[Morning Sermon] The Lord of the Sabbath (Luke 6:1-11)

The Lord's Day is a neglected gift among contemporary Christians. We're often so busy with work and life that we forget the fourth commandment to stop, rest, and remember God's goodness every Sunday. In today's passage, we'll be reminded that the Sabbath is not a straitjacket but a gift given by God for our flourishing. We neglect it to our great spiritual harm.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Alright, I would invite you to please open up your Bibles if you have them to look at the chapters. And if you open your Bible there, I would like to ask you a series of questions. If your boss asked you to worship Allah this week, would you do it? Shake your head. Come on, hidden. No. Okay, if your boss uh asked you to carve an idol and bow down to it and worship, would you do that? No. No. If he told you to curse God or lose your job, would you curse him? Okay? If he asked you to call up your mom and tell her how much you hate her, would you do that? How about if he tried to get you to kill one of your coworkers? Cheat on your spouse? Steal from a competitor? Lie to the FBI? Alright, now what if he showed you a bunch of pictures of your neighbor in his house and his wife or his husband and other wife or her husband or anything like that and tried to get you to pine after those things? Would you do that? Hard no's across the board, right? Now what if your boss asked you to come in on Sunday?

unknown 1:51

Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Thanks. Overachiever. Sit with that for a second. We're all a hard no on breaking nine out of the ten commandments, but when we when it comes to the fourth, the other one's less of a rule and more of a suggestion. And by we, when I say we, I'm not just talking about the people in this room, right? I mean evangelicalism on the whole. Like me and my family, we are friends with a whole lot of strong Bible-believing Christians. And pretty much everyone we know thinks it's weird that we set apart Sunday for rest worship and not like else. Like, why don't you want to go and do these things with us? Why don't you want to sign up for the big tragedy? Why not? It's Sunday, it's like every other day. It's not. It's not like every other day. And that's what we're talking about today. You know, it wasn't always this way in our country. In early America, virtually every Christian, without controversy and without distinction, kept the Sabbath as a matter of obedience to and delight in the fourth commandment. They all believed that God meant it when he told us to remember the Sabbath. And that was the default in our country for centuries. 1925, the Southern Baptist Convention, the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, they penned the Baptist faith and message as their own kind of statement of faith. And in it it said that Christians should keep the Lord's Day by being, quote, employed in exercises of worship and spiritual devotion, both public and private, and by refraining from worldly amusements and resting from secular employments, works of necessity and mercy only accepted. So that's just a straight-up. The only thing we're going to do on Sunday is we're going to rest and we're going to worship publicly and privately. 1925, the biggest Protestant denomination in the country. Fast forward to 2000. The revised Baptist faith and message tamps down its Sabbatarianism in order to say that the Sabbath observance was merely a matter of personal conscience. You do you. Now we can talk about how that happened. We can talk about why the largest evangelical denomination in the country followed the culture on this one. We can talk about declining religiosity in America. We can talk about the removal of prayer from public schools. We can talk about the decision to televise and host most pro football games on Sunday. We can talk about all of that. But regardless of how we got here, the fact of the matter is that Sunday has lost its unique religious character in our culture. It's become a day to get to the store or to finish up what we couldn't quite get to throughout the week. A day to catch up on work, a day to plan the week ahead, a kind of jump drawer of a day that we just kind of put everything in there. For most Christians, the going to church is probably the most distinctive thing about Sunday. But by lunchtime, the distinctive character of the day is all but gone. We've done church, we've taken care of that, we've fulfilled our duty. Now let's go to the mall or let's put on the football game. I want to be fair, right? I want to be fair to my Christian brothers and sisters who don't really see the problem as I'm presenting it. And maybe many of you, that's where you're at. You're like, what's Kenny on about today? Or if you're just visiting, what did I sign up for today? Some Christians read the Bible and think that the Ten Commandments don't apply to believers in Jesus. That's an Old Testament thing. We're in the New Testament now. Some believers think that. Most believers think they do apply. But when it comes