THE HOLY DAY

THE HOLY DAY Exodus 20:8-11 October 12, 2008 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction I have a Word from the Lord for everyone whose dozens of labor-saving devices don’t, whose hurry never gets them there, whose Type A is turning terminal, whose handheld organizers never get it done, whose bigger, better, new improved, more fashionable stuff is keeping you busier than it ought to. You need rest. “Rest? Are you serious? With all I have to do?” God says you’ll get more done with some timely rest than you will going a hundred miles an hour in a dozen directions. An officer pulled over a car for going too slowly. The elderly lady driving said she saw the sign and it said 20. “No, ma’am, that wasn’t the speed limit. That was the sign to tell you you’re on highway 20. The speed limit is actually 55.” The officer noticed 2 other women in the car who looked scared to death. He asked the driver, “What’s wrong with them?” “I’m not sure, but they’ve been that way ever since we pulled off highway 111!” God has a prescription for the suffocating stress we bring on ourselves, the sometimes perilous speed of our lives, the emotional erosion of our workaholism and the frustrating feeling of unfulfillment that makes us wonder if any of it is worth it. It is summed up in one simple Hebrew word: shabat. Sabbath may be the answer to your stress and anxiety. Text: Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the Sabbath day by keeping 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, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor you animals, nor the alien within your gates. 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. Let me deal with a couple of clarifications right up front, then return to our theme that Sabbath is good for us. 1. Sabbath: Saturday or Sunday or any “seventh day” Any student of the Bible who’s ever read from the first five books of the Old Testament knows that Saturday was the Sabbath for the Jews. It was patterned after the creation week according to verse 11. As one medieval rabbi said, “If God who never grows weary, rested on the seventh day, how much more should we human creatures take rest from our weariness on the Sabbath?” But when that same Bible student gets to the New Testament, he witnesses the shift from Saturday to Sunday for the Christians. Once Jesus rose from the grave and the resurrection became the prime element of Christian preaching, Sunday became the Christians’ day. Believers were not expected to practice Saturday Sabbath (not even the Jerusalem Council demanded that of their Gentile converts—Acts 15!). Now Sunday was the Lord’s Day (John in Revelation 1:10), and believers met on that day. Whereas the Jewish Sabbath had become a day of restrictions and meticulous rules—which Jesus repudiated as so much joy-sucking legalism—Sunday replaced the end of the week Sabbath with the first day of the week forward looking celebration of what is to come in Christ. Saturday was replaced by Sunday, but the biblical principle of rest was never rescinded. Many Christians by the second century began to avoid labor and business on Sunday, but it was never made a test of faith, and the Christians exercised great freedom in the honoring of days. In fact, Paul insisted Christians were not to get involved in arguments about special days and festivals (Col. 2:16), and that the mature believer would require no special holy days at all, but would regard all days as holy to the Lord (Rom. 14:5-6). The insistence on Sabbath from Friday evening to Saturday evening was dropped by the church, but the principle taught in the commandments was still to be held in honor. Regular rest, even in terms of one day a week, continued to be held in high esteem. The wisdom of God is revealed in Sabbath-keeping—not in the legalistic requirements by which the Jews had distorted the intent of shabat, but in obeying God’s loving direction to rest from labors one seventh of your week. 2. Dignity of work When God called for Sabbath keeping it was not a divine demeaning of work. God had commissioned Adam long before the Fall to work the garden. Work is dignity to human beings made in the image of God. It is fulfilling and invigorating to produce and perfect, plant and harvest, to apply ourselves and see the results of our labor. Work is dignity to the human soul. It is those who shirk and don’t work who are the most miserable. Work is our calling of holiness to the Lord. When we work we witness to His grace in our lives. God never intended to imply that work is less than honorable, or that it is beneath any human being. He said in this commandment, Six days you shall labor and do your work. This is to God’s glory. Then He says, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work… And this was to the glory of God! We in our human pride want to argue, “Well if work is good, then isn’t more work even better?” No, God says, I want you healthy and happy, so take rest. A little sugar is sweet, but a little