Sunday

Somewhere between the hustle culture sermons about “grinding for the Kingdom” and your boss passive-aggressively emailing you at 10 p.m. with a “quick question,” the idea of actual, soul-filling rest has been lost.

Rest isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. A spiritual, emotional, and even physical game-changer that modern life is actively working against. We treat it like a reward for productivity, something we “earn” by checking enough boxes. But that’s not how it works. If you only allow yourself to rest when you’ve run out of energy, you’re not actually resting. You’re recovering from burnout.

For a generation that’s really into “self-care,” we sure are bad at resting. We schedule vacations that are more exhausting than our regular lives and take “Sabbath” as an excuse to binge entire seasons of prestige TV in one sitting.

The Bible starts with God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh—not because he was tired but because he was setting the rhythm. Rest wasn’t an afterthought. It was built into creation itself.

Jesus followed that rhythm too. He regularly stepped away from crowds, left people hanging (yes, really) and took time alone to pray. If the literal Savior of the world wasn’t available 24/7, why do we think we need to be?

Here’s the thing: rest isn’t just good for your soul. It’s good for your brain. Studies show that chronic stress literally rewires your brain, making it harder to focus, regulate emotions, and be productive in the long run.

The world thrives on keeping you busy. Consumerism, capitalism, and even some versions of church culture—there’s always something else to achieve. But choosing rest? That’s countercultural.

So, take a real Sabbath. Put your phone in another room. Go outside. Breathe. Let yourself rest. Because you don’t need to “earn” it. In fact, you were created for it.

Eric Liddell took his starting spot in the finals for the 400 meters. More than 6,000 paying spectators filled the stadium on that warm Friday night in Paris, a century ago, when the starting pistol fired and the Scottish runner took off from the outside lane.

And 47.6 seconds later, Liddell had set a new world record, leaving his competitors in awe and his fans grasping to make sense of what they had just witnessed.

Liddell’s sprint at the 1924 Paris Olympics is a canon event in the history of Christian athletes, and not just because of what happened on the track. Liddell entered the 400-meter race only after learning that the heats for his best Olympic event, the 100 meters, would fall on a Sunday. He withdrew from that event, holding fast to his Christian convictions about observing the Sabbath.

Some admired his convictions, while others saw him as disloyal and unpatriotic. Many could not comprehend his inflexible stand. It was just one Sunday, and at a time when Sabbath practices in the English-speaking world were rapidly changing. Besides, the event itself would not happen until the afternoon, giving Liddell plenty of time to attend church services in the morning. Why give up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring honor to himself and his country? Liddell recognized that the world was changing. But the Sabbath, as he understood and practiced it, was to be a full day of worship and rest. It was, for him, a matter of personal integrity and Christian obedience.

Liddell’s performance in 1924 lingers because it was caught up in cultural narratives about what it means to be a Christian athlete and, by extension, what it means to be a Christian in a changing world.

His story inspired the 1982 Oscar-winning movie Chariots of Fire, which brought his accomplishments back into the spotlight and led to numerous inspirational biographies focused on his Christian legacy.

News of Liddell’s achievement quickly spread back home through the press and the radio. He arrived in Scotland as a conquering hero; those who had criticized his Sabbath convictions now praised him for his principled stand. He spent the next year traveling throughout Great Britain on an evangelistic campaign, preaching a simple and direct message. “In Jesus Christ you will find a leader worthy of all your devotion and mine,” he told the crowds.

Then, in 1925, he departed for China, spending the rest of his life in missionary service before dying in 1945 of a brain tumor at age 43.

And as the Olympics return to Paris this summer, Liddell’s name is part of the centennial commemorations.

Business consultants are calling it “The 85% rule.” An article in The Wall Street Journal explained how it works:

Are you giving it your all? Maybe that’s too much. So many of us were raised in the gospel of hard work and max effort, taught that what we put in was what we got out. Now, some coaches and corporate leaders have a new message. To be at your best, dial it back a bit.

Trying to run at top speed will actually lead to slower running times, they say, citing fitness research. Lifting heavy weights until you absolutely can’t anymore won’t spark more muscle gain than stopping a little sooner, said one exercise physiologist.

