4 Enjoy the Rhythm of Wholeness text
April 27 #4 Today, God says, “Enjoy the Rhythm of Wholeness.”
“And God spoke all these words:
”“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” Exodus 20.1, 8
Remember. The fourth commandment starts with a positive word. Remember the Sabbath. Not even a hint of obligation - at least not yet. In the Hebrew language the word remember isn’t simply a calling to mind of something lost or half-forgotten. It is more. Remembering is to recall and then to act in such a way that shows the remembrance is now current. Alive. To remember the Sabbath then, will result in keeping it holy. Keeping a different kind of day, maintaining a life rhythm of balance and health.
Claim of the text.
– The commandment invites God’s people into a weekly rhythm of rest for them all and all who are closely associated to them because God wants his people to remember God’s activity in creation.
Focus
– God’s people are invited into a weekly rhythm of rest and re-creation.
Function
– The message will challenge the listener to re-evaluate their personal need for rest and the rhythm of life they have already established. Sabbath is an act of faith.
Tasks
– Diffuse the tension over Sunday observance.
– Make a case for God’s invitation.
– Make a case for the value of rest as a faith act.
– Describe the rested life.
Outline
A. The fourth commandment may be one of the most challenging to discuss.
I. Sabbath keeping is a contentions topic.
a. Much of the rhetoric around Sabbath is legalistic.
i. Confession of my anxiety over the challenge that people expect
ii. My own stress over my not keeping Sabbath particularly well.
b. Contemporary culture is anti sabbatarian.
i. We are long past debates over Sunday shopping, regular work hours and the like.
ii. The questions of activities only scratches the surface of the command.
iii. The biblical concept of Sabbath is rich and ought to be recovered.
II. The forth commandment is important.
a. It is the transition commandment between our relating to God and our relating to each other.
i. Commands 1-3 teach us who God is.
ii. After Pentecost, we’ll begin on the human relational commands.
b. it is the longest commandment in the list.
i. the length indicates that if we got the first three and live within the forth, then the others will be easier to appreciate.
ii. The commandment will be read now.
Ex 20:8 ”“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
B. The Forth commandment urges an act of faith through Sabbath observance.
I. The first issue to discuss is, why does God command Sabbath keeping?
a. Sabbath is a Creation ordinance, not a law.
i. In God’s way law follows grace.
Genesis 1.31-2.3 “31God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning - the sixth day. 2.1Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. 2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”
ii. Sabbath is a basic need of all people.
1. Sabbath is distinct from but includes worship.
ii. Sabbath has a special significance that affects us to the core.
1. We find at the core of creation the invitation to rest. - Brueggemann, W.
b. Sabbath is a counter-cultural practice.
i. in Hebrew thought Sabbath is a precursor to work.
1. That God works then rests is the Divine prerogative only. We are not God.
ii. The evening and morning cycle illustrates that we rest for work.
1. Humans are created, they rest and then they go to work.
2. We have worth beyond our work
c. Sabbath was created as a gift for humanity.
i. Jesus affirms as much in Mark 2.27-28
27Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. 28So the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
ii. The commandment is an invitation into relationship.
II. The second issue to discuss is: what is God commanding?
a. The commandment is a call to remember God’s goodness.
i. The grammar indicates something like but stronger than an imperative.
ii. In Hebrew, remembering leads to action in light of the thing remembered.
b. The commandment is a call to inaction.
i. Sabbath is a verb calling humanity to stop, desist or cease work.
ii. Sabbath is a noun, an actual thing, a day.
c. The commandment is a call to holiness.
i. Yahweh is a personal God.
1. Note the use of the personal name – YHWH used throughout, no Elohim or simply the generic God.
ii. Yahweh acts in history.
1. Exodus command focuses on Creation but the Deuteronomy command focuses on liberation.
Deuteronomy 5.15 “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”
iii. Keeping Sabbath makes it Holy because it keeps our relationship with God fresh.
