We are working our way through the Ten Commandments,
the Ten Words, as God puts it.
And the fourth command we just read is about the Sabbath.
So far it's been thou shalt not, thou shalt not.
After this, mostly it's gonna be thou shalt not,
thou shalt not.
This is one of the two commandments that's positive.
Remember the Sabbath, honor your father and mother.
So we don't have here what are you being commanded not to do.
We have what you're being commanded to do.
It's positive.
So let's think about it.
First, what about it?
What about it?
What does it mean for us?
Does it apply?
That's the first question.
Secondly, what is being commanded of us?
And then lastly, how can we practice it?
Okay, so first, what about it?
And by that I mean, is this for me?
Is this for you?
Is this commandment for us tonight?
To remember the Sabbath day.
It's really clear what is being commanded here
in verse eight and following.
He says, remember the Sabbath day, keep it holy.
Set it apart, six days you are to work,
one day you are to rest.
So there's a very clear six plus one principle.
Six days you shall labor, one take off the Sabbath.
And the Sabbath day for ancient Israel
is a Saturday, the end of the week.
And so it's very obvious what God's telling them to do.
Keep it holy, meaning make it distinct.
Make sure you don't do anything else but rest
on that one day.
Now, is there a Sabbath day for the people of God?
Are we tonight being commanded to remember the Sabbath day
and keep it holy?
So it's a simple question, it's a first things first
kind of question.
We've got to address it, we have to answer it, right?
Now it's important to say first that Christians
disagree about that.
And they've always disagreed about it.
From the very beginning, the second century forward,
Christians have been in debate about this.
And we say even the confession that we subscribe to here
at St. Columbus says that not all things in the Bible
are alike plain in its old English,
meaning not everything is as clear as the gospel is.
And so there's secondary things that we all debate about
as Christians and that's okay.
That's the very first thing we have to say.
Now the answer tonight, however, however, the answer is yes.
So there's a debate but the answer is yes.
No, is this the Sabbath for us?
The answer is yes, I think,
but it's okay to disagree about that.
And I want to say that even in that yes,
even if, and there will be people,
some of you tonight will say,
I'm not so sure about that and that's okay and good.
And but even if you say I'm not so sure,
the answer is still basically yes.
So let me say what I mean.
Why?
Okay, verse eight, he says, remember the Sabbath day.
Why does he say, not, he doesn't say keep it,
but remember it?
And the reason for that is because
they're already practicing the Sabbath day.
They've been practicing the Sabbath day
ever since they left Egypt.
They already know about it.
This is not something they're learning about
for the first time.
And that's because at least,
well the Sabbath goes back a long way.
That's why, you know, the Sabbath goes all the way back
to the beginning of human history, a beginning of time.
Jesus, Jesus, God, the father, son and spirit
on the seventh day after creating the world
and six days rested, took Sabbath, kept Sabbath
on the seventh day.
And so they know about the Sabbath day.
They remember it because they know that it goes all the way
back to the beginning of the world when God took rest.
It's a pre-fall reality.
Now that teaches us a couple of things.
One, you can't say then that the Sabbath,
we can't say then that the Sabbath is a mere aspect
of Old Testament judicial law under the kingdom of Israel.
You can't say that.
You can't merely say that because the Sabbath began
at creation way before Israel ever existed.
So we can't leave it simply at that.
Well, that's Old Testament judicial law
and now we know that that's been fulfilled.
But it goes back way before that,
all the way back to the beginning.
The second thing we learn here is the issue
is that you can say, you all probably say tonight,
look, I get, probably, it's not good to murder.
It's not good to commit adultery.
It's not good to steal.
It's not good to covet.
It's not good to engrave an image of a bird
and worship it like it's God.
There's a temptation to say, you know, I'm okay with nine.
I'm good with the nine.
Those make sense.
But now that we live in the new covenant era,
the new Testament, there's one that I don't have
to observe any longer.
And I don't know that that works very well.
It doesn't work very well.
The 10 words are the 10 words.
And the 10 words actually communicate a fabric,
a grain to reality itself.
