DM 620431

What we start to find is that we meditate on them as well. You can't meditate on it if you show up here on Sunday and just sing it with us and then go home and forget about it. So if you sing these things at home, you'll find yourself meditating on them. You'll sing them when you weren't trying to sing them. So that's one of the reasons why we've recommended that you just use the same songs we do in church in your family worship and what I do is we do them the week before and sometimes that prepares us for Sunday but even if you don't get to that you can just do them the next week you know just kind of stick with them for a few days so we're in Exodus 20 verses 8 through 11 remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy six days you shall labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates.

For in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. You may be seated. the fourth commandment I'm sure that someone could say it's arguable since I've already told you You have to break the first one before you break any of them. But the fourth commandment, I think, is abundantly, clearly, the commandment that is most despised by our generation, in particular our Christian generation.

The fourth commandment is, I think, the most misunderstood one. And so we're going to try to clarify some of that. One of the reasons I say that is that if you've been a Christian for, you know, really almost any time at all, and you've gone to any church that's not a Reformed church, including some Reformed churches, but most churches in the United States today are not Reformed churches, you will receive a very different teaching about the Fourth Commandment than you're going to get here.

I like to think that we could spend about four weeks and then I can say to myself I'm finished I don't feel finished with the third commandment but there's a point where you just think okay we're going to move on and so you can go home today and you can google well you shouldn't google you should do duck duck go now we don't do google anymore because we're Christian but anyway it's a different thing but if you go home and you want to do an internet search and you want to ask the question is the Sabbath binding on Christians you can find all sorts of answers and if there's a way to just filter out anything that's Seventh Day Adventist that would be nice because we don't have any real interest in their take on it but there are a lot of people who we would actually recommend as good Christian men, good Christian teachers in a lot of areas, people who have had ministries that we appreciate, who do not interpret the commandments the way that we do. Excuse me. So I'm going to remind you of a couple things before we dig in, not because I'm afraid, but I think you need a reminder. chapter 19 of our confession that we all agree to here now whether you agree to it in your heart or not is between you and the Lord but we've agreed that this is how we're going to govern this church this is how we are going to hold people accountable before the Lord between one another chapter 19 paragraph 5 says the moral law doth forever bind all as well justified persons as others to the obedience thereof now there's more to that paragraph it says that not only in regard of the matter contained in it so not only because of the importance of the morality in it but also in respect of the authority of God the creator so even if you can't look at a commandment and figure out on your own why it's moral the fact that God said it's part of his moral law makes it under his authority it makes it binding on you and then it says this it's almost like they were anticipating dispensationalism here neither doth Christ in the gospel any way dissolve but much strengthen this obligation so we talked about this probably 10 weeks ago now where I did begin I thought this sermon series I tried to I think prove to you that the moral law is binding on us.

If you look at paragraph 2, if you're wondering what the moral law is, the same law that was first written in the heart of man continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness after the fall and was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai in Ten Commandments And they generally divided into two tables our duty towards God and our duty towards man. So the fourth commandment, being part of the Ten Commandments, is binding. chapter 22 of our confession actually goes into some detail about it off the top of my head it's one of the only commandments that confession feels the need to clarify the writers of the confession i don't want to personify the confession too much so the fourth commandment is an obligation that we are to keep and because of the gospel we're actually more strengthened to keep it and the command is actually more serious to us. Now, the fourth commandment relating to the Sabbath also contains a lot of other information about how to practice the Sabbath throughout the Old Testament.

And there is aspects of the Sabbath day that were part of the way that Mosaic law was to be governed in the time of Israel as a judicial law. And there were aspects of how the Sabbath was to be observed that fall under the ceremonial law. That, I think, is part of the confusion. So if you understand from, oh, this is kind of an intro here. I feel like there's a lot to do with the Sabbath, and I want to make sure that everybody's thinking about this properly before we just start reading scriptures.

