GIVE ME A SIGN: God says here that the Sabbath was intended as a sign.
- Ezekiel 20:10-12.
- These verses tell us that God brought Israel out of Egypt. He gave them the Mosaic Law as a path toward life and peace. And one of the signs He gave them was the Sabbath.
- What exactly does it mean that the Sabbath was a “sign” for them?
- I think the starting point to understanding this is to ask a simple question: why was the Sabbath given?
- The answer to that is two-fold:
a. It was given as a day of worship.
- The Sabbath was a day for the Israelites to worship the Lord. This is crucial, of course. We need to give God the praise and honor that He is worthy of.
- It’s not that He needs an ego boost. But there are a couple reasons this is important. First, we need a regular reminder that He is Lord, lest we wander off into living for lesser gods. Second, He wants us to live for what is ultimately the most meaningful and significant reason and that’s Him. Living, for instance, for money pales in comparison to living for the King of Kings. It would be unloving of Him to encourage us to live for what is less meaningful.
b. It was given as a day of rest.
- The Israelites were to work six days but take the Sabbath off as a day of rest.
- We talk often about the ridiculous and meticulous laws the Pharisees invented regarding what was and was not permissible to do on the Sabbath. Sometimes in laughing over the minutiae of their regulations, we miss a larger point, which is that the Jews were to be resting on that day each week.
- So those are the twin reasons why the Sabbath was instituted, but in what sense are those signs?
- Well, both are. Allow me to explain.
- First, the day of worship was a sign in the sense that everyone watching Israel worship each week would know, “Hey, this is who their God is.”
- The act of worship was a sign of who they believed in.
- Second, the day of rest was also a sign, although the reason is less obvious.
- Life is difficult and making enough to live on is often a great challenge. Because of that, many people work endlessly to keep their head above water.
- Obeying the Sabbath was in a practical sense an act of faith. It was essentially saying, “I’m not going to work one-seventh of the time I could work. I’m doing that even though it’s a lot of hours I’m leaving unused. In doing that, I’m making it clear that I am trusting that God is going to provide what is needed to make it. So this is an act of trust in God that He will be my Provider.
- There is a sense in which we do a similar thing today in tithing. I am saying, “I believe God can do more with the 90% than I can with the 100%. I am doing this as an act of faith that God will sustain me.”
IGNORING THE SIGNS: The American church does not prioritize the Sabbath today.
- In what sense is that true?
- I think it’s true concerning both of the reasons we shared a moment ago about the point of the Sabbath.
a. A day of worship.
- One reason for the Sabbath is as an opportunity to worship. Worshiping our God, one would think, would be a high priority.
- But what actually happens? We slide easily from a deeply meaningful phrase (“worship the Lord”) to one that’s easier to slide past (“going to church”).
- “Going to church” for many believers becomes something you do when there’s nothing else going on.
- Tired? Skip it.
- Kid might join a travel league that will require missing many Sundays? No problem.
- Friend wants to go to brunch? I’ll go next week.
- When you look at the stats on church attendance, there is an unmistakable and unarguable trend: it’s not a priority. The frequency of weekly church attendance has continued to decline. And I’m not talking about people who admit church doesn’t matter that much to them. No, I’m talking about people who claim to be strong believers.
- Let me be clear: I’m not saying that you should never miss.
- Sometimes you’re really sick and coming to church would be irresponsible.
- It’s nice to have a vacation and go to another state.
- I’m not saying it’s a sin to ever miss church.
- Rather, what I’m arguing is that you would think for a Christian that a regular weekly time of worshiping their King would be a priority. I need to and want to be there! Instead, though, it’s a secondary (at best) thing.
- And that’s a sign. It’s a sign that God is not our highest priority. Not just to us but to the world around us. They see our squishy commitment to worship and the hypocrisy of our rhetoric becomes clear.
b. A day of rest.
- The second reason is just as clear. The Sabbath is to be a day of rest but for most Christians we are running just as fast as we are every other day.
- There really isn’t in most Christians’ lives a deliberate effort to carve out space on the Sabbath to rest. No, it’s another weekend day to fill up with all that has to be done before the start of another week.
- It’s ironic that we are this way. God is telling us to rest, not run a marathon. You would think this would be a priority that we would love to embrace. “God wants me to chill out? Yes, please.” But we fail to slow down.
- This too is a sign. It’s a sign that our lives are just like everyone else: stressed, overwhelmed, frantic.
- Just a thought experiment: what if as part of our commitment to resting on the Sabbath we considered our whole lives and seriously asked what things we need to dump and quit so that our lives aren’t so endlessly busy?
