Keep the Sabbath Holy

Well, good morning. We are going to continue to look at the Ten Commandments this morning. And I'm going to give one quick plug at the beginning. We're going to do the fourth commandment again, part two. And this is a really hopeful pamphlet. It's written by a godly man named Ian Murray, who I don't know that I've read much of anything of his that has not been helpful. It's 30 pages long. Very doable. You can read this in... lesson or maybe an hour or two, right? There are three copies of it in the church library. I put them there so you can read it. So it's just very helpful. He walks through the Sabbath and what it means to rest in God. So I encourage you that if you have more thoughts and want to read through this, if reading is a way that helps you understand and process arguments, then read it. It's good. And none of us can say we don't have time to read a small

30-page book, right? So there's one quick plug. Now, last week, I argued that the Sabbath, or the Lord's Day, is a command from God, and that that command is rooted in creation. That the Sabbath is not a new thing when the Ten Commandments come. But rather, just like all of the other commandments that are in the Ten Commandments, it's something that reflects who God is. It's part of the moral law. That none of these are laws that ever, these laws are always binding for how we act. Now, in the New Testament, the day changes. And it changes from Saturday to Sunday. And there are a few other things.

After we read the passage, we're going to get more into looking at why the day changes and what happens in it. But what I want to remind us is that in the Old Testament, we see that the Sabbath is consistently broken and not kept. And that this is throughout Genesis to Malachi. Many of the judgments that God brings against his people are specifically related to the refusal of his people to keep the Sabbath day holy. In fact, when God takes the nation of Israel and Judah, when he takes them into captivity, the length of time of the captivity is actually determined by their lack of keeping the Sabbath.

See, every Saturday was to be kept as a Sabbath, holy and set apart. And then it extended to the years. So every seventh year, the land was to lie fallow. And they weren't to plant. And they were to keep that entire year as a Sabbath rest, as to not be planting. And then... God created and designed Israel in such a way that every 50th year was to be a super Sabbath. Because it's the seven sevens, right? And then you come to the year of Jubilee. And the year of Jubilee was a year of celebration. It was a year of freedom where slaves were to be set free. Where properties were to be returned to the households from which they'd been bought.

It was a year of rest. It was a year meant to be devoted to the worship and the service of God. Israel never kept it. They were not diligent in keeping the Sabbath. And so God judged them. And the length of the exile was determined by this disobedience. He said, you never gave the land a rest. I will give it rest. You never kept my Sabbath day holy. I will give a Sabbath day. And so he did. Now, you imagine what that does to the people of Israel. How it might finally have sunk in that God thinks the Sabbath day is important. So what happens is God brings them back under two men, Ezra and Nehemiah. And Ezra and Nehemiah take God's commands seriously.

They fear God. So they enforce to the Sabbath. Nehemiah kicks them all out of Jerusalem, all the merchants. He says, you're gone. You may not be here during the Sabbath. So all of them do what? They go and they sit outside Jerusalem. They come up to Jerusalem. They sit outside the walls and they're like, whatever, dude. We'll wait. So, you know, as soon as the gates crack open, we're going to come. And you know what Nehemiah says? He says, get away from the walls of Israel or I will lay hands on you. Them's fighting words, right? They feared God, they kept the Sabbath. Now, this then leads into the New Testament era, right? And who are the disciples of Ezra? Well, the disciples of Ezra are the Pharisees. Only the Pharisees are not Ezra's true disciples because Ezra loved the law of God and he loved God.

The Pharisees forgot their love of God and their love for God's law. If you read Psalm 119, it's sort of a shocking psalm to us because it's just talking about the joy of the law of the Lord and how sweet it is and how much delight there is in keeping it and loving it, right? And that's Ezra's attitude towards the law of God. That is not the Pharisees' attitude towards the love of God. The Pharisees' zeal for God's law became a zeal for their laws, their money, and their power. And so we see the pendulum, right? Israel didn't keep the Sabbath, and then the pendulum swings. And in the New Testament, we have the Pharisees, who all were worried about the Sabbath, but a Pharisaical keeping of the Sabbath, a works-based.

