Sermon Tone Analysis

EXODUS 20:8-11

 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Six days you shall labour, 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, 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 the seventh day.

Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.[1]

Just another day; that is all that Sunday is.

The statement was shocking, and the more so because the speaker was W. A. Criswell, pastor of the justly famed First Baptist Church of Dallas.

It was late in the decade of the 70s and he had just returned from a trip to India; he was describing how on a Sunday all the markets were open and throngs of people crowded every street.

In pagan India, in Hindu India, in anti-Christian India—Sunday was just another day.

Dr.

Criswell then looked about him at the situation which was then only beginning to prevail in his beloved Dallas and he lamented the growing attitude in America which insisted on treating Sunday as* *just another day.

The busiest shopping day for modern Canadians is Sunday.

The day most packed with sporting activities, with recreational activities, with cultural activities, is the Christian day of worship, Sunday.

Though an argument may be presented that Christians who preceded us in the faith were extreme in their insistence for Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, an even stronger argument could be advanced that we now err in the opposite direction.

For our contemporaries, as for us, Sunday has become just another day.

Modern Canadians cannot be accused of being a religious people; we are openly irreligious.

Our national religion is a mad pursuit of personal amusement and the exaltation of our own individual interests.

God has been reduced to a convenient source of aid when we feel the need for deliverance because our own resources have failed us for one reason or another.

Otherwise, we are content to move the Living God to the deep recesses of our mind where the old adage holds—out of sight, out of mind.

However, we cannot escape the sense that all is not well with our mindless pursuit of self-interests and that we are the poorer as result of our single-minded focus on the matters of this life, the whole of which shall surely pass away.

We need to be awakened to what we have done and to be reminded of our responsibility to worship the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.

Perhaps that is one reason our contemporaries and we are uncomfortable reading the Ten Commandments—no one likes to be reminded of responsibility and we don’t enjoy wrestling with the expression of holiness.

Nevertheless, the Ten Commandments stand firm and unchanging after these many millennia, and we are yet responsible to work out how we can please God through submission to His commands.

With that in mind, and with the challenge to regard our day of worship as something more than *just another day*, join me in exploration of the *Fourth Commandment* that we may discover the will of God for us.

Rediscover with me the awe of worshipping the true and living God.

The Divine Precept to Remember — My ability to forget is the stuff of legend.

However, some things must not be forgotten, for instance, the matter dealt with in our text.

The text is a call to remember—/Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy/.

God instituted one day in seven as a day which His people were to maintain above all other days as peculiar, holding that day as special for service to the Lord.

In fact, this command appears less concerned about designating a particular day than about remembering holiness.

Technically, one could advance the argument that no one ever forgets an event; but in the strictest sense, we do forget, and we need to be reminded.

For me, it is less a matter of forgetting than it is an issue of confusing issues competing for my attention.

Some matters I forget on purpose—their memory annoys me and I conveniently forget.

In some instances it is to one’s advantage to *forget*, if not to *overlook* an issue.

Other issues are overlooked because I become busy and push the matters away from the forefront of my mind.

In the press of daily life, those matters are eventually forgotten.

Other matters are forgotten, being dimmed by the passage of time.

All of us forget, and therefore all of us need to be reminded of those issues of greatest importance so that we will not forget.

We forget privileges and opportunities.

We forget vows and pledges.

We forget responsibilities and obligations.

We forget names and faces.

We forget friends, and sometimes we forget foes.

One of the saddest of conditions to afflict mankind is Alzheimer’s disease, where the one stricken even forgets loved ones.

We forget the things which are seen, and we are especially prone to forget those things which are not seen; and thus we even forget God /in whose hands our breath is, and whose are all our ways/.

If we can so easily forget God, should it be any wonder that we can forget holiness?

Maybe one reason many, even some among the faithful, neglect holiness is that we are uncertain what it is to be holy.

We lack a definition, and so we are unclear what is holy.

That concept, so conspicuous by its absence from contemporary religious argot, is essentially ubiquitous in the Word of God.

One example of the command for holiness is that penned by Peter.

/As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy”/  [*1 Peter 1:15, 16*].

Likewise, in an early letter Paul reminds us that /God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness/ [*1 Thessalonians 4:7*].

Christians, we may conclude, are to be holy.

What is it to be holy?

That term /holy/ in the two texts just cited is a translation of a Greek word which could also be translated by an even less well-known English word in this day, /sanctification/.

Likewise, in the Old Testament text for this day, that word translated /holy/ may be translated either by the English concept of /holiness/ or /sanctification/.

The thought lying behind /sanctification/—declaring a person or item holy—is the thought of setting that person or thing aside for a particular purpose, reserving a person or item for special use, usually religious or divine.

The command before us instructed the readers to set aside one day in seven as a day reserved for the Lord—a day holy to the Lord.

