Remember the Sabath

Text

Exodus 20:8–11 ESV

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, 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.

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

The prophet Isaiah reminds us in Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” Please pray with me.

Prayer: Blessed Lord, you have caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning—grant us that we may in such a way hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; that by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Laws Context

Psalm 19:7 “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;” The Law of God is often thought of as a heavy burden, one that is incapable of following and shows that we all fall short of perfection. So, who in this room can echo Psalm 19 and say that the law is perfect and revives your soul? Well, that is what I hope to expound to you this morning. I want to show you the excellencies and riches in the law and how they make the simple wise.

To begin with, it is important to understand that the Law of God first written here as the Ten Commandments is located in the Bible just after the Israelites had been delivered out of Egypt. These are given at the base of Mount Sinai as the foundation documents of what this people group is going to be known for and how they are to act. These are the first set of obligations that the Israelites must obey in order to maintain their special relationship with God. What is incredibly important to know is that God gave the law to his people not as a means of saving themselves through moral effort; he didn’t tell them if they followed the law perfectly, he would deliver them out of Egypt once they proved themselves. No, God was the one who rescued his people and then gave them the laws they were to follow. It is in response to their being rescued from slavery that the people of Israel are to act out of love and a thankful heart.

Laws communicate something about the lawgiver. When God was forming his new covenant people, he expressed his heart for them, for how they are to live and what they are to be like. The Israelites were called to be a people who looked different from all of the surrounding nations and one of the most significant ways everyone around them would notice how different they were, was because they took an entire day off from work.

During the times when the Bible was written, in the Ancient Near East, other peoples had stories about why humans existed, but most of their stories were big, bloodied wars that happened between gods who were lazy. In other cultures, they believed they humans were made to be slaves for the gods to do the grunt work and offer up sacrifices to the gods so the gods could eat on a regular basis. On a completely different view of the world, the Israelites showed with their lives that God needs nothing and made humanity not as slaves but as kings and queens; they were to exercise dominion over the world, and they were given a whole day of rest from their labor.

So God set up one whole day that communicates that humans are not slaves or animals to be worked like machines, but are called to have dignity in the work they are doing and given a whole day to rest from their work and enjoy being in this amazing world. This is something that would truly set them apart from everyone else.

So today, I want to talk about this commandment first, what to do, then how to do it, and finally, why we do it.

What to do

The first thing we read in the text is to Remember. Let’s just pause there. Why would this commandment begin with the word remember? This is the first positive commandment we see, not saying something we shouldn’t do but telling us something we should do. Remembering in the Bible is not a mere intellectual ascent to a set of propositional truths. The Bible is not just asking you to sit around on Sundays and think about the Sabbath No remembrance in this context is one that requires actions.

Illustration: 4th of July

We just had a call to remembrance as a country. We have an American liturgical calendar that calls us to remember special days and keep them set apart to honor what has happened in the past. We all just celebrated the 4th of July this past Tuesday. Independence Day. This is the day we, as Americans, declared our independence from the Britain Empire because they had unjustly been enforcing “taxation without representation”. Every year since, we celebrate with song and dance and Lee Greenwood singing God Bless the USA. We watch fireworks and eat barbecue and play corn hole. This time of remembrance is to keep alive in our memories something that happened a long time ago, but it is also a time to remember who we are as a people and what principles our country is founded on.

This is what God means when he says remember. We are to do something with our whole bodies, keeping an entire day set apart from the others so that we can remember what God patterned at the beginning of creation and who we are meant to be.

Word Study: Cease and Rest

So we are called to remember the sabbath by doing something for an entire day. Well, actually, by not doing something for an entire day. Sabbath in Hebrew is שָׁבַּת. Which means to cease, especially from your occupation. Sabbath does not mean to rest, which it is commonly associated with. The word for rest is נוּחַ which is where we get the name Noah from. No shabat means to cease. So we remember the sabbath by ceasing from all work. So what God is calling us to do is to cease from our normal occupations for one day to set it apart. That is what it means to make it holy, to set it apart. The Sabbath day should look different from every other day of your week.

