Ah, rest.
I agree with the Seventh-Day Adventists in that Saturday is the sabbath, not Sunday. I know, centuries of Christian tradition has made Sunday our sabbath; but I don’t see any scriptural evidence for making such a switch. Likewise, there’s no evidence for the idea that Christians should meet on Sunday—Christians should meet daily perhaps, or several times a week, not just Sunday.
(In fact, I once got into a rather silly argument with an Adventist over it. “You’re right,” I told him, “we should rest on the Sabbath. But you don’t rest; you go to church and worship. Worship is work.” He really didn’t like that interpretation.)
The point behind Sabbath rest, of course, is rest. It has little to do with following the command. I look at the command in this way: God gave it for our good. Humans aren’t meant to work nonstop. It isn’t so much that we’re to spend the day meditating on God—we’re to spend every day meditating on God—or depriving ourselves of fun. It’s to rest. It’s to stop working ourselves to death.
The hard part is determining what “rest” means. The Hebrew term shabbat has an original meaning of stop; God created the universe in six days, then stopped. The connection between stopping and rest comes from the Ten Commandments; but stop is probably the best guideline. So what does that mean? Well, as I understand it: Whatever you normally do throughout the week, stop. Step back from it. Rest from it.
Since I use my computers pretty much every bloody day, I decided I need to include the computers in my rest. Even though I use them for fun, they’re really too connected to separate. So, off they go. I even shut them down yesterday instead of putting them to sleep.
I felt a lot more rested.