to the Fourth Commandments, they believe that Jesus turned the Sabbath into a kind of principle of rest that we can observe whenever and however we want. So it's it's it's it's not a matter of people coming to the Bible and saying, yeah, I'm just going to keep nine of the Ten Commandments. It's a lot of our brothers and sisters, maybe you, in good faith, thinking that the fourth commandment does not require a day off, one in seven. But what I want us to see today is that the Sabbath, this gift, this weekly rhythm of six days on, one day off, it is a gift. And when Jesus came, he did not take away the gift. Jesus came not to take it away, but to rescue it from a whole bunch of man-made legalism. The Lord of the Sabbath, that's who we're reading about today. The Lord of the Sabbath restored the Sabbath so that now it's not so much that we have to keep it in some kind of narrow and legalistic sense. It's that we get to keep the weekly Sabbath as God's good gift to his redeemed preachers. The Sabbath is a gift. And my main goal today is to help us see that and to actually receive and unwrap the gift instead of hiding it in the closet. So, with that said, I'll invite you to rise as we read from Luke chapter 6. We're reading verses 1 through 11. On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grain fields, Jesus' disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? And Jesus answered them, Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him? How he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him? And he said to them, The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And a man was there whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. But he knew their thoughts. And he said to the man with the withered hand, Come and stand here. And he rose and stood there. And Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it? And after looking around at them, all he said to him, Stretch out your hand. And he did so. And his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and disgust with one another what they might do to Jesus. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Father, send your Holy Spirit now to help us understand what you have for us in your word. Lord, I pray that we would not experience condemnation so much this morning as invitation. That you would reveal to us a neglected grace, an opportunity to experience more of your good and to enjoy you all the better. Help us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. There's an old folk melody. It comes from the Scottish Highlands. It's called the Cockerel and the Creel. And the Scottish Highlands, if you're not familiar, in Scotland, old Scotch Presbyterianism, groundskeeper Willie from The Simpson, he was an old Scotch Presbyterian, and if you know him, then you know what I'm talking about. And they're well known for their strict Sabbatarianism, strict Sunday Sabbath-keeping rules. And this song, The Cockerel and the Creel, is about an old woman chasing a rooster around her yard so that she could cover it with a lobster trap and keep it there until Monday. Why? So that the rooster wouldn't do what roosters do on Sunday. She wanted her rooster to keep the Sabbath. Get it? You got it. You know, the song's meant to kind of poke fun at the legalism that had encroached upon the Sabbath at that time and place. And in today's passage, we see two stories that are meant to do more than poke fun at that legalism. They're actually meant to show us how Jesus went after it hammer and tongs. Now, before we can understand what's happening in these stories, we need to do a bit of a, we need to take a bit of a step back. And we need to consider the Sabbath in itself, the Sabbath in its broader biblical perspective. And in this, I'm going to ask you to stick with me today. Because this is one of those aspects of Christian teaching that is so neglected today. How often do you hear sermons on the Sabbath, right? It's so neglected today that we need to spend a little time getting back to the basics before we can really wrestle with application. It's like Hebrews 5 that you know, sometimes we need to go back to mother's milk before we can progress to the solid food. So this is a mother's milk kind of sermon. The Sabbath. In Genesis 1 and 2. At the very beginning of everything, God created all things out of nothing in the space of six days. And on the seventh day, God rested. I would love to unpack just how significant the number seven is in the Hebrew of that story in Genesis 1 and 2. But suffice to say that the number 7 is a highly significant, highly symbolic number, not just in creation, but in all of Scripture. It's a number that represents completion, it represents perfection. And so the idea here is that the seventh day is not just random. The seventh day is what God has been working toward throughout the entire creation week. And on that seventh day, he rested from the work of his hands. Now what does that mean? What does it mean to say the God of Israel who never sleeps, never slumbers, that's what the Psalm says. What does it mean to say