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Well, another year is drawing to a close. The earth has made another circle around the sun. The four seasons have run through their cycle, enriching our lives with diversity. And as we transition from one year to the next, we take time to think about all that has come in the year past, and to prepare our hearts for the year coming. What will it bring? None of us have any idea.
When many of us look out reflectively over any time in the future, we think of things we do that we would like not to do, and we think of things we do not do that we would like to do. It’s all too easy to imagine ourselves changing, but when the time which is now future becomes present, we find that we are the same after all, time pressures are the same, life goes on much as always, and it’s just harder to change than we thought.
Many of our resolutions have to do with how we spend or how we use our time.
It is right to strive to bring order into our lives. We have a sense that God would be better honored, that we would be in better health, and that we would be more useful if we could only get on top of a few things. It has been said that one of the main reasons we are so busy is that we are lazy. I know this sounds odd, and maybe insulting, but look at it this way. For most of us being busy and frantic is natural. Time is like a vacuum. It invites activity. We don’t work at being so busy. It just seems to happen. It’s a habit. But changing habits is really hard. Changing habits takes work, hard work, determined work. It’s easier not to work to change, and since we generally follow the path of least resistance, we don’t put in the work to change. And keeping a seventh day, in the very positive and biblical sense of “Sabbath,” involves changing many habits.
My concern for you as individuals and families, as well as for you as a body of believers, is that you, for your good and for the honor of God, live in harmony with the way He has made you and with His will for you. I long both for your wholeness and your holiness. When you are living out of synch with how you are made it undermines both your wholeness and your holiness.
I believe that keeping Sabbath is profoundly important as a symbol. Keeping Sabbath in the full positive sense is a concrete way of saying, “Lord, my time belongs to you. Lord, the days of my life are limited and numbered. But you are my God, and you have the right to set the agenda for how I spend my time. Lord, this is my life, be it done to me according to your word.”
We saw two weeks ago that there were three creation ordinances – marriage, work, and the cessation of work. We saw that the setting aside of one day in seven is part of the structure of creation. Not only did God structure the created order in a “six days and seven” pattern, but he blessed and sanctified the seventh day. We saw that the seventh day came into being for the sake of man, for the good of man, and that it was and is a gift to be treasured and valued.
Last week we saw that the fall of the human race into sin and misery has changed things. Because of the difficulties that have come upon us by our fall into sin, we need seventh day rest more than ever. But our fears, our anxieties, and our compulsions make it harder than ever to stop and to rest. After the fall, there is all the more reason to rest one day in seven, yet there is more and more pressure not to.
We also saw last week that stopping work one day in seven is not just a day of rest for ourselves, but a day to bring rest to others. Jesus made a point of healing on the Sabbath. Sabbath is a good day to do good. It is a good day tom extend the blessing of God’s rest to others. It is not and must not be a day viewed selfishly.
We saw as well that because of the fall the true reality of rest is still future for us. There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. The fullness of what rest means will not come about completely until the New Heaven and New earth, and so even the best seventh day rest is but a shadow of the fullness of our rest in Christ.
This morning I would like to build upon these two messages. I cannot of course take the time to review all of which has gone before. I have full text versions of these messages up here, and tapes are available as well.
My experience in talking about this is that people tend to focus on the negative, what you are not supposed to do. I want you to focus on the positive. I want fullness and wholeness for you. But let us be frank with ourselves and with one another. The basic meaning of the word “Sabbath” is that of cessation. When God rested from His work, He “shabathed,” He stopped, He ceased. The beautiful and positive meaning of the seventh day cannot be realized merely by stopping. But it cannot be realized without stopping.
We have six days to work. This too is good and positive. This means that in the six days we are to do what has to be done to fulfill the commandment to subdue the earth, to fulfill the commandment to Adam to tend the garden. So all the work and labor-type things in our lives are to be done in six days. This includes many different things like, of course, our jobs, like buying and selling, but also things like running errands, shopping, mowing the grass, doing the laundry, balancing the checkbook, washing the car, eating out, cleaning the house, shopping for food or clothes, studying, and fixing what is broken around the house. All of this is our work -- part of the six days. God gives us six days to do our work. He commissions us to do this. He blesses our work. Our work matters to Him, to a point, within boundaries.
Many of you will say, “but I can’t do it all in six days.” I would say back, “well, seems you can’t do it all in seven days either.” As I said before, we don't need more time to do things. There is never enough time to do things. All of us have more to do than we can ever do. We don't need more time to do things. Time in our modern world is a vacuum. It invites activity. More time creates more expectation. More time creates more activity. No, we don't need more time to do things. We need more time not to do things. But this can't be time that waits until we have done everything. The one who waits to rest until all is done will never rest.
Many of you will say, “but you don’t understand my situation.” I say this with gentleness and love, but I say it nonetheless, that some of us may tend to think of ourselves as a special case, a class unto ourselves, a unique circumstance, an exception to the rule. There is a particular danger when dealing with the issue of Sabbath, that we would determine for ourselves what is right and what is wrong for us, and simply assume that God agrees with us and understands because of course He loves us and all that.
