Personal Sabbath

Morning, church.

Hear now the word of the true and living God, Genesis 2.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them, and on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Come on, my notes.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption.

And we're we're back in Genesis.

So there's no there's no yeah, we're starting over in Genesis.

Uh yeah, for those of you that weren't with us, we've spent like a long time in Genesis, and we just finished to uh actually begin this sermon series which we're in, which go which is called Christ is enough.

And this is our summer series, which will take us through Labor Day.

And in it, we're looking at three practices that the Lord calls us to that help us to practice this reality that Christ is enough.

And those three practices are prayer, generosity, and Sabbath, things that we can participate in, which demonstrate the Lordship of Christ.

And now, our thought about this is that there's actually a unifying feature to each of these three things.

And it's it's perhaps more obvious to see when we look at their opposites.

We could consider that the opposite of prayer would be something like just self-talk, just thinking something over and over again to try and work your way out of a situation.

And the opposite of generosity might be something like greed or self-protection through your finances.

And the opposite of Sabbath would be restlessness.

Now, beneath each of those, I think something that's unifying here is this practice of self-sufficiency.

That is, that we don't say that Christ is enough, but we practice throughout our lives ways of saying that I am enough.

And I can be sufficient to care for myself, to tend to myself, to get everything in its right order.

Now, self-sufficiency, that doesn't sound so bad.

You know, you're at least not a leech, which is that sounds bad.

But the problem with self-sufficiency is it's a category mistake.

Fundamentally, it's misunderstanding the type of creature that you are.

There is one who is all sufficient.

God Himself is all-sufficient in himself.

And we are made by him and for him.

And so the type of creature that we are is not one who is self-sufficient, self-creating, or self-defining and originating, but we are actually made things.

We are created by a creator with intention.

And he designed us to find our full sufficiency, our absolute sufficiency in him.

So sufficiency is not something that we practice just in ourselves.

It's actually a practice of a relationship.

Now, it we find this just constantly frustrating in our own lives, that we can't seem to get things ordered in such a way where we can be totally self-sufficient.

We can't get our morning routine just so.

So we always feel primed to go into the work, that we're able to accomplish that day, and then we're able to wind down and then go to sleep.

And then if we link enough of those together, then we'll finally be sufficient.

And it seems that we just can't get the rhythm right, you know, not in the way that like Elon Musk does it or Jeff Bezos did it, where they just were able to link up enough of those days in a row, and now they're sufficient.

Instead, we find ourselves insufficient.

And we think of this as just this bug in our humanity, that our dependency is something that's inherently wrong or flawed with us.

And then we start to find things in ourselves, like our need for relationships or our need for uh friendship and camaraderie, our need for care from others, and we start to curse those things.

Those are not bad things, those are good things.

This is the very way that you are made.

You were made to be relationally dependent on another.

Now, that other, uh lest you destroy whoever you enter a relationship with, that other must be centrally the all-sufficient God who made you.

Only in him can we be satisfied.

So we're practicing these sort of um counter movements to our tendencies of greed and talking ourselves out of things and restlessness into the practices that God calls us to, which are practices of prayer, communing with him, generosity, where we're showing that he is the one who provides for us, and Sabbath, which is the rest that he calls us to in him.

So before we move into our texts for today, let's pray.

Holy Father, we praise you that you are all sufficient, that you made us out of no need that you found within yourself, that you come to us with nothing that we have in us that you need to satisfy you.

But Lord, that you are the fount of all blessing, of all goodness, of all satisfaction, and that you made us so that we might find our highest satisfaction in you.

Lord, would you train our hearts to become the type of people who can say and mean Christ is enough?

And that we might live in a way that that practices this counterculture of self-sufficiency, that we find true satisfaction in you.

Lord, I pray that even in our hearts today, that we might have a sense of hope, that though the restlessness that we've been experiencing, that because we haven't really sought it, sought our rest in you, that perhaps there is another way.

Lord, I lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

There's this famous quote from um the very beginning of Augustine's confessions.

And it becomes sort of the theme of the rest of uh that that autobiography.

It's really like the first autobiography in world history is Augustine's Confessions.

And the quote is this he says, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

That becomes the theme of the whole rest of the book.

And we see Augustine just goes through the story of his life as a child, and then uh running away from his mother into Rome.