Keeping of the Sabbath. We see that the Pharisees had forgotten the very purpose for which God had established the Sabbath. So what Jesus does in the New Testament is not diminish the Sabbath, but instead, Jesus cleans it. He refines it. And he teaches us how to keep it better. What he does with the rest of the law. He cuts through all this works-based Pharisaism. the things that they had added to the law of God, and he cuts through it all and says, this isn't meant to be a burden to you. So there are two ditches that we can fall into when it comes to the Sabbath. We can refuse to submit to God's command to keep a day holy, or we can go and we can add unbiblical, burdensome rules and regulations which end up making the Lord's day a dreary burden. Rather, than a day of joy and celebration. Some of us do stray towards the Pharisaical side of the equation. However, I believe that the prevalent danger for us and for our culture lies more towards not keeping the Sabbath than towards Pharisaism. Instead, if we consider the Sabbath at all, we tend to make assumptions.

about its fulfillment in Christ and think that it has no more bearing on us or that, you know, as long as we hit up church on Sunday morning in small group, we're probably good. And that satisfies the demands of the Sabbath on our lives. Well, my hope today is that you will be more diligent in your keeping of the Lord's day and that we would grow in our faith and in our trust of God enough to devote an entire day, to God. That we would better see the goodness and the blessing that the Sabbath is for us, and better understand the promises which God gives to us concerning the Sabbath. Now, if you'll please stand, let's read. And again, we'll read.

from verse 1 to verse 11. Our main text today will begin in verse 8, but I want to give us the context of the first table of the law, because it builds to the fourth commandment. This is the word of the Lord, and it's eternally true. Then God spoke all of these words, saying, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands.

to those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated.

One of the main arguments, I think, for keeping the Sabbath is, one, it's rooted in creation. The second is that it's in the Ten Commandments. It's part of the moral law of God. And it just doesn't make sense, and nor do we ever see where God diminishes it to nine commandments. Or there's no reason why we would somehow denigrate one out of the ten. There's still a lot of conflict on this commandment, though. And part of the reason I think that there's so much confusion in regards to keeping the Sabbath is that there are real aspects in which the fourth commandment has changed. And let's work through this, how it's changed. In the garden, when God creates the world, he sets up a pattern. Six days you labor. You work.

And then on the seventh day, we rest. Work, rest. Work, rest. It's a pattern. In the Old Testament, we see, as we've looked at earlier, that God thinks the breaking of the Sabbath is a very serious offense. In Numbers 15, we actually see that there is a man who is put to death for violating the Sabbath principle. That shows us that keeping the Sabbath is something that's close to God, that is a moral issue, and that it's important. But much of this changes in the New Testament. In the New Testament, God interacts with the Pharisees regarding the Sabbath several times. But what I want to drill home in our minds is that in doing so, he never...

speaks ill of the Sabbath or denigrates it. J.C. Ryle says that to clean moss from the roof and the siding of a house is not the same thing as tearing down the house. And Jesus' removing of the Jewish innovations does not in any way tear down the Sabbath. So one of the interactions that we see in the New Testament is that the disciples and Jesus are walking. And as they're walking, they're picking heads of grain. and they're eating them. And the Pharisees come up, and they say, do you not care that your disciples are breaking the Sabbath? Now here's the thing. Where do we see that walking along and picking grains, heads of grain, and eating them is a violation of the Sabbath? We don't. It's nowhere in Scripture.

What it is is one of the ways that the Pharisees have added to the law of God. And what the Pharisees would do is they would make all these deductions. So an example of this would be that there's the command not to make a fire on the Sabbath, right? So the Jewish rabbi sat around and they thought about it and they said, well, what's making a fire? Well, you have to create a spark. And this is why the strict Jews won't turn a light switch on, because they'd say that's creating a spark, which is tantamount to starting a fire on a Sunday. So you can have a timer for your lights, but you can't actually flip switches on it. Or you could hire a Gentile to come in and flip a switch, but you can't do that, right? And so they take these little things in Scripture, and they reason down through that to make up this huge array of onerous, burdensome laws.

