John and Jena Starke’s “The Sabbath We Need: Finding Rest in a World of Counterfeits” (Intervarsity Press, 2026) is an insightful and refreshing treatment of the oft-neglected gift of the Sabbath. Having planted Apostles Church Uptown in New York City, one of the fastest-paced cities in the world, the Starkes bring to this book their personal experience as a ministry couple and their effort to communicate to their congregation that the Sabbath is both a gift from God and a call to live by faith as we rest on God’s holy day.
The book’s introduction identifies the two cultural mindsets that make Sabbath rest seem untenable in our modern world: achievement culture and well-being culture. Achievement culture sees rest as an obstacle to avoid or a means to optimizing productivity and achieving personal goals. Well-being culture “doesn’t value achievement so much as experience. They [adherents] want freedoms, vacations, and good mental health” (5).
In both cases, the Sabbath is turned toward self-fulfillment and away from the purpose God intended. The Starkes spend the first half of the book exploring “Sabbath as Formation,” establishing what the Sabbath is over and against its cultural counterfeits. The second half, “The Practice of Sabbath,” gives practical guidance on how to keep the Sabbath in a way that both glorifies God and refreshes us.
The opening chapter explains the cultural context in which we all live. Using Israel’s slavish existence under the Egyptians as a paradigm, the book portrays the world’s systems as “confiscatory gods” that “demand more than they can give” (18). They tell us to make bricks without straw. And it’s within this confiscatory context that we either seek achievement — not realizing that we cannot prevail over the confiscatory gods and will eventually crash and burn — or we pursue our own well-being as our chief and highest end.
In Chapter 1 the authors frame the Sabbath as a form of resistance against the confiscatory gods; they also remind those who rest for the sake of well-being that when the Bible speaks of Sabbath observance, there is a level of self-denial inherent in it as well. This chapter was compelling and incisive. The authors identified the hindrances to the Sabbath that we all feel, but struggle to articulate. They know and understand their readers, making you eager to read on.
Against the self-focused, “secular Sabbaths” presented in Chapter 1, the Starkes present the Sabbath in theocentric terms in Chapter 2. The purpose of the Sabbath day is to reorder ourselves, not just on the Sabbath day but for the coming week, toward God himself. They do an able job explaining why the Sabbath command is still in force, even under the New Covenant and how God’s rest and the reason he rested establish the pattern and rationale for our own rest. The Sabbath is a holy day because God has set it aside and because it is given to make us holy (Exodus 31:13).
Chapter 3 presents the Sabbath as a means of spiritual formation: something altogether different from the “expanding markets of addiction (cannabis, sports gambling, porn)” that actively seek to conform us to the image of this world (52). The Sabbath is a regular reminder that the things of this world cannot satisfy us, even if we achieve everything we’ve set out to do in a given week. On the Sabbath we receive a “Sabbath heart” that changes the way we envision our lives, moving us from dread and regret to joy, gratitude, and anticipation of that which will satisfy our souls.
Rounding out Part One of the book, Chapter 4 provides an unexpected, but insightful, changeup. Chapter 4 spends more time in Scripture than the other chapters, as the Starkes examine the eunuchs of the ancient world. These men wholly dedicated themselves to civil service and gave up the possibility of family, paralleling the experience of those who are driven by achievement in our modern world. The gospel delivers us from this idolatry and includes us in the family of God. For those bewildered by the ceremonial law generally and the exclusion of individuals with physical defects particularly, this chapter helps show the deeper, spiritual intention behind these restrictions. I’ve already filed this chapter away in my mind for future conversations with skeptics or those who fail to see the gospel in the Old Testament.
Part 2 of the book addresses common hindrances to Sabbath rest and prescribes habits to help set the day apart as holy. The style of the book noticeably shifts in these chapters. Appropriately, it moves from an analytical to a conversational, open tone when discussing how to keep the Sabbath.
Chapter 5 acknowledges the difficulty of solitude and how community counterintuitively strengthens our ability to embrace solitude, encouraging us to press on and persevere through the difficulty. The chapter includes a number of practical tips for those who don’t know where to start, including “Start small and structured…Be intentional and consistent with space…Leave your phone and digital devices in another room” (94). All good advice.
The remaining chapters show how our view of the Sabbath transforms our relationship to our work the other six days of the week (Chapter 6), how we should envision the day as one of positive blessing not a day of privation (Chapter 7), and how the Sabbath offers us space to address grief and receive the healing of God (Chapter 8).
My only disagreement with the authors came in Chapter 7, “Imagining the Day.” The Starkes offer several patterns of rest to help the reader think strategically about how to best spend their time on the Sabbath day. Aside from corporate worship, which they take as a given, they recommend patterns of creative play (making something or visiting a museum), silence and solitude (embracing silence and meditation upon Scripture), feast and friends (exercise hospitality and enjoy rich food), and nature and adventure (take a walk in the woods). I appreciate elements of each of these patterns of rest. I practice some of them myself already (a walk with my wife and children, special meals we prepare only on Sundays, etc.), and they’ve given me some new ideas I am excited to try.
My question is how getting “drinks at a bar with friends” or frequenting a museum squares with the writers’ earlier presentation of the Sabbath as a form of resistance against the confiscatory gods of our culture, consumerism figuring prominently in that pantheon of idolatry. By engaging in commerce on the Sabbath day, are we not indirectly making it unfeasible for the bartender, ticket-taker, or security guard to rest on the Sabbath? Whether they see the value of Sabbath rest or not is beside the point.
As Westminster Larger Catechism 99:8 states, “That in what is commanded to others, we are bound, according to our places and callings, to be helpful to them; and to take heed of partaking with others in what is forbidden them.” If our unbelieving neighbors are commanded to honor the Sabbath Day and to keep it holy, we should make every effort to be helpful to them and to make room for their rest.
If such moral logic seems to unduly restrict our liberty under the gospel, as stated earlier in Chapter 1, the Sabbath calls for such self-denial, “It is a day of Sabbath rest, and you must deny yourselves” (25). To deny this would be to fall into the very error the book warns us against, namely viewing the Sabbath as a day for our well-being, to the exclusion of our neighbor’s. What is more, Christian liberty, rightly understood, is limited by God’s law (cf. Isaiah 58:13-14, Jeremiah 17:19-27) and love for neighbor (Romans 14:13-19). We are never free to do what God forbids, nor to exercise our liberty in an unloving way. Given the extensive biblical-theological treatment of the eunuch experience in Chapter 4, it would have been prudent to give equal treatment to the many texts where God rebukes his people for their disregard of the Sabbath day, whether for the sake of achievement or self-fulfillment.
These critiques aside, I was blessed by the book as a whole. The content and writing style, especially in Part 1, blessed my soul. It reads like a devotional at points. The Starkes’ acquaintance with a broad spectrum of theological and literary resources provided a richness and depth to the points they made. I have most of my highlights in chapters 1 and 2. Their love for the Sabbath came through on every page. This book would foster excellent discussion in a small group context or as a discipleship tool for a church leader to help young professionals form a healthy view of work and rest. The Sabbath is a gift of God, and so too is this book. I heartily commend it to you.
Stephen Spinnenweber serves as pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, Florida.