His parents didn't really get along, and his father the the story, if you haven't read The Confessions, it'll it you'll read it and it'll sound like it was written yesterday, and it was written in the 300s.

His uh Augustine was very intelligent, his dad wanted him to go to the big city and be educated.

His mother, Monica, one of the great uh church mothers, um, also uh very clean and fastidious, ends up marrying Chandler.

She has a uh uh she her heart is for Augustine to become a Christian and follow the Lord.

She was uh a uh convert to Christianity.

In Augustine's life, he goes to Rome and becomes educated and becomes a part of this um this cult that most of the intellectuals of the day were participating in.

And his his life is just chasing, chasing women, chasing fame, chasing all these things.

It's a picture of a restless life, and then he discovers the Lord.

And so as he tells that story, he he's showing: look, the pattern of my life has been constant restlessness and a pursuing of rest in all of the things that the world promised me would be sufficient.

But in my experience, I have seen and come to know that they are not sufficient.

The only place of true rest is the Lord.

Our hearts are restless until we find our rest in the Lord.

So today we're talking about the practice of the Sabbath.

And with prayer, generosity, and Sabbath, I think you probably have an intuition that, like, yeah, prayer, I should be doing that.

Generosity, yeah, I should be generous.

But Sabbath is probably not on the list.

It's not something that we talk about often or that we uh that is really a pattern in our lives.

John Frame, who's one of my favorite living theologians, he says, of all the Ten Commandments, the fourth, which is the Sabbath, yeah, the fourth is the most visibly rejected in modern society.

Now, of course, visibly is doing a lot of work there because what's the most rejected commandment in modern society?

It's probably thou shall have no other gods before me, if I were to put money on it.

Um, second only to making images, no more drawings of Jesus, you guys.

That's a question for later.

We'll address that later.

Your children's books are probably okay.

The um uh visibly is doing a lot of work because we look out and we see on Sunday, we are not resting.

It is another day for more modes of productivity.

And the fourth commandment, even when we talk about the fourth commandment, we typically talk about it in terms of exceptions.

Where when we're talking about the fourth commandment, uh we're we don't really do this with any of the other Ten Commandments.

With the other Ten Commandments, it's like, yeah, those are the those are pretty good.

With the Fourth Commandment, the conversation is yes, yes, we should have a day of rest.

But but you know what rest really means is just a participation in the eternal rest that Christ has purchased us.

We don't really need a day to do that.

In fact, we could be neglecting the eternal rest that God has given us by putting too much of a priority on this particular day.

And so we start talking in terms of exceptions.

And because uh much of our exposure to the fourth commandment is through Jesus' interaction with the Pharisees over the Fourth Commandment, we can mist we can miss the goodness of the Fourth Commandment and what it means that Christ is Lord of the Sabbath.

What the Pharisees were doing is they were taking the Sabbath, which is a good thing, and is a lifting of a burden, and they were turning it into a bad thing to heap burdens upon others.

And so Jesus comes in and he sees that, and what he's saying, he's not saying, it's bad how much you're practicing the Sabbath.

What he's saying is the way you're practicing the Sabbath is not the Sabbath.

And they would say something like, Well, who are you?

And he would say something like, Well, I'm Lord of the Sabbath.

So, you know, that's how he knows.

Because it's his.

So we're going to look at the Sabbath, and and the Sabbath I I'm I I think the first thing that we need to do in this first exploration of what the Sabbath is, is we need to have a confrontation with the Sabbath.

Because the Sabbath is something that that in my experience deeply confronts my heart.

When I was first explaining this sermon series to my wife Megan, we were brushing our teeth or something, and uh I was like, huh.

And she said, I had no idea what you're talking about, and I thought the Sabbath is difficult to understand.

No.

But I I was explaining this sermon series will be prayer and generosity and sabbath.

And uh Megan goes, We don't do the Sabbath as a family.

And I thought, well, yeah, huh?

And then I thought about it for another 30 seconds and and realized, she's right.

She's right.

This is um this is one of those things where I'm teaching it because it's in here.

And because I think it's I think it's good, and and I I'm aiming at this.

And I want this to be a part of my life and yours and the life of your family and the life of our church.

And so let's start with that confrontation.

The Sabbath is is deeply confrontational to me.

I um uh I find it very difficult to stop working.

