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Good morning.
My name is August Verne, and I am one of your deacons with a nice little orange name tag.
Today we have two scripture readings, one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament.
Today's scripture reading is Psalm 92 and Hebrews 4, verses 9 and 10, as printed in your liturgy.
A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day.
It is good to praise the Lord and make music to your name, O Most High,
proclaiming your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night to the music of the tin-stringed lyre and the melody of the harp.
For you make me glad by your deeds, Lord.
I sing for joy at what your hands have done.
How great are your works, Lord!
How profound your thoughts!
Since those people do not know, fools do not understand,
that though the wicked spring up like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be destroyed forever.
But you, Lord, are forever exalted.
For surely your enemies, Lord, surely your enemies will perish.
All evildoers will be scattered.
You have exalted my horn like that of a wild ox.
Fine oils have been poured on me.
My eyes have seen the defeat of my adversaries.
My ears have heard the rout of my wicked foes.
The righteous will flourish like a palm tree.
They will grow like a cedar of Lebanon.
Planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God.
They will still bear fruit in old age.
They will stay fresh and green, proclaiming,
The Lord is upright.
He is my rock, and there is no wickedness in him.
The grass withers and the flowers fall.
But the word of our God stands forever.
The New Testament lesson.
A reading from the letter to the Hebrews.
There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God.
For anyone who enters God's rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Good morning, Christ Church.
I would like to begin today with a simple question.
And the simple question is this.
What is good?
We all want something good, but ideas of what is good vary widely, do they not?
Many think that it would be good to gain wealth and possessions, what we often call goods, after all.
Some seek good in fitness and in health, and others in exotic travel.
For some, all the good that they want is bound up in the care and enjoyment of family.
Others concentrate on the good of education or the acquisition of some useful skill.
Some pursue the good in the arts.
Others find good in the excitement of watching sports, especially if you're a Dodgers fan right now, for example.
Some think it good to award themselves with a really good time by indulging, overindulging, binging on alcohol or something harmful like Netflix, for example.
There are so many different views of what is good.
So what do you think?
Here we are, this election, right, is eight days away, and the polls indicate that half of the nation thinks that this blue option is good.
And the other half of the nation thinks that this red option is good.
And how the opposition's vision of the good affects us is quite intense right now.
Some of us are anxious.
Some of us are depressed and cynical.
Some of us are exhausted.
And by the way, the church's mission is going to be the same the day after the election as it is right now, right?
Jesus is still going to be calling us to be the salt of the earth that resists decay, the light of the world that penetrates the darkness.
But coming back to Psalm 92, it is good to blank.
How will that sentence continue?
How will we fill in that blank?
Psalm 92 commends as really, really good something we haven't even mentioned yet.
It is good to what?
It is good to praise the Lord.
And praising the Lord is good all the time, but it's good especially on the Sabbath day.
Notice that superscript.
It says a psalm, a song for the Sabbath day.
This is the only reference to the Sabbath day in the whole Psalter.
And that Hebrew word Sabbath, it simply means stop, quit, take a break, rest.
To us, that word rest conveys inactivity.
It conveys vegging out in our sweatpants on the couch.
But the main way that the biblical Sabbath day renews our strength and our joy is through the highest of all goods,
which is worship and praising the Lord.
The command to keep the Sabbath, it's actually one of the most repeated of all of God's commands in the scriptures.
And yet it's also one of the most ignored in our culture.
And part of the reason I think that there's so much exhaustion and so much burnout right now in our culture
is that when we love and when we serve and when we praise anything more than God as if it were a greater good than God,
it becomes an idol that then saps our energy and our strength and our vitality.
Right?
Because idols are never satisfied.
The idol of career and status and success and relationships.
The idols of money and sex and power.
They promise more than they deliver.
They take more than they give.
And this Sabbath song of Psalm 92, it holds before us this conviction that it is good to praise the Lord and to praise the Lord alone.
It's good to worship the true God of perfect love.
This is the only good that actually holds the power to restore us and to reinvigorate us.
And so today we're continuing to talk about these holy habits of grace.