that God rests? Well, the word here for rest is the word yeshbot, which is a form of the verb Shiva, or the form of the word Shabbat. Or Sat, right? Quite literally, the word means to stop or to cease from activity. But at times in the Old Testament, it's used to connote a kind of not just stopping, but a resting delight in what you have just done. And that's what's envisioned in the creation week is God seizes from his creative work. It's like when I cut the grass and I take a moment to sit back and delight in the work of my mower. Or when you prepare a delicious meal or you create something beautiful. When we delight in the good work of our hands, we actually image the creator who set aside a whole day to sit back and glory in his own creative work. Now, Genesis tells us that God did not just rest on that seventh day, but he also blessed the day itself and made it holy. In creation, blessing is what God does in order to make his creatures fruitful. And so for God to bless the seventh day is for God to make it bear fruit. Not just for him, but for us. Call it the Chick-fil-A effect, right? Even though Chick-fil-A is closed on Sunday, Chick-fil-A dominates the fast food industry. They're not number one, but they're close to it. So Chick-fil-A does more with six days than they do with seven. Why? Because they observe the Sabbath. And they realize that peak productivity doesn't mean trying to squeeze every last minute out of every hour. I experienced the same thing in my own real estate business way back when. A few years into building my business and running the rat race and working 70, 80 hours a week, I decided that I wouldn't work. It was a matter of conviction about what the Bible teaches. I decided that I would no longer work on Sundays unless it was some sort of absolute emergency. And that kind of thing happens in real estate sometimes. No open houses, no client meetings or calls, nothing. And you know what happened? My business did not shrink. My business thrived. When you get on God's timeline, He enables to do, He enables you to do more with less. Like Jesus with the little boys' loaves and fishes, He multiplies what we consecrate to Him. And so God blesses the seventh day, but it also says that God sanctifies it or He makes it holy. He makes it different from all the other days. In creation, He gave the seventh day a character, all its own, so that the purpose of this seventh day wasn't just to rest, it was to witness to Him. It was to be a day not just for inactivity, but for worship. A day to sit back and to delight in God's gifts and to positively give Him praise for them. So that's the creational baseline, right? That's what God did. Six days off on, seventh day off. And He created that baseline for everybody. Every single human being, all the world, not just Israel. And so if that's a creational baseline, when we get to the fourth commandment in Exodus 20, the fourth commandment that calls on Israel to remember the Sabbath and goes on to root that command in creation, nobody is surprised by it. Moses doesn't need to explain to the people of Israel what a Sabbath is, they already know. But now, of course, think about the 400 years of Israel's experience leading up to that moment. Were they allowed to keep the Sabbath in Egypt? No, they weren't. They were slaves. That's why when Moses re-articulates the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, he doesn't point the people back to creation. He actually points them back to their redemption from Egypt. Why should we remember the Sabbath? Exodus 20 says we should remember it because God made it for us. But Deuteronomy 5 says we should remember it because we are no longer enslaved. And because we are no longer enslaved, we can not only enjoy rest on the Sabbath for ourselves, but we can even give rest to everyone around us, everyone in our home and outside of it, our kids, our servants, even our animals. And so this is the logic. This is the reason. This is the justification for the Sabbath. Creation and redemption. God made the Sabbath, and when his people were kept from it, he set them free so that they could keep it again. Now, I'd love to go through how this works in the Old Testament, but we see from the structure of all the feast days and the festivals and the year of Jubilee and all that, that the idea of the Sabbath, the Sabbath principle and pattern, lied at the very heart of Israel's civic and religious calendar. It was so central to Israel that God said to them in Exodus 31, Above all, you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations. You shall keep the Sabbath because it is holy for you. The people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath as a covenant forever. To keep the Sabbath was to keep God's covenant. To reject it was to reject the covenant, which was to reject him, which is precisely what Israel went on to do. That rejection of God typified in the rejection of the Sabbath marked the history of Israel until God finally sent them into exile as a kind of forced Sabbath for the promised land. He foresaw this in