STATION 3

(participant reads)
Before you is a selection of tools people might use for their work.  Collect a tool and hold it while you read.
 
A summary of Jesus’ birth and life:
Time after time, God shows His people a never-ending, ever-reaching love. 
Time after time, the people sadden God by going their own way - striving to make life work through their own efforts. 
They ignore God’s offers of love and leadership. 
Eventually, God can no longer overlook the response of the people.
Four hundred years passed by.  Not even a whisper is heard from God! 
But this silence is broken by a child’s cry.
This baby’s name is Jesus. 
Jesus has come to live in the world — to be God’s presence with people.
As a boy, Jesus learns his step-father's trade, and he speaks to others about God.  
He treats others with great respect and people catch a sense there is something different about Him.  
As a man, Jesus is baptized in the River Jordan — by his cousin, John.  As Jesus comes up out of the water, a voice from the sky is heard, saying, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” 

As Jesus begins to travel among the people He talks about God's Kingdom, "Come to Me, and I will give you rest." -  and people believe what He is saying, because He speaks with great authority.
Large crowds often gather around Jesus just to catch a glimpse of Him, to hear his message, or simply to touch his clothing.   

Sick people come to Jesus, and He makes them well again. People who are blind come, and He enables them to see. People who have never been able to walk come, and He tells them to get up and use their legs — and they can!  
Sometimes Jesus even gives life back to those who have died. 
Jesus speaks about how people can live before God and treat one another, and He shows others what life is like following God’s lead.  
To those who follow Jesus and believe in Him, he is inspirational. 
But some want Him stopped.  
The religious leaders are threatened by Jesus — afraid of His influence among the people.  They are too caught up in their own ways of thinking to allow any disruption from Jesus.
So they make plans to end Him.  
 
(guide reads)
Jesus reveals the priority of relationship with God.  The religious people of his day also claimed to be close to God, but their lives showed the opposite.  Jesus wasn’t just talking about the importance of a relationship with God, he was living it out.  And people liked what they saw and how they felt when they were around Jesus.  Well, most people — the religious leaders? Not so much.
 
One of the controversies surrounding Jesus and the religious leaders is his perspective on the practice of Sabbath. 
The word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word “to rest” and is an ancient practice that has its roots in the Bible’s account of creation where it says God rested.
 
(participant reads)
“By the seventh day
   God had finished his work.
On the seventh day
   he rested from all his work.
God blessed the seventh day.
   He made it a Holy Day
Because on that day he rested from his work,
   all the creating God had done.” (Genesis 2:2-3 MSG)
 
The weekly practice of rest is embedded into the life of the Hebrew people and becomes a part of their law at the time of the prophet Moses:
 
“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Work six days and do everything you need to do. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to God, your God. Don’t do any work—not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your servant, nor your maid, nor your animals, not even the foreign guest visiting in your town. For in six days God made Heaven, Earth, and sea, and everything in them; he rested on the seventh day. Therefore God blessed the Sabbath day; he set it apart as a holy day.” (Exodus 20:8-11 MSG)
 
(guide reads)
Before long, the weekly practice shifts from something that reflects a
Divine rhythm to life, to a means of gaining favour from God.  This further escalates to being a heavy burden placed on the people by the leaders of Jesus’ day — where they categorize types of work into 39 groups, and give detailed instructions around acceptable and unacceptable ways to participate in activity on the Sabbath. 
 
Needless to say, whenever Jesus heals a person on the Sabbath, He is identified as a law-breaker, and this raises the blood pressure of the people in power. On one occasion, the leaders confront Jesus after his followers had ‘broken the Sabbath rules’, Jesus responds:
 
“The Sabbath was made to serve us; we weren’t made to serve the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:28 MSG)
 
Jesus sees the practice of Sabbath as a gift.  
To enter into a day of rest is to trust that an endless stream of activity does not need to enslave me.  God invites me to resist the belief that the world depends on me and my work.
 
To work hard, but also to stop and rest.  To lay my tools down and delight in simple things.  To cease work and acknowledge that God makes the world turn — not me.  This is Sabbath.
 
What can Sabbath look like for you? 

What can you lay down temporarily to enter into a regular rhythm of rest?
 
This next moment can be a ‘sabbath moment’ — a rest — where you trust that the world will be ok without your busy-ness. 
 
Lay your tool down and enjoy your sabbath rest — pause in this moment, then make your way to the next station when you are ready.