And when you're walking in accordance and alignment
with that grain, that fabric, God's way, God's way,
he's saying that your life can flourish.
And when you stand against the 10 words,
have you ever stood against the 10 words?
Yes.
When you stand against the 10 words,
you know that you're in those instances,
sabotaging your life.
You're not walking in the grain of reality.
You're not walking in alignment.
And all the 10 words teach us together,
the alignment of reality,
walking in the grain that God has made.
But hold on a second.
What about the new Testament?
When you come to the new Testament, the problem looms.
And the question looms.
And the question is this.
In Colossians chapter two, verse 16 and 17,
Paul says,
let no one pass judgment on you
in questions of food and drink,
or with regard to the festival or the Sabbath.
So Paul comes and says,
now hold on,
do not ever Christian pass a judgment on another person
because they decide to eat or drink that.
And in the first century,
referencing all the laws from the Old Testament,
where Jewish Christians were deciding
for the first time to eat pork, for instance,
he says, don't pass judgment on that
if you decide either direction.
He says, don't pass judgment if you say,
I think the Sabbath is binding,
or I think it's not binding.
He says, actually you can't pass judgment
in either direction.
And what he's saying there is that it's a secondary matter.
Now he's not telling us the Sabbath is not binding.
It's not still a command for us,
but he's saying it's a secondary issue.
And so never pass judgment
on anybody because of their opinion,
what they think the Bible teaches about the Sabbath.
And nevertheless, at the same time,
the New Testament, I think,
teaches that it's still a command for us.
And so he says in the second line,
he says, these things, the Sabbath, food, drink, festivals
are a shadow of the things to come,
but the substance belongs to Christ.
Now even more, he's saying,
don't you see the Sabbath and the Old Testament,
this day of rest was a shadow,
but the substance is now found in Christ.
And you say, isn't he saying there
that now that Jesus has come, the Sabbath command
has been so fulfilled in him,
Jesus has become my rest,
that I no longer need a specific day of the week
to say that's my rest day under God.
Because Jesus is that, is that for me, seven days a week,
he is the substance.
The Sabbath was a shadow, but he's the substance.
And the answer is absolutely, absolutely.
Jesus Christ has fulfilled the Sabbath.
He is our Sabbath rest.
And when you come to Hebrews four,
the writer of Hebrews says, Jesus Christ is your Sabbath rest
and there still yet remains a Sabbath
for the people of God in the future.
And so here's how it works.
The writer is telling us it's both,
Jesus is your Sabbath.
You can Sabbath in him seven days a week.
You can rest in him.
You can put your deadly doings down.
You can come and rest.
And at the same time, there yet remains a Sabbath rest
for the people of God in the future.
In other words, the writer is saying,
the Sabbath is both now in Jesus and not yet,
not fully realized yet.
There is yet a day to come where you will completely rest.
And so until then, the weekly Sabbath day is a sign
of what is yet to come in Jesus Christ.
It's both now for you and Christ and it's not yet.
One day it's gonna come even more in Jesus Christ
when he comes again.
It's now and not yet, it's both.
And so let's move on, but let me say the unique way
the New Testament teaches us about this.
And it's marked off in a significant way in the gospels.
In Mark 16 and John chapter 20,
and here's how it talks about it.
Mark 16, the resurrection story.
Mark 16 verse two in the ESV says,
on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene
and some of the disciples ran to the tomb at sunrise.
But a very literal translation of the Greek
says something like this,
very early on the Sabbath day plus one,
Mary Magdalene and the disciples ran to the tomb
and it was empty.
You see, it doesn't say on the first day of the week,
it says on the Sabbath and one, the Sabbath plus one.
Now if you go through John's gospel
and we can't develop this tonight,
you'll see that the whole of John's gospel
is structured as a seven day movement
of Jesus' ministry,
symbolically putting the whole of Jesus' ministry
into seven days and then on resurrection day,
it's the seven plus one, it's the eighth day.
Mark 16 verse two says,
in resurrection day is seven, the Sabbath plus one.
And so Christians for 20 centuries now
have talked about Sunday,
not as the first day of the week, but as the eighth day.