And I want to talk about this holy habit of the Sabbath.
And I want to ask these three questions.
Why did God give us the Sabbath?
How do we celebrate the Sabbath?
And what does God do in us through the Sabbath?
Why did God give us the Sabbath?
How do we celebrate the Sabbath?
And what does God do in us through the Sabbath?
First of all, why did God give us the Sabbath?
Verse 1 says, it is good to praise the Lord.
And then verse 4 says, you make me glad by your deeds, Lord.
So the Sabbath is about the goodness and the gladness of a life that is centered on the Lord, on who he is and what he has done.
Why did God give us the Sabbath day?
So that we could experience his goodness and his gladness.
And this takes us all the way back really to pages 1 and 2 of the Bible.
There in Genesis 1, it says that God said, let there be light.
And bang, there was light.
And then there's this poetic image of God as a worker laboring for six days to build his creation.
And then what does he do on that seventh day?
Genesis chapter 2 says this, thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
And by the seventh day, God had finished the work he had been doing.
So on the seventh day, he rested from all his work.
And then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.
Because on it, he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
You see, the Sabbath day was created in the beginning.
Before sin came into the world.
It was created when Adam and Eve were without sin in the Garden of Eden.
And why did God rest on that seventh day of creation?
Well, it wasn't because God needed rest.
God is God.
God has eternal, unceasing life in himself.
God does not get tired.
He does not get exhausted.
He does not get overworked and burned out.
God did not take a Sabbath because he needed rest.
He took a Sabbath because we needed rest.
And this is why Jesus says three times in the Gospels that the Sabbath was made for people.
The Sabbath was made for people.
Again, that Hebrew word Shabbat, it means to stop.
But it also has this sense of delight.
If this 24-hour, one-day-and-seven Sabbath was created for Adam and Eve to experience not only rest,
but also delight and refreshment in the presence of God before sin came into the world,
how much more do we need the Sabbath?
Why did Jesus, the Son of God, build into his life this rhythm of an entire day to stop and delight in God once a week?
It's because God built the Sabbath into the grain of the universe.
And if you go against the grain of the universe, guess what's going to happen?
You're going to get splinters.
Jesus read Genesis 1 and 2.
And when he read Genesis 1 and 2, he saw that God blessed three spheres of his creation.
First of all, he saw that God blessed the animal kingdom and said,
Be fruitful and multiply.
And then God blessed the human family and said,
Be fruitful and multiply.
And then what did he bless next?
He blessed the Sabbath day and he meant it as something to be fruitful and to give us life.
God means the Sabbath to fill up his world with more and more of his life.
He not only blessed the Sabbath day, Genesis says, but he made the Sabbath day holy,
which means he set it apart.
He consecrated it as a time for us to linger with him and luxuriate in his holy presence
so that we are saturated with him and that we're saturated with his vision of life.
We're saturated with a sense of his holy will for our lives and for his world.
So why did Jesus himself practice the Sabbath?
Because he saw it as a gift of God that's both blessed and holy.
You with me?
More than that, the Sabbath is one of God's ten commandments.
You know, in Exodus 20, Israel, they've been liberated from their soul-crushing bondage in Egypt.
And therefore, God gives them this manifesto of how to live as free people.
And he gives it to them on tablets of stone, right, written with the very finger of God,
like kind of a big deal.
And the Sabbath command that comes in all these ten commands,
it's way longer than all the rest of the commands.
If you took all the ten commandments and you put them in a pie chart,
the Sabbath command would take up about 30% of that pie chart.
If this is God's priority list, the Sabbath ranks two commands before thou shalt not murder.
It's kind of important.
And here's what it says in Exodus 20.
Remember the Sabbath by keeping it holy.
The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
And to the Lord your God means that it's a day of worship.
It's a day of whole life orientation toward God.
It's a day to experience what Psalm 92 calls the goodness and the gladness of God.
You know, 40 years later, 40 years after Mount Sinai, Exodus 20,
Moses reissues the ten commandments for the next generation
before they're about to enter into the promised land.
And it says this in Deuteronomy 5.
