[0:00] The following sermon is from Grace and Peace Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grace and Peace is a new church that exists for the glory of God and the good of the northeast suburbs of Hamilton Place, Collegedale, and Oroa.
[0:16] You can find help more by visiting gracepeacechurch.org. Good morning.
[0:28] Would you please stand and follow along as I read the scripture? I will not read Leviticus. Exodus 20.
[0:42] 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 not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates.
[1:04] 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.
[1:17] Luke 4. And he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.
[1:28] And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
[1:42] He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
[1:55] And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
[2:10] You may be seated. Thanks, Stephanie. Okay.
[2:24] So last week we looked at the fourth commandment in general. Remember the Sabbath day. What we talked about was the Sabbath is a gift.
[2:37] A gift from God to help Israel remember who God was and who they are. They're not slaves anymore. They've been freed from Egypt.
[2:47] They're no longer slaves. They are children of God. They're not producers. They're not machines. They're receivers of God's gifts. God is not a demander of people.
[3:00] He is a giver of good gifts. God was fundamentally trying to show them in the Sabbath that he was the one who would provide for them.
[3:10] The Sabbath teaches us. Teaches you. This is why we honor the Sabbath. Remember the Sabbath is because it teaches us to rest in God's provision for us.
[3:23] Not trying to provide for ourselves. You know, one of the things we talked about last week is that the Sabbath frees you from the slavery to your own ambition.
[3:34] The slavery to your own expectations and desires that you have for yourself. Sabbath frees you. But that kind of personal faith, that personal resting in God on the Sabbath is not meant to be just for you.
[3:52] Look at the command again that Stephanie just read up there at the top. It says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
[4:04] Six days you'll labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God. Look at who benefits from the Sabbath day. On it, you shall not do any work.
[4:15] Oh, it's good for you. You know, you can rest. You or your son or daughter. Your male servant. Your female servant. Your livestock benefit from the Sabbath day.
[4:30] Or the sojourner that is within your gates. The sojourner. The resident alien that's within your gates. It's not just for you. Everyone is blessed by the Sabbath.
[4:43] See, here's what we can say. This is what I want to talk about today. The Sabbath was not just meant for Sunday. That's the point that we're going to see in this. Is that it was intended to be a way of life that resounded into all of your life and into our culture.
[5:00] That's what the Sabbath was initially for. It's kind of like the wake behind a boat. You know? It leaves its mark. A boat leaves its mark as it goes through the waves.
[5:12] My wife Natalie grew up water skiing. And so every chance we get, we like to get out on boats. If you have one, I'm okay if you invite me. Just saying. We like to get out.
[5:24] I love watching Natalie ski. She was a slalomer and would take it way out and do these just beautiful kind of gliding passes and hop over the wakes coming in.
[5:35] But when you watch a number of boats, what you see is that each wake is a little bit different. It tells you, when you look at the wake behind a boat, you can tell kind of how fast a boat is going.
[5:47] You can definitely see where a boat has been. What sort of turns or spins it's making or what it's doing. You can see even how much the boat weighs by the size of the wake.
[5:58] What Sabbath is doing and really all of the Ten Commandments. All of the Ten Commandments were never meant to just simply be these things that guard our private morality.
[6:11] They were always intended to have a public aspect. They were always intended to, for the people of God, to help the people of God leave behind them a wake.
[6:22] A wake of goodness. A wake of effect that was good for the people that were around them. See, a Sabbath is a marker of how our faith is being lived out beyond just Sundays.
[6:39] Sabbath isn't just for Sunday. I want to prove that to you by looking at Leviticus 25 that Stephanie was scared to read. For good reason. It's one of a couple of passages where God gives directions on ways that they are to live out the Sabbath principle.
[6:58] But it doesn't have anything to do with Sundays. God took the framework of the Sabbath. One day in seven. Set aside for rest. Like this fourth commandment.
[7:09] And he applied it far beyond Sunday. The Sabbath life. You know, you see people walking around with, like, on the back of their trucks. It's got salt life, you know. Being down at the beach, you know, shapes the whole of their life.
