Remember the Sabbath Day, To Keep It Holy
Download MP3If you would, I invite you to open your bibles to Exodus chapter 20, or if you want, you can look at your worship guide. We have several texts we'll be looking at tonight, Exodus 20 and Genesis 2. And actually, I'm gonna begin reading from Genesis chapter 2. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the 7th day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the 7th day from all his works that he had done.
Joel Brooks:So God blessed the 7th day and made it holy, because on it, God rested from all His work that He had done in creation. In Exodus 20, beginning in verse 8, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. 6 days, you shall labor and do all your work, but the 7th day is a Sabbath to the Lord, your God. On it, you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in 6 days, the lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the 7th day.
Joel Brooks:Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Pray with me. Our father, we are grateful that we get to spend time before you and your word. Lord, and we realize that we need a miracle to happen in order for, us to understand these things in order for them to work change in our hearts. You need to open our eyes, open our minds, open our hearts to your truth, and we will miss you.
Joel Brooks:And so God, at this time, in this moment, I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. And we pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. This evening, we're gonna look at what the Bible teaches us about rest, and in particular, what the Bible teaches us about Sabbath rest.
Joel Brooks:And it's a pretty important topic because I think this idea of rest is something that all of us strive for. It's it's a desire we have, but I would bet money on it that most of you find rest elusive. You want rest because your plates are full, or your bandwidth is full, and you're always hurried. You seem to never have time. Yet whenever you are looking for rest, you don't seem to find it.
Joel Brooks:And one of the reasons I think rest is so elusive to us is we're not really even sure what it looks like. True rest, I think, is kind of like Bigfoot. You know, you've heard about it. You've seen a few fuzzy pictures here and there. You've, you know, the the footprints.
Joel Brooks:You've seen some evidence. You you think it might exist. Maybe, you've heard others talk about it, but really, you have no idea what it is, where to find it. What are you looking for? And this is this idea of rest, and I say we're gonna look at what the Bible has to say about rest, teaches about rest because it's important for us to go to the Bible and not to go to Pinterest or not to go to Instagram or or hashtag rest to to see what rest is supposed to look like.
Joel Brooks:Serious seriously, I looked at hashtag rest, and, and and the pictures that were there were, as confusing as they were exhausting, when trying to understand the topic of rest. I never knew there was so much work involved in resting. In order to rest, when I was looking at these pictures, I either need to, I think, maybe own a private island, in which I can walk, you know, down the beach right as the sun is setting or I need to scale some really huge mountain and have my feet hanging over the ledge while I kind of like looking off in the distance, and the serene moment and that is hashtag rest. Or I need to spend 20, 30 minutes, you know, weighing and measuring and making coffee and have it sitting on my Bible and then just step back and take the picture of it and hashtag rest. It just seems like a lot of work.
Joel Brooks:And, of course, you have to have an immaculate home if you want to be able to rest. Almost every picture of rest that I found, it would have, you know, sunlight coming through the windows. This this hazy kind of sunlight, you know, the kind you never actually see in real life, but only in pictures, that produces some kind of, like, halo around the room, and and the sunlight is reflecting off these clean hardwood floors, and there's usually, you know, the cup of coffee with the steam coming up, and there is somebody maybe laying on the couch with their feet up reading a magazine, and I look at this, and I think that is a picture of rest that can never happen if you have kids. Okay? That that just cannot exist if you have kids.
Joel Brooks:I mean, I'd like to know how many of you with kids found it easy to come to church tonight? That was that a really easy, restful experience and you getting them here? Last week, my youngest, Georgia, she woke up on Sunday and she asked Lauren, she goes, mom, is today the Sabbath? And Lauren goes, yes, it's the Sabbath. She goes, oh.
Joel Brooks:She goes, all we do is go to church and hear people talk. I mean, that's that's my child. Like, she's fired up. She's ready to go, ready to rest. I'm sure yours are much different.
Joel Brooks:In a few weeks we're gonna go, or next month in March, we're taking a couple of trips to Haiti and I love when we go there because, pastor Henry's sister, Gladys, they run the place that we'll be meeting at called Canaan. One of the things they always say is, come on, you, you stressed out Americans, will you just come here and let us love on you? And we're like, wait, wait, no, no, we're coming and mission trip and we're ready. We're gonna make a difference. We're changing Haiti in 2 weeks.
Joel Brooks:And they're like, we could just come and just rest and let us love on you. And we actually learn a whole lot about rest from going there. But I want us to look at what the Bible says about Sabbath rest. And the Bible says a lot. I want you to know, Sabbath rest is a pretty big deal to God.
