon your apprenticeship to Jesus and formation into his image. It’s to say, “This far you shall go, but no further.”

Sabbath

The Sabbath is a 24-hour time period set aside to stop, rest, delight, and worship. It is the best day of the week. In our era of chronic exhaustion, emotional unhealth, and spiritual stagnation, few things are more necessary than the recovery of this ancient practice.

Low-grade physical, mental and emotional exhaustion is the new normal for most people, but it’s not the way of Jesus — he offers us an alternative way to live. Jesus offers us “rest for our souls.” God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In doing so, he wove a rhythm of work and rest into the fabric of creation; rest that the Bible calls "Sabbath." This rest is not something we can buy or earn — we simply have to learn to stop.

Sabbath

The Sabbath is a 24-hour time period set aside to stop, rest, delight, and worship. It is the best day of the week. In our era of chronic exhaustion, emotional unhealth, and spiritual stagnation, few things are more necessary than the recovery of this ancient practice.

When Jesus called his first disciples he invited them to join him in sharing what he called the "good news of the kingdom." To this day, what has come to be called "evangelism" is a key part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But this is becoming an increasingly daunting prospect as our post-truth society has more and more issues with being told what to believe. Is there a way that we can reach people with the love of Jesus that is gentle, respectful, honest, invitational, hospitable, culturally relevant, and that actually works?

Gospel of Matthew

To respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow him means to become his apprentices in life — learning from both his teachings and his lifestyle as we reorder our lives around being with him, becoming like him, and doing as he did. One of the key ways we do this is to immerse ourselves in the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life written by his earliest apprentices. It’s an essential part of living life to the full as followers of Jesus the King. join us as we journey through the Gospel of Matthew together.

Despite the human propensity for conflict, we can easily see war as something that happens to other people in other places—certainly not here on the Central Coast of California. So why do often end the day feeling battered and bruised, if not in body then in spirit? Why is it such a struggle to follow Jesus? The answer of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 6 is that we are actually in a war, we just don't realize it most of the time. It's not a war against flesh and blood, that doesn't make it any less real.

Gospel of Matthew

To respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow him means to become his apprentices in life — learning from both his teachings and his lifestyle as we reorder our lives around being with him, becoming like him, and doing as he did. One of the key ways we do this is to immerse ourselves in the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life written by his earliest apprentices. It’s an essential part of living life to the full as followers of Jesus the King. join us as we journey through the Gospel of Matthew together.

As the culmination of the story of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospel of Matthew contains many "hyperlinks"—imagery that directs us again and again to stories in the Old Testament that find their fulfillment in Jesus. The story of Jesus' baptism in Matthew 3 brings together the two most important narratives in the history of God's people—the Genesis story of creation and the Exodus story of redemption—as Jesus relives and recreates our collective story.

Gospel of Matthew

To respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow him means to become his apprentices in life — learning from both his teachings and his lifestyle as we reorder our lives around being with him, becoming like him, and doing as he did. One of the key ways we do this is to immerse ourselves in the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life written by his earliest apprentices. It’s an essential part of living life to the full as followers of Jesus the King. join us as we journey through the Gospel of Matthew together.

Jesus was born into a world of all kinds of kings and kingdoms, but the heart of Matthew's gospel account is the good news that God's kingdom has arrived, and that Jesus is the true king of the world. That begs the question for both his original readers and for us today — what does it mean for Jesus to be king of our lives and of our world?

Gospel of Matthew

To respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow him means to become his apprentices in life — learning from both his teachings and his lifestyle as we reorder our lives around being with him, becoming like him, and doing as he did. One of the key ways we do this is to immerse ourselves in the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life written by his earliest apprentices. It’s an essential part of living life to the full as followers of Jesus the King. join us as we journey through the Gospel of Matthew together.

As we begin our journey through this biography of Jesus, Matthew takes the time to set his story in context by taking us through a genealogical list of names, tracing Jesus ancestry back to Abraham. It's easy to gloss over this introduction as boring and irrelevant, but if we do we'll miss some important ideas that our modern Western minds can easily miss.

Gospel of Matthew

To respond to Jesus’ invitation to follow him means to become his apprentices in life — learning from both his teachings and his lifestyle as we reorder our lives around being with him, becoming like him, and doing as he did. One of the key ways we do this is to immerse ourselves in the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life written by his earliest apprentices. It’s an essential part of living life to the full as followers of Jesus the King. join us as we journey through the Gospel of Matthew together.