“The Sabbath, in other words, is designed to help people become spiritually stronger and closer to God” Douglas Stuart
III. The third issue is how can we keep Sabbath in today’s world?
a. Acknowledge and accept our bent toward ignoring the command.
i. There is grace and forgiveness for all who come.
ii. Allow for grace, change comes slow and hard.
13“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
14then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Joy - daintiness, exquisite delight
a pleasure, i.e., what causes enjoyment and relish
b. Commit to regular worship time and times.
i. Humans are habit driven; structure helps us: establish a regular day.
ii. The day for worship and Sabbath may or not be the same.
iii. Some must divide the two because of work.
c. Commit to a day every week that allows reflection.
i. Sabbath is intended to help us hear God’s voice.
Is what I am doing today allowing me to reflect on God and his goodness?
Is what I am doing today allowing me to celebrate the past week?
Is what I am doing today helping others find rest?
Is what I am doing today giving rest to the earth?
d. Commit to Sabbath as an act of faith.
i. If we must be busy seven days – what god(s) are we serving?
ii. Faith is thanking God in advance for what we need, knowing he will provide.
IV. The final issue to discuss is the promise.
a. God promises to meet with us in Sabbath.
i. God will have the opportunity to remind us of his love.
1. Sabbath is an invitation to stop living in exhaustion.
2. Sabbath is a relational experience unto holiness.
Ex 31:12 Then the LORD said to Moses 13 “Say to the Israelites, ‘You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the LORD, who makes you holy.”
ii. Through Sabbath God will finish the work He’s begun in you.
Heb 12.1-2 “let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.
b. God offers Sabbath as a present day taste of the Sabbath to come.
Communion
Message
We’re continuing in our series on the ten commandments and today’s word may be one of the hardest to share. It is the forth commandment. The one about Sabbath.
A. The fourth commandment may be one of the most challenging to discuss.
Sabbath? Some here are wondering what that word is and means while others have had certain meanings and associations drilled into them from their youth. For some Sabbath means Sunday observance rules like no bike riding or shopping. No TV or casual clothing. For some Sunday was the worst day of the week because we couldn’t do anything. And others grew up with few of no boundaries at all.
Over the years, I’ve spoken on Sabbath a number of times and to be honest, I never find it easy. There is so much baggage and yet this is a huge word FOR us. Not to burden, but maybe one of the strongest freedom words we’ll find in the Bible.
I also have a certain amount of stress talking about something that I don’t always do particularly well. There I said it. And in light of all this we will press ahead because Sabbath is important. In culture, the debates over Sunday shopping are long settled. It’s here. The debates over work, also done. We live in a 24/7/365 world. And yet God urges Sabbath. Is it relevant, hasn’t the world changed since the command was written. Yes and no. It changed for a while, but we live in a time much like the original listeners did.
This matters, this is relevant and I suspect none of us e live it like we could.
Just a bit more background and context before we move to our study. The forth word is the transitional word between commands related to God and the final six that have to do with human relations. If we get Sabbath right, we’ll have a better chance of living the others well.
The forth word is also the longest. Probably because it is important and because the extra clarification gives us a clear picture of what’s involved. By comparison take the sixth word: do not murder, or is it kill? And is it a fully comprehensive word? For all time and all cases? Is there no mercy, no room for extenuating circumstances? If we take the simple word – no! But if we look further in scripture we see that there are extenuating circumstances. That word is ambiguous. Not commandment number 4.
So let’s get at it and read with me from Exodus 20. 8-11
Ex 20:8 ”“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
B. The Forth commandment urges an act of faith through Sabbath observance.
Now what we’ll do is examine the command, ask some questions of it. See what kind of answers we can begin with and it will all fall under the umbrella of Sabbath as an act of faith.
1. The first issue to discuss is, why does God command Sabbath keeping?
Three reasons: first, Sabbath is a Creation ordinance, not a law. Sabbath is hard wired into the entire creation, every human, plant, animal and the dirt we all need to live on and draw life from. Sabbath is created at creation. Genesis 1.31-2.3 tells the tale.