Joel Brooks:As a matter of fact, God requires the death penalty if you do not observe the Sabbath. Leviticus 23 says, you don't observe the Sabbath, and I will destroy you. It's pretty pretty potent strong words by God on this subject. So just that alone should, should get your attention to think, okay, maybe, maybe the Sabbath rest thing is something I should listen to. So let's look more closely at the command itself.
Joel Brooks:We are told to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy. The word Sabbath simply means to cease from work or to rest. So one day a week, we are called to cease from work and to rest. Now we could talk later and you could welcome to come up to me after the service. You want to talk about what day is this talking about and what exactly constitutes work and, and those are important things to discuss, but it's going to and those are important things to discuss, but it's it's gonna be outside of the realm of this sermon and I don't wanna, I don't wanna go down that road and, you could really quickly get into a form of legalism as you try to define all those things narrowly.
Joel Brooks:But the idea here is that you are to take time away from work and rest. Now most of the commands that we have as we hit the 10 commandments begin with the you shall not, shall not lie, you shall not murder, you shall not steal. But here, this command begins with a call to remember. It could have easily been stated as a you shall not, you shall not work on the Sabbath day, but it's not. Instead, it's a call to remembrance.
Joel Brooks:We are we must remember the Sabbath. And I think it's an interesting way that God introduces that command to us. I think he uses the word remember because he knows that no matter what culture we are in, no matter what time in history we live in, the currents of that culture and the currents of that time will always be against rest and it will be easy to forget. Taking a day of rest has always been and always will be hard to do, and so it's it's a pretty easy command that we can forget by God, and you're you're not really gonna forget thou shalt not murder. I mean, that's probably pretty much embedded in you or thou shalt not steal.
Joel Brooks:It's embedded in you, but a lot of times we forget, oh, yeah, I'm supposed to cease from working one day. I think another reason that God tells these Israelites that they are to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy is because this is a command he has already given them. This isn't anything new. He he taught them about the Sabbath earlier. 1st, he taught them about the Sabbath during creation itself when he created the universe and the world and everything in it in 6 days, and then God took a Sabbath, he rested.
Joel Brooks:And He also taught them about the Sabbath when He taught them about manna and He gave them manna to eat. Turn back just a few chapters to chapter 16, chapter 16 in Exodus, and you can see where God gives this command to observe the Sabbath. Verse 22, On the 6th day, they gather twice as much bread, 2 omers each, and when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, this is what the Lord has commanded. Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till morning.
Joel Brooks:So they laid it aside till the morning as Moses commanded them and it did not stink and there were no worms in it. Moses said, eat it today, for tomorrow is a Sabbath to the Lord. Today you will not find it in the field. 6 days you shall gather it, but on the 7th day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none. On the 7th day, some of the people went out to gather, but they found none.
Joel Brooks:And the Lord said to Moses, how long will you refuse to keep my commandments and laws? See, the Lord has given you the Sabbath. Therefore, on the 6th day, he gives you bread for 2 days. Remain each of you in his place. Let no one go out of his place on the 7th day.
Joel Brooks:So the people rested on the 7th day. And so here we see before the people ever hit Mount Sinai, before they ever reached that mountain and received this law of God, God has already given them the law concerning the Sabbath. This is the original commandment. The first law that he gives them is to honor the Sabbath. And verse 29 is really the key into understanding why he gave the Sabbath and what it means.
Joel Brooks:Look again at verse 29, when he says, see, the Lord has given you the Sabbath. Here, Moses tells us that the Lord has given us the Sabbath. It's given to us, not that he commanded us to observe the Sabbath, but this is a gift from God to us. It's a beautiful life giving gift. And Jesus affirms this himself in Mark chapter 2, when he says, The Sabbath was made for man.
Joel Brooks:Not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made as a gift, and it was given to man. My wife, she quilts some and she made me a beautiful quilt and she gave it to me to, for me in the morning so I could wrap it around me as I get up and I read and have my cup of coffee. And this was a gift. She didn't commanded me.
Joel Brooks:Hey, put this on. Keep yourself warm. It was a gift I took, and I I embraced around me. In the same way, I want you to picture the Sabbath. He he gives you this gift as a comfort, as a good thing for you to put on, not as a command.
Joel Brooks:And so what I want us to do is look at all the ways in which the Sabbath is a gift from the Lord, or we're not going to look at all of them. We'll look at 5, 6, 7, depending how much you stay with me. Alright? First, the Sabbath is a gift that allows us to enjoy God's creation. It's a gift that allows us to enjoy God's creation.