The trick—be it in exercise, or anything—is to try for 85%. Aiming for perfection often makes us feel awful, burns us out and backfires. Instead, count the fact that you hit eight out of 10 of your targets this quarter as a win. We don’t need to see our work, health, or hobbies as binary objectives, perfected or a total failure.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Interestingly, if you truly remember the Sabbath—one day out of seven—that equals 85.7% of your week devoted to work. So, the Sabbath was God’s original 85% rule.

More millennials attend church weekly now than before the start of the pandemic. According to a Barna Group survey of 13,000 adults, roughly 16 percent of regular churchgoers have not returned to services at all in 2022, but weekly attendance among those born between 1981 and 1996 has risen from 21 percent to 39 percent this year.

The trend can be partly explained by life stage. Across age cohorts, church attendance is highest when people have young children, drops off for “empty nesters,” and then increases again when friends start to pass away. The oldest millennials are 40 and 41

Freelance writer Jason Heller describes how he and his wife made a pact a few years ago:

Every Sunday, we swore to each other, we will abstain from work. We start our morning and end our day by bingeing TV in bed. The door of our apartment is opened only for pizza to be slid inside. Chores go undone. Fitness is spurned. Job-related emails and texts are not read.

Lazy Sunday, as we like to call it, is hardly a revolutionary idea. A weekly time of rest is an ancient staple of several religions. And the five-day workweek has been the standard in the U.S., (but) spillover into non-workdays is common. A 2015 Rand survey found that about half of American employees do work in their free time in order to meet job demands. For many who started working from home during the pandemic, the boundary between labor and leisure has dissolved even further.

We shouldn’t need to actively protect our one day off—but sadly, we do. Rest time can feel indulgent or unnatural. ... The instinct to hustle—whether for success or just survival—is hard to shake. Still, we do need respite—not only from our jobs but from all of the many obligations that crop up in adult life.

Pre-pact, Angie and I often used Sundays to prep for the coming workweek. We thought we were buying time that we could spend later. The problem is that work is a bottomless pit—there’s always more to do. Sometimes, the people we’ve been close to for decades are the very people we tend to take for granted. Taking a break gives Angie and me the opportunity to really see each other again.

That might be the most important reason to pause work: not just to fuel up in preparation for more work later on, but for the sake of the pause itself. Although Angie and I aren’t religious, we really do think of our secular day of rest as sacred; that’s why we take pains to protect it. When you take away all the tasks you might feel pressed to do on a Sunday, what you’re left with isn’t an absence. It’s an opening.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Sabbath; Sunday; Rest - Although this article was admittedly written from a secular point of view, and includes excessive time with the TV, the central idea agrees wholeheartedly with Scripture (Exod. 20:8-11; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2). Obviously, for the believer, Sunday rest would include gathering with the Lord’s people for worship (Heb. 10:24-25), but also taking the rest of the day for rest and recovery from the week. 2) Labor Day – This holiday is a good reminder to return to God’s guidance of taking one day a week off to rest, not just once a year.

In a poll of 2,000 Britons the 'Perfect Sunday' involved: waking at 8:30 a.m. to the smell of breakfast cooking, a cuddle, and three hours of television. A quarter of Brits thought an ideal weekend morning starts with a full English breakfast in bed and a third wanted to start their Sunday morning with a cup of tea or coffee, before pottering around the house for an hour.

The perfect roast is said to be best served at 3:15 p.m. with, ideally, four people. Other activities Brits enjoy doing on Sunday include reading a book, listening to music, and doing some gardening. Nearly one in 10 said they spend their Sunday afternoon at the pub, while one in seven think Sundays are made for doing food shopping to keep the cupboards stocked for the rest of the week.

Attending church did not appear in the poll. Graham Nicholls from Affinity, a network of evangelical churches, said:

I suppose I was sad that attending a gathering of God's people, in a church, wasn't kind of anywhere on the majority of people's lists. … It means that they're not hearing the gospel, they're not coming to an encounter with God … It's also that churches are great places for taking our families, for making friendships and for learning who we are and why we're here.

"If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan."

—Physician, missionary Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965)