Now, in our culture, that sounds like a humble brag.

You know, like, oh wow, he's so committed to his work or whatever.

And we can we can miss the danger of that because we are uh so indoctrinated into productivity as the as the highest aim of our lives.

But uh ask my wife how vacations are, or how Saturdays are, or how it it's going since seminary has ended, which it has, by the way, it's a long story, but uh I'll catch you up.

Wasn't supposed to, but it turns out I was right, the registrar was wrong.

Sorry, I'm done.

But the the the the point is that even just having this uh my week loosen a bit uh without being just like in a in a pressure cooker of work to be done, it has been very hard.

It's been very hard.

And what this shows is that the way that I relate to work is one of the main sources of meaning and validation and justification for my existence in my life, and to lay that down feels almost impossible.

What I often find is the case, and I think is the case, particularly with the Sabbath, is that the most corrupt parts of my heart are not always those parts that seek out evil things, but they're also those parts of my heart that are unable to receive the goodness that the Lord gives us.

And what we'll see as we look at what the Sabbath is, is that it is almost unimaginably good.

And the thing that we must learn to trust above all to be able to participate in the Sabbath is that our Lord is good, He is good to us, and He gives us good things.

Until we understand that, until we're able to receive that, we won't be able to do the Sabbath.

Because we'll consider this is something like a trap.

There's something in here where God has put this here as a means of just testing and exposing, and there's no goodness or delight in it.

Because why would he give that to a wretched creature such as I am?

We have to learn to trust that God is good.

And what he gives us and calls us to in the Sabbath is good and for us.

So let's begin with the first Sabbath to get a sense of what the Sabbath is.

It's at the very beginning, the second chapter of the Bible, Genesis 2, 1.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

Okay, so six days of creation.

Then on the seventh, on the seventh day, God was done.

He had made his realms and he had filled them with his glory.

He had created the light, and then he had given the sun, moon, and stars to rule over the light.

He had created the sea and the sky, then he had put fish and birds to inhabit and populate the sea and the sky.

He had separated the sea from the dry land, and then he had on the sixth day put animals, and then crowning all of creation, he makes man in his own image to rule over it.

Now, when we see this verse in its context, that it is right after the completion of the six days of creation, immediately our minds are trained to think six days is too short of a time to create the whole world as we see it.

In fact, a better sense of this would be if it said something like billions and billions of years would be a better reading.

That's where our intuition goes and where our arguments tend to go.

Augustine had the precise opposite intuition.

Whereas he thought six days is way too long for God to have created the heavens and the earth.

What God would have actually done is created it in something like an instant.

And then the six days of creation is just a story that's told to accommodate the nature of existence to the frame of a human mind that lives in process.

And of course, God could have created everything in an instant, but God didn't create everything in an instant.

He created it in a process of seven days, six days of work, and one day of rest and enjoyment.

You know, we're pretty good about understanding that God creates visible things, but we're not that good at understanding that God also created invisible things.

One of the aspects of creation that's put in the beginning is the week.

God made a week.

Now, humans have been rebelling against this.

It's famous, of course, during the French Revolution that they stopped and started the calendar because the French Revolution would stop and start the calendar because it would be that important of an event.

It wasn't.

And they moved to a 10-day week.

You know why they moved to a 10-day week?

Because a 10-day week is rational.

It makes sense to have a week based on tens and a calendar that's based on that.

So we humans, the most important thing about us is our reason, and so we should craft time itself to reflect the reasonableness of man, because man is, of course, the center of all things.

The Bible teaches that the week is made by God in the same way that you could think of creation itself as like the container that is the environment that you are made and attuned to, the space component, so too is time attuned to the human frame, so that we are made for one another.

We are made to inhabit time.

And we don't inhabit space arbitrarily.

But uh we treat uh so we treat space as though there's something about it that is limited to our human frame.

We don't treat time that way.

We're constantly warring against time to make us unbound by it.

But the Lord has set this boundary into creation for our good.

It is where we find our the way that we're actually able to participate in it.

So God finishes his creation, and then he rests.

It says, and on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.

Now God doesn't need to rest.

He was not tired.

There's not things that are too much for God.

So why does he why does he do that?

Why is it that God rests?