Leviticus 26, 43, when he said, The land shall be abandoned by them and enjoy its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them. Eventually, of course, we know the story. God brought them back from exile. And 2 Chronicles 36 speaks of when the land finally enjoyed its forced Sabbath, the Persian king Cyrus let Israel go home. Now, think about that history. Think about that history of profaning the Sabbath, and then that consequence of exile. Think about them finally getting to come home. And you can imagine that when they got back, the people would have been very careful to prevent something like the exile from happening again. And if you imagine that, it's not hard to understand how over these centuries there would have emerged a set of very careful Jews who are bent on never going into exile again. You know what we call this set of Jews that emerged that was very conservative, very careful? We call them the Pharisees. And what did these conservative Bible-believing Jews do? They did a lot. But one of the things they did that's very relevant for today is they put offensive regulations around the fourth commandment so that no one would profane the Sabbath ever again. They called it the 40 minus 1. 39 regulations to protect the Sabbath from our accidentally breaking it. You'll find them observed even today in strict forms of Orthodox Judaism. Rules against using electricity or turning on lights. My refrigerator has a Sabbath mode. And if you turn on the Sabbath mode, it makes it so that the light doesn't turn on when you open the refrigerator door on Saturday. Because turning on a light is like kindling a fire, and kindling a fire on the Sabbath is prohibited.

SPEAKER_02 20:18

Wait, is that true?

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Yes. There are rules against tearing fabrics on the Sabbath, which, according to a number of interpretations, include toilet paper. No tearing toilet paper on the Sabbath. Rules against carrying items in a public space unless you carry them in an unusual way, like in your shoes or in your mouth. All these rules, again, 39 of them, they stipulated how the people of God were to keep the Sabbath, how they're to keep it even today. That was the burden. That was the burden that the Pharisees had layered on top of the fourth commandment and inflicted upon the people of God. So to just get our bearings here, God created the Sabbath as a good gift. When the Egyptians took away that gift by enslaving his people, God reclaimed it for them. And when they gave it away themselves, he disciplined them and he gave it back to them. But instead of receiving that gift back to be enjoyed, the Pharisees turned it into a thing to be protected at all costs. They became like the kid who buys the comic book, but he never takes it out of the protective sleeve. Or like the middle-aged man who buys a sports car and he'll never pull the thing out of his garage and drive it. He'll just wipe it with a diaper. The Sabbath for them was no longer a gift, it was an obligation. The worst kind of obligation. And that's what leads us to our passage. Here we have two stories that cover the same ground from somewhat different angles. In the first, we see Jesus and his disciples act engage in an act of necessity. They're hungry, they feed themselves on the Sabbath. In the second, we see Jesus perform an act of mercy. A man needs healing, and he heals him on the Sabbath. And because he does these things on the Sabbath, it makes the Pharisees incredibly grumpy. But what Jesus does is he doesn't overrule or Overturn the Sabbath. What he does is he actually shows how these two things that he does, the acts of necessity and mercy, they don't violate the Sabbath at all. What they violate is the Pharisees' legalistic interpretation of the Sabbath. And because Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath, his interpretation wins. So let's look briefly at this first story. In verses 1 through 5, we see Jesus and his disciples walking in a field and they're plucking and eating heads of grain. And you might think, hey, that's stealing, right? If somebody comes into my yard and starts plucking things from my garden, I'm going to have a problem with it. But the law told farmers specifically not to thresh their fields up until the edges. You're supposed to leave some food behind. And it was perfectly fine for people in need to come by and to glean a little bit, to feed themselves. No problem there. But the Pharisees, that wasn't their problem. So they say to Jesus and his disciples in verse 2, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? See, these guys, this is pathetic if you think about it. But these guys made it their mission to follow Jesus around and look for ways to accuse him. And so they're following him through the fields because they got nothing better to do. And here it looks like they've got something. Jesus is breaking the law. Jesus is breaking their law. The 39 rules, Jesus. The 39 rules. You're not supposed to reap, but look, you're plucking heads of grain. You're not supposed to thresh, but