Application: Time and Money

If I was going to try and discover the most valuable things to you in your life, i would turn to two places. Your bank account and your calendar. Your time and money are the resources you put toward what matter most. And we live in a culture that is trying to eat of every bit of those. The culture is telling us to maximize every moment and be as productive as possible. When billionaire Bill Gates was asked why he didn’t believe in God, he said, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.” We are being bombarded with messages to grow and produce at rates that turn us into machines instead of human beings. But God’s economy is a different world entirely. It is an upside-down economy. God has said that you will actually flourish the most in this world if you live on only 90% of the money that you are paid. If you tithe 10% to your church, you are actually going to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. In the same way, he has said that if you live on only 86% of your time, you are actually going to be more rested and productive to keep going for your whole life. God is asking for 14% of your entire life to be dedicated to him, which would be 1 day out of 7, and that time is meant for nothing else than stopping and enjoying Him, his people, and the creation he has given us.

How to do it

So we know we are called to Sabbath, but how exactly do we do that? What is interesting to note here is that the text gives us very few practical ways to stop. How is someone just supposed to stop their life for one whole? Well, Jewish scholars, for a long time after this commandment was written came up with a lot of regulations around the Sabbath to make sure people did not break this commandment. They said that someone was not allowed to light a fire or to ever walk too far on the Sabbath, but all of these were fences around the instruction given by God to protect people from breaking God’s commandments. Yet all of these restrictions later laid on my men are not what God says; he says stop. We are not bound by our conscience to keep the Sabbath in any other way than the Bible has laid down for us. What this means is that we actually have a lot of freedom in what it means to stop from work.

I know that for many of you, this would be an entirely new way of orientating your life. If you were to take a whole day off per week to stop from work it would require you to shift so much around. You might use Sunday as a catch-up day for all of your chores and planning out the next week, and you can’t imagine trying to stop from doing everything you need to do on a Sunday actually to set yourself up for the next week. But I have the ask brothers and sisters, is this life pattern that you are practicing actually making you feel rested? Do you step into your week ready to do on a Monday morning because you did things that actually brought joy to your soul over the weekend? If you are like me, you don’t, and you begin your week already with your emotional tank in a deficit because you don’t know how to put things down and enjoy the world around you.

Application: Ancient Practice

I am going to suggest you adopt a very ancient and practical way to observe this day. Traditionally, in the Hebrew calendar, a day started when the sun went down. When many of us think of taking a sabbath for a day, we actually think of a 36 hour Sabbath. We think it should start on Saturday night and end on Monday morning. But the way to get a true 24 hours in would be to observe the sabbath from Saturday night at dinner time until Sunday night at dinner time.

This does two amazing things.

You start your sabbath from a place of rest. You begin your sabbath by going to bed. At dinner on Saturday night, light a candle, play a song, read a passage of scripture, and do something to commemorate this day as set apart from others. Then begin with rest and go to bed.

Secondly, this means it gives you Sunday evening to go over your week. After dinner on Sunday night, you can plan your week, iron your shirt, and get that email written. Thats's fine because you have just taken 24 hours off from your daily grind.

That's how long the day should be, but what should we do? There are two primary things you should be doing on the Sabbath: First, worship the Lord, and second, we are called to enjoy Him, his people, and his creation.

The first thing you should be thinking about on a Sabbath day is the worship of God. This is the day we come to church and celebrate what Jesus did for us on the cross. We come together as a people to hear God’s word from the Bible, sing to him, confess our sins to him, and hear that because of Jesus life, death, and resurrection, we can have eternal life through him by simply placing our faith in Him. Worship is the primary way we Remember this day and keep it holy.

Secondly, Enjoy Him! In the morning before you come to church, have your favorite breakfast cereal or a half box of donuts. After church, go for a walk outside or read a book, drink a cup of coffee, invite people from church over for lunch or dinner, and spend time with God’s people talking about the sermon you heard that day. This is to be a time of celebrating and rejoicing.

1 Vacation vs. 52 vacations

I mentioned earlier that we observe an American liturgical calendar as a country. Well a big part of that calendar is taking a vacation. Usually this happens once a year right about now. We go to the beach, or the mountains, or a lake and build up a big savings account to pay for a massive vacation. Well, God has structured his world a little differently. Instead of having to look forward to a big vacation every year, we have a vacation to look forward to every week. God has given us 52 days of our entire year to stop and rest! Now I am not saying don’t go and take extended time of rest but what I am saying is I want to begin to think about how your life would look different if you actually practiced Sabbath once a week every year!