Well, when we understand what God is doing with this week of creation, is God by creating this world that humans are the crown of, that we're in his image and meant to participate in in the way that he made it to be, God is already a Accommodating his transcendent glory into a frame that human creatures from the dirt, like you, are able to participate in.

So that the world is designed something like a temple.

And a temple is a place where you go, and in that temple, you are able to participate with the transcendent.

And to do so, you accommodate yourself to it in particular ways, you know?

We see practices all over the world where people do this.

You walk up a certain number of steps, you say a certain prayer as you walk up to this thing, and then when you accommodate yourself to this temple in some particular way, then the promise is that you'll be able to participate, creature from the dirt that you are, on the earth, in the transcendence that the temple promises.

Well, the whole world is meant to be that.

The whole world as the people that we are, Eden is this place that we are perfectly attuned to and is perfectly attuned to us.

Why?

So that in it we might be participating in the transcendent glory of God.

So why does God rest?

Because he's building in the patterns that humans are able to move in to experience and participate in his glory and transcendence in ways that are attuned to you.

I want you to hear the care and the love that God has for his creatures as he rests on the seventh day.

Because he's establishing something for us.

He's establishing our rest.

Now, why would God do that?

This is the thing that we have to start to learn to trust more completely about God, is that he is good and he deeply loves you and desires for your enjoyment of him.

So why would God create the world such as it is, with time such as it is, and a day of rest that we are able to participate in, such as it is that he created it?

It's because of the depth of his love for his creatures.

And if you keep reading the Bible, you'll see, you'll look back on the establishment of the Sabbath like this, and you'll think, yeah, the Lord did this for his people to know him more completely, that they might come to him and enjoy him more completely.

And if you keep reading the Bible, then you'll think, man, isn't that what he's like?

What the Bible shows us over and over again is that the transcendent God accommodates himself, condescends to the level of creatures like us that we may know him.

Such is the depth of his love towards you.

God makes the seventh day and he rests and calls us to participate in that rest.

He doesn't need to rest, but we do.

God will do crazier things than this as the story goes on.

He'll rescue a people from Egypt, part waters and bring them out, and then they'll be extremely annoying.

For forty years.

They are a bad hang.

And what does God do?

Well, they wander around the desert living in a tent.

Excuse me.

He lives in a tent with them.

What is he like?

What's he like?

That's what he's like.

Later, he will do more than live in a tent.

He will take on the very flesh of his creatures.

Dwell among them.

Think of the accommodation to the human frame.

Brian read this morning, he knows our frame.

He knows that we are dust.

What do you do with that type of information?

Do you use it to destroy, or do you accommodate yourself to the frame of your creatures?

Here's the question that you must ask your heart.

And the answer to that question is what do you think God is like?

Do you think he puts things into the world, builds them into creation to destroy you?

Or do you think he is the type of God who attends to your frame and gives you good things?

The Sabbath shows us that he is that type of God.

So he rested on the seventh day.

Now the the rest is the creation of the Sabbath, and it also has this other aspect to it, which is God is enthroning himself by his rest over all of creation.

Kings are the type of things that can that can rest.

And when God steps back and he appreciates the goodness of his kingdom that he has made, he sits back and for a day he rests and enjoys it.

He enjoys the goodness of what he has created, creates space in time, which is the place that you all live, so that we might be able to come in time to the place that he lives.

He is enthroned in his rest.

And if you follow the creation narrative, you can see that this hierarchy is being established.

I'll skip that.

You can ask me after.

As you follow the create the creation narrative, you can see this hierarchy is being established.

And the hierarchy is something like heavens and earth and the wedding of those two things.

That wedding takes place at the creation of man.

Humanity, why is that?

Well, where does man come from in the story?

Do you remember?

Your dust from the ground and your breath from the heavens.

And those two get wed together.

You're like a priestly mediator between the heavens and the earth.

And humanity is given dominion over all of creation.

And if it just ended there, we we might think, okay, great, we we are God is the one who starts things.

And then we are the ones who finish things.

But God doesn't end it with the creation of man and the cultural mandate to be fruitful, multiply, and take dominion.

He ends the story with the Sabbath.

And it says that God finished his work.

This is the first glimpse in scripture, right at the very beginning, where we understand, we come to understand that God is not just the starter of things.

God finishes what he starts.

This is why we have values in Christianity like hope.

Hope is is over there.