you're rubbing the things in your hands. That's threshing. You're not supposed to winnow, but you're separating the husk from the chaff. You're not supposed to prepare food. You guys are making yourselves a meal out in the field. Shame, shame, shame, Jesus. That's silly, right? It's pretty silly. And so what does Jesus do? Jesus points them back. You want to tell me I'm breaking the law? Jesus points them back, not to some man-made fence that they had erected around the law. Jesus points them back to the Bible itself. Specifically, 1 Samuel 21, where we read of David and his men when they were on the run from Saul and they needed something to eat. And so they went to the tabernacle and they asked the high priest to give them the bread of the presence. And this bread was only supposed to be eaten by the priests. And yet, somehow, the priest was able to give it to them without offending God. The high priest, he had no trouble giving David and his men what they needed, even if it meant doing something that the Pharisees would have said was unlawful. And it's not because he took it upon himself to relax or to break the law. 1 Samuel 21 doesn't say that. And Jesus himself had no time for people who would relax or break the law's demands. No, the priest could do it because whatever the law meant, and however the law was supposed to be applied, it did not mean that God wanted the Lord's anointed and his men to starve. And the priest was a good enough reader of scripture to know that. And the same is true here. If we look at the same story in Mark 2, it shows up in other gospels, but if we look at it in Mark 2, specifically verse 27, Jesus says to the Pharisees here, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And what that means is that if you think that the Sabbath is about depriving yourself or depriving others in the name of religiosity, you've got it all wrong. That's not what the Sabbath is. That's not what the Sabbath is for. Now, Luke doesn't include that line. Not because he disagrees, but because he focuses more directly on Jesus' authority to overrule and to correct the Pharisees. And so Jesus says to them in verse 5, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. We've seen that Son of Man title several times in Luke so far. And it points to Jesus' cosmic power and authority. In chapter 5, we saw Jesus, the Son of Man, exercise his prerogative as the Son of Man to cleanse the unclean, to heal the sick and broken, to forgive sinners of their sins. And here we see the Son of Man use his power and authority not to abrogate, not to overrule, not to do away with the Sabbath, but to assert his power and authority over it. He is the Lord of the Sabbath. So he's not going to sit there and let the Pharisees challenge him on what he can or can't do with the thing that he made. And he is certainly not going to let them use their legalism in order to deprive people of the good gift that he had given them. Now that bit becomes all the more clear as we press on and we get into the second story. In verse 6, we see another tussle like this one between Jesus and the Pharisees on another Sabbath day. Luke doesn't tell us exactly which one. It wasn't the same Sabbath, but we don't know which one it was. This time Jesus is teaching in the synagogue, which was his M.O. He went around Galilee preaching in the synagogues. And this time there happens to be a man whose right hand is withered there with him in the synagogue. Once again, verse 7 introduces the Pharisees along with their scribes as these watchers, waiting for their opportunity to accuse Jesus. Only that this time they come off as much worse than just a pack of religious carrions looking for a reason to report Jesus to the HOA. This time they come off as absolute monsters. Because think about it, you have this man with a withered hand, and they have no compassion for him whatsoever. To them, his plight is nothing more than a convenient trap. And even worse, later on in the story, when Jesus heals the man, the only emotion they feel is not joy, it's not wonder, it's not praise, it's not relief, it's fury, it's anger. Who does Jesus think he is? What is he doing? Does he not know what day it is? Of course, Jesus knows their thoughts. He knows what's going on up here and in here. And so he challenges them. And he challenges them by inviting the man to come over and stand beside him. And as he's standing there in verse 9, he turns to the Pharisees. He asks them a question: Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? To save life or to destroy it? It's a challenge because he's trying to get them to reckon with what the Sabbath is actually for. Because you got this man with a need, and Jesus has the means to fulfill the need. And for Jesus to refrain from healing this man, from dealing with his problem, from taking care of him, it's akin to him harming him, to him destroying his life. So what's it going to be, Pharisees? What should I do? According to the Sabbath restrictions, healing was allowed. But healing was only allowed in urgent cases. You could save someone