It is true that you and I each have to make a choice about Sabbath keeping. I hope that your choices are motivated out of a spirit of submission to the word of God. I hope that you will look at this issue seriously and examine your lives by the rule and measure of Scripture. Maybe you believe the Scripture gives you freedom to work and shop and trade seven days a week, week after week. I am not going to send the Sabbath police out after you. I am not going to make grim facial expressions if I hear of you slipping off to the store on a Sunday. But given the weight of Scriptural teaching, can you in fact say that you are being true to the Word by working and cleaning and buying and selling all the time, day after day, without stop?
If you want to bring order in a godly and biblical way into your life, keeping a seventh day is a great place to start. I think it is the best place to start. It will have positive ripple effects through the rest of your life each week. You know, we affirm and believe that Christ is Lord of all aspects of our lives. We say that He is Lord of our wallet, Lord of our Daytimer. Don’t you think it would be, well, odd, if we dedicated our Daytimers to the Lord and forgot the one clear provision God has actually made for us regarding the way we use our time?
Young people and students, I particularly encourage you to start out in your lives with good and healthful habits that you won’t have to unlearn later. Particularly I would invite you to consider ordering your lives so that you have one day a week, preferably Sunday, where you don’t do your main work which is studying, or where you don’t take part time jobs. The gift of the seventh day is a gift to you as well as to the rest of us. I know that our culture treats you like you are some separate species with a laundry list of special needs, but you are not exempt from the weight of this commandment, and your needs really are not so very different from the rest of us. Start keeping a seventh day now. You will not regret it.
How many of us when we are lying on our death bed will say to ourselves or to our loved ones, “I should have worked more, I should have tidied more, I should have spent more days at the office, I should have vacuumed more and mowed more, I should have watched more TV?”
In fact, the things most of us would say we wish we had done more of are the things we have opportunity to do on a seventh day rest, time with God and His creation, time with loved ones and friends, time with family!
So even though I desire that you focus on the positive, the negative is still there. It cannot be avoided. We cannot do the one thing without not doing the other. But I would like for you to see the negative commandment to stop working, not as a burden, but as an emancipation proclamation. We are in bondage to our activity. We are in bondage to our fears. We are in bondage to our pursuit of the perfect life.
The command to stop is an invitation to trust. It is an invitation to believe that God can provide for our needs in six days of working.
The command to stop is an invitation to fellowship, fellowship with God, with family, with the corporate body of Christ. It is an invitation to restore essential relationships. It is an invitation to believe that people are more important than work.
The command to stop is an invitation to love, to love God in private meditation and corporate worship, to love and minister to one another in the body of Christ.
The command to stop is an invitation to enter into rest, to rest the mind, the body, the Spirit, to stop doing and begin being.
The command to stop is an invitation to submit to God, to let Him set the scheduling agenda in our lives.
The command to stop is an invitation to be freed from bondage to our temperament. If we are such that we can never rest until everything is just so, then in truth we can never rest, because hardly ever is everything just so. The command to stop invites us to accept more loose ends and more untidiness than we might prefer, and invites us to learn to rest in Christ in spite of our surroundings and circumstances.
And so let’s look at several of the positive aspects of keeping a seventh day. But first let me ask this question, “Should this day be Sunday?” My answer is that if we have the freedom for this day to be Sunday, then it is best that it be Sunday. Why? Because from the very earliest times the apostles set aside the first day of the week, the day of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, as a day of assembly, as the day of sacred assembly and corporate worship for the New Covenant church. I respect this precedent. Apostolic precedent carries almost as much weight as apostolic command. Indeed, the day which Jesus rose from the dead, the day he achieved victory over evil and death, this is indeed the best day to worship Him as our living Savior. And because of the close connection between worship and rest, it seems fitting that this same day, Sunday, also be the day of ceasing from work. Generally speaking, if Sunday is the day of corporate worship, Sunday should be the day of seventh day rest.
Some of us work as nurses on the weekends. Some may be police officers or firemen. Work that has to do with the preservation of life or with maintaining the basic infrastructure needs to go on. This creates extra challenges in terms of keeping another day as a seventh day. But you can work these sorts of jobs with a clear conscience. Some of you work for big companies with processes which never stop, with rotating work shifts that keep you off balance and exhausted. You can’t change Boardroom decisions, and I don’t think you are under obligation to make a scene or quit. I feel for you. My only advice is that you consider one of your days off not just as a day off but as a Sabbath day, a cessation day from all that involves work. This is hard, because everyone else is working, but it’s possible, and I encourage you to do it.
Also, as a practical matter, I would invite you to consider looking at the seventh day as running from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday. This is the way the Hebrew day was structured, and I see wisdom in it. This way you can set aside an evening Saturday to wind down and prepare for worship, and you can spend Sunday evening if you need to studying or planning your work week.
