<p>What we can do to make this a reality</p>

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Restoration International

Remember the Sabbath Day

Alane Waters

Tom Waters

The Essence of the Sabbath

Spiritually Special Sabbaths

What’s in the Box

Sabbath Memories

This morning we want to talk to you as a family about spiritually special Sabbaths.

For those of you that have been to family camps before, you know that 1 of the great desires that we have in our heart for families, for grandparents, for single parents, whatever position you find yourself in, is that our Sabbaths can become alive in Jesus Christ.

It is Jesus Christ that brings the doctrines of the church alive.

We talk about Christ being the center of a meaningful doctrine in our church.

Christ must be the living head, the living center of what makes the Sabbath special.

But I want to tell you that it's not enough that the Sabbath was made for man.

Just as it's not enough that the gift of salvation has been provided to us, that's not enough.

We must accept and enter into that spiritually special experience with Christ and that's where we come in parents primarily I'm going to speak for a moment to the parents because I know the young people I see the young people at these camps they're desirous of entering in their desirous of doing the will of their Heavenly Father and it's much like the Old Testament closes with turning the hearts of the fathers to the children.

Fathers, we need to turn our hearts to our children.

Mothers need to turn your hearts to your children.

And you'll find as you do, faithfully turn your hearts, your young people will turn their hearts to you.

And so we want to talk today about making Sabbath spiritually special.

And so we're going to go through some things from when our children were very young, right on through things that have brought the Sabbath alive and made them practical in our home.

It was just a cardboard box and it was filled with all kind of things like ribbon, little pieces of paper, glue, glue guns, little magnets, all kind of things that you could use to put things together to have a Theme that could be an activity for your young people and you as a family together When we talk about these type of things, this is not something for children.

I remember once we had the theme on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and after we discussed it and we had a nature walk we came back and we all every 1 of us sat down at the table and we got out our collage box.

It's already there and you can use anything in that box to create the scene that's in your mind of the crucifixion.

We had construction paper in there and it was interesting to see the children create on a piece of construction paper how they saw the crucifixion using different things, colored rocks, pieces of wood, or whatever it was they would glue on there.

We hung them in our kitchen on the bulletin board and they hung there for a long time as a reminder that Jesus died for them.

So this is something, the idea of having something pre-prepared ahead of time, this is in our home still, in our closet upstairs in the living room, ready for any time we need to have something to direct the attention of our guests.

You know, my children at their ages, they're not sitting necessarily at the table doing this.

But it's interesting, even, I'm going to point out a few other things in here.

Even where we are now, there's cards in there.

Cards with envelopes, and they're blank cards, so you can see.

So sometimes we'll just sit down and write a note of encouragement, or we'll put something special that we've designed on the front of the card, write a note of encouragement, and then Monday it goes out in the mail.

The things in here are very simple, very inexpensive, and after the meeting today, it will be sitting out on the table in the first room we come through, where our tape table was, so you can feel free to look through it to see some ideas that are in there.

But 1 of the things that we found interesting, it doesn't take a lot of resources.

We went to the printer in town who printed our girl's cookbook and talked to him because he knew we were homeschooling.

And he says, well, do you ever need paper?

Scraps of paper, because printers have lots of scraps of paper, all colors.

He cut these for us in 1 swipe of the machine.

You can have a whole bunch of bookmarkers, nice quality paper, and they're in there just ready for use.

There's stickers in here and all kind of things.

He's even the 1 who cut the cards for us.

He cut them and he matched the scraps to the odd envelopes he had laying around his print shop that he's never going to be able to sell and gave them to us just to use in our home.

So there's all kinds of resources out there.

They're all cut and ready to do what with?

Yeah, make a chain or whatever else you want to use them for.

So we just encourage you with with about 20 minutes of time and maybe 4 or 5 dollars in expense, or maybe a little more than that, you can go and you can put together very simply a collage box that's there in your home ready at all times to make Sabbath really special.

Because you don't have to go think of a great idea or you don't have to go hunt all the stuff up and who wears the scissors and what did you do with the glue and all that kind of stuff everything's here and it's only used in our home on Sabbath so it's always prepared and ready.

We all enjoy that, especially when you are indoors most of the week or If you work in an office type environment, it's always so nice to be able to get outside and do things that are fun.

But sometimes the weather doesn't always cooperate, does it?

Like today, it's been raining a little bit.

So it's nice to have the variety of indoor things and outdoor things, but whenever the weather is conducive, we always enjoy, especially on Sabbath afternoons, going outside into nature and finding out what God has in store there for us.

Nature is God's second lesson book, isn't it?

And beyond going out and just having a special time outside, The emphasis that we want to draw out this morning is that it can be spiritually special.

There's a difference between just having a fun time and bringing that enjoyment into the spiritual realm where it can bring lessons to the heart and we can go throughout the following weeks with those lessons.

So whenever we go out into nature, into the outdoors, especially on the Sabbath, we like to make it a spiritual time, a time of drawing our minds and our hearts closer to our Creator and the 1 that created everything out there for us and for our enjoyment.

And this can be done many, many different ways, but this morning we're going to share with you just a few little things that we have enjoyed doing over the years.

And I'm sure that many of you have heard about this first game that we're going to talk about, and that is the blindfold game.

How many people have heard about the blindfold game?

How many of you have done it in your homes?

Jesus said if you know these things, Happy are you if you do them, right?

So what really makes Sabbath spiritually special is doing these activities, not just hearing about them.

That's a little like preaching, isn't it?

And you know, the thing is, it doesn't have to be the games that we share with you.

We just are sharing with you from what our family has enjoyed, things to give you ideas.

So you can go home and you can be creative.

But these are some very simple things that everyone, it's easy to catch on to and everyone can do it.

But anyway, for those of you who don't know how this game goes, we go out on a walk and each of us have a little bag with us or a bucket, and as you walk along you pull things from nature, little different nature objects, and you put them in there when no 1 else is watching because you don't want anyone to know what's in there.

And when you come back together, everyone sits in the same room and there's a chair there that someone volunteers to come and sit in and then someone else will volunteer to blindfold them.

And a third person will take something from what they have gathered and put it in that blindfolded person's hands.

The blindfolded person holds their hands out in a cup, and then a nature object will put in their hands and they have to figure it out using all their senses except sight, and we don't usually recommend taste, it can be kind of risky, to figure out what is in their hands.

So once they have discovered what it is, the blindfold comes off, and then they have the first opportunity to come up with a nature object or a Bible story that comes to their mind where that nature item was used.

And then talk about how that, what that means to them practically in their own lives.

And after they're finished sharing that, in the small setting of just the family or a couple of families together, everyone in the room has the opportunity to go around and share what they thought of.

And then whoever is in the chair gets to choose the next person to come and sit in the chair and then they'll blindfold them.

So we want to make this morning interactive.

So we have a chair here and we have a nature object and we have a blindfold and we even have someone to blindfold 1 of you, but we need to have a volunteer to come up and sit in this chair.

Why don't you right here on the front with the red tie, why don't you come up?

Because your hands are going to be down here like this.

Part 1 of 4

Spiritually Special Sabbaths