It's a future thing.

We can have that because from the very beginning, we see that the enthroned God is the God who finishes things.

So after he rests, the scripture is kind to give us the thing that happens, but then to also give us the interpretation of the thing that happens.

And that's sort of the shape of what's going on here.

God finishes his work, God rests on the seventh day, and then verse 3 says, So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

When God does something, because of the type of things that we are, we relate to what he does.

And so when God rests on that day, he is making that day holy.

And God makes this explicit by saying, This day is set apart and it is holy.

Now, what did God told Adam and Eve to do?

God creates the world in the six days of creation.

Then when he creates Adam and Eve, he blesses them.

And he says, Be fruitful, multiply, take dominion over all of creation.

And the reason why we see that pattern there is because what are those that are made in the image of God meant to do?

Well, they're meant to do the very thing that God had been demonstrating over the week of creation.

They're meant to continue in this process of good creation that God has established.

And so God makes things, He makes forms, and then He fills them with life and flourishing.

And He says, You made in my image, you go and do the same thing.

Now, how are we to do that same thing?

We're to do it in the week, the week that God has given to us.

And the week that God has given to us includes this: His rest.

It is not a world of just work.

It is not a world of just rest.

The world that God created, that humans live in, is a world of work and rest, and it comes in this proportion.

Six days of work, one day of rest.

This is the world that God calls you to for your thriving.

The seventh day is set apart and made holy.

It's also worth noticing that the seventh day would have been the very first day, full day, of Adam and Eve's life.

So the first day that they spent is in the Temple of Eden, and they know that they are to do what God does.

And so what does God do on the seventh day?

He enjoys his lordship as he is enthroned over all creation, and he rests.

What are we to do with our Sabbath?

We enjoy the Lordship of God and we rest.

John Frame, he can do a lot in a sentence.

So here's one sentence where he does a lot.

Celebration of completed divine work is called rest.

What is so sometimes easier to understand things in its opposite.

What then is restlessness?

It's a disappointment in an incomplete divine work.

It's a disappointment in the incompleteness of your work.

And so you can't rest.

Not yet.

Maybe soon.

It could be just around the corner.

You're probably just a few house projects away from being done.

What we are called to do on the Sabbath is celebrate the completed divine work.

Okay.

Now this is built into creation, and you it it might be per it might be percolating in you of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but is this really for us?

And is this really for us now?

Like this is a lot of Old Testament stuff.

Uh, is this really for us now?

Well, I just want to read, I just want to read the ten, not all ten, the fourth commandment from the Ten Commandments, but but where it's first illustrated in Exodus 20, verses 8 through 11.

Exodus 20:8–11

And then, you know, you deal with it.

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 do, 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 scale of the of the Sabbath, it extends beyond just your person, just you personally.

Moses, in the in the Ten Commandments, we can see he expands it to the whole household and really to the whole community.

This is something that we must participate in together.

We'll look at that later on in the series as we look at the Sabbath at the level of the family, and then we look at the Sabbath at the level of the church.

But I want you to see that the this tenth commandment is not some arbitrary addition onto the created order.

But the Ten Commandments are better understood as an explication, a making explicit of the created order as it is meant to be participated in.

So when God calls his people out of Egypt, brings them through the waters, and brings them to the mountain, Mount Sinai, and he meets them there, and he enters into a covenant with them after saving them, then he lays out for them the ways that they are to live, which is bringing them back into alignment with the way the world was meant to be, apart from sin.

And this is our hope that in our redemption and as Christ accomplishes our salvation, that we might be sanctified in a way which draws us back into the original holiness of the world.

And that's the project that Jesus has accomplished.

And we see the created order is being made explicit in the command in Exodus.

In fact, it's it says again, somebody might ask, right at the end of verse 10, okay, so nobody do any work on the Sabbath.

Why, Moses?

And then Moses kept speaking.

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.

So why should you participate in the Sabbath?

Well, because God did it, because God made this in the world.

So I command you to participate it, to participate in it.

So we see that the Sabbath is grounded in the reality of creation.

But there's a second list of Ten Commandments in Scripture.

It's the same Ten Commandments, but with slight modifications.

In Deuteronomy, when the Ten Commandments are listed, the fourth commandment is given a different reason.

It's not the reason that it's built into creation.