And I start telling you, here's what this scripture means. We believe the law is tripartite. We believe that there's a moral law, specifically moral, it's all moral in one sense because God gave it, But there's a moral law where we see eternal morality defined for us and exhibited. We see the eternal goodness and righteousness of God manifested through His moral law.

And I'm going to try to answer for you how the fourth commandment actually exhibits God's eternality. How God eternally has, we'll say, shown forth the fourth commandment, just like He shows forth the rest of them. We also believe that there were ceremonial laws given to the Jews, and there was judicial laws that were given to the Jews, so that they knew how to govern their society.

Judicial laws, the judges could judge the people that way. Ceremonial laws, the things the priests did when they went into the temple to follow the right procedures in order to bring right sacrifices to God, all as a picture of Christ. So in the New Testament, what we find is that these ceremonial laws are done away with. I think the word is abrogated.

It's the word that we use. They're done away with because Christ was what those ceremonial laws were always pointing to. And once Christ came and became the perfect sacrifice, we didn't need to do all the ceremonial laws. Well, if what I said earlier is true, that if you read through the Old Testament and you read all the verses about the Sabbath, and it'll take you a while, There's a lot of verses that have that word.

And if you read the surrounding context, you're going to be reading a while. You will find that there were many aspects of ceremonial law worship surrounding not only the Sabbath day, but there were other things that God called Sabbaths in the Old Testament. Now it gets a little confusing. Because it would be real easy for us if there was just a different word for each and every one of these things, right?

But there's not. The word Sabbath sometimes refers to the seventh day. Sometimes the word Sabbath actually just means week. I guess it's from the Hebrew word that means seventh. Sometimes the word Sabbath means to rest or to cease from your labor. And so you might call a day the Sabbath, but you also may say I need two Sabbath as a verb in one sense, right?

And so because there are aspects of the Sabbath that were so intertwined with ceremonial law, which has been abrogated, aspects of the Sabbath that fell under the judicial laws in ways that we wouldn't enforce today. So for example, the general equity of God's law according to the Reformed Baptist tradition would be that if you violate the Sabbath, rather than stoning you to death, we would begin a disciplinary process whereby you may be put out of a church if you refuse to repent of that. So because we're going to administer it differently, now that Christ has come, some people have thought, well, it's just gone.

There's no command whatsoever. And I've seen some of those arguments. I will confess before the church and before God that I was one of those people for many years. I know it's not story time as Elijah pointed out but the very first gospel tract that I ever wrote I still have a copy of it somewhere we tried to mimic Ray Comfort's method of evangelism we would present the law and then the gospel and on the front of the tract it said have you broken any of these commandments and it listed nine commandments because I was so convinced that people would not be held accountable before God for breaking the fourth commandment that I refuse to put it on a tract and so I am a repenting sinner who is trying to think right about God's ten words or ten Commandments so the Sabbath is a command it an obligation for us in the New Testament Jesus Christ said I did not come to abolish the law of the prophets but I came to fulfill them So if you are a Reformed Baptist Christian, despite some of the arguments, and some of the arguments are good, they're clever, despite the things that we see sometimes that people will say about the Sabbath, despite the fact that your violation of the Sabbath rarely carries immediate consequences.

And despite the fact that sometimes your adherence to it actually makes your life more difficult, it does not exonerate you from the need to obey it. Jesus said He didn't come to abolish the law. So we believe in ten commandments, and we believe they are all to be obeyed. And one of the challenges I will have is to help you to see how to obey it. And so again, if I could just, I said this when I talked about Blast Me, if I could just hand you a list of things to do that would not satisfy what God desires.

The Sabbath too often is seen the same way that most of us see dietary plans. too often it is seen as a list of things I want but I can't do and if your attitude about the Lord's Day which is one of the phrases we use to talk about the Sabbath and the New Covenant if your attitude is the same as you can't eat chocolate if you want to lose some weight you're never going to delight in the Sabbath just like I don't delight in most dietary plans that don't include copious amounts of chocolate So turn to Exodus 16. We're going to start with the very first word. I try to be exegetical and expositional.