whose life was in danger, you could deliver a baby, and that kind of thing. But this wasn't an urgent situation. Jesus could have just waited until the next day, according to them, but he didn't. Why? Because the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. And healing is the kind of thing that he made the Sabbath for. If the day is supposed to be a day of rest, a day of rest that we enjoy for ourselves and a day of rest that we share with one another, then what better thing could Jesus have done than give this man rest from his affliction? If the Sabbath is supposed to be a day to sit back and delight in God's good gifts and to give him praise for them, then this was the perfect time to give the man his hand back. He didn't need to wait another day. He could do it right then, right there. Again, that drove the Pharisees absolutely up the wall. It filled them with fury. Or we can even translate that as madness. They were besides themselves, so much so that they began to discuss what they might do with him. It's Jesus. He's teaching against us. He's breaking our rules. He's upsetting the apple cart. He's drawing people away from us and toward him. Something needs to be done about him. The great irony here, of course, is that Jesus didn't do anything. He didn't work. All he did was speak a word, and the man was healed. But at that point, it wasn't good enough for the Pharisees. They weren't really interested in the technicalities of the law. This wasn't about sanctifying the Sabbath. It wasn't about glorifying God. It wasn't about enjoying his gift. It was about using his gift as a prop for their own religiosity. It was about establishing their own righteousness in the sight of everyone on the basis of their own works, their own ability to keep the Sabbath according to their own strictures. See, this is the default mode of the human heart, of the sinful human heart. We take the good gift that is God's law in all of its dimensions and we distort it. We dial up the temperature on the bits of it we like and are particularly good at keeping, and we kind of ignore or slough off the bits that we can't keep. And then we judge ourselves on the basis of our own pretended ability to keep our own custom tailored version of the law. But Jesus, here and everywhere else in the Gospels, will have none of it. Hear what he said in Matthew 5, 18 through 20. This comes from the Sermon on the Mount. Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Does that sound like someone who's relaxing the demands of the law? No, it's someone who is emphasizing just what the law of God requires. And in saying that, Jesus shows us just how tall an order it is to possess the kind of righteousness we need in order to be saved. Paul's epistles unpack it. They teach us that we simply cannot acquire that level of righteousness because we have all sinned. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. That option is not available to us. But the good news is that this righteousness that Jesus talked about, the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, does not come from us. It does not come from our ability to keep the law, whether that's the real law of God or that's the law we've made up for ourselves. It only comes by grace through faith alone. In the Christ alone, who kept the law perfectly on our behalf and through his sacrificial death paid the price for our law-breaking. We were enslaved by sin. We were deprived of the gift of God's good word in every dimension, but Jesus tasted death to set us free from our self-imposed slavery. The Lord of the Sabbath himself allowed himself to be profaned on a cross so that we could be forgiven for all of the ways in which we've profaned his law and profaned his Sabbath. And what does he do? What does Jesus do after dying to forgive us of all of our sins, keeping the law on our behalf, he gives it back to us. Not as a covenant of works, not as a condition upon which we might be saved, but as a gift of his good providence, as a guide for how we ought to live in the world. The Lord of the Sabbath takes away our jacked-up legalism around the fourth commandment, and he gives the day back to us. Not as a legalism, but as a gift. In the same way his law teaches us to follow the rule and know the blessing of having the true God as our only God in the first commandment, or worshiping him how he wants to be worshipped in the second, or praising his name rightly as it does in the third. Jesus invites us back into the fourth commandment to follow it and to know the blessing of rest on the Sabbath day. Rest. He doesn't take it away from us, he gives it back, purified, sanctified, free of our legalistic, self-righteous sin. So what does it look like for us today to receive that gift? The Pharisees cluttered up the Sabbath with man-made tradition, with legalism. And there have been times in our own traditions, Reformed Presbyterians, where our ancestors have done the same. But I think today, our danger is not that we take the gift away like the Egyptians did, or that we would cover it up like the Pharisees. Our