too much will cost you your pancreas. Too insist on working beyond God’s prescribed parameters is to disobey Him. Workaholism is at heart, blasphemy toward God. It is saying to him, I know what is best for me—I don’t need rest. Think about it: it’s pure pride and arrogance to think you’re indispensable and the world and the workplace will grind to a halt without me. What about the early bird getting the worm? God helps those who help themselves? Idle hands=devil’s workshop? Work is man’s dignity, but Sabbath rest is man’s protection from being eaten alive by too much of it. David Slagle writes about an occasion when he got a frantic phone call from a young lady who was a client of his. She said that her car had broken down and she was stranded about two miles from his office. So, he drove over to the location and found her leaning against her car, looking flustered. He leaned against the car next to her and asked what happened. "Well, I was just driving down the road and it quit running," she said. "So I pulled off to the shoulder." "Could you be out of gas?" I asked. "No, I just filled it up." "What happened? Did it make any noises?" "Oh, yeah," she replied. "As I was driving down the hill, it went 'brump, brump, brump, POW!'" He asked, "When was the last time you changed the oil?" She gave me this quizzical look and said, "Oil?" As it turned out, she bought the car used two years ago and had never changed the oil. Our lives—body, soul and spirit—require routine first-echelon maintenance. If you are not taking rest, you are going directly against God’s counsel. There is grace from God in shabat. 3. Grace of Sabbath God’s fourth commandment was never intended strictly as a restriction. It was to be a blessing to mankind. Just as we need regular sleep on a daily basis, so we need regular rest on a weekly basis. It’s good for us. It honors God when you relax, clear your mind and rest your bones. It is worship to Him for you to do nothing! Look at the command again: …it is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. What is? That you rest. Again, we glorify God when we work, and we glorify Him when we rest. It’s when we overdo either on that we get messed up! We waste our lives with too much rest and ruin ourselves with too much work. There is a holy rhythm to work and rest, and the healthy pattern is destroyed by getting them out of balance.   Sometimes you hear of someone who loves his career with passion and unhealthy obsession. He works very hard—60, 70, 80 hours a week. Then suddenly one day he becomes so disillusioned that he throws it all away. On the other extreme is the person whose hardest work is trying to avoid work. He’s better than others, wants everything on a silver platter, is entitled to government handouts and sits around with nothing to do, no motivation and a hundred excuses. Such people are never well: they’re depressed, feel worthless, then die young. God’s grace is extended to us in the Sabbath commandment. Embrace it! While we’re at it, did you notice there’s nothing “religious” in this commandment? We’re not told to go to church. No, our rest is our Sabbath! We attend worship and fellowship events for lots of other good reasons. Don’t lose the Sabbath in legalism. That’s what the Jews did. How is it we want to make the grace gift of Sabbath into a thicket of rules, voiding the very two things it was designed to provide us: rest and joy? If the Sabbath “rules” say don’t lift anything too heavy, what’s the first thing we ask? What’s the weight limit on “too heavy”? Don’t take a long hike on Sabbath—Well how far can I go? Among strict orthodox Jews today, you can dip a celery stick in salt and eat it, but you can’t leave the celery stick in the salt longer than a second or two. Why? Because the celery will start to pickle, and pickling is forbidden as work on the Sabbath. The grace of Sabbath is this: it is a gift of God to benefit man, not a burden to weigh him down. It is for rest and shalom God gave us the Sabbath, not as a burdensome obligation. He never intended any meanness in the commandment; no hidden agenda; no fine print, no “gotcha”! He said, in essence, I give you this as a blessing—my grace to you. I put it in the form of a commandment because I know it is so good for you that I didn’t want you to ignore it! Jesus confronted the religious leaders of His day because of their legalism re the Sabbath. He really lit into them on a couple of occasions for making the Sabbath a burden instead of a blessing. On one of those occasions He said, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath! (Mark 2:27) Embrace the grace of God's sabbath. He intended it for your good that you would not work yourself to a frazzle. The Sabbath is a refreshment for you to make you more effective when you return to work. The story is told of two men who had the tiring job of clearing a field of trees. The contract called for them to be paid per tree. Bill wanted the day to be profitable, so he grunted and sweated, swinging the axe relentlessly. Ed, on the other hand, seemed to be working about half as fast. He even took a rest and sat off to the side for a few minutes. Bill kept chopping away until every muscle and tendon in his body was screaming. At the end of the day, Bill was terribly sore, but Ed was smiling and telling jokes. Amazingly, Ed had cut down more trees! Bill said, "I noticed you sitting while I worked without a break. How'd you outwork me?" Ed smiled. "Did you notice I was sharpening my axe while I was sitting?" Four Exhortations 1.  