Genesis 1.31-2.3 “31God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning - the sixth day. 2.1Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. 2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”
And it’s just one more way that law follows grace. In the created order, God designed things so that it would all run properly. Happily, smoothly. It was only because humanity messed things up and ignored the need for Sabbath – a grace gift, that the word had to be written. The Law reminds us of what God has available for us. Law follows grace because of human folly. If law came first then the commandments would be about earning love. That’s just not the case.
Let’s unpack it a bit further. Is or isn’t Sabbath a necessity for all people? Part of Sabbath is resting. Who here can go without sleep or off time? Another part of Sabbath is worship and over the past weeks we’ve talked a lot about that and how it’s a general human desire. We need rest, it seems and we desire worship experiences. That is experiences that get us out of this world into a less chaotic place. Sabbath is a large part of the answer to both. For all people.
And second Sabbath is also a counter-cultural practice. We’re busy and many of us are busy much of the time. Work hard, play hard typifies the culture we live in. But beneath that is a conviction. The conviction being that work or play comes first and then rest. That’s backwards and contrary to what God’s done in creation.
Look again at those Genesis verses: evening and morning . . . Evening comes first. First we rest, then we work. That’s how we were created to function. In God’s way, rest is always the precursor to work. Day six of creation, we’re made, in God’s own image we’re made. Again, grace. And then God delights in us and the God tells us what we have to do with our lives – enjoy and tend creation and then he gives us the day off. Why? Why, because it is not in what we do that we have worth. It is what we are and whose we are.
Now some may object and say, look, God created first then rested. Right! True! Exactly! And we are not God.
The thirds reason and the conclusion to this section is that Sabbath was created as a gift for humanity. And Jesus affirms this in Mark 2.27-28
27Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. 28So the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
Rather than a burden, the Sabbath is made for us to help us remember our true worth in God’s sight. And pressing even further, the commandment is an invitation into relationship with that personal, loving, creating God.
2. The second issue to discuss is: what is God commanding?
Well we have a few things here as well. First, the commandment is a call to remember God’s goodness. The key word is remember. Humans are forgetful. Would you agree? Is it easier to remember a hurt you have suffer than a kindness that you received?
Remember is a powerful word and in the commandment it’s expressed powerfully. Remember to keep the Sabbath . .. is not a casual , throw-away line. The grammar of it makes it like a command, but stronger. Hey! This matters, you’ve got to remember or you’ll forget! And it’s a powerful word because in Hebrew (the original language) remembering leads to action in light of the thing remembered.
And the action needed for memory work is what? Busyness? No, inaction. I just asked you about remembering a hurt or kindness. Can you remember a kindness right now? Is it more likely in a quiet setting? Maybe, probably. The word Sabbath is both verb and noun. The verb form simply means to stop, desist, cease work. Do you ever feel guilty for not being busy? Stopping is pretty alien. And when we do stop, either from exhaustion or vacation, do we feel we deserve the rest. Of course we do! But whose kept us from it really?
And the noun form of Sabbath is that it’s a thing. The Sabbath is a day, a block of time a real thing. In the commandment God is reminding us that we need a weekly cycle of stopping on a day so that we can remember. And the content of that remembering is what we’ll raise next.
The remembering has everything to do with God who he is and what he has done. All through the commandment, all four verses from Exodus 20, the name God gives is his proper name. Yahweh. No Elohim, the generic ‘God.” But three times, we’re reminded that this personal God is involved in our lives.
Again, why? Well because this personal God who hears and delivers his people from captivity. First in the Exodus and then in Jesus. This God, is the God who continues to hear and deliver. I AM is present and active. And we need to remember that because in the busyness, the hurts pile up and the kindness are forgotten and God’s people fall into despair.
Punctuating this is the variation for the word in Deuteronomy 5.
Deuteronomy 5.15 “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”
Remembering our prior bondage to sin, death and exhaustion helps us to not go back. God is the God of liberty.