danger is that we would give it away. Like Israel going into exile. And so my exhortation for us as God's people today is not that we would protect the gift, but that we would simply receive it. Receive it. Okay, so what does that look like practically? The first thing to address, of course, is the when. The when of Sabbath observance. In our tradition, we believe and teach that the resurrection signaled a fundamental shift in the day we observe the Sabbath. In the old covenant, they observe the Sabbath on the seventh day. In the new covenant, we observe it on the first. Why? Well, we get it from the pattern and practice of the early church that we see recorded in the New Testament beyond. All of it rooted in the resurrection of Christ. The fact that Jesus was raised on the first day of the week is a fact recorded in all four of the Gospels. In Acts 20, verse 7, in 1 Corinthians 16, 2 showed the church gathered on the first day of the week for the kinds of things that we do in worship: fellowship, teaching, collections. We see that organically throughout the life of the church on every day, but in these texts, we especially see it in a kind of formal way, the kind of way that we do it today. Revelation 1.10, John uses the term the Lord's Day to refer to a day when he was in the Spirit on the Isle of Patmos. And if we look at early church writing and writers beyond the New Testament, the Didache, the letter of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, we can name even more, we see that the Lord's Day was not just a pious way of describing every day as belonging to the Lord, but it was a technical term for Sunday, for the day of the Lord's resurrection. So this day, the Lord's Day, came to be the day when Christians gathered in distinction from the Jews. The Lord's Day, Sunday, we would say, has superseded Saturday as the Christian Sabbath. And the old creation rest came on Saturday, at the end of God's creative week. In the new creation, Jesus' resurrection happens on the eighth day, the day after the Sabbath, and the first day of a new week to mark the beginning of the new creation. And so our rest in Christ looks back to what he's accomplished on the cross, but it also looks forward to what is to come when the new creation is consummated and in new heavens and new earth. Hebrews 4 describes that as an eternal Sabbath rest. A rest that was opened up for us on the seventh day of creation and that is held out to us an open invitation for all of God's people who persevere through faith in Christ. That's our destiny. That's what we're heading toward. And when we set aside our worldly labors and recreations every Sunday, every Christian Sabbath, when we set the day apart as holy and we enjoy it as God's gift to us, we actually tune our hearts to that heavenly reality. We orient our schedules and our very being toward the even greater rest that is to come in the new heavens and new earth. We take our eyes off this world and the things of this world and we fix them on the things of God in heaven where our life is hidden with Christ. Some of us desperately need that reorientation. Some of us desperately need a break. We're burning the candle at both ends. We're trying to squeeze every last minute out of every last hour. And so we'll leave worship today and we will plunge right back into whatever it is that occupies us for most of the week. Or maybe we'll plop in front of the TV and we'll give our hearts over to whoever happens to be playing today. And instead of delighting in God, being refreshed and restored and rejuvenated by Him, we'll numb ourselves out for a few hours before we get back to the grind. Listen, I'm not trying to play the Pharisee here. That's not what we're doing. What I'm trying to do is to encourage you and to encourage myself to stop living like a slave and to unwrap the gift that God has given us. Let's set our work aside. Let's set our homework aside and leave it until Monday and know the peace that God has given all the time we'll need to get done the things that He's called us to do. Let's not strip the Sabbath of its benefits by turning it into just another day to get to the grocery store or do our chores. Let's not let professional sports become the thing that dominates and defines the day. Let's find our joy not in what the Titans are doing, but in what Christ has done. Let's not let youth sports rob us of the benefits for us and for our covenant children that God hands out to us on the Lord's day. Let's make time for works of service and mercy, all of that good stuff that we would love to engage in if we just had a little more time. He's given us a day for it. Let's not just open this day with fellowship and worship. Let's close it with fellowship and worship as well. Whether that means you come back for evening worship or there's something that you do at home with your family or your small group. Don't just settle for the Lord's hour when He's given you the whole day. Don't just check church off your list and then launch right into the grind of another crazy week. Take a day off. Set it