Youth 180 Devotions - NCC Question 10

Youth Devo

Good morning Youth 180.

It is Thursday May 28. And it’s Thursday’s with Germ here at Youth 180.

I hope all is going well with you wherever you are today. Hope that you are getting some time outside and getting to enjoy the sunshine and company with those around you. Hopefully by this point you’ve gotten to do something relatively normal. That you are getting some small elements of normalcy these days.

Well, this morning we’re going to continue with another question from the New City Catechism.

Today we’re going to look at the question “What does God require in the fourth and fifth commandments?”.

The fourth and fifth commandments from Leviticus 19:3 says, “3 “Each of you must show great respect for your mother and father, and you must always observe my Sabbath days of rest. I am the Lord your God.”

Reading these 2 commandments seem easy enough right? We’re to respect our parents and to observe the day set aside to worship and honor God.

Let’s look at honoring our parents first. I don’t think this is always as straight forward as we might want it to be. Generally we might look at this and say, “Well this just means that I need to be nicer to my parents”?, right? But I think this means more than this. When we read all of these commandments we have to read them in light of the gospel.

In light of the good news of Jesus. And in the gospels we are reminded that God is our Father and we are to respect and honor him because of the grace and love that he gives to each of us. We’re called to love God with all of our hearts, soul, minds and strength. This is the model that we are given to love our heavenly father. I think we’re to use this model when it comes to our parents as well. We are to love and honor them, not in the place of God, but as the people that God has given us to to care for each of us.

Now I know everyone doesn’t have the best relationships with their parents. You might not have the best relationship with your parent. But I really think that when we work on our relationship with God that the other relationships in our lives begin to be worked out for the better. A guy by the name of John Rice says this, “After one is right with God and pleases God, the next most important thing in all the world is to be right with one's own father and mother.” And that is so true.

The other commandment is to always observe the Sabbaths day of rest. If you aren’t sure the sabbath is simply a biblical word for rest. When we read Genesis we see that God created the world and everything in it in 6 days and on the seventh day he rested. This is the model for the sabbath. That after 6 days of work we’d rest for the seventh day. And not only would we rest but we would use that day to worship and honour God.

There are folks who would say that we just need to set aside a day to rest, honor and worship God. In our tradition we look at Sunday’s as our sabbath. That we’d use that time to spend time in public and private worship of God, that we rest from our regular routines and rhythms of life. That we’d use that time to serve God and the people around us.

Tim Keller calls this a crucial practice. He says that we all need a rest. If we’re working throughout the week we will need a day to rest and recover to prepare ourselves for the next week. Thats the only way that we can really be effective is if we take a time to rest and get rejuvenated.

With this in mind a great way to help us direct this time of rest is to be apart of a worship service. Here at SCC we have services at each of our campus’ that you can be apart of, and during this time of Covid-19 you can even participate in the comfort of your own home. There’s way to remain connected in worshiping God which will help direct us in remembering and taking part in the sabbath.

So I hope that this helped in understanding what these 2 commandments have for us.

Let’s pray.