It says,
Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.
And then it says this,
Remember that you were slaves in Egypt
and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand
and an outstretched arm.
So in Exodus, the Sabbath command is grounded in the creation story
and the rhythm that the Creator God built not only into the universe
but into our very bodies.
And then in Deuteronomy, the Sabbath command is grounded in the redemption story.
It's grounded in Israel's liberation from slavery
into a freedom that they now have to worship their gracious Redeemer God.
So here's a once-a-week celebration of all that is good in God,
our Creator and Redeemer.
Fast forward, after Jesus' resurrection from the dead on Sunday morning,
the early church moved their day of worship to the first day of the week
and they started to call it the Lord's Day.
And so if you read the New Testament, you read the book of Acts,
the letters of the New Testament,
every time the resurrected Jesus meets with His disciples
as they are publicly assembled,
guess what day it is?
It's Sunday.
It's the day of resurrection.
So from that first Sabbath day in the Garden of Eden
all the way to the empty tomb of Jesus on Easter Sunday,
all the way to that day when Jesus finally returns in His glory,
God has always intended His people to stop,
to rest,
to breathe,
to delight,
to celebrate,
to worship our Creator,
to praise our Redeemer,
and to allow this 24-hour period,
one day a week,
to fill us with His eternal and abundant life.
And this is why Psalm 92 says,
it is good to praise the Lord,
especially on the Sabbath day.
Do you share in this conviction?
And more than that,
does your calendar line up with this conviction?
Might this holy habit of grace be just what our exhausted bodies
and our burned-out souls really need here
as we come to the end of 2024?
Why did God give us the Sabbath?
But here's the next question.
How do we celebrate the Sabbath?
That opening word, good, in verse 1,
is rich in meaning.
It means beautiful.
It means desirable.
It means pleasing and life-giving.
So this psalm opens,
and it doesn't say,
you are commanded to praise the Lord.
It does not say,
you should praise the Lord.
You ought to praise the Lord.
You must praise the Lord.
What does it say?
It is good to praise the Lord.
The public gatherings of God's people for worship,
one day in seven,
are a sheer delight to the psalmist.
It's not just a regularly ingrained habit
or a faithful duty.
No, he positively delights in it
and takes pleasure in it.
He longs for it.
He looks forward to it.
It is so, so, so good.
As we heard in Psalm 122 last week,
I rejoiced when they said to me,
let us go to the house of the Lord.
He brings with him to the Sabbath day
a certain attitude,
a certain cast of mind and spirit,
and it's one of delight,
and it's one of rejoicing.
It's one of celebration.
And what are the features of this Sabbath worship?
Well, look with me at verse one.
It says,
it is good to praise the Lord
and to make music to your name, O Most High,
proclaiming your love in the morning
and your faithfulness at night
to the music of the tin-stringed lyre
and the melody of the harp.
What this tells us is that Sabbath worship,
it's not an individual thing.
It's a collective, corporate,
gathered assembly of people,
and it's also not a passive thing.
It's not a passive audience
coming to watch a performance.
It's rather an active congregation
of engaged participants.
And what are they doing?
With the help of some instruments,
the people of God are making music.
They're keeping time.
They're singing melodies of praise.
And it's not just one in four people singing.
It's all the people proclaiming
to God and to each other
through psalms and hymns
and spiritual songs
who God is.
And who is God?
God is the Most High.
God is sovereign and supreme.
God is glorious and praiseworthy.
God's name is above every other name.
And so Sabbath worship is about praising God
as higher and greater and lovelier
than anything and anyone else.
And what is the focus then of our praise
and our proclamation on the Sabbath day?
Well, verse two says this.
It says,
We proclaim your love in the morning
and your faithfulness at night.
This is what we're meant to give our time
and attention to
from the beginning of the day
to the very end of the day
is to focus on God's character
and on His attributes.
And this isn't the general love
of the Creator God for His creatures.
That's not the love that's being talked about here.
This is the special and particular love
that the Redeemer God has
for His chosen people.
This is His covenant love.