We are going verse by verse through Exodus 20. But the nature of this sermon series is that it just ends up being topical. each of the ten topics, each of the ten commandments becomes a topic, but the very first word in Exodus 20 is remember. It's an imperative word. He's telling the Israelites, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. the Sabbath day is already holy.

God made it holy. We're told that in verse 11. Therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath and made it holy. I'm still in Exodus 20. I told you to turn to 16. So now we're going to go back a little bit and we're going to see where God has said, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

What's He telling them to remember? Because one of the arguments about the Sabbath not being persistent today is that it was given to Moses and to Moses only in the Mosaic Covenant. And if you come to our men's meeting, you'll hear us say over and over, the Mosaic Covenant's gone. We're in a new covenant. So if I tell you we're in a new covenant today, and then I tell you to obey stuff that's part of the Mosaic Covenant, now I'm an inconsistent liar.

But the Sabbath command predates the Mosaic Covenant. So although the Sabbath command is part of the Mosaic covenant, because God's moral law would have certainly made sense for the people of Israel, God's moral law was written on the heart of man from the very beginning. This is why you can do your research on this one. This is why every civilization in the history of the world has had a seven-day week.

And it's not because the sun goes around the earth in seven days, or the moon does something in seven days. There's nothing to indicate seven days except it's written on our hearts. And it's the only thing that works because it's how God wired us. It's why there's a story, I don't even know if it's true, so you can go figure it out if you want. Apparently Napoleon tried to turn France into a ten-day week or something and it just utterly failed.

There's been other cultures that have tried to make people work more than the six and seven. Our problem is we only want to work five here in good old USA. But the seven-day week is something God has written on our hearts. And having a rest in that seven-day week is vital to our health. So there's a good effect of the Sabbath. But the fact of the matter is that your problem is not that you don't rest enough, most of you.

Some of us need to take that rest. Some of us should work harder on the other days and take that rest. But your problem is that you think all seven days are yours. So if God says, give me one of them, all of a sudden he's a big meanie. And he's stepping on your territory. But if your mind changes and you decide that all seven days are God's, and you realize that out of seven days, if you could do the math, he only asked you to dedicate 14% of them to him. he's actually asking you for very little and he's granting you an amazing grace in this sin cursed world where your work is cursed where you will eat bread by the sweat of your brow and now you get forced to actually rest there's one pastor I like he says it's like God's forcing you to take a nap and you're angry but you need a nap you need a rest So in Exodus 16, the Israelites have left Egypt.

So at this point most United States Christians are going to say well they didn have the Ten Commandments yet Even though Job was sacrificing making sacrifices to God The people all over the Bible knew how to try to come to God, apart from some revelation at times. But the Ten Commandments written on the hearts of people, here in Exodus 16, and God reveals something to them. He says, let's go to verse 2. when the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.

There's a theme here. They're grumblers. They grumble all the time. Some of you are grumblers, I bet. I don't remember the exact number, but God killed 32,000 people one day for grumbling. So, be that as it may.

And the people of Israel said to them, Moses and Aaron, would that we had died by the hand of Yahweh in the land of Egypt when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. So they wish they were slaves again, being asked to build bricks without straw. And I'm certain, I can't say I'm certain, I don't remember it being written.

I would guess that in Egypt they worked seven day weeks there as slaves. And then Yahweh said to Moses, Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. This is not the Mosaic Covenant. This is God talking about a law that he's testing to see if people will trust him. on the sixth day when they prepare what they bring in it will be twice as much as they gather daily why? because the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord even before Exodus 20 was written in stone do you understand that? the seventh day was a Sabbath to the Lord in Genesis 2 I told you I'd try to explain to you why the Ten Commandments are a manifestation of who God is.

