God Rested

It’s good to be back with you tonight as we continue our study on the Ten Commandments. By God’s providence, we have actually planned out the timeline of this series perfectly because we will be finishing the first tablet, the first half, or the first four laws of the ten commandments tonight and then in 2 weeks, we will begin the second tablet or second half of the commandments. All that is to say that we have a good stopping point with trunk or treat scheduled next week and we will switch gears on November 1st. In these first four commandments that we have gone through, we see what I call the law of the vertical. The first four commandments have to do with how we relate to, obey, and serve the Lord. In the next six commandments, we have the law of the horizontal and that is the law by which we live with our fellow man. As we look at this fourth commandment, I think that you will find that as Christians, it is the commandment that on paper, seems like the easiest of the first four commandments but out of the first four commandments, this is the one that we appear to break the most. This is the commandment that God has passed to us that we are to remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. This is our commandment to have a day of rest. I think that you are going to find that the way that you rest is going to greatly impact the way that you work. If you don’t rest well, you won’t work well, or at least as well as you could. What I want us to look at tonight are four aspects of the fourth commandment that we must be mindful of: 1. The need for rest and work. 2. How the Sabbath relates to worship. 3. The Sabbath and creation. 4. The sabbath and redemption. So, let’s open up in prayer and then we will dive into Exodus 20:8-11

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 Need for Rest and Work

At first glance we may wonder why God puts such an emphasis on work and rest and I believe that the reason that God includes this commandment as the fourth commandment comes down to the need for us to have a day devoted to worship and we will talk about this in more detail in a little bit. What I want us to discuss first is the need for rest and the need for work. Both work and rest are good things because they are a God thing. God works and as we will see in the creation narrative, God also rested. That too we will get to later on. What we need to be mindful of is that our work and our rest need to be grounded in our relationship to God. The way that you honor the first three commandments will influence how you carry out the fourth commandment. We need to understand that if we don’t honor God on the first day, chances are we aren’t honoring Him on the other six. In this commandment we see God addressing two sides of the same coin. We see work and we see the other side of rest and we need both of these things. Let’s talk about work first and then we will talk about rest. We need to understand that work is a good thing. God worked and is working now and will always be working. Work is a good thing because we see that God gives it to Adam prior to sin entering the world. Work was not given as a punishment to sinful behavior but because of sin, work is significantly harder than it was intended to be. When we went through our series on 1-2 Thessalonians we spoke at length about work and how some within the Thessalonian church quit their jobs and chose not to work because they thought that there was no point to it if Jesus was coming back. This mindset was so wrong that Paul takes the time to set them straight because they were negatively influencing others within the church. Paul speaks of the need for work elsewhere and one of the best places is in Colossians 3:23–24 “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” This is important because I think that we go into work with the wrong mindset. As Christians, everything that we do is ultimately being done for the Lord first. Every act must be an act of service to our Lord first. We exist to please Him. We are to be intentional in our work. We are to put effort into our work. Keep in mind, this does not mean that the only work that is being addressed is the 9-5 job. Our command to work and to do it heartily to the Lord stretches to the chores we do at home, to the work we do in school, to the way that we push ourselves to accomplish tasks, whatever it may be, it is all-inclusive. History doesn’t remember or write biographies about lazy people. Everything we do is ultimately done to the Lord first. This means all the good we do is a good act to God but all the bad stuff we do is an insult to Him first. This is why David could say in Psalm 51 that it was against the Lord only that he had sinned. So, what is your mindset towards work? What’s the attitude that you have towards service? One thing that I know is that we do a lot of service and mission work in this ministry and in that work I usually see the same 5 or 6 of you and praise God for you that you have a desire to do that. But then there are some of you who have been coming for years and all you are doing is consuming. You take and take but there isn’t any giving, there isn’t any going. I’m not calling anyone out by name, but if you feel the Spirit telling you to go, it’s time to go, it’s time to do. Remember, you don’t have to work, you get to work. You have an opportunity to serve the Great Redeemer of the world and not every one truly gets to say that. We need to have the right head and right heart to work. But we also need to be mindful of our need to rest. You cannot be all go, go, go and I am sure that might sound contradictory to what I just said. The Lord commands us to rest and that is for our benefit. God gives us a day of rest because we need rest. Jesus says in Mark 2:27 “And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” A day of rest was made for all mankind. Like all of the Ten Commandments, it is not just for the Jew, it is a universal command. J.C. Ryle said, “God made it for Adam in paradise, and renewed it to Israel on Mount Sinai. It was made for all mankind, not for the Jew only, but for the whole family of Adam. It was made for man’s benefit and happiness. It was for the good of his body, the good of his mind, and the good of his soul. It was given to him as a blessing and not as a burden.” Are you getting rest? For your body, your mind, your emotions, and your whole life, you need a day off. You need a day that is devoted to rest and recovery. I remember my junior year of college, Lora and I were both exhausted, we both were really working too much, especially her and what we started doing was setting aside Saturday as a day where we didn’t work. We didn’t do homework. We just rested. And guess what? It helped exponentially. Did it mean that we had to work a little harder the other 6 days to make sure we could rest on Saturday? Yeah it did but we were better rested because of it. We were physically stronger, mentally sharper, emotionally stabler. There is a command to work and there is a command to rest but what we also see in this commandment is a command to worship.