Instead, Moses says that the reason that you ought to keep the Sabbath, your whole household should keep the Sabbath, is to remember that you were slaves in Egypt.

And God drew you out of slavery with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

God is saying, Why do you keep the Sabbath?

Because God is your master now.

And you know what slaves don't get?

A day off.

I rescued you out of Egypt.

Come and live like I am your master.

Now, if you cannot take a Sabbath, if you cannot take a day where you are not productive, if you cannot set aside one day a week to rest and enjoy the lordship of God over all things, to see him as the way that he describes himself with the Sabbath, which is he is the creator.

Sabbath is tied directly to creation, as we saw in Genesis 2, and he is the redeemer, as the Sabbath is tied to redemption in Deuteronomy.

If you cannot take one day a week and enjoy by rest and enjoyment the lordship of God, someone else is your master.

And so you live according to this other master.

And it will be much more like the slave drivers of Egypt than it will be like the goodness of God.

So how do we practice that Christ is enough, that the work that He has accomplished is sufficient?

How do we become the type of people, be reformed into the type of people that are able to celebrate and enjoy the Lordship of God?

Well, God has given us a means to do that.

It feels arbitrary to us because we're not good at we think of we think of the most important things about our faith as our ideas about our faith.

And if we just get our ideas right about our faith, then we'll be done.

We'll be as formed as we need be because we can pass the greatest tests about our faith.

But God doesn't just form us in our ideas.

God forms us as whole people, the types of things that get tired and need a day off, that can rest and nap and enjoy and feast.

Notice the Sabbath is not a day of fasting.

The Sabbath is a day of feasting.

It is a time of enjoyment and gathering together with an enjoyment with your with your friends and celebrating the completed work that God has done.

God is saying, left to your own devices, you won't celebrate enough.

And your heart won't be formed to be able to celebrate and enjoy the world.

He's right.

Left to your own devices, you won't be able to.

Your heart will be unable to receive the goodness that he's given you.

So he gives us this practice that is attuned to our frame.

And it looks like one day a week.

Now I know, because we've got to do this sort of quickly, that there's there's all kinds of exceptions and questions and practical practical concerns that are that are being raised in your mind.

Because that's what Sabbath conversations are.

But what if, like, I still need to change my kids' diapers?

Yes, you do.

We still need to eat, yeah, you do.

These are the you know what Jesus, what we see in Jesus' ministry over and over again is that uh uh the Sabbath does not eliminate just works of necessity.

And the Sabbath, of course, does not eliminate works of mercy and goodness.

These are ways of celebrating the Lordship of God in our lives.

But before you go down the road of all the exceptions and all the reasons why you why you can't participate, let's just give it a simple reading.

That the Sabbath is good.

Let's begin there.

A day a week set aside to rest and enjoy the Lordship of God.

Is given to you as a good gift.

This is not a burden.

Do not receive it as such.

This is a good thing.

And so how can we enter into that goodness?

There are three ways.

I want to just kind of give you these to close out, just for some sort of sort of practicality.

Three ways that we can practice the Sabbath.

I hope these are low-hanging fruit that you could begin.

One of them, you've already begun, I can tell just by looking at you.

Because the first one is prioritize coming to church on Sunday.

Just bake it in.

And so far as you are able, be here.

We gather together here to worship the Lord and enjoy Him.

To celebrate coming together.

This is not a fast time.

This is a feast time.

We end with a meal.

So prioritize coming to church.

This is so clearly how we participate in enjoying the Lordship of God, celebrating and enjoying the created work of God.

You're meant to do this.

Secondly, if it feels productive, don't do it.

So if it somehow, if it's something, and it migrates over onto your list of things that are that are productive.

And remember, we're we'll we'll let we'll create this blanket category, Jesus creates it, of works of necessity and works of mercy.

You can smuggle as many of those in as you want.

But if it fits on your list of this is productive, then don't do it.

I can feel the nerves in the room.

I can feel them going up my own spine.

I'm looking at today.

I'm preaching on the Sabbath, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the day, and it's like, oh, really?

Will I be able to make it?

Well, the Lord is the one who starts, the Lord is the one who finishes, He is sufficient, and He calls me to this, that means He'll provide.

You know, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna have to really, really trust to be able to participate in something like this.

I'll give you I'll give you an example.

