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Your Gift DOUBLES to Launch Our First Animated Feature Film!

Will you help bring Journey into the Impossible to theaters nationwide? Every dollar you give will be DOUBLED through a $1 million match opportunity.

Your Gift DOUBLES to Launch Our First Animated Feature Film!

Our first-ever animated feature film is in production! Give now and your gift will be DOUBLED through a $1 million match to help bring this Gospel-centered story to theaters nationwide.

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Your Gift DOUBLES to Launch Our First Animated Feature Film!

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Rest and Restoration

June 12, 2017

How did Jesus celebrate the Sabbath?

Look closely at how Jesus practiced Sabbath because therein lies a lesson. For one, almost all Jesus’ Sabbath practices, in the eyes of the religious leaders of the day, looked like Sabbath breaking. Whatever the religious minds thought Sabbath should look like, the reality, for Jesus, was quite different.

Restoration

But there’s something else here, almost hidden in plain sight: For Jesus, Sabbath is mostly about restoration. Has a cow fallen in a well? Lift it out! Has a woman been bent over for 18 years? Straighten her up! Are people hungry? Pluck grain and feed them! Story after story carries this same point: Sabbath is for restoration. Whatever is lost, broken or sick, Sabbath is meant to make whole.

Sabbath focus

This concept has had radical implications for my family’s Sabbath practice. We began to ask, What in our lives is withered or bent, broken or lost? What has our haste or distraction stolen or damaged? We would plan our Sabbath around restoring such things.

Had joy gone missing? We would do that which would bring it back — something so simple as a board game or watching old episodes of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Were our bodies aching and drooping? We would do that which rested and revived them — sometimes no more than making a thermos of hot chocolate and visiting the beach on a winter’s day.

In this way, every Sabbath day became a gift shaped to meet a real and pressing need.

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