Let’s begin tonight by reading the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20:1-17.
Tonight we come to the 4th Commandment. "Remember to keep the Sabbath holy.”
Now for so many of us this is the Command that we have been waiting for. We understand the need to only serve God, and we agree that we should not put anything above God or try to shrink God down to a manageable size. But we are a New Testament Church and the only thing holy about Saturday is College Football.
First I believe that we need to understand what the Sabbath means. In verse 11 we read that God rested on the Seventh day and blessed the Sabbath, so we assume that the Sabbath day was Saturday or the Seventh day. But Sabbath doesn’t mean seven; Sabbath means to rest from labor. And I believe that today we need to look at this more than ever.
God commanded that the Jews observe this day of rest every week. And God was very serious about this commandment – you Jews need to take a break, prop your feet up, and rest for a while. I don’t want you doing ANYTHING on this Sabbath day.
Now, in terms of seriousness, where would you rank this command? Let’s be honest. Surely it doesn’t sound as serious as “Thou shalt not commit adultery” or “Thou shalt not murder.” God says, “I want you to take it easy for a while.” What did you suppose should be the penalty for breaking that command?
Somebody doesn’t rest like they’re supposed to, they get up and start washing the dishes or cleaning the house, what would you do about it? Maybe you’d give them a good talking to – “Don’t you know that you’re supposed to rest today? What are you doing working when you should be home sleeping?”
Or maybe a slap on the wrist or a fine. “Tell you what we’ll do -- we’ll fine you all the money that you made on that day and put it in the building fund.”
But as with every command God wasn’t joking. In Exodus 31 we see that the penalty for breaking this command was death. If you don’t stop and rest one day a week, you will be put to death. I believe that puts this command on an even plain with, “Thou shalt not murder” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery”!
Tonight we will look at this in two parts: 4 reasons why this Command was necessary and then 3 things that the Sabbath still protects.
(1) God knows how important it is that humans rest.
The U.S. Army conducted a study in which they observed several soldiers in various conditions to determine at what stage these individuals achieved the maximum level of output. They discovered that after seven consecutive days of hard work, each soldier’s performance dropped. But the most interesting discovery the army made was that even though the soldiers’ performance level dropped, the soldiers themselves were unaware of it. They thought they were still operating at maximum level.
Maybe that’s why so many of us think we don’t need to rest, that it is somehow LAZY to take a break every now and then. But God knows the importance of rest. God made us. He knows how much this body can handle. And he knows that if we don’t take time to recharge our batteries, that we will very quickly destroy ourselves.
(2) God knows how much humans don’t want to rest.
Those of you who parents fully understand this, because we see the same resistance with our children. Have you ever watched young children fight sleep? They whine and cry; keep themselves busy, running and playing so they can’t fall asleep. But whatever they’re doing, no matter how frenzied their efforts to stay awake, they’ll insist they’re not tired. I’ve seen Trafton’s eyes lose focus, and his head look like it’s going to bob right off his neck in the middle of telling me, "Daddy, I’m not sleepy." There are times when a mother or a father simply has to make a child rest.
God knew that man needed rest from his labor, and he also knew that man would resist it. And if God had told the Jews, “You know, you guys really ought to take a break every now and then,” there’s not a single one that would have taken God seriously. But when God says, “Either you stop and rest for a while or I’ll kill you,” folks, you tend to listen to instructions like that.
(3) The Sabbath was a sign of God’s covenant with Israel
The Sabbath served as a sign of Israel’s covenant relationship with God. God had promised to provide for Israel, and they had promised to be obedient to God. And there were two things which stood as symbols of that covenant. One was circumcision, and the other was the keeping of the Sabbath. When other people living around the Israelites noticed that the Jews didn’t do any work on the Sabbath, it would provoke questions in them. Everyone else worked seven days a week. You had to if you were going to survive, or at least that’s what they thought. “Why do you Jews only work six days a week and refuse to do any work on the seventh day?” To which, they could respond that they did this as a testimony to the fact that they belonged to Almighty God and that they were trusting in Him to provide for their needs.
And that brings us to the fourth reason that I think God was so serious about this commandment.