And if all of creation happened in six plus one, seven days,
what the writers are doing and saying,
it's as if history from creation to Jesus
is one full cycle, one full week.
But now that Jesus has risen from the dead,
the eighth day of history has begun.
The first day of new creation.
You see, we had creation in seven days
and now the first day of new creation has begun,
the eighth day.
And that's why Christians started to worship on Sunday,
the eighth day.
And that's why Revelation 110 says,
the eighth day, Sunday, the first day,
the eighth day is the Lord's day.
And so you can call it the Lord's day,
you can call it the Christian Sabbath,
people have debated about that, you can do either one,
but it's there, it's real.
It's the eighth day, it's the Lord's day,
it's the day of resurrection and it's the day of worship.
Now, if you say then two things,
two lessons to take away from that.
One, if you tonight say,
I believe the Sabbath still exists for the people of God,
it's an obligation, it's a gift that God is calling me to.
The eighth day today, this Sunday, resurrection day,
the Lord's day, if you believe that
and your neighbor says, actually,
I think it's completely fulfilled in Jesus.
And I don't know that there's a single obligatory day
that we're to gather and worship.
I think you could think about doing that in different ways.
Then remember, remember Colossians one, Colossians two, 16.
Paul says, do not judge your fellow believer
for the theology they've developed, their opinion on this.
He says, it's a secondary matter.
It's not something to question somebody's status
as a believer about, not at all.
And if you think there's no way it's obligatory,
then don't question the status of the believers
who think it is.
He says, actually, you can have peace and disagree
and that's okay, it's a hard thing to look at
and answer.
Now, but the second thing is this
and we'll move on to the next point.
The second thing is that here's what we all can say,
no matter what you think about it.
It's from the beginning.
The Lord took Sabbath on the seventh day of creation.
And that means at least we all have to agree
that it's a wise thing to do.
You know, why wouldn't you?
Why wouldn't you observe the Sabbath?
The Lord did it.
If people have been doing it for so long across human history,
if you go to Blackwells, to Waterstones,
you'll pick up productivity books and you know what they'll say?
They'll say, the ancient religions, Judaism, Christianity,
understood that you need a Sabbath day and they'll say,
and we figured out that when we do scientific studies about it,
you really do.
It's wisdom.
You see, it's built into the grain of life
and 40% of all the words of the Ten Commandments,
40% are dedicated to the Sabbath command, 40%.
And if God gave 40% to this one thing,
it's probably still real, right?
It's a big deal in the list of the Ten.
Most of the words go to it.
It's wisdom.
It's built in, you know, it's so built in to the fabric of reality,
to flourishing that we learned in the Old Testament
that the land needed a Sabbath day.
That every seven sets of seven, every 49 years,
the 50th year was the year of Jubilee,
where God said, do not work the land.
Give the land a Sabbath.
Give debtors who have been put in prison
and had their land taken away every seven years, release them.
It's a Sabbath.
You see, the Sabbath says that grace, grace,
is built right into the fabric of world history.
Grace for the land, grace for the debtor.
Rest, grace for you, every single week.
Secondly, okay, let's get practical.
What's being commanded?
Okay, the way to see what's being commanded specifically
is by looking at the details here, the why.
Why does he tell us to observe this?
Now, we haven't looked at this yet in our series,
but the Ten Commandments are listed in two places
in the Old Testament, here in Exodus 20,
but also Deuteronomy chapter five.
And it's interesting, when you go to Deuteronomy five,
there's a different why for observing the Sabbath day.
And in Deuteronomy five, the reason that we're given is,
as God says, you were slaves in Egypt,
and I bore you on eagle's wings.
Therefore, remember the Sabbath day.
So the reason that you're given in the second instance
of the Ten Commandments is you were a slave,
so you better rest on the seventh day.
In other words, he's talking about the original context,
and he's saying, you were slaves,
you Israelites were slaves for 400 years,
and now I'm commanding you take a day off work.
Because for 400 years, you worked seven days a week,
all day long, morning till evening,
and he's saying, and I'm telling you,
you know, I got you out of Egypt,
but I'm having to command you to get Egypt out of you.
