By Kayla DeKraker
The late Charlie Kirk held prioritizing the Sabbath in high importance, and a pastor recently explained its biblical significance.
“You’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath,” Pastor David Engelhardt, who is also a TPUSA board member, told Fox News. “And the idea is, you know, the Scripture says, ‘Six days you shall labor, and on the seventh day you shall rest, because it’s holy.’ And so it follows a pattern. The same pattern that we see in Genesis, where God works, He creates the whole world and then He rests on that seventh day.”
He added, “We know that God is all powerful, immortal, all of those fun adjectives, but…He doesn’t need to rest. Why does He rest? He shows us a pattern of how to live, this pattern of rhythm, pattern where we trust God. If we don’t trust God, then we work all the time. We don’t stop working.”
Despite his busy life, Kirk made sure to follow God’s example and rest.
“It gives us an opportunity to have fresh starts, to have a new day. Charlie…he would turn his phone off so he wouldn’t be distracted by his work, and he would turn screens off, and he would spend his time with his wife and kids, and they would rest,” Engelhardt explained. “They would go on walks…they would spend some time in Scripture, and he practiced it from Friday to Saturday. That’s worked best for his schedule.”
Related: ‘The Charlie Effect’: How God’s Using Charlie Kirk’s ‘Martyred Blood’ to Spark Revival
Engelhardt explained that rest is more than a command; it is a way to honor the bodies that God has given us.
“I think that there’s so many people that burn out and crash and burn their lives because they just don’t care for themselves. They don’t take care of the body. They don’t recognize that we’re not machines,” he explained. “We need seasonal rest…we need weekly rest…we have a fiduciary obligation over our actual bodies, and God gives us these commands. So, they’re blessings to us.”
Engelhardt, in fact, inspired Kirk’s Sabbath habit.
“Charlie was under duress, stressed out and said he was having a hard time sleeping,” he recounted. “I just said, ‘You need to start observing the Sabbath, you need to start taking 24 hours — block it out and just hang out with God, hang out with your family.'”
In his posthumously published book, Stop in the Name of God, Kirk helps “you discover how observing the Sabbath isn’t a rejection of modern life but a rebellion against busyness and a pathway to genuine connection, peace, and presence.”
“I think that to our own detriment and to our own failure, we as Christians have decided to cast away resting on one of the seven days,” Kirk said in a previous speech. “God rested after creation, that comes before the Hebrews and even before the creation of the modern world and civilization as we know it, and it says very clearly in the scriptures, for six days you shall work, and the seventh day you shall rest.”
Hebrews 4:9-11 says, “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.”
While our Sabbath rhythm likely will look different than Kirk’s, we all should find a way to honor God through rest.
Read Next: How ‘Sabbath’ Transformed Charlie Kirk’s Life
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
– Content: +2Share:
– Content: +1