- One way to think of it: if you’re too busy to rest of the Sabbath (and you know God has commanded you to) then that would presumably mean you have stuffed things in your life that God doesn’t want in there. Not necessarily sinful things - just unnecessary things that are forcing you to jettison bigger things (the Sabbath) to continue smaller things (another sports practice). Maybe it’s time to say, “No” and not feel guilty.
- This is another area where far too much we look just like the rest of the world.
- It should be a sign that makes us stand out but we blend in.
THE PRINCIPLE: Sometimes there are “signs” God desires in our lives and we’re not the least bit bothered that we are lacking them.
- Now that we’ve unpacked all that concerning the Sabbath, I want to zoom out for a second and give the general principle that I think this is an example of.
- That principle is that sometimes there are “signs” that God desires in our lives and we’re not the least bit bothered that we are lacking them.
- There are things we pay a whole lot of attention to. Our faith and church lives center around these things. But simultaneous with that are often significant aspects of our walk of faith that God intended to be attended to that we just ignore or overlook.
- Above we unpacked that reality with regard to the Sabbath.
- With regard to the Sabbath as both a day of worship and a day of rest we often ignore those as worthy priorities in our walk of faith. It was important enough to make it in the Ten Commandments but we consumed with other things.
- What are we to take from this?
- I think it’s that we always need to be attentive when we are reading the Scripture to consider what it says is important and not merely read it through the lens of what we already presume is important. That can lead us to dismiss passages that are clearly intended to be important. That can lead us to elevate passages that are secondary and talk about them all the time as though they were John 3:16.
- It’s a human tendency to just look around, see what everyone else is doing, and then presume that’s the right way to do it. But we aren’t to copy those around us near as much as we are to copy the Bible.
- This should inform the way we read the Bible. With open ears and open hearts to where our spiritual lives aren’t matching up to what God tells us in His Word.
- I think it might be worthwhile to give a few practical examples of this phenomenon so that you get a taste for what I’m talking about.
SOME EXAMPLES:
1. CHURCH UNITY.
- John 17:20-23.
- Protestants have been terrible about continually dividing and subdividing. We get worked up over relatively minor issues and then split over next to nothing.
- And we don’t just break up but each side does it with a sense of pride and not grief. The pride stems from our confidence that we are the ones who are really honoring God with our beliefs. Those other guys are compromised or off-track. We are the ones who are being truly faithful.
- As we do that, though, we are often oblivious to the principles of John 17. Unpack passage.
- The key thing for us to note this evening is the emphasis Jesus puts on unity and how that is a crucial part of our witness to the world.
- We ignore that, blissfully dividing the body of Christ up over increasingly minor issues.
- Our unity was meant to be a sign to the world of what God is doing in us. But we’ve messed that up.
2. LAWSUITS.
- 1 Corinthians 6:1-11.
- There is a passage in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians where he talks about how bad it looks to have believers taking other believers to court (v. 6).
- This deserves a whole sermon to unpack but let’s just keep it simple and look at v. 5. In the midst of all this instruction to not have believers suing other believers and thus sullying our witness, Paul asks a simple question: is no one in the church wise enough to settle these disputes outside of court? I think what he is envisioning here is not that those with a conflict do nothing but rather that there be a means within the church of settling this dispute that allows believers to treat each other with respect and have an arbiter who is knowledgeable in the Bible to try to settle this according the Scriptural principles (which might differ somewhat from the legalities of that day).
- Now, let me ask a simple question: have you ever, even once, heard of this happening? Me either.
- Paul slams them in v. 7 by saying that the very presence of lawsuits within the church is a sign they’ve already lost. You might say that it’s a bad sign, in the sense we’re using “sign” in this sermon.
3. BELIEF.
- James 2:14-26.
- We have a prevalent “empty belief” problem in American Christianity. So many have been taught that all they have to do is proclaim their “belief” in Jesus and then they can go on their merry way, completely unbound by any need to follow or obey Him. It’s simply not reflective of the New Testament understanding of what real faith looks like.
- James 2 famously unpacks the idea that faith without works is dead. It’s a clear and obvious principle but one that is widely ignored.
- This is something where Baptist preachers are particularly guilty. They have peddled this empty belief for a long time. It’s become a default idea within many Baptist churches, even though it’s not a Biblical idea.
- Here again we are dealing with a sign.
- One of the biggest objections that non-Christians have about coming to church is that the Christians they know are hypocrites. By that they generally don’t mean that the Christians are imperfect. Rather, they mean that these Christians claim belief in God but their lives look no different than everyone else around them. They claim to be connected to a higher power but without any evidence of that in their lives. It’s a sign, and a bad one.