And most people like to say, well, the Ten Commandments reveal who God is because he's not an idolater and he's not a thief. And God wouldn't be an adulterer and he loves life. And so people try to say, well, all the Ten Commandments are somehow rooted in God's attributes. And then the zinger question is, well, how does the Sabbath? how does the Sabbath teach us to be about God how is that an eternal attribute of God it's got a Sabbath keeper God doesn't keep the law in any sense whatsoever the law comes from God you need to understand that but this is the best I could come up with the Sabbath reminds us to get our focus off of created things for even just a short period When God rested on the seventh day, and it even says here he was refreshed, which God needs no refreshment.

When God rested on the seventh day, he rested from his creative work. We need to take a step back from creation, and we need to be in awe of the Creator. God isn't in awe of himself in the sense that we would be, but God rested to show us that there is something far greater than even the amazing creation that should wow you. And we saw a rainbow today.

Just beautiful. Saw a picture of the Milky Way the other day that someone had made, or a picture that some telescope had taken. It was just beautiful. And as awe-inspiring as those things are, we need to step back and realize that the creator of all those things is worthy of so much more. And He is worthy of our worship. So they're to gather twice as much on the sixth day.

Why? So that they don't have to gather on the seventh. So God's going to test them. And so Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel in verse 6, At evening you shall know that it was Yahweh who brought you out of the land of Egypt. And in the morning you shall see the glory of Yahweh because he has heard your grumbling against Yahweh for what are we that you grumble against us.

So Moses and Aaron are teaching these people something. Hey, when you complain, you're just complaining against God, not us. We're nothing. And Moses said, when Yahweh gives you in the evening meat to eat and in the morning bread to the full because Yahweh has heard your grumbling that you grumble against him. I'm sorry. Am I right?

Yeah, I thought I had the wrong verse. What are we? Your grumbling is not against us, but against Yahweh. Verse 9, Then Moses said to Aaron, Say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, Come near before Yahweh, for he has heard your grumbling. And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of Yahweh appeared in the cloud. and Yahweh said to Moses I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel say to them at twilight you shall eat meat and in the morning you shall be filled with bread then you shall know that I am Yahweh your God in the evening quail came up and covered the camp and in the morning dew lay around the camp and when the dew had gone up there was on the face of the wilderness a fine flake like thing fine as frost on the ground when the people of Israel saw it they said to one another what is it? that's what the word manna means that's why we call it manna because they said manna so we just made it word manna what is it for they did not know what it was and moses said to them it is the bread that yahweh had given you to eat so there's some irony here i think you have to see god's trying to show you he told him he's going to give them bread in the morning in the morning something they didn't recognize was there right in front of their face and they're just like what is it i think we're supposed to see this and realize sometimes we don't see what god puts right in front of us.

Don't forget, we're no better than the Israelites. But maybe by the grace of God, we're doing a little better now. This is what Yahweh has commanded. Gather of it, each one of you as much as he can eat. You shall each take an omer according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent. And the people of Israel did so, and they gathered some, and each had no lack, in verse 18.

But then at 19, Moses said to them, Let no one leave any of it till the morning. But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning. So some people decided, I'm going to make sure I have some for tomorrow. So this isn't telling you, go home and eat all your food tonight. That's not the point. but they were supposed to trust God each day give us this day our daily bread each and every day they were supposed to trust God would provide verse 20 and it bred worms and stank God miraculously I think it could have been providentially but I'll say miraculously ruined their bread so that they would know we need to do it the exact way God says.

There's a lesson in here that's outside the Sabbath right now, and that's that there's one way to do things, and it's the way God has told us. There's not two ways. There's not the way that's almost like God's way, but we just do a little bit extra to make sure. And Moses was angry with them. The meekest guy on earth. I love him.

He gets angry at them all the time for their sin, though. Morning by morning they gathered and each as much as he could eat, but when the sun grew hot it melted. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers each. And when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, this is what Yahweh has commanded. Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to Yahweh.