And one of the things that they had is that you can't eat grain on the Sabbath. Jesus says, no, you can't. Why? Jesus is establishing a principle that it's not a sin to do things that are necessary on the Sabbath. Eating is a necessary function of life. And it's not in violation of the Sabbath to eat. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Another time is the Pharisees bring... Make sure Jesus comes into contact with a man with a withered hand because I want to test. Will Jesus do work on the Sabbath? Well, Jesus does heal on the Sabbath. And again, the Pharisees are all offended because Jesus had done unnecessary work by healing this man on the Sabbath. And again, you know, you see the hardness of heart of the Pharisees.

And Jesus reminds them, Sabbath, man was not made for the Sabbath. But the Sabbath was made for man. And that, you know, people talk about exceptions to keeping the Sabbath. And the exceptions being works of necessity and works of mercy. I don't like the term of an exception. Because I think... mercy is something that ought to be shown on the Sabbath. It shouldn't be viewed as a violation of the Sabbath, but rather part of the heart of the Sabbath is that since we live in a fallen world, that we would show mercy to others. And that our weakness as humans, we do have necessities. And they have to be met. And so, Jesus is demonstrating something. He's peeling it back and saying, I never said we can't show mercy on the Sabbath.

I never said that we can't show, do the works that are necessary. And even the Pharisees had an understanding of this because he says, if your donkey falls in a pit, you would pull it out. Both a work of necessity and a work of mercy. So what we see then also in the New Testament is that Jesus says, I am Lord of the Sabbath. So he's saying, I have the authority. to properly interpret what is allowable or not allowable on the Sabbath. Another significant thing that you see in the Gospels, in the beginning of them, is that Jesus meets on the Sabbath in the synagogue with the Jews and teaches them and reads from God's Word. But it changes. When does it change?

Well, it changes after Jesus dies. So Jesus gets put to death, and he's buried. And then he raises himself up from the dead on a Sunday. And then, do you know what he starts doing? He never meets again on a Sabbath. He meets on Sunday. The next two meetings that he has with the apostles are on Sundays. It's evident in Acts chapter 20 and in 1 Corinthians that it was the practice of the early church to meet on the first day of the week, on Sundays. John, in Revelation, calls Sunday the Lord's Day. And this is really interesting because what he does is he turns the word Lord into an adjective and says, Ownership over this particular day. The only other time that the word Lord is used as an adjective is in reference to communion, the Lord's Supper. So he's doing something here. This is instructive for us. The church, the early church, going beyond the book of Acts and into history, what we see is that their practice was to meet on the Lord's Day.

It is the uniform understanding of the early church fathers that the Lord's Day is the first day of the week, that it is a Sunday, that that is when you meet and worship God. Now, did they rest the whole day? Often not. They couldn't. They didn't have that kind of freedom. But what we see is, as the church grew in influence and power, people did begin to keep the whole day as a day of rest. And the whole culture shifted towards honoring the Lord's day. Now, who would have the right to change the creation mandate of worshiping on the seventh day to worshiping on the eighth day? Not the apostles. Not any man. Only the Lord.