Joel Brooks:Now we see this in the very start of the Bible in Genesis chapter 2, after God creates the universe, and this world, he rested on the 7th day. Now God doesn't rest because he's really tired. You know, speaking the world into existence is, like, man, it's exhausting. You know, he's he's not recharging his batteries here. That that's not what is happening here.
Joel Brooks:What is happening is God is, He's enjoying. He's taking a step back and He is enjoying His accomplishment. He is celebrating the completeness and the perfection of his work, the beauty of it. He's he's taking satisfaction and in what he has made and how everything he has made declares the glory of God, not because he's tired. He makes man and goes, man, this is really good.
Joel Brooks:He makes man and he goes, man, this is really good. You see him delighting in that. And after he creates man, he says, this is really good. Then God in a sense kicks back, props up his feet. He doesn't really do this, you know, image here.
Joel Brooks:Kicks back, props up his feet, and he takes satisfaction in the beauty of what he has made. Let me just say if if God does that, shouldn't we? We are to put away work. We're to quit checking our emails all the time. We're to stop cleaning up and we are to simply enjoy for a day what God has created.
Joel Brooks:It's one of the gifts of the Sabbath where we could walk outside and we could take in the sunshine. We could look at trees. We can watch birds in flight. We can hear them sing. God gives us this day as a way of celebrating his work, just as he did.
Joel Brooks:Alright. 2nd, the Sabbath is a gift to remind us that our value is not in what we do. Our value is not in what we do Before Adam and Eve did a single work, before they had done anything, God said, you are very good. You are very good. He already declared their worth before they ever did a single thing.
Joel Brooks:And the reason that I think keeping the Sabbath is so hard for many of us is that we don't hear those words from God anymore, or we don't believe those words from God anymore. We still believe that we are lacking, that he's not celebrating in his perfect work, but we somehow have to do something to justify our existence. God, let let me prove to you that I really can be valuable. Let me do something to earn your favor. We feel that need to work, and so we work and we work and we work and we never stop working simply because we don't trust in the finished work of God.
Joel Brooks:We can't sit back and we rest in the celebration and the completion of what God has done because we feel so incomplete inside. Now this is a result of the fall. It's a result of when sin entered this world. It's it's not a result of of work because work is a gift from the Lord. But once Adam and Eve sinned, work changed for us.
Joel Brooks:It was given new meaning. Adam and Eve began finding their identity and what they did and how they performed. And so they wanted to prove themselves to God and to one another. We we carry this now. This is the inner machinery that drives us now.
Joel Brooks:When you meet somebody, perhaps you've already done this here, and there's nothing wrong, inherently wrong with this question. But when you're trying to get to know somebody, what's the first thing you ask them? So what do you do? What do you do? Because I want to define you by what you do.
Joel Brooks:How do you perform? Justify your existence before me. Just state it that way next time. Alright? Please justify why you you are allowed to breathe air.
Joel Brooks:Okay? But we put so much weight in what a person does because we really wouldn't know how to answer the question. Could you please just tell me who you are? That's a lot more uncomfortable and personal. So God gives us this day, this Sabbath, to remind us that we have been declared good and that we have his affirmation.
Joel Brooks:Now when we forget this, the result is going to be that we're gonna strive so hard to get that affirmation from others. Moms are gonna make sure that your your kids are perfect when they're in public. So other mothers will go, man, you are such a good mother. Or if you're a stay at home mom, you're gonna make sure that you know, you have amazing meals. Your house is clean.
Joel Brooks:Your kids are perfect. You're always wearing stylish clothes, and yet you're doing it all with this air of ease just so others will go. You're amazing because you want that affirmation because you don't believe in God's affirmation of you. And God gives you a day in which you can remember that. I mean, how many of you, like, have to check Facebook all the time to see how many likes your latest post has?
Joel Brooks:And the more likes you get, the better you feel. You're like, oh, yes. You know, because God's thumbs up, God's like of you is not enough. And so you you feel like you have to get more and more from others. You have to prove your worth.
Joel Brooks:And the Sabbath violently stops that inner machinery that we have that drives us to work more and more to get other people's approval. When we can't work, we are reminded our existence is not dependent upon what we do, but on what God has declared us to be. Alright. 3rd, the Sabbath is a gift that cures our anxiety. It's a gift that cures our anxiety.
Joel Brooks:Another way of putting this is God gave us the Sabbath to remind you that you are not God, but he is. He rules the world. Now I confess, this is one of the reasons that I have a hard time keeping the Sabbath because I like to think that I rule, maybe not the world, but my own little universe here. And I think, you know, if I were to suddenly stop working 247, redeemer would implode because I'm the one who holds it all together. And I don't think I'm alone in this.