Why to do it

So we know what to do, we have some idea how to do it, but why should we Sabbath in the first place? Well, we see from the text that we Sabbath because God did. God modeled to us the pattern of work and rest in the creation of the universe. God says that in six days, he made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and then he rested on the seventh. Now God did not stop doing anything because the whole universe is held up from by the power of his hand, but he did cease from creating. God was showing humanity by example what they were to do every week, work and rest. God ceased and blessed the day. This day was patterned from the beginning of the world to be a blessing to all of humanity.

In the New Testament we turn to the teaching of Jesus when he says in Mark 2: 27 “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Jesus is giving us the wisdom here that we were not put here on this earth to keep the sabbath. We do not exist to keep the sabbath, but that God gave the Sabbath to humanity as a gift of grace. We are not slaves who are being called to work ourselves to death or to earn rest; we are sons and daughters of the king who has given us an unbelievable task to take care of this planet but has also given us one day when we can rest from all of that and enjoy Him.

Is Rest Possible?

For many of us rest doesn’t seem like an option. You are tired and broken down by the miseries of life. You have just gotten family news that someone was just diagnosed with cancer which eating away at all of your mental space. Or you might think you are on the edge of losing your job and the idea of rest is ludicrous because you can’t stop for a second you need to put food on the table but please hear me: either you stop or you the Lord will stop you.

Do you want to know why you can’t seem to stop? You can’t stop because you think everything around you is just staying afloat because you keep working. You have become the savior of your own life. You are the one who is keeping everything in check in life and the only reason that life around you seems to function is because you stay at work just an hour later than you need to to get one more thing done. You stay up just until 11 so you can finish the laundry you never had time to get to during the day. The pattern of your life is currently designed to give you exactly the results you are getting. Overworked, busy, and tired. You can’t stop because you are looking in the wrong place to find rest. You are hoping that if you just work hard now, the next season is going to slow down. You promise yourself and others that if you can just get this one thing done, then you are going to be able to slow down. What you are missing is that the place where you are actually going to find rest for your soul is in the person of Jesus. Jesus told everyone Matt 11.29 “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” If you are looking for something other than Jesus as a way to get rest, you are going to keep falling short because it is only by placing your faith and trust in Jesus as your savior that you are going to be able to stop trying to save yourself.

Sucking at First

As you begin to try a new pattern of life, you are going to be hit with the reality that you suck at resting. If you’ve never tried to Sabbath before you are going to find that you wake up on Sunday morning to check your phone really quick but saw that twitter notification, got lost in your emails for 30 minutes, quickly rushed to get ready for church, and then you go home and crash after because you are so tired and you feel like a failure. That’s ok! Praise God you sucked at trying to Sabbath. When we try new things, we are not good at them. If you’ve ever tried to learn to play an instrument or a new sport, you were terrible when you first started, but by practicing over and over again, you got better! If you fail, the amazing reality is Sunday comes again in one week, and another, and another. You are going to have an amazing amount of time to discover just what you need to do to stop and rest. Talk to your friends about it, read books about the Sabbath, and try your favorite foods in the morning.

Again Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Please keep in front of you every week that the day of stopping is not a burden placed on your back but a promise of a better rest that is to some. One day everything is going to be made new and we will enter into an eternal Sabbath where there will be no more pain. As you practice the Sabbath, look back to the rest Jesus gave you and look forward to the rest that is to come. You do not need to be perfect to engage with this day, but you are called to be obedient. Obedience looks like putting work away. Going for a walk. Making love to your spouse if you are married. Drinking a really good bottle of wine. This day should be the highlight of your week so Christians should not be asking one another how was your weekend, but we should be asking one another, how was your Sabbath?

Conclusion:

So we see that God calls us to Remember the Sabbath day, he said that we do that by ceasing from work and worshipping him, and the reason we do this is because he patterned Sabbath from the beginning of creation. We can rest ultimately because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and invites us to rest in Him because it is through Him that we can finally cease. If you are looking for a way to get yourself to stop, look to the cross of Christ. Look to his finished work has done for you and recognize that when Jesus said it is finished, he is inviting you into a rest that brings you peace with God. So let’s respond to that rest by praying to God:

Prayer:

Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.