In other words, he's telling them this because they will
and do throughout the whole Old Testament struggle to Sabbath
because they want to work.
And he's saying, I bore you on eagle's wings,
I pulled you out of slavery,
stop running back to Egypt.
You know, he's saying, you've got to get the inner pharaoh
out of your heart.
He's not your boss and master anymore,
but for some reason you can't leave him behind.
And so he's addressing in Deuteronomy five
the problem of chronic busyness,
the problem of overwork.
And he's saying, you've got to get pharaoh out of your heart,
even though you've gotten pharaoh, you've gotten out of Egypt.
Stop acting like slaves.
One theologian says that the Sabbath command
is the great act of resistance.
It's to say every week to the world of work,
I will not be a slave to you.
It's a great act of resistance.
And, you know, Bilbo understood it, I think, really well.
Bilbo, in talking to Gandalf,
do you remember what he said about it?
He said, I feel thin, sort of stretched out
like butter scraped over too much bread.
And in that he said, I feel like in life I'm so busy
that I'm languishing.
Like I'm scraped butter and my life is a scraped life, scraped out.
I'm not flourishing, I'm languishing.
So, ten words are there to say, here's how you flourish,
not languish.
And so, the first thing he tells us is the reason why you need the Sabbath
is because you've got to inner pharaoh.
And that inner pharaoh is constantly driving you back to work,
to work, to work, to work all the time.
Now, we'll come back to that in just a minute,
but here's the second reason.
The second reason is the deeper meaning.
And it's not in Deuteronomy 5, it's in Exodus 20.
Remember, they give us different reasons why we observed the Sabbath.
Deuteronomy 5 says because you were a slave
and you've got to get that slavery out of your heart.
Exodus 20 says something different.
And you can see it there in verse 11.
It says in verse 11,
in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything else,
and then he rested.
So he doesn't go to your slavery, to the slavery of Israel.
He instead goes back to the beginning and says,
the reason you observed the Sabbath day is because God did,
at the beginning of creation, like we talked about a minute ago.
Now, that's important to think about because why?
God obviously does not need to rest like we do.
You know, God did not take a Sabbath day at the end of creation to recharge his batteries.
God did not need to lay on the couch, you know, one day of the week.
Not at all. God doesn't have a body.
God is spirit.
God is the spirit. He doesn't have a body.
So it can't mean something like the physical rest that says,
don't be addicted to your work. You need rest.
It can't mean that. God's Sabbath rest is not that.
Instead, what is it?
And here's what, if you read across the way people have interpreted this for years and years,
it's basically something like this, that God's Sabbath is his beholding the world that he made with delight.
That he came down into what he made and he took joy.
He took joy. He took joy in being in relationship with the people that he made.
That's his Sabbath. He rested. He came down and he said, this is very good.
It was his delight, his joy. That was his rest and saying, it's very good.
I love this. I love to be in relationship with this.
You see, the reason in Exodus 20 is that you don't just need physical rest from your labor.
That's not Sabbath. That's just the beginning.
True Sabbath is to be like God.
And that means that true Sabbath is interior rest, soul rest, the type of rest where you can say,
I take delight. I have deep soul joy like God did in the beginning.
That's true Sabbath.
Now let's come back to Deuteronomy 5 for just a second and think about it then,
because you see that deep rest applies to work rest, to rest from work.
That's what we learned. It's not just about the physical. It's more than that.
It's about the interior. It's about the soul.
Deuteronomy 5 says, don't be a slave to your busyness because you are not made to be like that.
You weren't made to be like that.
And yes, that's a physical thing. Of course, you get fatigue, but more significantly, it's a soul thing.
And here's what it means. It says, it's like this. Here's the principle.
The human principle, we flourish when we realize that we do not stop our work when we're finished.
That you don't wait to stop your work when your work is finished.
Because there is a God and His name is not quarry. His name is not your name.
And that's good news. You don't stop your work when you're finished, because it never will be.
He's saying, you've got to commit to the Sabbath and take the day fully off so that you can teach your soul that you're not in control, that you are not God.