[7:24] If that's you, more power to you. It's like Margarita. It's like, you know, it's the 21st century version of Margaritaville. Can we just be honest? And the Sabbath life. So I want to read and walk through Leviticus 25.
[7:37] We're going to just kind of take our time, look at different things here. And then we'll try to tie it all up at the end. So beginning at the beginning of Leviticus 25. The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai.
[7:51] Now, notice that. It's the same place where he gave the Ten Commandments. This is just a little bit later. God had already given the Ten Commandments. And then much of Leviticus and other parts of the first five books of the Bible are God explaining and expanding on what he meant in the Ten Commandments.
[8:09] So, God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai saying this. Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land that I will give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the Lord.
[8:26] For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather its fruits. But in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land.
[8:39] A Sabbath to the Lord. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap what grows of itself in your harvest, or gather the grapes of your undressed vine.
[8:49] It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. The Sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourselves and for your male and female slaves, for the hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you, for your cattle and the wild animals that are in your land.
[9:09] All its yield shall be for food. Okay, so there's a Sabbath farming cycle. Every seventh year the Israelites were not to plant their fields.
[9:20] It was a year of rest for the land. I just think that's amazing. Number one, that God cares enough about the land that he does this.
[9:32] That even the land is not ultimately known by its production value. It's not even the earth. The ground that we walk on is not just a resource to be exploited for our own benefit.
[9:46] That even the land has its own inherent dignity and goodness because it is part of what God has made. It's to be respected in and of itself.
[9:57] But, you know, on the other hand, that kind of sounds a little bit dangerous. Like, you know, what are you going to eat the seventh year? That seems like a problem. Well, if you look down at verse 20, And if you say, what shall we eat the seventh year?
[10:10] Well, thanks for telling me. If we may not sow or gather our crop, I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years.
[10:22] When you sow in the eighth year, you'll still be eating some of the old crop. You shall eat the old until the ninth year when the new crop arrives. What God is saying is, look, if you will just trust me, I will provide for you.
[10:39] I know it sounds crazy, but just rest. Let the land rest. I know you can't see where food's going to come from, but I'm going to provide for you.
[10:51] God would provide exceedingly and abundantly so that they would have enough. I just want you to appreciate for a minute how gloriously and abundantly God cares for the land and for his people.
[11:05] How can we say this? God was literally commanding his people to not overwork themselves, to not be slaves to anything, to simply receive from him, to be human, to see his grace.
[11:26] But he actually went further than just that Sabbath farming principle. This passage that we're reading is actually called the year of Jubilee. And here's the basic idea, and then I want to read through it because it's a little confusing.
[11:39] The basic idea is that after seven of these Sabbath farming cycles, you know, six years of planting, one year off, after seven of these cycles, you get to 49 years.
[11:50] And there was, at the end of that, seven cycles, there was a huge celebration. And on that celebration, all debts, all the way through society, were totally forgiven.
[12:05] Anyone who'd sold their land in those 49 years, their land was restored back to them. They went to live back on the land. Okay, that's super interesting.
[12:17] Let's read more about it. Verse 8, You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you 49 years.
[12:31] Then you shall sound a loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month, on the day of atonement. You shall sound the trumpet throughout all the land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.
[12:48] It shall be a jubilee for you. When each of you shall return to his property, and each of you shall return to his clan, that fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you.
[13:00] In it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines, for it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field.
[13:14] Keep going. In this year of jubilee, each of you shall return to his property. And if you made a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall do no wrong to one another. You shall pay your neighbor according to the number of years after the jubilee.
[13:29] And he shall sell to you according to the number of years of crops. If the years are many, you shall increase the price. If the years are few, you shall reduce the price. For it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you.
[13:40] You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear the Lord your God. Or you shall fear God, for I am the Lord your God. And I'm going to read a couple of verses. Verse 25.
[13:51] You can pick this up later. It's not printed. If your brother becomes poor and sells part of his property, then his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his brother has sold.
[14:02] If a man has no one to redeem it, then himself, he himself becomes, and he himself becomes prosperous and finds sufficient means to redeem it.
