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Sabbath Rest: My New Year's Resolution

Jan 6, 2026 8:30:00 AM | by Caitrin Bennett



Caitrin Bennett shares her 2026 New Year’s resolution to make Sunday a true day of rest.

 
The Third Commandment

What does your Sunday routine look like? After Mass, do you head home for family time and quiet prayer, or are you often running to sporting events and social gatherings? Do you use Sunday to rest, or to do chores and prepare for the rush of Monday morning?

I have long known that one of the Ten Commandments required that we “keep holy the sabbath day,” but I thought this just meant making it to Mass. After that, I felt that I had checked my sabbath box and I could do whatever I wanted to do or needed to get done the rest of the day. In high school, I usually had scheduled activities on Sunday afternoons and evenings. In college, I often had a paper to write on Sundays, having procrastinated all weekend. Now, as a mom with young kids, Sunday seems like the perfect day to catch up on laundry and plan for our upcoming week of homeschool and activities.

But recently, God has put the idea of sabbath rest on my heart, so I went back to the actual text of the third commandment in Exodus 20. It was convicting.

Remember the sabbath day—keep it holy. Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God. You shall not do any work, either you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your work animal, or the resident alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the LORD has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)

Here’s what stuck out to me: there is literally no mention here of gathering to worship, or even of praying and studying Scripture on your own. The Church has wisely instructed that faithful Catholics attend Mass (at least) on Sundays, and we should of course be obedient to that. But Scripture is very clear about how we are to observe the sabbath: rest. Not rushing around to events, not planning for the week ahead or doing chores we didn’t get to last week; ideally, not doing any work at all.

Thousands cheer as the sun rises on winter solstice at Stonehenge

Thousands of people have gathered at Stonehenge to celebrate the winter solstice

By
The Associated Press
December 21, 2025, 6:03 AM ET

Headlines from ABC News LiveCatch up on the developing stories making headlines.The Associated Press

LONDON -- Thousands of people cheered and danced around Stonehenge as the sun rose over the prehistoric stone circle on Sunday, the winter solstice.

The crowds, many in costume, had gathered before dawn, waiting patiently in the dark and cold field in southwest England. Some sang and beat drums, while others took time to reflect among the huge stone pillars.

Many make the pilgrimage to the stone circle every summer and winter and consider it a spiritual experience. The ancient monument, erected between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago, was built to align with the movement of the sun on the solstices — key dates in the calendar for ancient farmers.

Sunday is the shortest day of the year north of the equator, where the solstice marks the start of astronomical winter. It’s the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the longest day of the year and summer will start.

The winter solstice is when the sun makes its shortest, lowest arc, but many celebrate it as a time of renewal because after Sunday, the sun starts climbing again and days will get a little longer every day until late June.

Source

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Advice by Michael J. Coren
January 23, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EST

Every Friday around sunset, I close my laptop. For 24 hours, my work is done. No email. No news. No social media. If it’s work-related, it waits.

What I try to do is — nothing at all. Or, rather, I spend time with people I love, usually outdoors. I swim or surf. I share a meal with friends and family. Sometimes, I just lie on my back in the park enjoying the sun.

It has rekindled a sense of joy I last felt when I was a kid with nothing to do, and gratitude for whatever miraculous series of events led me here to this moment.

For years, this one-day pause seemed untenable. For many, it’s virtually impossible to set aside an entire day for rest free from responsibilities to work and family.

But on the verge of burnout a few years ago, I began to practice a Sabbath. Giving myself permission to stop doing was hard. My brain betrayed my intentions, unconsciously leading me to flick open my phone, check work emails or scurry ahead to a Monday that hadn’t yet begun. Disconnecting took practice, and still does.

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Restfulness on the Sabbath

February 4, 2020 Jessica Florey


Observing the Sabbath is a complex discussion at Covenant. During my four years here, my understanding and view of the Sabbath has continued to transform. The Sabbath is not only a day of rest for our bodies, but also a day of rest for our souls—a day set aside to worship and be reminded of the many ways God has been faithful in the past week.

In my experience, we do not often see this whole picture of Sabbath rest and worship play out among the student body at Covenant. We emphasize the need for physical rest but often we confuse Sabbath rest with watching TV or sleeping. Are those really all that it means to enjoy the rest for our souls in worship that the Sabbath offers us?

Taking a Sunday to sleep in or miss church because life can be hectic is okay, but we do need to be careful about not getting into a habit of. It can be easy to trick our minds into believing that “Oh, I’m feeling a little under the weather, and I haven’t rested all week” or “I stayed up ‘til 2 AM last night and really just need to take an easy morning.” This is not what the Sabbath is about. The Sabbath is about taking a day away from the work of the week, and focusing on worshiping and glorifying God.

Although we should be worshiping every day of the week, the Sabbath is specifically set aside to worship as a Christian body. If we are taking the Sabbath seriously, that means setting aside other things to make sure we can prioritize worship on that day; for instance, maybe instead of staying up until 2 AM, you could go to bed earlier so you don’t need to sleep in.

I do believe a part of the Sabbath is, in fact, taking physical rest. This can be in soaking in time with friends, not doing homework, and even in letting our brains relax with some entertainment. But this day was set aside for reflecting on God’s faithfulness in the week and in all that he has done. Are we really doing that by prioritizing physical and mental rest?

Have we all lost the plot on Sunday worship?

David Baker 

Fri 1 Jun 2018 11:40 BST

I heard recently of a large church in the midlands region of the UK which has a problem.

Church leaders reckon the total congregation is about 1,000-strong. For England, that's big. The problem they have is that, on any given Sunday, about 300 do not turn up to worship. The reasons, I understand, are broadly what you might expect: people are away visiting relatives, or away on a weekend break, or simply 'doing other things'. And as any church minister will tell you, this is an issue across Britain. Even those who regard themselves as 'regular' worshippers may only be at a service once or twice a month. It is true in some other countries, too. All in all, it's a far cry from the New Testament picture of believers who 'every day continued to meet together' (Acts 2:46).

Michelle Jimenez/Unsplash

Are Christians abandoning Sunday worship?

The results are pretty easy to see. For example, face-to-face fellowship between Christians is more fragmented. Preachers trying to work through a Bible book or theme on successive Sundays find that their hearers are only there, say, for the first, third and sixth of a seven-part series. To use the biblical picture of the Body of Christ, it's like some of the organs in a physical body going missing for 50 per cent of the time. Both churches and Christians are feebler as a result.

So how has this situation in relation to Sunday worship come about? In the UK, the liberalisation of the Sunday trading laws in the 1980s meant Mammon could seduce us seven days a week, rather than six. Sport quickly followed on. Suddenly, church had 'competition'. Add in to this 24-hour TV and the internet, and the results are all too predictable. But some would argue there's been a theological change too. For some evangelicals today, the whole issue seems rather legalistic. For them, talk of Sunday observance sounds a bit too much like the New Testament pharisees and their rules. After all, shouldn't we refrain from judging people about 'Sabbaths' (Colossians 2:16)? And isn't 'rest' for Christians more about salvation than any particular day (Hebrews 4)? Well, yes – but that's not the whole picture. Whatever our precise views, here are some questions to challenge us, and our churches, about the issue of regular Sunday worship:

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