He says, bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning. So they laid it aside till the morning as Moses commanded them. And now this time when they laid something aside to the morning, they did the same exact thing they did on the other day. Verse 24, it did not stink and there were no worms in it.

There's no scientific explanation for this, okay? obedience to God was the reason why it didn't breed worms and stink on the Sabbath day. And so Moses says, eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to Yahweh. Today you will not find it in the field. Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none. And now here you go.

On the seventh day, some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. They went looking for more. It sounds reasonable sometimes to our minds. You gather a bunch, you keep it overnight, it stinks. Right? So then another day you gather a bunch, you keep it overnight, but then it doesn't stink.

Right? every day it's there, but then one day you think, well, it's going to be there today too. Because people are always thinking carnally. We're always thinking we understand. Verse 28, And Yahweh said to Moses, How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my laws? This is before the Ten Commandments were given. he says see Yahweh has given you the Sabbath therefore on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days remain each of you in his place let no one go out of his place on the seventh day so the people rested on the seventh day now a couple lessons from there each of us has a similar call right now we have been told to honor the Sabbath to keep it holy we've been told to remember the Sabbath we'll read later in Deuteronomy that we're told to observe the Sabbath we have a fourth commandment that still abides in the New Testament now it may not be exactly the same as the way the fourth commandment was always observed at times under the Mosaic Covenant.

We certainly aren't looking for manna six days a week, are we? But one of the lessons here is this. The extra work that was done on Saturday was a form of their worship to God. When they were preparing a little bit extra on Saturday so that on Sunday they'd be able to rest. That was a form of their worship to God. Because they believed God.

They believed His Word. God Word is our only hope If you put your hope in what you can see in what you can understand in what you think science has explained or all these different types of things that are out there, you're going to eventually fall short. And what will happen is, you will do the opposite of what God has commanded you. Our world is absolutely opposed to the Sabbath.

The largest sports league in the United States, the NFL, the most popular one, is almost exclusively Sunday league. Until recently, they added some Thursday games. But the NFL decided, we're just going to be your church. Functionally speaking, most people, that's their church on Sunday. And the excuse is, oh, well, I go to church in the morning, and then I spend the rest of the day focused on football.

And we're going to see why that's not in keeping with the fourth commandment. Found a website today. I almost hate to... It was so sickening, but it's a good example. A website today where you can order Chick-fil-A to be delivered to you on Sunday. and so what I figured out is they take your order in advance and then they must buy up the stuff on Saturday and then they heat it up for you and they'll deliver it and they'll deliver it for $6.66 so they must have grown up as dispensationalists and now they're walking away from that stuff but this is somebody's idea to make 80 cents a delivery apparently on Sundays.

And what's clear about it is their goal in life is not to, they're not really trying to make money. Their goal is to oppose the Sabbath-keeping of the founder of Chick-fil-A, who believed that people should have a day to worship God. I've been to businesses that have a sign that says, we are closed Sundays so that our employees can spend time with their families. that's nice but that's not the fourth commandment I'm glad for a person that gets to work for a place like that that's fine but the Chick-fil-A guy actually was very clear it's a time to worship God so a couple arguments about the Sabbath the first argument being that the Sabbath is part of the Mosaic law therefore it went away with the rest of the Mosaic law when Jesus died to pay the price that we needed to pay for the law and since the Sabbath wasn't a repeated like clear command in the New Testament it's not an abiding command and we reject that because the Sabbath in fact is part of God's eternal moral law it existed on the seventh day of creation it existed when the Israelites before Moses got the commandments from God on the mountain in Exodus 16 and it exists today second reason people give or a second reason people like to give is that they say the Sabbath was not repeated in the New Testament and they say things like it's not talked about in the New Testament if you turn to Matthew 12 what we'll see in the New Testament if you read it is that the Sabbath is the most mentioned law of God in the entire New Testament you just never see a line that says oh by the way the fourth commandment is abiding God thought it would be a little silly I think to have to tell us I don't mean to be offensive but Psalm 92 inspired text of God's this is what happens when your brain starts going different places but in Psalm 92 which is titled a psalm a song for the Sabbath in Psalm 92 it says it is good to give thanks to Yahweh to sing praises to your name oh most high to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night.