The Sabbath and Worship

Notice that the Lord says we are to keep the sabbath holy. He doesn’t say that we keep it with high regards. He doesn’t say that we are to keep it with respect. We are to keep the sabbath holy. What this means is that we need a day of rest that is devoted to God. We need a day where we find our rest in Him. John Piper said, “The rest is not to be aimless rest, but God-centered rest. Attention is to be directed to God in a way that is more concentrated and steady than on ordinary days. Keep the day holy by keeping the focus on the holy God.” Not only that, we need to make sure that we gather together in worship. We need to set time aside to be in the Word of God with the People of God. What does your church life look like? What is the motive behind you going? What is the motive behind you being here on Wednesday nights? One of the reasons that I try to make Wednesday nights feel like a church service and not just some crazed youth event is because I want you to be prepared for the future. You might appreciate that, you might not, but I’m not here to make fans, I’m here to make disciples. I want you to recognize what it is to sit under good Bible teaching, Christ-centered worship, and fellowship with the saints. You need to be in church. The church is not something that you as a Christian can take if you want and leave if you don’t. To say that you love Jesus but hate the Church is not possible. Jesus says if we love Him, we will do what He commands and one of those commands is to love the people within the church that He created. The author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 10:24–25 “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” It is a blessing to be a part of the Body of Christ, it is a blessing to gather in His name, but we don’t always think of it like that do we? You need to be in church. God did not create the Body of Christ simply to be supplemental but as something that was for our benefit. Thomas Watson wrote, “God not only appointed the seventh day, but he blessed it. It is not only a day of honor to God, but a day of blessing to us; it is not only a day wherein we give God worship, but a day wherein he gives us grace.” I think that we also need to be mindful of when we gather together as the church of how we are worshipping. We talked about this for the past 2 weeks. Are we gathering in a way that is holy and pleasing to the Lord because if I am doing something that is not pleasing to the Lord, I don’t want to do it. God has set apart the sabbath as a holy day of remembrance and a firm reminder of what God has done. So, let’s take a few minutes and let’s look at the sabbath from two perspectives: looking at creation and then looking at redemption.