It's about your soul more than about your body. It's about your body, but it goes way deeper than that.
It's about learning that you're not in control. It's the command, lay your doings down in your soul.
Stop your control. Lay down the need to work and perform in order to determine your value and your identity in life.
Lay down the need to curate your identity on social media.
Lay that down on a Sabbath day.
Lay down your job performance to curate your value and identity.
Lay down your public performance as a good person in order to curate your value and your identity.
It's about your soul. You have to learn who you are and that you're not in control.
And so stopping work, resisting the inner pharaoh, is about true deep soul rest, the kind that God experienced on the seventh day.
Now, last thing, and we'll move on to the last point. Back to Exodus 20 from Deuteronomy 5.
It says, stop working. Don't be a slave to your job. Stop working.
But Exodus 20 again, here's why true rest is not, cannot really be binge watching Netflix all day.
If you say that my rest day, my Sabbath day is the West Wing for six, seven, eight hours.
Here's why. Look, have you ever experienced that? You've done that.
You've said, I just need a break and your rest day becomes that, becomes entertainment, mere entertainment.
Have you ever done that and you get up for it and you're not ready to work again? You're not ready to go back.
You're more tired than when you started after that spree on the couch.
And you see that it's because that's not true rest. True rest is not physical. It is physical, but it's more.
It's deeper. It's interior rest. And that's what Exodus 20 is saying. Here it is.
True rest, God took delight.
True rest, we see when God comes down and he takes delight in his relationship with Adam and Eve in the garden.
That, that's what it meant for him to Sabbath.
And so that means for us that Sabbath true rest is when you take delight in your soul, in your abiding and living relationship with God.
That's true rest. That's what really gives you rest.
One of the theologians says it like this. This is very helpful. He says, you know, your strongest desires are not your deepest desires.
Your strong, your very strong desires. Is that not your strong desires?
Your strong desire to lay on the couch all day as rest is not your deepest desire.
And sometimes you have to pass through. You have to see through your very strong desires and you have so many to get to the deep desires.
And when you find the deep desires, then the strong desires start to be reframed and changed. And then you start to truly change from the soul outward.
Deep true change begins by passing through the strong desire to merely be entertained and to get to the depth of the desires.
And that's real rest. Rest with God. Rest with an abiding relationship with the living God.
I think God is saying to Israel, nothing Israel will destroy your ability to take delight in a growing relationship with the Lord who's born you on eagle's wings out of Egypt, like working seven days a week.
Nothing, nothing will stop that faster than working every day.
And modern person, nothing will get in the way of your ability to have a living, deep soul abiding relationship with the real God like working every day of the week.
That's what he's telling us. Alright, so that's why we read from Mark chapter six.
In Mark chapter six, I just want to give you one line from it, not look at the whole thing. One line.
Jesus says in the middle of a controversy around the Sabbath, he says, I am the Lord of the Sabbath.
And, you know, he's saying in that moment, he's connecting himself back to Genesis one and two because Lord in their minds means Old Testament God and Creator.
He's saying I'm the Lord of the Sabbath, meaning I am the God who made the world in six days and took rest on the seventh.
Jesus is saying that's me. I am the one who came down into the Garden of Eden and took delight and joy in this living relationship.
I am that one. I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. I made it. I did it. I was the first one.
So he's telling them, you know, you got to listen to me. I know what I'm talking about.
I know what you're supposed to do on the Sabbath day, Pharisee, because I'm the Lord.
That's what he was telling them in that context. But you see, this is where you learn about true rest.
It's the great paradox of the Gospels. The man, the man who came into the world and said, I am the one who made the Sabbath.
I am the one who took utter delight in what I had made and said, it's very good.
I am the one who has so much joy, infinite joy, eternal joy, abiding joy, a Sabbath heart that weak as human beings can never even fow them.
That's him. And in order to give you that, he became utterly restless.
You know, you exist to rest ultimately with the Lord, with God, and the God who is eternal rest in himself became utterly restless so that you could have that.
That's the great paradox of the Gospels. It's the horror and beauty of the cross.