Remembering Sabbath and the God of Sabbath is what makes the day holy. All this remembering. All this time spent with personal God. All this time to reflect is what Sabbath is for. Keeping Sabbath makes it Holy because it keeps our relationship with God fresh.
“The Sabbath, is designed to help people become spiritually stronger and closer to God” Douglas Stuart
3. The third issue is how can we keep Sabbath in today’s world?
The first thing might be to acknowledge and accept our bent toward ignoring the command. I already confessed my sin. It helps to confess. That’s another form of remembering that leads to action. We don’t have it all together, yet. And again, God’s grace, forgiveness and love makes up the difference. The Law is a reminded of what we need. Law follows grace, indeed.
And connected with this is some practical insight. The kind of thing that God is commanding – a whole day once per week to reflect – may seem impossible, even foolish to some of us. It may seem an impossible goal. And for those who are making that change, failure is probably frequent. Grace friend, grace. Change is slow and yet God is in control. More God promises something grand if we learn to live Sabbath lives.
From Isaiah 58:
13“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
14then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
The most important word there may be joy. Who doesn’t want more of that? And it is the pay-off for Sabbath. And it’s a rich word. Used twice actually in the passage. First in verse 13, translated as delight and then in verse 14 – joy. The word means: daintiness, exquisite delight; a pleasure, i.e., what causes enjoyment and relish. Think of a delicate chocolate, chilled glass of ice wine, the soft texture of silk or whatever it is that you like, that tastes or feels best when there is just a small amount. The savor, the thrill. The first sip of an American made just right. Exquisite. That is the gift and promise of Sabbath. That desire is what we are to cultivate. In God through Sabbath.
In that light, it won’t be a burden, will it?
So, in light of that, the steps.
First to develop Sabbath life, commit to regular worship time and times. We are habit driven and structure helps. Worship is a time to remember our personal God who works in history. Our history. Worship and Sabbath are connected but they don’t have to happen on the same day. Find time to regularly worship with the people of God. It will help your memory.
Next, commit to a day every week that allows reflection. Yes a whole day. Too much, start small, try an hour, then two. You don’t have to be alone, find a friend read together, talk, pray, just make the focus Yahweh and what ‘s going on in your world. Sabbath is intended to help us hear God’s voice. Do we want to hear his voice? We need to observe Sabbath.
What can we do on Sabbath days? To asjk that question is in some ways to miss the point. This isn’t the ultimate rule day, just the opposite. But in our transition from frantic lives here are some helpful questions to guide your Sabbath.
Is what I am doing today allowing me to reflect on God and his goodness?
Is what I am doing today allowing me to celebrate the past week?
Is what I am doing today helping others find rest?
Is what I am doing today giving rest to the earth?
There are more you can ask, but that may be a good start.
And last, the hardest, commit to Sabbath as an act of faith. Stuff will either be put off or opportunities missed. We can’t do it all and we will never get all of our work done. Ever. We will all die with things left un-done and opportunities missed. Friends, if we have to go full out seven days a week, another question may be– what god(s) are we serving anyway?
There is a different way to go. Faith is thanking God in advance for what we need, knowing he will provide. Faith is allowing God’s agenda to settle over and inform our own. Faith is saying, I trust you God and thank you for doing what is best in how you made me.
4. The final issue to discuss is the promise.
Because as with all of the commandments, this one too is a promise. God really does promise to meet with us in Sabbath. Yes, he can show up whenever. But if we think of a friend, we know that we need one on one time. It keeps the relationship alive. And in that living relationship, God the Father is inviting us to stop living in and with exhaustion.. And in that living relationship God the Spirit is making us holy. More like Jesus.
Ex 31:12 Then the LORD said to Moses 13 “Say to the Israelites, ‘You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the LORD, who makes you holy.”
Or in the new testament,
Heb 12.1-2 “let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.
God promises to finish what he’s begun. We get to be like Jesus. And that is what eternity is all about. The great gig in the kingdom is Sabbath 24/7/365. Every Sabbath time right now is simply a taste. An exquisite taste of what is to come.
Communion