What a crazy world we live in today.
Do you ever feel like the Rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland”? You know the one, he’s always rushing this way and that looking at his watch and muttering, “I’m late, I’m late”.
It seems that every hour of every day is filled to the limit with things that need doing and we never seem to have enough time to do it all. How often have you caught yourself wishing for more hours in the day or more days in the week so that you could finally catch up and finish everything that you are supposed to do?
That wouldn’t do any good though. We all know Murphy’s law and some of us know about Newton’s law of gravity. But are you familiar with Parkinson’s Law, first outlined in the middle of the last century? 1955. It was developed by C. Northcote Parkinson who wrote, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
And so regardless of how much time you have available you still won’t have enough.
And if you were granted your wish of having an extra day in each week your stress level would simply be added to, because you would have one more day to try to jam too much into. Maybe instead we should wish for shorter days with fewer days in the week to limit our crazy schedules.
Modern technology promised us that all of the new conveniences would save us time and make our lives easier, but in the workplace, computers, the internet, and cell phones have increased the pace of our work rather than reducing it.
At home, dishwashers, washing machines, vacuums and microwaves have made life easier but to go back to Parkinson’s law, work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
And so mothers lose the time they saved to carting the kids around to hockey, music and school activities. Even our kids are stressed out because so much of their time is scheduled and there is so little time to just be a kid, playing and allowing their imaginations to run wild.
It is a never ending circle that seems to escalate over time until finally, there is no more time. Henry Twells an English poet who lived in the 1800’s wrote:
When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full-grown man,
Time RAN.
When older still I daily grew,
Time FLEW.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.
O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then?
Amen.
And a little less poetic, but just as true, it was Andy Rooney who said, “I've learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.”
This is week 5 of our series, A Return to Civility. And it came about when I wondered if the culture that we are living in, where we are no longer free to agree to disagree and where public discourse has de-evolved into rude, intolerant name-calling, is the result of the lack of a mutual morality that we used to share.
There was a time when most North Americans attended a weekly worship service, and one of the things we shared, was this short list of rules called the Ten Commandments.
And it is in this crazy rushed world we live in that we would like to re-introduce the fourth commandment which reads Exodus 20:8–11 Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your livestock, and any foreigners living among you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.
The Sabbath, a day of rest, seems to be archaic today in the year 2024.
And maybe you’re thinking “Well sure, that was fine back then when people didn’t have as much to do, as far to go, but no sir, not for 2024. In 2024 we need every hour of every day and every day of the week to get done what we have to get done.” And that technical term for that my friend is a crock.
Please remember one cardinal rule of life, “You do, what you want to do.” The fourth commandment was not given just for the people of Israel as they wandered in the wilderness, and it wasn’t just given for Jesus and his disciples, it wasn’t just given for John Wesley and the early Methodists in the 1700s or and it wasn’t just given for your grandparents. The fourth commandment is as valid today as it was 30 years ago, 200 years ago, 2000 years ago or 4000 years ago.
God didn’t just give it to annoy people or to mess up their plans for the weekend he did it because he knew what we are like. He knew that if he didn’t legislate a time out in our lives that we wouldn’t take one.
A tree has to take a break. It can’t say, “You know I really should produce leaves all year round and fruit in January when it’s cold and miserable.” It can’t say that, because it has no choice. It must take a break because that’s the way it was created.
But people are different. We have our freedom and that is the problem. We can drive our bodies, minds and emotions well past the breaking point. We have the power of choice and because of that power we are always in danger of destroying ourselves for some false set of values. It might be work, it might be appearance, it might be the desire to be the perfect parent, and in combination, it provides a deadly cocktail for burnout.
Because of this great hazard, God gave us a great gift, the Sabbath day, a day set apart, the Lord’s Day, a day of rest and worship, relaxation, recuperation and joy. It is his gift to all of us, but it’s up to each one of us to decide whether or not we will accept it.
A lot of confusion, misunderstanding, dogmatism and hard feelings are generated by this commandment. Almost everybody uses it to prove some point of view. So, let’s move very carefully as we explore what it means to observe the Sabbath today.
Now at this point we need to clarify that in the Christian church, in most cases, we do not celebrate the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the last day of the week, remember what we just read, Exodus 20:8–10 “Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the LORD your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work. . .