The Sabbath and Creation

Where does the sabbath come from? Well if you look at Exodus 20:11 we see the Lord say, “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 sabbath reminds us of our Creator. It reminds us that all that is is because God created it. We are also shown in the work of creation a pattern that we are to observe. God worked six days and rested for one day. This wasn’t for God’s benefit. God wasn’t worn out after creating everything. He simply spoke and it was. He’s not going to Home Depot and building a house from the ground up. No, He speaks and it is there. Our God never changed which means He is never tired and He doesn’t need to sleep. So in the work of creation, we see God saying to us, you need this day of rest. I took this day of rest not for my own benefit but for yours so that you could see a pattern of what you need in your life. As we think back to God as our Creator, we need to be mindful that He is in absolute authority over us. We answer to Him, He doesn’t answer to us. Believe it or not, you are not in charge. Believe it or not, God has every right to tell you what to do. It is God and God alone that has absolute authority over all things. It is God and God alone that is the interpreter of His Word. You don’t create the meaning, you apply what God has written in His Word. The Bible has authority over your life because where the Bible speaks, God speaks. Allow me to save you some time when it comes to how you study the Bible. One of the worst questions that you can ask in your private time or in a group Bible study or small group is this question: What does this mean to you? What does this verse or this chapter or this book mean to you? Who cares what it means to you! What matters is what does God mean in His Word? What did Paul mean as he was led by the Holy Spirit to write it down? What did Moses and David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Peter and John and Luke mean as God gave them the Word? There are many different aspects of application in the Word of God but there is only One Interpreter of the Word of God. Your very existence is indebted to God. By God’s grace He has allowed you to be here. By God’s grace He created you in His image and the sabbath day is our reminder that we are not here by accident. We are not the result of some cosmic mumbo jumbo that was caused by some atoms that were somehow created by nothing and then somehow created everything by running into each other. You are not the result of some fish that took a bold approach to life and walked out onto a sandy beach or a monkey that was a little more advance than the rest. You are here because God has created you. You are here now because God in His grace sustains you. The sabbath is a reminder to us that we are human and God is not. We are the created and He is the creator. The sabbath reminds us of a great work of God, an impossible work of God. You and I have never created anything by nothing. God did. But the sabbath also points us to an even greater work, a work that far surpasses creation because creation itself was created for this purpose. The sabbath reminds us of and points to redemption.

The Sabbath and Redemption

In Deuteronomy 5, we see Moses teaching the next generation of Israelites the Law of the Lord and the Lord says something really important in regards to the sabbath and the fourth commandment. He gives the people another reason why they must remember the sabbath and keep it holy and says in Deuteronomy 5:15 “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” God is saying to His people, you will have this day of rest and this day of worship because I have rescued you. I brought you out of Egypt, I brought you out of slavery and bondage, I saved you when you were unable to save yourself. God is saying that it is because He had rescued them, their lives belong to Him. Every sabbath day is a reminder to the people of God that they have been rescued and they have been redeemed. If you are a Christian, you need to remember the sabbath and how God has redeemed you.Cornelius Van Til said, “This brings in the redemptive element in as much as the release from Egypt is the first complete typical expression of the whole redemptive process of man. As a consequence true Sabbath observance will always be colored by references to the redemptive work as it centers in Christ.” You need to remember how Jesus Christ saved you from a greater Egypt, from a greater bondage, from a greater slavery. He redeemed you from Sin, Satan, death and Hell. He went into the heart of our Egypt, He went into the pit of our bondage and He rescued us by dying for us. It was the blood of the lamb that was put over the door frames of the people of Israelites on the night before they were rescued from Egypt and it is the blood of the Lamb of God that is put over the door frames of our heart that rescues us from sin and death. It is because of what God did that the people of Israel walked out of Egypt and it is because of what God did on Easter morning that we walk out of our bondage to sin and shame. It is in Jesus Christ where we find the true sabbath. Jesus is not where we find rest for our souls for only one day a week but He is where you find rest for eternity. Jesus says in Matthew 11:28-30

Matthew 11:28–30 (ESV)

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

You don’t need to earn this rest because only Christ can give you this rest. The author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 4:9-11

Hebrews 4:9–11 (ESV)

So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

You will never feel the fullness of this Godly rest in this lifetime. Instead, we must look ahead to the rest that awaits us when we stand before Christ in Heaven. It is there where we will finally receive the rest from our labors and a peace that will never go away. Revelation 21:3-4 says

Revelation 21:3–4 (ESV)

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

An eternal state of blessedness and rest awaits all that belong to Jesus Christ. God has promised to each blood-bought believer that we will enter into the final sabbath rest. We will one day be in a place of perfect peace and stand before our awesome Creator and Redeemer. Are you ready for that day? Can you say that you have rest for your soul? Have you come to the One that not only created you but is able to rescue you from sin and death? Because unless you have Christ, you will never have true rest. You will never possess eternal comforts and joy. Now is the time and now is the hour to remember the sabbath and to keep it holy. Now is the time and now is the hour to look back on what God has done and to look ahead to what God is doing. Have you found rest for your soul because if you have not, I call on you now to find it and the only place that you will be able to find it is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.