This is His sworn loyalty
to be our God
to the point ultimately
of shedding His blood
and giving His life.
That's how much He loves us.
Listen to verse four.
It says,
For you make me glad by your deeds, Lord.
I sing for joy
at what your hands have done.
Now, a less tame translation says this.
I shout cries of joy
for the works of your hands.
And my mentor, Bruce Walkie,
comments on this verse.
He says,
It's like shouting for a sports hero
in a stadium.
Right?
Like Freddie Freeman's
walk-off Grand Slam the other night.
It's like shouting like that.
Any of you spontaneously rejoice
when you saw Steph Curry
in the Olympic finals this summer?
I mean, wasn't that unbelievable?
And the psalmist would say,
You know,
what if we had more joy
and more awe
at what the Lord's hands have done
than what Steph Curry's hands can do?
Or what any human hands can accomplish?
See, why do we rejoice
with shouts of joy on the Sabbath?
Or why do some churches
rejoice with shouts of joy
on the Sabbath?
Verse 4,
For you make me glad
by your deeds, Lord.
I sing for joy
at what your hands have done.
How great are your works, Lord.
How profound your thoughts.
The psalmist has in mind
the saving deeds
of the Lord in the Exodus,
the wonderful works of redemption
from bondage in Egypt
to freedom in the promised land.
And friends,
we have so much more
to rejoice over
because we've seen
the saving deeds
and the wonderful works
of the Lord
in His Son, Jesus Christ.
How He's taken us
out of our bondage
and He's given us
His freedom.
We've seen how the Father
sent His Son
from heaven to earth.
We've seen how Jesus
took on human nature
so He could represent us.
We saw how Jesus
embodied and demonstrated
the Father's covenant love
and His sworn loyalty
by volunteering His hands
for the nails of that cross.
We saw how Jesus
put Himself there
in our place
to be punished for our sins
and to die our death.
And we saw how He was raised
to life
so that He could give us
new life.
And when we see
the costly love
of Jesus on His cross,
we can't help but cry out,
You make me glad
by Your deeds, Lord.
I shout with cries of joy
at what Your nail-pierced hands
have done for me.
You with me?
So, I just want to give
a little bit of practical,
down-to-earth,
nitty-gritty pastoral application
and some guidance
to help you put
this holy practice,
this holy habit of grace
into practice
on a weekly
and not every other weekly
or monthly basis.
You ready for some guidance?
You're not ready.
I can tell.
Here's the first thing.
Prepare for the Sabbath
on Saturday morning
and afternoon.
Get your laundry washed,
your bills paid,
wrap up that work project,
finish your homework,
do the grocery shopping,
work through your to-do list.
Our Friday newsletter
that we send out every week
has a link at the very bottom.
It says,
Songs for this Sunday.
It takes you to a YouTube
or a Spotify playlist
and you can listen to that
while you work
so that you can know
the songs we're going to sing
here on Sunday morning.
Secondly,
begin your Sabbath
on Saturday at sundown
and mark the moment.
Light a candle.
Pray a psalm.
Ask the Holy Spirit
to come and fill you
and fill that time.
Enjoy dinner with your family
and your friends.
Go on a walk.
Have dessert.
Drink tea.
Stop.
Number three,
take a 24-hour break
from your technology.
Ooh.
Turn off your screens.
Power down your devices.
Put them in a box
and stow them in a closet.
Create an out-of-office message
that says,
I will respond to emails
on Sunday night
and just drink deeply
of an unplugged human life.
Amen?
Number four,
prepare for worship.
So,
after you've put yourself to bed
early on Saturday night
and given yourself
the opportunity
to get really good sleep
and woken up
and had that delicious
and big breakfast
to last you through
about 1 o'clock
or 1.30
on Sunday afternoon,
I want you just to pray
on Sunday morning,
whether that's at home
or here in our boiler room
because how many of us
go and work out
without warming up?
What happens
when we work out
without warming up?
Bad things happen.
Bad things.
Your Achilles starts to act up
and you've got to go
to physical therapy, right?
So,
why wouldn't we warm up
for worship?