OK, I would like now to mention briefly a few of the positive things we are to do on the seventh day. These are:
corporate worship
rest
prayer
play
creativity activity
family
From the beginning Sabbath was a day for man to cease from his job of subduing the earth. It was a day for man to be refreshed, to delight in his maker and God. Rest, as we have seen, is physical, mental, and spiritual. These aspects of who we are intertwined and intermixed. If it is true that we are made in God’s image, if it is true that we are complete in fellowship in Him, then we can only rest when we are at rest in Him, we can only really rest physically and emotionally when we are at rest with God..
So there is a necessary God-ward orientation not only to life every day, but life on the seventh day. It is not a day where we declare freedom from God and rest as we see fit. It is a day when we are more free to pursue our relationship with Him, freed from some of the stresses and distractions of our work. It is a day when we are more free to pursue ministering to others in the body of Christ, and to our neighbors.
From the beginning the seventh day has been a day for His people to gather in corporate worship. This is fitting. God made the seventh day for man to rest in and delight in Him. This has always been not just an individual but a corporate delight. Corporate worship is that time when the people of God come together in Christ to express their love and adoration of God, and to love and serve one another in Christ. God doesn’t merely enter into relationship with individuals, but with a people, a corporate entity. In fact. as I often say, it is a people in the corporate sense He is committed to calling out of darkness into the light. And the New Testament is not lax about the importance of gathering together on this day. When it says, for example, in Hebrews 10:24-25, that we are to
consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching,
and then in Hebrews 12:22, that we
have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect,
it is speaking of the central importance of the corporate assembly of God’s people.
Without going into detail, let me say that the wording of this and other passages is even more pointed than it may appear in the English translations. These passages speak of the official gatherings or assemblies of the church. These references to gathering together don’t refer to friends spending time praying together, individuals having quiet times, families having a worship hour, or other good but informal gatherings of believers.
The decline of the sense of the corporateness of the body of Christ is one of the tragic casualties of rampant American individualism.
As you know, the first day of the week was not held as sacred by the Romans. TIt was a normal workday. But Christians were so committed to gathering as a fellowship on this day, for the purpose of worship, teaching, and communion, for the purpose of building up and encouraging one another in the faith, that even if it meant getting up at 5:30 in the morning and worshipping before work, that’s what they did. Later, when Sunday was declared a day of rest, Christians were free to worship at more convenient hours, which of course they did.
And so it is right to include corporate worship in our keeping of the seventh day. It is right to arrange travel schedules around this, to come back from out of town by Sunday morning or to leave later after corporate worship in order to worship with the body of Christ as a corporate entity.
The seventh day is also a day to pray, to spend time with God as an individual, to take some extra time to read Scripture, to get reoriented. I see the seventh day as a compass day, a day, to realign yourself with the compass of God’s will, to reflect upon successes and failures of the past week and consider opportunities of the next week. I don’t mean so much here business opportunities, but personal growth and ministry opportunities. It is a good day to confess, a good day to evaluate relationships, a good day to ask forgiveness, a good day to ask for God’s empowerment for the upcoming week. It is a good day to read a challenging book, to meditate upon the Scripture.
The seventh day rest is also a day of play. It is a day to relax and have fun in being a human being. It is a good day for laughter, for enjoying one another, for enjoying God’s world. It’s a good day to run along a mountain ridge, to play hide-and-seek, to play fetch with a dog, to enjoy a fun game of basketball, to go for a walk or a hike, to climb a tree, to ride a bike, to explore a creek, to watch birds, to weed the garden, if of course this is done not out of compulsion, but simply for the pleasure of being near God’s good earth.
The seventh day is a day for creativity. We are made in His image, and we are made to be creative. The seventh day gives us space to be creative and imaginative, With the pressure off, with God’s permission simply to live with undone things, we can create. And so it is a good day to paint, to draw, to carve, to weave, to write, to mold, to play the piano or guitar, to write a song.
The seventh day is a day for service. Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and we are to extend blessing on the Sabbath. And so the seventh day is a good day to visit someone in prison or in a nursing home, to chop some wood for an elderly neighbor, to invite a lonely friend over for dinner, to give a single mom a break, to spend time with a neighborhood kid who is lost and confused. The seventh day is a good day to do good. It is not a day simply to spend selfishly, but a day to extend blessing.
The seventh day is also a day of physical rest. I have mentioned all sorts of things one could potentially do on the seventh day. It would be easy to try to fit so many things in that the day becomes as frantic as the rest of the week. This would not be good. We don’t have to do everything every seventh day. God gives us fifty two weeks in a year, fifty two seventh days. Each can have its own flavor. We can weave different things into different seventh days. This is our freedom. Our bodies sometimes need rest. Some seventh days we may take a nap. Some seventh days we may need to sit back in an easy chair for an hour or so and read a book.
In closing, the seventh day isn’t a day to be somber and morbid. It is a day to live! It is a day where we are free to love and worship and serve and rest. It is a good day. It is a good gift from a good God. As you ahead to the coming year, make the keeping of Sabbath a part of your weekly pattern of life. You will be glad that you did.
Amen |
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