The seventh day of the week or the Sabbath has historically been celebrated from sundown Friday until sundown on Saturday. And in its original form it merely forbade the performance of work on the seventh day, it was set apart as a day of total rest.
And so, our Sunday, which is the first day of the week, is not the historic Sabbath. But we are Christians, not Jews; most of us aren’t even Christian Jews like the early church. I know that in our Christian vocabulary and in our hymns and poems we certainly use the word “Sabbath” as a valid figure of speech when referring to Sunday, but we need to understand that the two are not the same.
The fourth commandment is the only Old Testament commandment that is not repeated anywhere in the New Testament, nowhere. Each of the other nine commandments are reiterated and often made even tougher in the New Testament, but not this one.
There is no record of Jesus ever teaching anyone to keep the Sabbath. As far as we know, no apostle ever told anyone to observe it. In John 5:18 we are told that Jesus violated the Sabbath and in other stories, we almost get the impression that he did so very deliberately.
But if the letter of the law, the seventh day Sabbath is not applicable to us today, certainly the principle of the Sabbath still is. Because it is grounded in the nature of God, in the nature of man and in the nature of creation.
We discover the sabbath in the creation story, on day six, God created the animals, culimating with his creation of humanity, and we pick up the story in Genesis 2:1 So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed.
But the story doesn’t end there, if we keep reading, we discover in Genesis 2:2–3 On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation.
Although there is nowhere in the New Testament where we are taught the exact literal Saturday Sabbath command the New Testament certainly reinforces the divine principle behind the command.
That principle is that a specific and proportionate amount of time is to be set apart for rest and worship. That principle was not first laid down in the book of Exodus but in the book of Genesis, which tells how God himself rested after six days of creative labour.
Every once in a while, I read something and think, I’ve never thought of that before. In her book, The Ten Commandments, the Significance of God’s Laws in Everyday Life, Dr. Laura Schlessinger reflects on the fact that when Adam and Eve were created on day six, they woke up on day Seven and realized that they had another day. Schlessinger goes on to write, “Every Sabbath, like the first one, we should awaken with a deep appreciation of what it means to wake up and live another day.”
And even before the Commandments were given, earlier in the book of Exodus when God provided manna for the Israelites to eat, he told them to gather a double portion on the sixth day so they wouldn’t have to collect it on the seventh day.
The Christians of the New Testament soon discarded the literal Seventh Day, the Sabbath, but kept the Sabbath day principle.
Instead of keeping the last day of the week, they began keeping the first day of the week, which we call Sunday. Why? Because it was recognized as being the day Christ arose from the dead.
Paul follows the great resurrection chapter in 1 Corinthians 15 with these words in 1 Corinthians 16:2 On the first day of each week, you should each put aside a portion of the money you have earned. Don’t wait until I get there and then try to collect it all at once.
And so, Paul establishes a principle of a set time of the week when a gift is given to God. The first day of the week.
But it’s not enough to know where the concept of the Lord’s Day came from, we need to understand why the principle behind the Sabbath is still valid today. And we find the key in three spots in the scripture. The first is from the command itself. Exodus 20:8–10 Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the LORD your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your livestock, and any foreigners living among you.
And so, the first thing we need to see is how this command relates to “A Time to Rest”.
We live in a tired generation, we are chasing a brass ring that may never be able to be caught and we are willing to make way too many sacrifices for it, and we do sacrifice for it and it’s not necessarily a new phenomenon listen to what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote over a hundred years ago “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by neglect of many other things.”
The rest that God commands us to take allows us to step back from the arena of life and evaluate exactly what it is we are trying to achieve. Even from a purely physical perspective it has been proven that people cannot go on indefinitely without things starting to go wrong with their bodies, their minds and their emotions. God is basically telling us in the fourth commandment, “Take a break”
Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “I do not mean to make an idol of health, but it does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least. When we lie down to sleep at night, we offer our full appointment calendars to God in lieu of prayer, believing that God—who is as busy as we are—will surely understand”
But it’s not just a day of rest; the next scripture would indicate that there is more to Sabbath observance then simply staying in bed, sorry. Deuteronomy 5:15 Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt, but the Lord your God brought you out with his strong hand and powerful arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to rest on the Sabbath day.