Number five,
arrive early
and stay late
and here's the deal.
If you come 15 minutes earlier
than you normally do,
you will be here,
some of you will be here
to welcome the newcomers
who get here at 10.15
and some of you
will be here at 10.30
when we start.
Every week.
Our coffee hour afterwards,
our monthly lunches,
those are times
to build up the joints
and the ligaments
and the connective tissues
of the body of Christ.
Our classes are times
for us to have shared vision
and values,
shared life and language,
so pack a lunch
if you need to.
Number six,
pursue one another's good.
The Gospels tell us
that Jesus fed people
and he healed people
on the Sabbath day.
So,
invite someone to lunch
and allow God
to minister through you
to their loneliness
and to their burdens
that you have no idea
they're carrying
into this place.
Number seven,
this is really important,
take a nap.
Go on a walk.
Enjoy the fact
that salvation
has been finished
in Jesus Christ.
Enjoy the fact
that the Holy Spirit
has set you free.
Here's number eight.
Make a plan
for Sunday evening
because the Psalm says
we proclaim your love
in the morning
and your faithfulness
at night.
The whole day
belongs to God.
It's not Sabbath morning
and then the rest of the day
you just do whatever you like.
It's not the Lord's hour,
it's the Lord's day.
So,
I think all of us
would do well
to ask this question,
how can I live
on the Sabbath day
the way that I want
to live all the other
six days of the week
from morning to night?
And maybe for you
that's just sitting down
at the dinner table
and opening the Bible,
maybe reviewing
what you heard about
in the sermon
of the lesson that day.
Sing a hymn,
pray about the week ahead,
pray for all the people
you're going to have
conversations with,
pray that God
would give you guidance
that through you
God's blessing would flow
into the lives
of other people.
Psalm 92 says
that the Sabbath
is a whole day
for the goodness
of praising the Lord
and the gladness
of His saving deeds.
Some of you complain
that I'm not practical enough
and I'm trying to remedy
that in this series
by just getting
super down to earth
and I hope that's
helpful for you.
Why did God
give us the Sabbath?
How do we actually
celebrate the Sabbath?
But then the last thing
I want to look at
is what does God do
in us through the Sabbath?
What does God do
in us through the Sabbath?
And here's verse 6.
See what the Sabbath day
does is it enables us
to gain perspective.
The Sabbath day
enables us to rise above
the mess and the muddle
of our week.
It enables us to rise above
all those limited,
finite, fallible,
and temporary perspectives
of all the people
around us
in order to come
and gain God's perspective
on human life
and human history.
The psalmist says,
left to ourselves,
we are senseless
and foolish.
Left to ourselves,
we just don't know
and we don't have understanding.
Understanding about what?
Well, he says,
think about the seasons.
The climate in Israel
is basically like the climate
in Northern California.
And he says,
you know,
think about those winter rains.
Think about how the hills
spring up
and they flourish
with lush green grass.
And remember that God
allows that to happen.
He allows people to flourish
who actually are centering
their lives on themselves.
People who are centering
their whole life,
organizing all their time
around their desires
and their agendas.
God is so kind
and he's so patient
that he allows people
who neglect him
and who ignore him.
He allows people
who live apart from him.
He allows people
who think to themselves,
it is good to do
almost anything
but praise the Lord.
God allows them
to flourish
like the green grass.
But of course,
that's not the whole story,
is it?
Because the green grass
grows from
about November to May.
and then what starts
to happen?
And then the sun
starts to scorch the grass
and wither the grass.
It turns the grass golden
and brown
and lifeless.
And you see,
the Sabbath day
gives us God's perspective
of how to distinguish
between flourishing now
and ruin later.
How does the psalmist
describe this for us?
He says in verse 8,
but you, Lord,
are forever exalted
for surely your enemies, Lord,
surely your enemies
will perish.
All evildoers
will be scattered.
You see,
if the Lord
is the exalted one,
if he's the most high,
if he's sovereign
and supreme,
if he's utterly just
and righteous,
and if people
neglect him
and ignore him,
if people live apart
from him
as if they're their own makers
and their own judges
and their own lords.