Dedicate a seventh of your time to shabat – a time of rest and devotion to the Lord. Make it a time for avoiding labor and a time for meditating on the Lord. To be preferred is an entire day. If not maybe two half-days per week. But I can’t—I’m too busy! That is exactly the point. That’s same reasoning as saying I can’t give an offering to the Lord—I don’t have anything left! That’s precisely why we need some structure—to help us dedicate ourselves to God first. 2.  Honor the rhythm of the Sabbath. Genesis says the Lord rested on the seventh day. Thereafter, the Bible makes it clear that was to be an example for us. There is something to be said for making your Sabbath weekly. We need regular rest, just like we need sleep after 15-16 hours of wakefulness, so we need one day of rest after six days of labor. The rhythm is an important feature of Sabbath. We need not only the rest of Sabbath, but also the time to reflect on the goodness and grace of God. And don’t neglect the time with other believers for spiritual rest—those “holy happy hours” that carries us through the ensuing week. 3.  Celebrate Sabbath. If you see the practice of Sabbath rest as duty, something is wrong. If taking time out of your busyness or your work really bothers you, then you are just the kind of person who needs Sabbath in the worst way. I encourage you to seek the Lord’s will in this matter, get some good counsel from Christians you love and respect, and learn anew the art of celebrating Sabbath. Again, it is not so much law as it is privilege. 4.  Exercise Sabbath faith. Taking Sabbath rest is a way of showing our confidence in God’s work, and trusting His faithfulness. It takes a good dose of faith to believe, really believe, that something good will happen if we stop doing for awhile; if we just trust God Who tells us to rest and it will be okay. I remember a day a while ago when Charlotte and I were busy, too busy, getting a lot of things done that just had to be done. Everything we faced seemed to have deadlines and we were uptight and getting snippy with each other. In fact we were getting mean and cantankerous with each other. We looked at each other out of our feelings of hurt and repentance and just agreed, “It’s time for a break—to step awaaayyy from the work! We made arrangements for child care (since Joni was one of the current stressors) and off we went to Borders Bookstore. We had some coffee, read through a couple of magazines, talked and settled down. We caught our breath, talked for a few minutes about getting our priorities back. We rehearsed how our lives, our ministries and our marriage were dedicated to the Lord, and how we had made it so much our own. Mental and emotional health was restored, and a new perspective was gained. In the flesh, it made no sense to walk away for those two-three hours. There was a lot to be done in a short time, and it would be downright irresponsible to walk away right then. But we believed it was right in the Lord, we obeyed the prompting of the Spirit, and we did it. And it worked. When we got home, all was well with Joni, we sailed through the assignments we had almost effortlessly. And we sat down to relax again with time to spare, shaking our heads at how caught up in the ferment of fretfulness we had allowed ourselves to get. Life has a way of getting us all pent up, and taking a break often seems like the last things we need to do. But God knows better. In His wisdom, He set up a rhythm of shabat. It was the Lord, you remember, who gave manna to His people in the wilderness, and He did it in just the manner He wanted. He sent the miracle manna every day, just enough to be gathered for the day. But He didn’t send any on the Sabbath. Rather He sent enough the day before to be gathered for both days, and on the Sabbath day they rested and thanked God for His faithfulness. Frederick Faber wrote this paragraph. I hope you’ll let it be massaged into your heart: There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on. Sabbath is our opportunity to Be still and know that He is God. The Sabbath is our cue to once again lean into God, unharried, unhurried by the world’s demands, and to hear His still small voice. When’s the last time you heard the Holy Spirit say to your spirit that you are a child of God? Romans 8:16 says that’s the Spirit’s work, and He’s doing it all the time. We just don’t hear Him! Keep God’s Sabbath and God’s Sabbath will keep you.   [Back to Top]