And although not scripturally mandated, a Sunday afternoon nap is a wonderful gift.
Not only does God call us to rest on a special day but he also calls us to take Time to Reflect on that day as well. In this scripture, God is calling his people to reflect on how He had delivered them from the slavery of Egypt.
I would suspect that it would be fair to talk about how we now need to reflect on how he delivered us from sin.
Now some people try to rationalize that a Sabbath spent golfing, shopping or going to the beach as fulfilling the spirit of the Sabbath. Golfers in particular plead their case by saying, “I do more real praying on the golf course than I do in church”.
However, “Please God, give me a birdie,” is not recognized as part of any accepted liturgy, nor does it substitute for a good worship service. And there’s probably a lot more cussing then there is praying on the golf course.
Sunday is a day for God’s people to get together and to reflect and celebrate what He has done for us.
We do that by singing his praise, by reading and hearing from his word, by lifting up his name in prayer and by giving to his work. In this case it’s Cornerstone.
We had mentioned previously that it appeared that Jesus had a problem with the Sabbath, which isn’t exactly true, what he had a problem with was what people had done to the Sabbath. Mark 2:27–28 Then Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord, even over the Sabbath!”
Throughout history the observance of the Sabbath or of the Lord’s Day has inspired two extremes. People have found ways to misuse this gift just as they’ve found ways to misuse the other gifts that God has given us. The first extreme are those people who have historically made Sunday into a day of gloom and depression instead of a day of joy and gladness. This is what had happened in Jesus day. The scribes and Pharisees had counted 39 letters in the original langue of the fourth commandment and multiplied 39 by 39 and came up with 1521 and that was the number of ways they had come up with to break the Sabbath.
We aren’t going to do the fourth commandment any favours when we turn it into something like “Thou shalt not enjoy life on Sunday.” Many people mean well, but we cannot make people, especially children, enjoy God by forbidding them to enjoy anything else on Sunday. Such a rigid observance of Sunday can become just as idolatrous today as it was in Jesus day and that is what he was warning us about.
But usually today that’s not our problem is it. Our problem today is probably the opposite extreme. We turned a holy day into a holiday and then simply made it the last day of the weekend. A day of commercialized recreation, entertainment and profit.
There is a great lesson from Jesus found in Matthew 12:9–11 Then Jesus went over to their synagogue, where he noticed a man with a deformed hand. The Pharisees asked Jesus, “Does the law permit a person to work by healing on the Sabbath?” (They were hoping he would say yes, so they could bring charges against him.) And he answered, “If you had a sheep that fell into a well on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you work to pull it out? Of course you would.
Some of us have taken that passage and have used it as an excuse for everything and anything on Sunday.
The truth is though if we are careful and avoid pushing the sheep in the well through the week, then we won’t have to spend our Sunday pulling it out.
And if your sheep has a habit of falling into the same well every week then you ought to fill in the well or get a new sheep.
According to the Bible, God created the Sabbath. It’s not just a day on which nothing happened, but God blessed it and made it holy. It is intended as more than just a day of fun or rest. Within that day represents one-seventh of our week and ultimately one-seventh of our life.
The first six days the bible tells us God called “good” the seventh day God made Holy. So, what can we do on Sunday or what should we do? Good question.
I think I’ll close with some wisdom from Dr. Laura Schlessinger gives in her book “The Ten Commandments, the Significance of God’s Laws in Everyday Life.”
“We think of ourselves as being omnipotent during the week. Through our creative abilities, we emulate God. Once a week we must redefine our essence. We spend the week trying to understand the mysteries of the universe through science. We perform new engineering feats, we open the mysteries of the atom, and we search the heavens and the earth for signs of life.
On the Sabbath, we search for the essence of God. Shabbat is the antidote to the tendency toward self-idolatry. On this day, we are reminded that God is God.”
So, to honour the fourth commandment, and in the spirit of Jesus’ words, that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, are you willing to take some time to intentionally connect with God and His family in a proportional and deliberate way, each week?
Free PowerPoint may be available for this message, contact me at denn@cornerstonehfx.ca