[14:13] Let him calculate the year since he sold it and paid it back and the balance to whom he sold it and returned to his property. If he does not have sufficient means to recover it, then what he sold shall remain in the hand of the buyer until the year of jubilee.
[14:28] In the jubilee, it shall be released and he shall return to his property. Okay, I'm going to stop there. There's a lot more in there. You can read it on your own.
[14:38] This takes a little bit of explanation. Let me back up, give you a little bit of context here. So God has rescued his people out of Egypt. He's ransomed them from Egypt and he's taking them.
[14:49] They're on their way to the promised land, right? And when they get to the promised land, what God is going to do is he's going to take that land and he's going to divide it up among the tribes. You remember how many tribes there were in Israel?
[15:00] There were 12. Thank you. And they're going to divide it in the tribes and then each tribe will take each clan, which is a group of families, and they'll divide up their tribe into clan land.
[15:17] And then the clan will go through and divide up their land according to the families. Now, this was more than just a nuclear family, you know, mom, dad, two and a half kids.
[15:28] It was the extended, the multi-generational family, the father's household, it said. So you can have quite a lot of that. And when they divided this up, the land wasn't divided up in a super neat and orderly and equal fashion.
[15:47] You know, when the kind of pioneers moved out west, you know, they sold the land back east as 40 acres and a mule, right?
[15:58] This was not 40 acres and a mule. They would take the land and they would look at the size of the family. They would look at the particular needs of that family. They would look at what the land had to offer and they would match it.
[16:11] So each portion of land was uniquely designed for that particular family. It met each of their needs well. Now, this is really important because remember, this is an agrarian society.
[16:25] Everybody was a farmer to one degree or another. Unless you were a priest, you were a farmer. They didn't have a complex economy like we do. And so because of that, all that people needed to care for themselves and for their family, to provide a life for themselves, was a piece of land that they could farm.
[16:45] But people are going to be people, right? So this was not utopia. This did not work out very well because people squandered their land.
[16:58] They often had to sell it to others, you know, and for lots of reasons. Maybe they were just foolish, you know, slept in too much. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe, maybe they got robbed.
[17:10] Maybe a storm came along like Ian and washed out everything that they had. Maybe they had a fire. Maybe they, maybe they had an accident and couldn't work the land.
[17:25] In a thousand different ways, the reality was people came to the place where they became destitute and would have to sell off their land.
[17:36] But God declared that every 50 years, the person who sold that land would have that land returned to their family for free.
[17:50] For free. They didn't have to pay their debt. It was given back to them. They went back and they inhabited the house that's there. They went back and started planting there. And in this way, every single family was protected and provided for.
[18:04] I just want, do you see how unique and bizarre this is? And how wonderful it is? You see, on the one hand, it kind of, it sounds, it's a way of making hard work and incentive, right?
[18:21] That you were, your family was given land. You had land to work. And if you worked hard, if you were wise, your family was going to flourish on the land. They were going to be provided for.
[18:32] You were going to have enough for your children. But, if things went poorly, if you had to sell your land, if you had to sell yourself into kind of an indentured servitude, those mistakes would not rebound into generational poverty.
[18:53] these were things that went only one generation. They were problems that would be corrected. It was a way of God protecting the people from their own mistakes.
[19:08] Furthermore, the ancient Near East was very much like what you see in kind of like feudal lands. Not exactly the same, you know, not big castles and stuff, but the same idea that you had the wealthy and you had the elites that gobbled up the land, gobbled up the people, and then all the peasants, all the little small farmers, you know, did all their stuff, paid taxes, all of this system was supporting the elites and the wealthy.
[19:37] But not in Israel. Not in Israel. Israel's God was establishing a way to preserve the social fabric of the people. The Jubilee was intended to be, by God, to be a way of leaving this like beautiful wake in society behind His people.
[19:57] God wanted Israel to be a place that was actually good for human beings to live. That was a place where they could be responsible for themselves. To take responsibility for themselves and to be a place where people even when people got into trouble, it wasn't the end of the story for them.