I love to I love to ride my bike.

And I oftentimes think of riding my bike as training.

That way I get faster at riding my bike, which is important.

I've seen people who are slow on bikes, not interested.

When I ride, if I go for a ride on Sunday, it's not a training ride.

It's don't don't even try and smuggle it in.

Sometimes I know where my head is, and it's like I can't, I can't today.

This is just to enjoy.

Just to enjoy.

So I bring that up because it seems so clearly like it would just go in the category of rest, but I know what your hearts are like.

And you're thinking of it as another way of being productive today.

That way you can that way you can hit that thing that says, I'll be able to take care of myself.

I'm not getting behind.

I'm not getting behind.

Get a little behind.

And lastly, so prioritize coming to church.

If it feels productive, don't do it.

And the third and final thing, you have to plan to enjoy it.

So you should plan things that you like.

You should have great meals on Sundays, and they should be long.

And you should have friends involved with them.

And you should cook, you should cook as good a food as you can.

And you should drink great drinks, wine, beer.

You should go for walks in your neighborhood, and you and you should you should talk to people and you should enjoy them.

You should enjoy the the company of your family.

And you should play with your kids.

You should say nice things to your spouse.

You should walk outside and you should look at sunsets.

And you should be.

You should be grateful for them.

Because they could look the same every night, but they don't.

Because that's what he's like.

And then you practice that together.

So plan to enjoy it.

I should be saying this smiling, but it made me choked up for some reason.

But there's you should plan to just enjoy this.

To do that.

You have to trust that God desires to give you good things by drawing you to himself so that you might rest and enjoy his lordship.

All right.

Are there any questions today?

Okay, let's take a question.

Why do we observe Sabbath on Sunday, first day, instead of Saturday, seventh day?

Oh, let us take a trip back to the first century while they were experiencing their own sabotarian controversies.

So there's been a lot of ink spilled on the Sabbath as seventh day and the Lord's day, which is the day that Christians gathered on.

Much of what Paul is writing about when he is saying, do not consider the days or the weeks, or don't let someone judge you with regard to the days or the weeks.

You know, we've got to read the New Testament and understand that the Jewish people are a distinct people that had had the promises of God for, you know, a long time.

And had thought of themselves as this absolutely distinct people under the promises of God.

And suddenly in Christ, Gentiles are being integrated into this world.

And so we see this with circumcision controversies, and we see this with observance of days controversies in Scripture.

Now, I believe that the Sabbath at the resurrection of Christ was moved to the Lord's day, which is Sunday, which I believe is the Christian Sabbath.

We see that Jesus, when he reveals himself after the resurrection, he consistently reveals himself to uh his followers on that day.

So the day that the Lord draws you to come into his presence and enjoy him, this is a Sabbath pattern of the day.

We see hints throughout the Old Testament, such as the first day of Adam and Eve's life being the Sabbath day, that there's something about the migration that was going to happen, about the move from the Sabbath to the seventh day, to the Sabbath being on the first day.

And this has become, this became within the first century, although it was more integrated then, as there were often people who were observing the Sabbath and then observing the Christian Lord's Day.

But after the first century, it became just the observance of the of the Lord's Day for the Christian.

And that's that's a Cliff Notes version of that of that story, of which there's a lot more to say.

And it's been said.

Yeah.

Great question, though.

But that's why the Christian Sabbath is in line with the resurrection.

Okay.

To begin our feast today, the Sabbath.

Let's come to the table.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, 23 and following, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, This is my body, which is for you, do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

This is the same Lord who instituted the Sabbath.

He is the one who is the Lord of the Sabbath, and he calls you to feast at his table today.

This is not a God who has tricks, who is waiting to trap you in something, or who is placing some burden on you that's impossible to live up to.

This is a God who gives good things even unto his own life.

So we invite you to the table this morning.

If you are a Christian, come to the table, feast at the Lord's table, enjoy your Sabbath, and then figure out how you're gonna enjoy this day even more, because I just cleared your schedule.

Holy Father, I pray that you would attend this time of communion, that we would find rest in you, and that you would teach our hearts to participate in this, that we would encourage one another in these practices, that we would put uh dinner plans and enjoyable evenings on each other's schedules so that we teach ourselves the Sabbath together.

Lord, teach our hearts to receive your rest.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.