That the one who is the eternal Sabbath became the anti-sabbath.
That he was hung upon that cursed tree for our restlessness, for our inability to lose control, for our ability from the very beginning of time to say, you're not in control, God, I'm going to be.
He became a slave because we can't get past our inner pharaoh.
He became ultimately impoverished and restless. He became the ultimate slave so that you could know true rest.
The Lord of the Sabbath became the anti-sabbath so you could have it.
And that's the great paradox of history. It's the paradox of the Gospels. It's where true rest comes from.
You know, there's been so many great teachers and philosophers. There's been so many great people, great in so many ways that have started religions over the course of human history.
But none of them, none of them ever said, come to me and I will give you forever rest.
None of them ever said that. He's the only one. He's the only one. None of them. None of them are like him.
Are you weary? Are you heavy burdened by your doings? Your performance at work? Your performance in religion? Your inability to get past your sins?
Are you burdened and weary? He says, come to me and rest. I'll give it to you.
Jesus Christ is our eternal sa… He is our rest. He is the true Sabbath. He is the place on the Sabbath day that we lay down our deadly doings and we rest.
That means that justification leads to the Sabbath, leads us to the Sabbath.
Now lastly, very brief. How do you do it? How do you practice Sabbath?
Now here's the interesting thing. Sabbath is the only one of the ten words that's actually a discipline.
So the rest of the ten words are moral commandments, what not to do.
Sabbath, the Sabbath command is the only one that is an abiding spiritual discipline.
And so what we're being commanded here is to actually say, you've got to practice the Sabbath, to love the Sabbath,
and we all have to be constantly committing and learning to that discipline, the discipline of the Sabbath.
In other words, the Sabbath exists to help you really believe that Jesus is your Sabbath. That's what it exists for.
It's there to work something down into your heart.
And so let me just give you a couple of quick things about it and we'll be finished.
A couple, that's kind of a lie. But a few more than a couple, but they'll be fast, don't worry.
The pre-modern church understood something that I think is really hard for us to see.
In the pre-modern church, all the way back to the second century, third century, it's largely in a literate age.
And so, in a literate age, so much of the Christian's growth in the Christian life was about the disciplines when they couldn't read.
And so, practicing the Sabbath was a way that they experienced the gospel.
Practicing the Lord's Supper was them seeing, tasting, touching the word of the gospel.
And so that means that Sabbath is sort of like the Lord's Supper.
The Lord's Supper is one of the capital S sacraments that Jesus has given us. We're about to do it.
But some of the theologians of old have talked about how something like the Sabbath is like a lower case S sacrament.
It's not one of these sacraments, but it's like that in that it teaches you physically your physical body rest,
but it's meant to show you that your soul can rest too.
It's a discipline that's really unique, kind of like the Lord's Supper.
And so, that's why I think Paul says these really difficult things in the New Testament like, one, he says,
you are saved and so rest in Jesus and now work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
How could he say, you don't work to get your salvation, but work out your salvation?
And I think what he's talking about there is he's saying, your salvation is in Jesus Christ alone rest.
He is your Sabbath and now go and work hard to believe that, to believe that all the way to the bottom of your soul.
He's saying, take on the disciplines of the Christian life, work out your salvation.
In other words, you've got to Sabbath and celebrate the Lord's Supper and read Scripture and pray to really work that truth down into your heart.
What would your life look like if at every moment you really believed that Jesus was your eternal Sabbath?
The second thing is, then he's telling us also the Sabbath is what we actually have to build our life around.
In other words, it's not the addendum to our week.
It's not the thing we add to our work week, but the thing that we build our entire sense of work around.
One pastor I was listening to about this, he says it like this, he says, following Jesus is not a hobby.
Sabbath is not something you add to your work life like an extra ingredient in a recipe.
It is the base.
You actually build the rest of your life around it.
Believing in a theology of the Sabbath is different from practicing it.
He's saying there has to be both.
It has to be the centerpiece of your week.
Third, the what to do.
Eugene Peterson says that there's no coincidence, that our day begins in sleep and our week begins in Sabbath.
