Isaiah 58:13

"If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words:"
Isaiah 58:13


This was really interesting to me today as I was reading.  I've always thought about the sabbath as a day of rest, and of focusing on God.  Going to church, taking time to worship, pray, think on the things of God.  And so it is... but to me this verse takes it deeper.  It's more of an absence of self thing, where we practice just doing God's will.  Which is kind of what we should be doing all the time, but setting the sabbath aside specifically that way helps us to get it right.  I like the "nor speaking thine own words" part... can you imagine?  Saying only what God would say?  That's hard, and crazy... and really, really cool. :)  We could arm ourselves with some good scriptures that say normal things... like "All hail" in Matthew 28:9, or 2 Kings 4:26 has "Is it well with thee?" so we can make small talk. :)  But harder to do larger conversations. :)  So, I guess the only way to do it would be to really have the spirit with us, to know from that what God would say, and what he wants us to say. :)  I wonder though if we can remove ourselves from our own conversation that much... if we can really focus on other people and on what they need and want, and what we can do for them.  The more I think about it, the more I see that that is what God is really about.  His focus is all on us.  Everything he does is for us, teaching us and helping us.  Today, let's remove ourselves from the equation as much as we can.  Let's see what happens when we focus totally outward, not doing anything for ourselves, but everything for God.