Although he’s “still not very good at it,” Justin McRoberts says, learning to practice the Sabbath-keeping commandment “has been quite literally life-saving.”

Believers are commanded to remember the Sabbath as a reminder of the goodness of their lives and God-given gifts, McRoberts, a San Francisco Bay Area pastor and musician, told a Bluffton University audience March 17.

But another voice “tells us something else about what we are,” he added, showing a TV commercial for a smartphone that its maker claims will turn a user into “an instrument of efficiency.” That “evil” voice tells you that “you are what you make in the world”—a belief in which McRoberts said his father rooted his identity. And when he lost his small business, he lost his identity with it and took his own life at age 55.

“I have his blood in my veins,” carrying some of the same workaholic tendencies, but Bluffton’s Spiritual Life Week speaker said he doesn’t want to base his self-worth on work. “I don’t want to believe that about myself,” he continued, saying he wants his value rooted in his relationship with God instead.

He advised his listeners to resist, too, “when life comes at you at 115 miles per hour and says ‘you are what you do, and you’ll be judged by the quality of it.’ Say ‘No, I’m not what I produce. I’m a beloved son, or daughter, of God.’” That widely experienced struggle with self-identity “is why God gave us the gift of Sabbath,” he said.

As an independent artist, he ignored the Sabbath’s place in his Christian history for years, McRoberts admitted. But that ended 10 years ago, when two friends asked him to come to Kansas City, then Nashville, to work at separate events that both featured author Mark Buchanan and his book, “The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath”—the same book that his wife, questioning his always full schedule, had been wanting him to read.

“God was chasing me down,” recalled McRoberts, pastor at Shelter Covenant Church in Concord, Calif. Among other things, he has since come to realize that he should keep the Sabbath because God did, too, and that taking a day off each week tells God that “I want to be part of your work in the world,” he asserted.

And that day off doesn’t have to be the same one every week, he added. Saying “regularity is the goal, not uniformity,” he urged his listeners to schedule Sabbath before anything else on their weekly calendars.

McRoberts also told a story about asking a friend to assemble a shelving unit in his home when his wife was expected their now-young son. When the job was done sooner than he had planned and his friend left, he could have filled the remaining allotted time with work, namely, with filling the shelves, he noted.

Instead, he said, he grabbed a bench, sat down in the middle of the floor and took time to consider the gifts of friends he could call for help with projects he couldn’t do, of impending fatherhood and of his “incredible” marriage.

“When was the last time you stopped to realize how ridiculously great your life has been?” he asked. 

McRoberts also spoke at Bluffton’s Sunday Night Worship and Thursday morning chapel services, as well as giving a Thursday night concert, during Spiritual Life Week on campus. A clothing drive for local charities was also among the week’s events.

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Justin McRoberts (left) talks with Julia Thomas, a Bluffton senior from Yellow Springs, Ohio, and other Bluffton students during his visit to campus for Spiritual Life Week.