Joel Brooks:I think some of you check your email every few minutes. You think you have to do that, because if you don't, the sky is going to fall, or puppies are going to explode, or like something something bad and horrible is going to happen if you're not always checking your email. Let me just break it to you as clearly and maybe as bluntly as I can. You're not that important. You're really not that important.
Joel Brooks:You were never meant to carry the weight of the world. That's God's job. And when you try to do his job, it is going to crush you. And all the control that you think you have in this life anyway, it's just an illusion because God is the one who has control. And all that anxiety that you feel is simply because you refuse to acknowledge that.
Joel Brooks:And you're exhausting yourself doing God's job. You know, God gives, I mentioned he gives the death penalty for those who break the Sabbath. Let me tell you what God is doing here. By issuing that death penalty, he is simply speeding up the process of what will inevitably happen when you try to rule the world. And so God says, don't do it.
Joel Brooks:Don't do it. So he gives you the Sabbath to free you from that burden. You know, one of the ways he did this, he taught the Israelites this, was in the way he gave them manna. You know, he he taught them first, you could do all the hard work in the world, but unless I bless you, there will be no fruit in it. The only reason the people's work was fruitful is because God gave them manna.
Joel Brooks:And then he told him something else. He said, you know what? If you decide to work on the Sabbath, you will have fruitless work. I will not bless the work you do on the Sabbath. And I realized some of you were thinking, I don't know if I believe that because I think there's a lot of fruitful work that comes on the Sabbath.
Joel Brooks:And I would just I would challenge you to redefine fruitful. If you define fruitful as making a lot of money, then yes, you can work an extra day and never stop and you can make a lot of money. But if you decide to find fruitful as knowing God and enjoying him forever and being blessed with that, God's gonna deny you that when you work on his Sabbath day. Well, let's look at the 4th reason. The Sabbath is a gift that allows us to enjoy relationships.
Joel Brooks:And when God gives us the command to keep the Sabbath, he doesn't just tell us not to work. Look carefully at that command. He says, you shall not work nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your livestock, nor the sojourner or the immigrant that's at the gate. And he lists all of these people, all of these relationships you have, none of them are to be working. What God is saying right here is on the Sabbath day, you will not treat any person as a means to an end.
Joel Brooks:Nobody is a means to an end. You will not treat people as a commodity, And this is huge here. God is saying on this day, I will not allow you to use people. Not at all. You're not gonna work, you're not gonna discuss business, you're not gonna talk about what you could do for others or what they can do for you.
Joel Brooks:Instead, God, he gives you this gift. He gives you this day in which you are to simply be in the presence of another person who's created in in the image of God. You can simply be there, and this is huge. Husbands, how many of you, like if your wife really wants your undivided attention, she probably needs to take your phone and duct tape it to her head, you know, so you would look her in the face for a few minutes, Or wives, how many times would your husband think, oh, that's that's what you would have to do? Because we're always so distracted.
Joel Brooks:We're always we're never really there. We're always thinking of work or what's the next thing we need to do, and then God gives us this day and he says, I want you to simply be with other people. Relate to them as one image of God would relate to another image of God. So put those things down. I mean, just think about it.
Joel Brooks:How often have you shortchanged another person because you're like, I I love to talk, but I I gotta rush off to do this. Or parents, how often have you done this to your children? I'd I'd really like to discuss this, but I just gotta send off this one more email. I got to do one more tweet to save the world. Okay?
Joel Brooks:Can you just hold on as I take care of this? Then God says, here's a day I want that put down. Alright, can you simply be with another person? You don't relate to the mailman as a person who gives you mail. You relate to him as a person that God created in his image.
Joel Brooks:Just be with Him. 5th, the Sabbath reminds us that salvation is by grace alone. To see this more clearly, we really need to look at Deuteronomy's version of the 10 Commandments, and we have that in your worship guide, Deuteronomy 5. In Deuteronomy 5, what we see here is it's the 10 Commandments repeated. It's repeated.
Joel Brooks:This is when it was repeated about 40 years later after they'd been wandering in the desert, and it's pretty much repeated, all of them, word for word, except there's there's just a couple of differences here. And one of them is in keeping the Sabbath, a new motivation or a new reason for keeping the Sabbath is given. And so we read this in Deuteronomy verse 15. Here's the motivation. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
Joel Brooks:Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. All of your efforts to save yourself were useless. They were futile. I saved you with an outstretched arm. Don't ever think you were saved by any great work you did.