apart. Let it be different. I promise you won't fall behind. The devil would love to convince you that you'll fall behind. You won't. You won't miss out. You won't fall short. God will give you everything you need and then sometime. God will multiply the time when you offer up your weekly schedule to him. We're not saved by our Sabbath keeping. That was the Pharisee's mistake. And if you're hearing that from me, you're hearing me wrong. We're not saved by our Sabbath keeping. And yet Scripture tells us that this is the unique day that the Lord has made blessed and sanctified for his glory and our good. So we're not saved by the Sabbath. Yet we are saved for the Sabbath. So that every week we can enjoy a glorious foretaste of the eternal rest that is to come. Don't neglect the gift. Receive the gift. Enjoy the gift. Let's pray. Father, how often we neglect your good and gracious gift to us. We cover them up with the clutter of our own legalism. We set them aside because they seem strange or inconvenient. We convince ourselves that the promise of life that you give us through the grace of you, spirit-empowered following of your word, we convince us that the benefits aren't worth it. Father, forgive us. Remind us of the good and gracious gifts that you've given us. Give us everything we need to walk in them. Lord, and when we fall short, not just in this matter, but in all the ways, Lord. Remind us of the one who went before us. Remind us. Of the Lord of the Sabbath, who kept the law perfectly for us in our place, so that when we come before your throne, we are not reckoned according to our righteousness, but according to his. And the reason we get into eternal rest is not because we have an unbroken record of Sabbath keeping or commandment keeping, but because Jesus does. Thank you for him, Lord. Fix our eyes upon him in all things we pray. In Jesus' name. Amen. We're going to invite our elders forward to prepare the Lord's Supper for us this morning. This is a gift of the risen Christ. This is a gift that Jesus has given to us in order to tune our hearts to heaven. To remind us that one day we will enjoy that unending Sabbath rest with Him in glory. So if your faith is in Christ, you are invited to this table. If you have been baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, if you have joined yourself to the body of Christ, if you've become a part of a Bible-believing and gospel preaching church, come to the Lord's table. Come be nourished, come be strengthened, come be encouraged, have your hope set on him. But if that's not your story, if you're not there yet, for whatever reason, I hope you know that there's no shame here for you. There may be the conviction of the Holy Spirit drawing you to God, but there is no shame from us, and there's no shame in asking questions or in refraining from coming forward. That's fine. Refrain for as long as you have to. But don't stay there forever. Come and talk to one of us because we would love to help you see the glory of this Christ who gives us rest in every conceivable way. And we would love for you to come to this table and partake with us. I'm going to pray now. Ask the Lord to bless our time. And once everybody's come forward and received the elements, we'll partake together. Father, thank you for this meal. Thank you that you call us together to worship you and to experience the deep comfort and strength and assurance that comes from your supper. Bless it to our bodies, Lord, and bless it to our souls. Help us to know that we belong to Christ and Christ belongs to us. And because that is true, we belong to one another. And so we pray that you bless this family meal and that you continue to knit us together in Christ. Amen. And after giving thanks, he broke it. And he said, This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way after the suffering took the cup, he said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. As often as you drink it and do this in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat the bread and drink the cup, proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. I invite you all to rise now as you're able. The worship team is going to come up and lead us in our song of response. It's one of my favorite hymns about Christ, our solid rock. Sometimes what it looks like to take a stand for Jesus is to sit down and take a break. Sometimes it looks like five o'clock rolls around and you set aside your to-do list and you say, I'm going to go home to my family. Sometimes it looks like Saturday night and you say, I'm going to set this aside, and I'm going to set this day, someday, apart to the Lord. It's an act of faith. It's an act of trust. It's an act of receiving the gift that God has given. Receive the gift. As you ponder that in your hearts, I'll leave you with this good word as you go. You've heard it once before today, but it's worth hearing again. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace.

unknown 54:37

Amen.

SPEAKER_01 54:38

Praise God from whom all blessings closed. Praise him of creatures. Praise God, Son and Lord.