So he's saying the Christian has to flip their mindset.
The day begins in sleep and then you go to work.
The week begins in Sabbath and then you go to work.
In other words, he's saying resting in God in sleep and Sabbath is the condition for good work.
It's the condition for going.
So we don't work and then we rest when we're tired.
We rest in the living God so that we can go to work.
That's the mindset that has to be flipped upside down for us modern people.
Now, how do you practice that Sabbath?
I'm going to just list six plus one, six plus one ways.
And we'll just, I'll read them in 90 seconds and we'll be done.
Six ways to spend your Sabbath.
First, commit to time with God and his people in worship.
Hebrews 4 tells us this, don't neglect the assembly of the people of God on the Lord's day.
That's the first thing. There has to be time with God.
Secondly, avocational time, meaning don't do what you do at work on the Sabbath day.
Don't go back to Egypt on the Sabbath day.
Right? If you check email six days of the week, don't check email on the Sabbath.
Go for a walk instead.
But if you're a dog walker, maybe don't go for a walk unless it's actually rejuvenating.
Right? Don't do what you do every other day of the week. Do something different.
Do something different. Avocational and rejuvenate of, reju... I can say that, rejuvenate of time.
Third, soul time. Dedicate time on the Sabbath to your soul.
Have a time for contemplation. Have a time for reading, praying, journaling, writing prayers,
walking and praying, working on your soul.
Fourth, aesthetic time. Get outside. Enjoy the things that God has made.
Enjoy the theater of God's glory if you're able to at all. Why?
Because on God's Sabbath day, He entered creation and says, I love this.
It is very good. Aesthetic time.
Fifth, feasting time. The Sabbath is a day of resurrection and it's a day of feasting.
The Lord's Supper. So feast with God's people.
Sixth, relational time. I think the Gospels teach us to nurture relationships with people on the Sabbath day,
close to you in the church and also with people in need that you see around you.
Mercy, nurturing relationships. Six plus one, the last thing.
The way that these two commands are framed are actually slightly different.
And the way they're framed is they're addressed to the head of the household.
Did you notice that? In verses 8 to 11, six days you shall labor, but in the seventh, seventh is the Sabbath.
And on it you shall not do any work. You, your Son, your servant, the people who work for you.
And in that economy, that household economy, the business was in the home.
Here's the seventh thing to think about as a Christian person who practices Sabbath.
If you're a boss in the modern economy, if you're a boss, this command is speaking to you very directly.
And it's saying, if you have people under you in the workplace and you have the power,
make sure, strive that you have a culture of Sabbath in your workplace,
that you are giving people Christian or not the possibility of true rest.
And that means he's saying that in the household and in the workplace, there's a Sabbath culture,
like the land needs a Sabbath, the debtor needs a Sabbath, grace and rest,
pervading the culture of the household and the workplace.
And if someone asks you as a boss, the last sentence, if someone asks you as a boss,
why is it that you are so generous with rest?
You know, I've worked in so many different places and I've been worked down to the bone,
but here I'm given time to rest, grace.
There's a place, it's different here than you can say,
because in six days God made the world on the seventh he rested.
You can say to that person, because Jesus Christ became ultimately restless, so I could have rest.
And so I want there to be a culture of that here.
You can start a gospel conversation because of the Sabbath culture in the workplace.
Let's pray. Lord, we give thanks for the Sabbath and we pray that you would make it into a place,
as Derek mentioned this morning at the beginning, of joyful Sundays, joyful Sabbath days,
because you took delight, you took joy in creation.
So we ask that we could adopt your heart, your soul, your spirit,
that you would teach us, that you would communicate us what it's like to be like you,
the image of God being the image of God.
And we pray, Lord, above all that we would see that the only way that's really possible is by looking
at the irony, the paradox, the horror of the cross.
Our Savior, restless for us, so that we might have rest.
So today we give thanks for Resurrection Sunday, that in Him there is victory.
Teach us the interior rest of the soul tonight as we go forward, rejuvenated to work, as you've called us to.
In the name of Jesus and Christ's name, amen.