Jeffrey Heine:That
Joel Brooks:because we can't save ourselves. God's someone who saves. God's someone who gives us rest. And I think it's interesting that, I love that the the Sabbath day, the Jewish people, they celebrate it from Friday evening, you know, into Saturday. The Jewish day begins at sunset, Goes from sunset to sunset.
Joel Brooks:And it's really taken from Genesis where you have the order of creation. It says, and there was evening and there was morning the first day. It doesn't say there was morning and evening the first day, but it begins with there was evening and there was morning. The first day. And I think beginning a Sabbath rest in the evening is a beautiful and a profound thing to do.
Joel Brooks:Because what you do is you go to sleep. You're doing nothing, and you begin your Sabbath. And then you wake up into a world that you did not create. You wake up to a world that you had nothing to do with. What you do is you simply walk in what God has prepared for you to live in, and you enjoy what he has done, not what you have done.
Joel Brooks:It's really a beautiful picture of how we should observe the Sabbath. 6 and then we'll we'll end with this one. The Sabbath points us to Jesus. It's a gift that points us to Jesus. So many ways we could go in this, but Colossians says this, that the Sabbath is a shadow of things to come, but the substance belongs to Jesus Christ.
Joel Brooks:So the shadow is a or the the Sabbath is a shadow, but Jesus is the real thing, the substance to which it points. Come who are all all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Teaching them the meaning behind the Sabbath to whom it points. Teaching them the meaning behind the Sabbath to whom it points. The Sabbath reminds us and it points us to the finished work of Jesus on the cross.
Joel Brooks:What he achieved when he cried out on the cross, it is finished. It is complete. It is done. Very similar to what he has said at creation. Your salvation has been achieved and you don't need to work to do anything to now have my favor.
Joel Brooks:So it points us to the cross. Jesus did all the work and we receive all of the benefits. The Sabbath reminds us of Paul's words in Romans chapter 4, in which we read, and to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, I feel I need to say because I know this has probably come up some in our home groups and as the whenever you talk about the law, raises a lot of issues. But there is still the death penalty for breaking God's law, breaking the Sabbath. There is still don't think because we're in we're in the new covenant that that doesn't remain.
Joel Brooks:What has happened is we believe Jesus has taken on the death penalty for us. Alright? The the new covenant isn't saying, oh, God's no longer concerned about these things. He's no longer concerned about adultery still carry with them the penalty, but as Christians in the new covenant, what we believe is Jesus has taken that penalty for us. Not that those things are no longer important.
Joel Brooks:And I just want to be really clear about that. This is something that we embrace in our life and through the spirit, we can now live out in joy for him. Let's look real quick on how we can keep the Sabbath. It's going to be easy. Pick a day and rest.
Joel Brooks:My Sabbath day is Friday. A lot of times it begins kinda late Thursday night and goes into Friday. Can I tell you in the preparation for this week, man, keeping a Sabbath was hard? It was we had so much on our plate this week that I was dying to read a little bit more on Friday in preparation and study. I wanted to break a Sabbath in order to prepare my sermon for the Sabbath.
Joel Brooks:I feel that pressure. I really do. But pick a day and you rest. And you keep a Sabbath not by just ceasing to work, but by filling your mind, not with garbage, but but filling your mind with Christ. That's what you want to occupy your mind with.
Joel Brooks:Sabbath keeping isn't trying to distract yourself from the harsh realities of this world. It's not distraction. It is filling yourself with Christ and taking the time to do that. Have you ever noticed when you read through the Bible, when when Jesus is describing the kingdom of God, he describes slow processes. The kingdom of God is like a seed that you plant.
Joel Brooks:Over time, it grows and it grows into a very large tree. Or the kingdom of God is like Levin, which you work into the dough and over time, it it grows and it leavens the whole bread. It's not a instant process. The Sabbath gives us room to simply waste time before God and let him do his work in our lives. And we need to keep that.
Joel Brooks:So consecrate a day and make it holy. And a day in which you put aside the things that so normally occupy your time, that tax your mental strength and your physical strength, your energy, and simply waste time with God. Enjoy his creation. Hear his word. Invest in relationships.
Joel Brooks:This is a command, but it is also a gift that God has given to us to enjoy. Pray with me. Lord, all of us are Sabbath breakers. We break the, the legality of it there, and that many times we don't specifically keep a day. We also break the heart of it because so often we don't go to you and really find rest.
Joel Brooks:We miss the shadow and the substance so often. And so God, I pray that through your spirit, you will work real change in us, that we would embrace this incredible gift that you have given us that really teaches us the gospel. And so God, we ask that you would do that. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.