Only the one whose day it is has the proper authority to do that. And can you imagine a culture like the Jewish culture that we see in the New Testament who are so bound by tradition and rules, changing the day of worship without the permission of God, without having seen that that was the practice of the Lord himself. Now, this is what's really cool. What we see in Jesus' death and resurrection is that he changes aspects of the Sabbath. And this is really neat. First, we see that Jesus changed the very day. We also see that Jesus changes the ceremonial aspects of the day, i.e., we don't have to put people to death anymore for being in violation of the Sabbath. That that is one of the ceremonial things.

that is fulfilled. And notice in our passage in the Ten Commandments, there's nothing mentioned about being put to death for violating the Sabbath. That there are a lot of other rules throughout the law that are instructive to us about the importance of the Sabbath, but are fulfilled in Christ. The other really cool thing is, in Jesus' death and resurrection, what did Jesus do? If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone away. Behold, the new has come. So in creation of the world, God sets up a pattern. Work six days, rest. When Christ recreates us, he sets a new pattern. Rest. Rest because he's fulfilled the law. And then work in light of that for the next six days. And then you rest again and remember the finished work of Christ. Isn't that amazing?

Christ recreates, and when he does this, he re-patterns the fabric of our world. Now we rest, and then we work. But it's like grace, right? This is a picture of grace in ways. Because we don't earn salvation by the things that we do. Rather, Christ fulfilled the demands of the law, and then we go forth in obedience to his law because of the love and the mercy that he showed us. There's a love for him. We obey him. But it's because of the work that he did. And that's what this is. We rest, and then we go forth and do work because of the fulfillment that Christ has. The Old Testament was work, look forward to the coming rest. We rest, and in the strength of that rest, we go forth to work. And yet, so the Old Testament looked forward to the rest found in Christ.

But we rest in Christ and look forward to the eternal rest. So we're again, we see this already not yet. We're still in this in-between time. We still have work to do. Christ is sitting at the throne of God. We're not there yet. We have job ahead of us. None of this undoes the fact that in creation we have a mandate from God to set aside a day as holy. The day has changed, but the command has not. The command, and notice there's only two positive commands in the Ten Commandments. Honor the Sabbath and honor your father and mother. The command has not changed. It's still part of the Ten Commandments, which do not just disappear or go away.

Because they teach us about the character of God. So what does this mean for us? How does this then, what then does this mean? Well, I believe in creation and in Exodus and in the New Testament, we can learn many principles to help us as to how we should apply the fourth commandment to our lives today. I'm going to read to you again these verses, and then we're going to go through a few principles and look at how they can apply to us. And rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. First principle is, Remember, remember. Why would God tell us to remember? Because we're prone to forget. We can get so busy and so wrapped up in all the stuff we have to do that we completely forget that God has called us to set a day apart to keep holy and to worship him.

And this idea of remembering is not a just recall what I told you earlier type of a remembering. Rather, it's active. It means that we are to be conscientious. We are to be calculating. We are to keep it in the forefront of our mind so that we can do something about it. So when we hear about keeping the Sabbath, we tend to think of it as a command about one day. But that's really not the case, is it? The command is that you work six days and you rest one day. Remembering means that we actually have to plan our lives around the fact that we ought to be keeping a day holy for God. And that that actually takes work. Your week should be planned around...

the Sabbath. And there is no way that you will manage to keep the Lord's Day holy if you do not think through how you are going to do that. Practically speaking, this means that if your school or your work gives you a deadline, and that deadline is Sunday at midnight, as a Christian, your deadline is Saturday. And you have to plan your week accordingly. It should take into account, after all, The Lord doesn't say that the Sunday is a day for catch-up, for all that you forgot to do, or all the work that you didn't complete in six days. This is one of the ways that we're different from God, isn't it? The Lord completed that work in six days of creation, but Adam didn't complete taking dominion of the world in six days, but he was required to rest. This affects how we plan meals, how we shop, when we get gas.

If we remember the Sabbath, then we can plan ahead for these events, and it will help us in keeping the day holy and set apart. Part of remembering means go to bed at a reasonable time on Saturday night. It's hard to keep the day holy and set apart when we're sitting in church, barely able to keep our eyes open, because we didn't plan our week in such a way that we could have a day to worship God. We take baths on Saturday night. We prepare on Saturday for the duties that we'll have in small group. Listen, this command is on you as fathers. Did you notice what it says? It says that sons and daughters, male and female servants, even the cattle and the sojourners are not to be doing work, which means It is our job as fathers to plan and guard the Sabbath so that those who are within our authority do not have to work. In other words, the Sabbath isn't a day where we get to rest by forcing everyone under us to do work. It's actually that we're to remember it and plan and work our family schedule in such a way that they will rest.

