Don't Go Back There

God, stop this thing.

I am caught on a treadmill that I, I didn't want to be on and it is going faster and faster and I just need it to stop.

So we're going to be talking over the next two weeks about this idea of stopping.

The word Sabbath literally means to stop.

And how do we build Sabbath into our lives? Now, um, I'm, I'm gonna use a word in our scripture today, in our sermon today that's found in our scripture and I want to really be careful with it and it's the word is slavery.

Um, obviously, uh, real slavery, the slavery that the, uh, that the Jews were, um, the children of Israel were subject to in Egypt, the slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and modern slavery that's still around.

You know, fifty million people are still caught in slavery today.

They may be la- uh, forced labor.

It might be debt service where they borrowed money to go somewhere or do something and then they, they aren't paid enough to pay off the debt and they have to work it off.

It may be child labor, forced child labor, it may be forced marriage, um, it may be sex trafficking.

There's all sorts of different, uh, slavery today and I don't want in any way to, to imply that what we're talking about today is the same kind of thing.

But maybe there's a metaphorical sense that we can talk about, about slavery in the sense of being captive by something that controls us.

Um, and, and that's really what I want to, uh, deal with today.

We can be controlled captive by all sorts of things.

We can be captive by addictions of some sort.

We can be, um, a, a, a captives of our sense of order.

I want everything just right.

Everything has to be just right or I can't be okay.

I can be, uh, a captive by my schedule.

I've got to eat at noon and I've got to eat at six o'clock and I've got to go for a walk at three o'clock and everything has to be at exactly the same time or I just can't be happy.

Um, I, I can be a, a, a captive to expectations of other people that people expect certain things of me.

I mean, we can go on and on about all of the different kinds of things that we're, we, we are slaves to.

Um, but I want to talk about two specifically today and one is to be-- that we can be slaves to our work life and we can be slaves to our schedules.

These things that just seem to just always are demanding of us, always demanding of us and we just can't seem to get off the treadmill.

But we can be slaves to our work.