This is for the Sabbath. To the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O Yahweh, have made me glad by your work. At the works of your hands I sing for joy. This is what he does on the Sabbath. Sings to the Lord.

He says, how great are your works, O Yahweh. Your thoughts are very deep. And then he says, the stupid man cannot know. The fool cannot understand this. You know who can understand? that there's a Sabbath, this is the fool. You have to be somewhat intentionally stupefying yourself in order to read the New Testament and walk away saying there's no Sabbath.

Look at verse 8 of Matthew 12. Turn back there. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. I don't know about your God, but when my God's Lord of something, It's not because he's about to get rid of it in a couple of years. Now, Jesus, in the New Testament, when he talks about the Sabbath, is making a point many, many times. And one of the points is that your extra-biblical rules surrounding the Sabbath are not what God intended for it.

And it's not what God intended for the people who you have yoked with your extra rules This is one of the reasons why I will not be handing you a discrete list of Sabbath violations Now we can name a few Some of them will become obvious as we study through the text. I'm not going to hand you a discrete list of ways you can cheat on your wife, either. I certainly expect that you're going to be conscientiously trying not to. and then in some cases you're going to have a heart that's led enough by the Holy Spirit that you're going to know when to turn away from something or not but Jesus also clarifies he clarifies the Sabbath but he also part of I think his point of all this is to continuously proclaim himself Lord of the Sabbath each and every time Jesus dealt with the Sabbath it resulted in unequivocal proclamations of his deity which again that's another thing people like to say well jesus never claimed he was god my friend andrew rapaport did a study through the sayings of jesus in the new testament and decided that at least two-thirds of all verses in the new testament actually are claims that jesus is god he just doesn't say i am god very often.

But he makes not. Like if I stood here right now and said, die the way, I'm unchangeable. Would you guys just think, well he's so funny, Michael would never claim he's God? No, you'd say, this guy just called himself God. That's why he got killed. They knew he was calling himself God.

Colossians 2.16 This is all the anti-sabotarians favorite verse. I won't say antinomian. I just said antinomian. But I just said it. Colossians 2.16. Colossians being written.

Some people say to refute Gnostic heresy. Some people will say that they were trying to fight against Judaizers coming in. verse 2 16 therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath tells us in verse 13 and 14 you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh God made alive together with him having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

So the argument is, God took the record of legal debt and the legal demands against you, and he set it aside, nailing it to the cross. Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of all these things, including the Sabbath. Depending on what Bible version you have, your Bible might say Sabbath day. there's a number of Bible versions that say Sabbath day now the word that's used here this is really interesting to me the word that's used here is plural in the Greek there is a singular word for Sabbath that was not used that the author of this book was aware of.

But he used the word Sebas. For my Greek guy in here, it's the genitive plural. It's a noun. And so, the question is, does this verse tell us, hey, we shouldn't pass judgment on one another over the Sabbath? And that's the argument people make today, that it's okay. ironically the anti-sabotarians pass judgment on sabotarians like crazy because legitimately if there was no sabbath law given by God to Christians then being a sabbatarian would be a form of legalism that probably ought to be condemned like the Judaizers in Galatia and so I think they're actually right to pass judgment on us if they really believe that there's no such law.

Because we're now adding to God's law. So the irony is, their very position requires them to pass judgment on people in regard to the Sabbath, right? Which is funny. But if we didn't have all of the rest of the teaching of Scripture, this verse would be a nail in the coffin of Sabbatarianism. We could put it to death, and we could say, well, I guess we can't judge anyone, but if you read through the Old Testament, St.

