ALPHA MAAMA (A.M.)

 Sapate Fepueli 8, 2026

LEVITIKO 22-23; HEPELU 4:1-13

The Sabbath is more than a religious duty; it is a gift of grace from a God who knows us and loves us.

Ko e Tauhi ‘o e Sapate ‘oku ‘ikai ko ha fatongia faka-lotu pe; ko ha me’a’ofa ‘o e kelesi mei he ‘Otua ‘oku Ne ‘afio’i mo ‘ofa’i kitautolu.

It is tempting to live beyond your limits. It is tempting to work harder and longer than God has designed you to do. It is tempting to evaluate your life by how much you have experienced or achieved. It is tempting to exhaust yourself by working to acquire, and then working to maintain what you have acquired. But there is no limitless human being. God has created all of us with limits of time, energy, wisdom, and righteousness.

Think about time, for instance. You and I will never get ten days in a week or thirty hours in a day. We'll never have fifty days in a month or five hundred days in a year. We all have to live inside of the limits of time that God has set for us. This means that if something in your life commands more and more of your time, it will begin to eat into and take away time from some other area of your life. If you work eighty hours a week, it will encroach on your familial and spiritual callings. The same applies to physical energy. No person is an endless fount of energy and strength. It never pays to deny your body the need to rest and rejuvenate. Think of human wisdom. No human being is wise all the time and in every way. It is unwise to leave no time in your life to grow in wisdom and knowledge, to act as if you know it all.

So God, knowing the limits he has set for us, says, "Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the LORD in all your dwelling places" (Lev. 23:3). In loving wisdom God calls us to stop each week for one day. Stopping is hard for some of us, because we have attached our identity, meaning, and purpose to always being in motion. God says, "You need to have a day when you do no work." I love the words "solemn rest." Here is a call to be serious about rest, because the one who made you and called you to himself is serious about it. But there is more. This stop-day is also a day of holy convocation. It is a time, because of sabbath, that God's people can gather for worship and remember who we are and what we have been given as the children of God.

"It is a Sabbath to the LORD." We don't belong to our material possessions. We don't belong to our achievements or successes. We belong to the Lord. By grace, he has made us his, and in living for him we experience life's greatest joys. And, finally, every Sabbath reminds us of the ultimate Sabbath of rest found only in our substitute and Redeemer, Jesus.