(4) The Sabbath was a test of the Israelites’ faith in God
Now I’m not a farmer and I know that some of you are so forgive me if this seems a little less than spectacular, but this week I realized something about the Sabbath commandment that I hadn’t really thought about. As I understand it, there is a certain timing for everything that you do as a farmer. You plant things at a certain time of the year according to what the climate is and how that crop deals with the climate, and then you know pretty much what time of the year your crop is going to be ready for harvesting. If you wait past the time for planting or don’t get all your crops planted before the heavy rains come, then you’ve got real problems. If you allow your crop to stay too long in the field, you’ve got problems, too. Everything will rot and be of no value. Timing is everything.
So God, knowing how crucial timing was to a farming culture would make an exception for those times of the year when the crops were being planted and harvested. Surely they could work right through the Sabbath and then make up for it later on in the summer when they were just sitting there watching the crops grow. Right?
I believe that this was a test of their faith. Was their faith in their own ability to get that crop in the ground and then harvest it in the fall, or was their faith in God, the one who made the crops grow in the first place? Did they have enough faith in God that they would sleep and sleep peacefully without pacing the floor in their mind even as their crops were potentially rotting in the field?
The problem is that with the Israelites and with us, we sometimes don’t have enough faith in God to really believe that He is going to meet our needs, protect us, and carry our burdens. If we don’t work those extra hours, then we’re just not going to be provided for. So we work and we wear ourselves out because we just don’t believe that God can take care of us if we don’t.
God was serious about this commandment. He wasn’t messing around. And, by the time of Christ, the Sabbath day was kept with a vengeance. By then it had become such a distinctive feature of the Jewish religion that anyone who knew anything at all about the Jews were aware of their strict refusal to work on the Sabbath day.
For many Christians, the Sabbath day has come to symbolize legalism at its worst. The Jewish rabbis had taken God’s command to such absurd extremes that the Sabbath was hateful to many Jews of Jesus’ day.
The Mishnah, which gives us a written record of Jewish tradition in the time of Christ, includes 1,521 rules on how a person could break the Sabbath. Among these are such things as separating two threads, writing two letters of the alphabet side by side, tying a knot, reading by candlelight, and so on. As if that weren’t enough, each of these prohibitions generated debate as to what constituted an offense of its kind. For example, could you wear an artificial leg or was that considering carrying a burden? Some rabbis said you could, but others said it was wrong.
The same teachers of the law added precautionary measures intended to prevent acts, which might lead to breaking the Sabbath.
For example, a tailor was not even allowed to take his needles home the day before the Sabbath because he might be tempted to sew something.
A scribe couldn’t take home his pen because he might be tempted to write something.
But the Law of Moses was never intended for such absurd purposes. Jesus tried to put things back in their proper perspective by saying in Mark 2:27, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." God meant for the Sabbath to bring the Jews peace and rest.
The Jewish legalists had taken a beautiful commandment and turned it into a harsh and hateful ritual. They took a day of rest and turned it into a burden. From the start, God had intended it to bless his people. It was a time when families and friends could be together, a time when devotion to God could be shared, a time when the spirit and body could be refreshed. But instead, the Pharisees made the Sabbath something that absolutely wore people out trying to follow all their guidelines.
Like all of God’s laws, the Sabbath was designed not to be a burden, but to be a delight. It was designed not to inhibit freedom, but to protect. So today let’s close with the three things the Sabbath law protects.
First, ironically, it protects the dignity of work.
Notice that vs. 9 of Exodus 20 says, "Six days you shall labor and do all your work. "
Contrary to what many of us think, work is not a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. In the garden, God gave Adam a job to do. He was to tend the garden and keep it. Work was a part of the world God called good. So when God gave the Sabbath regulation, he wanted to be sure we understood that he was not condemning work, but rather he was giving us a way to protect the dignity of it.
I don’t know about you, but you know one of the first things I think about when I get I my car on Sunday evening. Today was a good day. It was good to get together with Brothers and Sisters, but Sunday is coming. " In my world Sunday is always coming. There is always another sermon to write. Another class to teach. Sometimes I feel like a sermon factory and the assembly line never stops.
Health care professionals have the same problem. You may care for the patient in the bed until he is well. But what happens as soon as that bed is vacated. Another patient takes his place.