[20:16] You see, the Sabbath for them wasn't just about their private morality. God was doing something here. God was, He was putting this into legislation.
[20:28] The laws were meant to be just and merciful. It was a place of mercy. I just think this is fascinating.
[20:40] I mean, think about this. The Jubilee. Now, it's not like a, you know, super leftist socialistic system, right? Where the king or the government owns everything and then they just apportion that out to everyone on a kind of an equitable basis.
[20:57] They give everybody the same thing. It's not that because people own their land. They had the responsibility to work for it. But it's also not like this unrestrained capitalist economy because God was actively preventing people from being dominated by the wealthy and the powerful who could just live by unrestrained accumulation.
[21:25] You might be wealthy. You might become wealthy and you might be able to buy a property but you don't get to keep it. Only for 50 years. It's a great lake house for 50 years and then it goes away.
[21:37] And you see how that you even saw it in here that kind of defines the way that the economy works. So if there's 40 more years until the year of Jubilee well the price is going to be pretty high.
[21:53] If there's only three years left until Jubilee well the price is going to be pretty low. It bounded in it restrained the economy in very particular ways. Here's how Robbie Holt who is, I'll show you his book in a minute.
[22:07] He used to be a pastor here in Chattanooga. He wrote a book that talks some about this. He says this, the God of the Bible cares infinitely more about every family having the opportunity to provide for themselves and participate in the economy than he cares about any one family's right to acquire more and more for themselves.
[22:34] Okay. what does that have to do with Sabbath? What does that have to do with Sabbath? Well, I think it has everything to do with it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor, wrote this, your life as a Christian should make non-believers question their own disbelief in God.
[22:56] Let me repeat that. Your life as a Christian should make non-believers question their disbelief in God. You see, there is something beautiful and honoring and dignifying about the way that God sees humans in the Sabbath and the Jubilee.
[23:16] See, Jubilee and the Sabbath make people want to know the God that we proclaim. Let me ask it this way.
[23:27] What would it be like if we as Christians were the loudest voices for kind and compassionate treatment of every human being in our society? What if the Sabbath was more than just Sunday for us?
[23:43] What if the Sabbath principle that we are humans who are receivers from God, that God owns everything, God owns everything in the world, and we are his recipients, and that our fundamental identity is not as producers, is not as machines, but as people?
[24:05] How might that change the way that we run businesses, that we work with co-workers, how we think about, you know, office hours, how we think about the way that we spend our money, if Sabbath was more than just Sunday?
[24:23] Now, the problem was, it wasn't so pretty in Israel. Do you want to know how many times Israel celebrated the year of Jubilee? It's recorded exactly zero times.
[24:38] Now, they may have done it and just didn't get recorded, there are other things that we think they did that didn't get recorded, but if it did happen, it didn't happen very often. In fact, one of the things, Israel was eventually sent into exile in Babylon, you remember that story, Daniel, the lion's den, all that, been one specific reason that the prophets gave for why Israel ended up in Babylon, was that they disregarded the poor.
[25:08] Natalie told me yesterday, she was reading about the exile and God saying that the 70 years of exile were a Sabbath for the land from iniquity. See, the Jubilee didn't work for them.
[25:22] They didn't follow it. It wasn't, and it's not meant to be a solution for us, although frankly, I would love to see a politician try to do something like this. I mean, you know, we're not an agrarian economy, it's not going to work the same, we're not a, you know, we don't live in a religious kingdom that is united around its worship of God, so it's a different thing, and I'm not making the argument that we should do that, but how can we live with this kind of Sabbath principle that undergirds, that pervades the way that we live?
[25:56] Well, here's what I want to do, I want to read the end of this Jubilee passage, just verse 23. God says, the land is mine, or the land, sorry, the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine.
[26:12] There's something about our ownership of the land that gives us the false idea that we are in control and actual owners of it.
[26:22] for you are strangers and sojourners with me. That's an odd phrase.
[26:34] Wait, haven't we heard that before already? Oh, wait, you remember in the fourth commandment? The Sabbath is good for you and for your son and your daughter and your animals and the sojourners who are within you.