The logical New Testament conclusion is that Christians are not to simply hold one day in reserve, but that Christians are to live a life reserved to service for Christ.

The command to set aside a day as holy to the Lord has neither been rescinded nor set aside in the New Testament, but it has lost the force of common consent, even among contemporary churches.

Thus, we are uncertain how to rest and even our worship suffers as the result of our mad rush to seize that which can never be seized—*satisfaction*.

One might be inclined to argue that in an earlier day, Christians went overboard in their observance of a day of rest.

Without question, some of the actions appear extreme to us in this more enlightened day; but it may be that the observances of that day far removed from the rush of modern living only appears extreme because we no longer know how to rest.

We must confess that in our day Christians have gone to an extreme in the opposite direction, and few if any professing believers hold a given day as peculiar to the Lord.

Sacrificing a day set aside for the Lord, we also surrender every claim to rest and refreshment which was promised in that day.

While it is true that any day can be held holy, a day must nonetheless be reserved if it will fulfil this rule for living.

The concept of a day of rest, a day set apart for the Lord, is valid, even in this current dispensation.

Those who hold to the tenets of the cult known as Seventh Day Adventism, even other Christian groups such as Seventh Day Baptists, and assuredly our Jewish friends, all alike contend that if we will observe the Sabbath it must be on Saturday—presumably the seventh day.

Actually, because of changes in the calendars during the years since the rise of the European powers, we are uncertain which of the seven days of the week is the Sabbath that Moses observed.

Superficially there is a certain logic in the argument that the seventh day should be reserved as holy to the Lord.

We could simply throw up our hands and say that since the seventh day was a day of rest for God in Genesis, then the seventh day—whatever its correspondence to that earlier time—will be now held sacred.

However, by the time the New Testament was written, early Christians were already setting aside the first day of the week as the day on which they gathered to worship the risen Christ.

The transition was natural and accomplished quickly and without undue opposition, save from a few Jewish Christians who were intent on mixing law and grace.

The basis for this transition is that Jesus rose on the first day of the week [*Matthew 28:1*; *John 20:1, 19*].

The first day appears to have been set aside as holy, especially to the Gentile Christians, and perhaps in part to distinguish them from the Jewish observances.

Within a few short years of Jesus’ resurrection, Christians met together on the first day of the week to memorialise His sacrifice [*Acts 20:7*].

Apostolic Christians, especially Gentiles, appear to have regularly met for worship /on the first day of the week/ [*1 Corinthians 16:2*].

Paul assumes that this is the day the Corinthian saints would meet and approves it through his lack of commentary on the act of worship on the first day of the week.

Later, when John, in exile on the barren isle we know as Patmos, saw the Risen Lord, it was as he worshipped on /the Lord’s Day/.

Whichever day it was that John saw the Risen Lord, it was a day which appears to have been universally recognised as holy to the Lord among Christians by the end of the first century A.D.  He felt no compunction to explain which day it was, assuming that all who read the account would know the day and make the appropriate association in their minds.

That day, the Lord’s Day, is generally accepted among scholars as the first day of the week.

Though in later years, 321 A.D. to be precise, the first day of the week was declared to be a legal holiday by the corrupt and wayward Roman church, it does not negate the fact that the first Christians observed the first day of the week as a day of worship of the Risen Lord of Glory.

For them, as for the church throughout long ages since, Sunday—the first day of the week—has been observed as the day churches hold sacred.

It is the Lord’s Day, a day for worship, a day to be considered as holy to the Lord.

We can get tangled and trapped and mired in the minutiae of the Word, but if we will honour God we will hold in our minds this truth, *we are to hold a day as holy to the Lord*.

The focus of our worship is to endeavour to draw near to God in holiness.

Any benefits which may flow from that worship are solely for those willing to submit to the Lord of Glory.

Whatever else may be garnered from this rule for living, I urge you to glean this singular truth: *worship is to be in holiness*.

Among my favourite psalms is one which includes this admonition for the manner in which we are to worship the Lord God.

 

/…worship the LORD in the splendour of holiness.

/

[*Psalm 29:2*]

 

We fulfil this injunction as we reserve a day as holy to the Lord, when we set aside time to worship, when we give ourselves to obey Him and His command.

It lies less in the precision with which we observe that given day than it is in how we observe the day—remembering God and His glory, drawing near Him in holiness and in purity of heart.

The Divine Provision for Rest — Man is a tripartite being.

That is, man is a living soul possessing a body and a spirit.

Accordingly, any attempt to obtain rest must take into account this trichotomy.

We are confident that we know how to obtain rest for the physical.

We insure that we sleep uninterrupted.

We pull the shades at night, perhaps we drink a warm glass of milk, we rid our minds of the cares and pressures of the day, and then we simply resign ourselves into the arms of divine love and drift off into sweet slumber.