It might mean that we actually have to get off our high horse and help our wives so that we can rest on Sunday, they can rest on Sunday, because they probably have a harder time doing it than you in a lot of ways, and so that we can be to church on time. And so there's a lot of things involved in this idea of remembering. We have to help our kids. Setting apart the Lord's day will not happen on its own or by accident. It takes forethought. It takes remembering. It takes us having a vision for our week so that we can have the joy of a rest. One, remember. Two, keep it holy. Remember in Genesis that God sets apart the day. He blesses it. He makes it holy. Setting apart. That's what holy is, right?

Something that's holy is set apart. It means it's different than the rest. We see this reiterated in our passage in Exodus. This is the example that we see in the New Testament, that the day is set aside for worship and for holy things. So the minimum of honoring the Sabbath is coming to church and being part of Sunday worship. This, as Christians, should be something that is non-negotiable. in our lives. We should never allow something as trivial as sports or other events to keep us from the house of God. Now, there's works of necessity and works of mercy. We can't talk about that. But the thrust of our life should be that we have a sacred day that nothing gets in the way of us going and worshiping God. So when you're on vacation, do your homework. Remember the Sabbath.

find a good church to visit. And you'll probably find a church and be like, well, I guess we're not going back to that one. That happens, right? But you do your diligence. Have you ever thought about how many of you here, you don't have to raise your hand, but how many of you here have a book that's like, oh, that's a really good book. Maybe it's a book of theology, a book of church history, a book about a doctrine, and you're like, I really need to read that. And you just somehow never have time. God gave you a day to read things that are good for your soul. You don't actually have an excuse. The reason you don't have time is because you don't set apart a day to be holy. A day devoted to do that work of feeding your spirit. The Puritans talked about the Sabbath as the marketplace of the soul. The market day for the soul. Where you go out and you...

You do the works of grace, the means of grace that God has given you. This day is a gift. It was given for you to use to strengthen your soul, to deepen your relationship with God. You should long for Sundays because they give you so much joy, because they give you such an opportunity to feed your heart and soul and mind on the things of God. It's such a good opportunity to catechize your children. To teach them the things of God. This should also, keeping it holy, should inform our conversations. It should be a day that gives us an opportunity to see how others are doing spiritually. To talk of holy things with them. It does not mean that we should ignore these things during the week. Of course we shouldn't. But it does give us time free of worldly concerns in order to focus on the things of God. There's a godly man in the 20th century named John Murray. And John Murray was at...

a friend's house on a Sunday, and they started talking about baseball game and what was going on. And he's just saying anything. He was just sitting there quiet. And finally someone's like, why aren't you talking? He goes, oh, I don't talk about baseball on Sundays. You know, and we can be like, oh, it's so stodgy, and that's so Presbyterian, so Reformed. But can we be too careful about keeping God's law? It's something to think about. I'm not saying that we can't talk about anything fun. What I'm trying to say is that we should have a day that we talk about holy things. It's not just a day to catch up on everything, but we should actually have spiritual conversation and see how our friends are doing and how their week was. What were their struggles that week? I'll give you a couple thoughts about shopping. This is controversial. Not everyone will agree with me.

But the command explicitly calls on those who have authority to give rest to those who are underneath them. I think that that means we should not go shopping on Sunday or eat out on Sunday. When you shop and when you eat out, this is hiring people to do work, and you are not helping them keep their Sabbath rest. In fact, who are waiters and waitresses? They're the poor. They're the servants. And so... It's like we're keeping them out of the house of God. And how much warning is there in Scripture for how the wealthy treat the poor? And God is offended on their behalf. And so we ought not lightly to go and spend our time shopping and eating out and taking advantage of these poor people who may not have a choice, or at least in the way that their lives have been organized.