[26:47] The idea of this word sojourner is an alien, a stranger, a resident, a guest, a tenant, something like that. It is someone who lives in the land but doesn't own the land.
[27:05] You see, this is grace. What God is saying is, I want you to see what the real deal is. The real deal is, you are not the owners here.
[27:16] I am, but I want you to be here. And I want to provide for you. I want to give you what you cannot get on your own. I am inviting you in to live in my world, to be my people, to be the children in my household.
[27:34] That's what the Sabbath is all about. I mean, this is very much the, you know, this is the bird man. I'm going to take you from slavery. I'm going to release you. But let's never forget the relationship here.
[27:48] I am the Lord. You are not. You're guests here. You see, the problem is, when we read the Bible, we typically read the Bible as owners, not as sojourners.
[28:05] We typically, when we come to the Bible, we see ourselves in passages like this. We see ourselves, and of course, obviously, because we're, you know, successful, and we live in a successful place, a successful nation, we're, we're, we automatically see ourselves as the ones who are like losing out in the Jubilee principle.
[28:28] Because obviously, I would be on the winning end and have a lot of property and have to give it up. You know, I'm giving up that beautiful vineyard I bought. But you see, that if that was not you, if you were the one who was destitute in Israel, how beautiful of an idea this would be, how dignifying this would be, if you were at the low end of the totem pole, this would be the best news that you could imagine hearing.
[28:54] Because you would hear, God has saved me from this terrible place that I found myself. See, God wanted his people to see themselves, to see themselves as sojourners, as people who were receivers from him.
[29:14] This kind of identity was central to what he wanted. Did you notice the day on which they proclaim the day of jubilee? Verse 9, then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month, on the day of atonement.
[29:34] The day of atonement, when the sacrificial lamb was brought out and the priests put their hands on the lamb to show that the sins of Israel were now being placed on this lamb, this innocent perfect lamb, and then they slaughtered the lamb and sacrificed it so that the sins of the people would be forgiven, would be removed from them, that they would be freed.
[30:02] What God is saying is, is this is a, the Sabbath, the Jubilee is a lived picture, of what redemption looks like, that we are needy, we are desperate before God and he provides everything that we need.
[30:22] Stephanie read the very first part of Jesus' sermon recorded in Luke chapter 4 for us. This is Jesus' first sermon, it's his coming out party, everybody's wondering what he's going to say, and he picks up Isaiah and he reads the prophecy from Isaiah about, particularly that God's salvation would look like the day of Jubilee.
[30:45] He uses, excuse me, uses the phrase, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. What year was that? Throughout the Old Testament, that's the year of Jubilee.
[30:57] Jesus took the year of Jubilee as the metaphor for what he was doing in saving people. God, you know, God, you know, you know, Jesus is saving you from your sins and you're just holding on until you can go to heaven.
[31:17] That's not the gospel. You may have heard it, but it's wrong. See, Jesus is talking about not just a spiritual rescue from sin, but a physical release from bondage, from oppression, from even debt.
[31:34] a complete restoration. And the Jews, the religious people, they understood what Jesus was saying. They understood the year of Jubilee stuff, and you know what they did after Jesus' sermon?
[31:46] They did not clap. They did not take notes. They did not stand at the door and say, nice sermon, pastor. They took him outside and wanted to kill him because they understood that what Jesus was doing was completely upturning.
[32:03] the entire social order was advocating for something that was so outside of what their social world looked like, what they wanted it to be like. But do you know who it was good news for?
[32:16] The lame, the poor, the outcasts, those who were burdened by sin. They thought it was great news, the best news they've ever heard, and they started to follow Jesus.
[32:30] You see, what Jesus is doing here is, he's giving you the opportunity to expand the wake of goodness that you leave behind you.
[32:40] You have to start here with seeing Jesus as the glorious redeemer, the one who frees you from slavery. What can that actually look like for us?
[32:51] I've got three examples really quickly. One is a man, he's a friend of mine, a man named Marvin Olasky. Marvin is a, he's a journalist. He used to be, when I worked in Austin with students, he was our faculty advisor, he was a, he went to our church, super smart guy.