Teachers. You get to the end of your day and you know what’s coming tomorrow? The same students. You get to the end of the school year and after eight weeks or so of summer another batch of the little hooligans take their place.
Sales people. Government workers. Office staff. Full time mothers. It doesn’t matter what you do, your work is never done. And after awhile, if we aren’t careful, our work becomes toil. There is all the difference in the world between work and toil. Hard work gives us that good, tired feeling at the end of the day. Toil just makes us tired. Meaningful labor leaves us satisfied. Toil leaves us drained.
The Mishnah says that even if you can’t get all your work done in six days, on the Sabbath, you should live as if all your work was done. The Sabbath was a way of dignifying labor. And imagine what those people felt when they heard God decree this command. They’d been slaves for 400 years.
And slaves don’t get days off. Taking one day out of seven to rest and focus on God protects the dignity of work.
Second, it protects the dignity of human beings.
Did you notice that vs. 10 includes slaves? "On the Sabbath you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. " Everyone and everything was to take a break from work.
Why? Human beings have always judged themselves and others by what they produced. They did it then. We do it now.
We get uneasy if we show up at a Doctors office and there is no one in the waiting room.
I won’t leave my car with a Mechanic who has no other cars to work on.
We carry Day timers and Palm Pilots and fill them with tasks and appointments so you will know how busy I am. Because we equate busyness with importance. The busier you are, the more important you are. We virtually celebrate our crowded schedules and unavailability to our families and our early mornings and our late nights because we have come to believe that an idle person is a worthless person. If you aren’t out there pounding the pavement and driving hard and burning the candle at both ends and all those other clichés, then you must not be a very important or successful person.
Our dignity is determined by busyness.
So God said, "One day a week, stop it. Just sit down and stop trying to prove how big you are by how much you have to do. Even I, who created the world took a day of rest. And you are not more important than me." God wants us to realize that who we are is not the same as what we do. He wants us to understand that our worth as human beings isn’t tied to our productivity. We are valuable because we exist in his image.
I once heard that Busy was an acronym for Being Under Satan’s Yoke. And as I watch those around me filling their time with everything but God I believe that’s right.
Third, and most important, the Sabbath was designed to protect our relationship with God.
If all we ever do is work we not only lack the time to reflect on the nature and glory of God, we begin to lose our need for him. If I, by my skill and energy and power and knowledge can carve out of this world a life of ease and comfort and success, why do I need God?
Soon I begin to imagine that God is dispensable, and that I am indispensable. They need me, the people at the office or at the hospital or at the church or at the school. If I’m gone, what will they do? We become seduced by our own sense of importance.
Taking a day away from the world of demands and deadlines and expectations is God’s way of saying, "Dip your finger into the ocean, then pull it out and see what an impact you made. "
It isn’t that we aren’t important to the people who count on us and to whom we are responsible. The point is that the most important responsibility we have is to God. The Sabbath is a holy place in time where we remember our need for him, the unquenchable necessity of his presence.
That’s why taking a Sabbath from work has to include God. Rest without spirit is the source of corruption. A Sabbath is more than a day off. It is a day away from the world. A day in which we remember who God is and who we are. A day in which we get our priorities back in line. We recognize that God is the indispensable one, not us.
There is a story about a meeting between Satan and his minions. He asked them, "What’s the most effective thing we can do to wreak havoc and pain on the earth?"
One said, "Tell them there is no God." Another said, "Convince them that they’ve wandered too far from the right path to ever return. " Still another said, "Convince people that there are no consequences to their behavior. " They all agreed that these were great ideas. But a voice came from the back and said, "What if we convinced them that there is plenty of time." And Satan loved it.
Time is the first thing God ever declared as holy. If we think that attending to our relationship with God is something we will get to someday, we treat time like one more commodity among all the other things we think we control. We de-sanctify it.
I know that the Sabbath day isn’t binding on us any more. But the principle is. We need to redeem the time we have, because we never have as much as we think.
Tonight I wonder how do you spend your time? Do you fill your time Being Under Satan’s Yoke or do you take time to be still and know God?
Tonight Jesus’ invitation is still offered. "Come to me, all of you who are tired and have heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Accept my teachings and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in spirit, and you will find rest for your lives.”
Tonight the invitation of rest is offered to you as we stand and sing.