That green grass
that God is allowing
to flourish now,
it's very soon
going to face the reality
that without a relationship
with the living God,
without his divine life,
without his eternal life
in you,
you just can't stay
green forever.
You're going to dry up.
You're going to wither.
You're going to become lifeless.
You're going to become
like chaff
that the wind blows away.
And you see,
it's only as we give ourselves
to the Sabbath worship
of God
that he enables us
to see
that temporary prosperity
is very often
just a prelude
to perishing,
but that it's
eternal flourishing
that ultimately matters
in the end.
And what is it
that brings about
eternal flourishing?
Well, in verse 8,
there's this very subtle shift
in the speaker.
And we kind of have
to ask ourselves,
like, who is speaking here?
And who it is,
this is actually
God's anointed king,
and he's speaking
to the Lord,
and the anointed king
is saying to the Lord,
he says,
Lord, you are forever exalted.
Lord, your enemies
are going to perish.
And then what does
the king declare?
He says in verse 10,
you have exalted my horn
like that of a wild ox.
Fine oils have been
poured on me.
My eyes have seen
the defeat of my adversaries.
My ears have heard
the rout of my wicked foes.
This is a king
who's talking enthusiastically
about the victory
that God has given him.
The ox is a symbol
of fierce strength.
The horn,
a symbol of power
and honor.
The oil,
a symbol of anointing.
All of these are signs
of a royal victory.
And of course,
Christians can't help
but hear in this
the voice of our king,
Jesus,
speaking to the Lord
about his victory
over sin and death,
about the defeat
of his great adversary,
the devil,
about the rout
of his wicked foes,
those dark powers
and principalities
that seek to steal
and kill
and destroy
human beings.
And this is a song
for us about the victory
of this anointed king
who paradoxically wins
by being defeated.
But more than that,
this song is not just
about the victory
of the anointed king,
it's about what his victory
means for us
and for our lives.
And here it is
in verse 12.
The righteous will flourish
like a palm tree.
They will grow
like a cedar of Lebanon.
Planted in the house
of the Lord,
they will flourish
in the courts of our God.
They will still bear fruit
in old age.
They will stay fresh
and green,
proclaiming,
the Lord is upright.
He is my rock
and there is no wickedness
in him.
You see,
the victory of King Jesus
means that instead
of our lives
being like green grass
that just flourishes today
and perishes tomorrow,
we, by God's grace,
can be these palms
and these cedars,
these evergreen trees
in the presence of God.
The picture here
is of a new garden of Eden.
The picture here
is of an orchard
of evergreen trees
who find their nourishment
in the abundant
and never-ending source
of God himself.
Those who find
their nourishment
in God
humbly draw their strength,
their spiritual energy
from him,
they're going to flourish
like that tall
and graceful palm tree,
it says.
They're going to flourish
like that mighty
and beautiful cedar tree,
it says.
Those who say to God,
you are my rock
and no other.
You are my reliable refuge.
You are my never-failing shelter
and my savior
will be like these rooted
and stable
and long-lasting
evergreen trees
whose leaves
never wither.
Those who look
to the resurrected Jesus
as their rock,
those who look to Jesus
and say,
you are upright
and there is no wickedness
in you,
they're going to be
full of sap
and they're going to be
laden with rich foliage,
not only in their old age,
but they're going to have
endless vitality
in Jesus' new creation.
Friends,
that is the eternal perspective
that God wants to put into us
on his Sabbath day
and that is the coming reality,
that is the coming hope
that we celebrate
on the Sabbath.
And so,
I want to just end
with these words
from the prophet Isaiah.
The prophet Isaiah
says this in Isaiah 58,
if you keep your feet
from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing
as you please
on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath
a delight
and the Lord's holy day
honorable,
and if you honor it
by not going your own way
and not doing
as you please
or speaking idle words,
then you will find
your joy in the Lord.
Then I will cause you
to ride in triumph
on the heights of the land.
And then you will feast
on the inheritance
of your father Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord
has spoken.
In the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.