I didn't always think that way, and if you think you're not consistent in this, you're right. I'm not up here saying I'm perfect in how I keep the Sabbath. What I'm trying to say is God had told us to keep a day holy, and we ought to seriously consider what that means for us. The third thing is rest. Have you noticed how everyone is talking about mental health these days? Everyone struggles with depression and anxiety. Every podcast I hear touts better help. Maybe, maybe, Part of the root of the depression and anxiety is related to our refusal to submit to the pattern that God established for us in creation. And it's still the same pattern for today. Work six days, rest one, spend it on holy things. That might help our mental state. It's how God made us to work. And the other point with rest is that how good do you think Israel felt?

about taking an entire year off work. What do you think they thought about their pocketbooks when they thought, we're going to have to give everything back every 50th year? What are you talking about? The Sabbath is all about our trust in God. It's just like tithing where you say, I believe the 90% will go further than the 100%. The Sabbath is saying, I believe. I trust in God that what I can accomplish in six days will be more profitable and better than what I can accomplish in seven days. It's an acknowledgement that God owns our time, that he's established our days, and that we will trust in him by keeping one day set apart to love him and honor him and focus on spiritual things. It's a matter of faith. Does this make sense to the world?

Of course not, because the world doesn't have faith. But if we have faith, can we not trust God with one day and seven? Your work will never end, ever. There will always be more to do. When you die, you will be like, man, I had work I still needed to do, and now I'm dying. God knows that. Politics will never cease, but can you trust God to let go of them for one day and spend it in meditating on him? Listen, this is freeing. This is so freeing. You have a divinely sanctioned day of rest. You can laugh at all those people who kill themselves trying to catch up on their study on Sunday and say, nope, I trust God. He gave me a day for rest.

and I'm going to take it. It's so freeing, because he said he'd bless you for it. We don't have time to go into works of necessity and mercy. But like I said, we live in a fallen world, which means that there are things that have to be done. Hospitals must operate. The power grid needs to stay on. We need police. We need military. Sometimes there's an emergency at work. We remember that God allows for these things, and we don't need to feel guilty for doing them. In fact, when we show works of mercy, we're demonstrating and being visible that God is love. When we show love, we're demonstrating God to the watching world. But we don't plan our lives around exceptions. We remember the Sabbath. So you say, well, if I don't fill up my tank on a Sunday, right, I'm going to have to push my car. So you fill up, work of necessity.

That happens. We all have to do it. But if we remember the Sabbath, we can limit it happening. As you think about a career, this should be something you consider. Will this keep me away from the house of God? The further our culture moves away from honoring the Sabbath, the harder honoring the Sabbath gets. But that is no reason to not keep it. In fact, it makes it more important because it will instruct our kids all the more. What's inconvenient to us and costs us something will be very instructive for our kids and for the world around us. They will see this is important to dad because he does not allow anything to get in the way of us being at church and worshiping God. He does not allow us to frivol away our Sunday afternoons. And it instructs them.

And when we keep the Sabbath holy, the whole world that sees is instructed. And what are we teaching when we go out dressed in our Sunday clothes and we don't keep the Sabbath? What are we telling the world? The Sabbath is good for us. It's a blessing for us. It's not meant to be, nor should it ever be, a hardship and a drudgery. We should be teaching our kids to enjoy it, to love it. It helps us teach them to love God. There are a lot of ways where we will disagree, and we need to have Christian charity and love for each other. But we should not be afraid to exhort one another to be more faithful in our obedience to the fourth commandment, that we should have a day that we keep holy for the worship of God. Proverbs 3, 9, and 10 says, Give God the firstfruits of your time. See if he doesn't bless you with it. See if you do not find his mercy poured out on you. See if Sunday does not become filled with more joy and peace than any other day of the week. See if it doesn't become your favorite day, the day you can't wait to get to, because that day...

You are close to God. And devote your energy towards that work. Let's pray.