[33:09] He, there's a whole story, I'll put a link on the website for his story, but it's fascinating. He, in the 60s, he was kind of a campus radical, went to Russia, was a communist, ended up getting converted, and he started, he's a journalist, he helped start World Magazine, which you may have heard of, he's actually left that magazine now, but he, he actually worked as an advisor to George W. Bush when he was the governor of Texas back in the late 90s.
[33:37] In fact, Marvin is the one who coined the term compassionate conservatism, if you've ever heard that term. He coined that phrase and he wrote a lot about how can we, he was passionate about how public policy can be compassionate with protecting the poor so that they could be free to be the humans that God had made them to be.
[33:59] It's incredibly dignifying. I think that's part of the reason he left World Magazine, because his passion for people came into conflict with, with others there. You know, we could, I long to have people from our church that would go work in the public policy arena.
[34:15] That would be amazing. If you think about that, I'd love to talk to you about that. But it's not just in politics and public stuff. It's in a neighborhood. It's in a neighborhood.
[34:25] Robbie Holt, I mentioned his book, it's called Practicing the King's Economy. We had a few on the book table, I didn't see any today. We may be out of them, but I put a link on there.
[34:37] It's a wonderful book that Robbie is talking about what it looks like for the way that we spend our money as Christians. That we have the opportunity to provide unique and creative ways to help foster the kind of inclusion of people who are outside of the normal economy.
[34:57] And he has literally, in just the chapter I read, dozens of ideas. One of his ideas was having like a shark tank thing at a church for people in the neighborhood who want to start small businesses.
[35:09] Using resources of the church to help people who are attempting to use their talents for good.
[35:23] There was a church, one of our members used to be a part of a church in California that used church property to build affordable housing. A massive project. It's a fabulous idea.
[35:37] So it could be public policy, it could be right in the neighborhood. But there's one more example. After Jesus' resurrection, the early church began to see themselves truly as sojourners.
[35:51] You know, the early disciples, they were outsiders. They never thought of themselves as having any sort of influence and power. And so twice in the first four chapters of the book of Acts, the author describes the way that the early Christians relate to each other.
[36:06] I just want to read a couple of these really quickly. Acts chapter 2, the end of chapter 2. Here's how it describes the disciples. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers.
[36:20] And awe came upon every soul. Many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles, and all who believed were together. They had all things in common.
[36:32] They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing proceeds to all as any had need. And then over in chapter 4. Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him were his own, but that they had everything in common.
[36:56] And with great power, the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. Listen to this.
[37:06] There was not one needy person among them. For as many persons, for as many as were owners of land or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed as any had need.
[37:22] That phrase, there was no one needy among them, that's a direct quote from Deuteronomy 15 where God talks about the Sabbath farming principle.
[37:36] The design of Israel from God was to be a place that was good for everyone, where no one was overly concerned with their own personal accumulation.
[37:51] And it was rooted in the Sabbath. The idea that everything we have is God's. And that we are all receivers from him. And that principle should be the thing that animates the way that we think about how we are engaging as a church, how we care for one another.
[38:10] Our new deacons are going to be charged with actually working some of this out. It should change the way that we think about our neighbors and our friends. One of the people I've quoted before, Ellsworth Kalis, says this, that by keeping the Sabbath, the Sabbath will keep you.
[38:30] It will keep you needy. It will subvert, it will undercut your own ambitions and your own expectations. If you will give yourself to the principle of the Sabbath, like we talked about last week, the actual rest.
[38:45] But expanding that, if you keep it, it will help you live the reality that God owns everything and you are his glorious recipient of everything you need.
[39:01] And you are simply called to trust him. Wouldn't it be beautiful if you actually had Christians that lived this way? What might our impact on our community be if we were more concerned with the needs of other people than our own needs?
[39:25] I got to tell you, I don't know what to do with all that. It's really challenging. And yet, this is exactly what God has given to us for our good.
[39:36] It's what we need. In light of that, we're just going to take a minute to pray and confess our sins.