Leviticus 23 in particular, you will see that there are actually a number of Sabbaths that God commanded the people to keep. One of them is the Sabbath in the fourth command. The Sabbath that God practiced on the very first Sabbath, the very first seventh day. but God told them to practice all sorts of different Sabbaths where they would, it says in my version, afflict themselves I think it means to fast, mostly where they would not do any labor so it wasn't just one day in seven that they were to cease from their labor there were many days that they were to dedicate to the Lord at the end of their different feasts at the beginning of some of their feasts and so what the author of Colossians is saying.

I can tell you this. You can find good people who will disagree with me. Nobody that wrote the 1689 disagrees with me, but there good people today who will disagree but the author of Colossians is telling people look if some guy that grew up Jewish wants to keep practicing some of these festivals and some of these feast days that he grew up enjoying as a Jew, let him enjoy.

Don't judge him for still doing that. And don't you judge other people because they don't celebrate those things. What it is not saying is, oh, and by the way, there's only nine commandments. now. That's what you have to get out of your mind that it's not saying. Because the Sabbath is a command from God to us, your flesh wants to rebel against it. you need to understand that the Sabbath command was written on your heart before you were born the fact that I'm hopefully awakening that right now might be the reason why some part of you is actually rebelling a little bit inside because there is a part of you that remains that hates the Sabbath.

Chapter 6 of our Confession, paragraph 5, the corruption of nature during this life doth remain in those that are regenerated. We do not believe in sinless perfectionism in this life. And although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified. So although your flesh is being mortified and although Christ has put to death your flesh in one final sense of your justification, it says yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly sin.

The internal battle that you actually have with regard to keeping the Sabbath is itself sin. Albert Barnes wrote, They who do not love the Sabbath on earth are not prepared for heaven. Okay, so I'm going to finish this quote, but I want you to think for a moment about the other commandments. I don't want to be overly graphic here, but can you imagine a couple of people get married and say, you may kiss the bride.

And he gives her a kiss and everyone's clapping. We say, Mr. and Mrs. whatever, right? And then the guy turns and he says, so am I not allowed to be with other girls now? It's comical because it's absurd, right? I don't mind you laughing. It's comical.

But you know what? I don't know if I would judge you for smacking a guy for doing that. Or if somebody said, well, how close can I get to other girls? Can I just massage their back? We'd think this was insane. To even ask some of the questions.

What part of you isn't fully satisfied with the bride you've been given? Right? don't you delight in the bride you have go delight in her go enjoy what you have why are you so worried about what you don't have and it's because part of him still wants what he doesn't have right same thing with stealing well how how inexpensive of something can I steal from someone and it's okay if you're asking that question you have a problem you're a thief in your heart now I think genuine believers can ask some good questions about how to obey the Sabbath as part of their discipleship you may want to understand things better and that's good but that's different from well what can't I do what are all the fun things that I want to do on Sunday that now I can't do that's the wrong attitude to have so Albert Barnes says they who do not love the Sabbath on earth are not prepared for heaven if it is to them a day of tediousness listen to me kids because you're all going to be held accountable for the Sabbath as well and parents you're responsible to teach this to your kids while they're little so they don't get into some bad habits if it's hours move heavily if they have no delight in it's sacred employment what would an eternity of such days be you see what he's saying heaven is kind of like an infinite number of Sabbaths. So if you hate it, why do you want to go to heaven?

He says, how would they be passed? Nothing can be clearer than that. If we have no such happiness in a season of holy rest and in holy employment here, we are wholly unprepared for heaven. To the Christian, it is the subject of the highest joy in anticipation that heaven is to be one long, unbroken Sabbath. An eternity of successive Sabbath hours. But what to a sinner could be more repulsive and gloomy prospect than such an eternal Sabbath?

Robert Gordon from the sanctification of the Sabbath about 170 years ago wrote it is quite possible that we may abstain from everything could be regarded as a violation of the letter of the fourth commandment. And that we may observe also with becoming decency the duties which belong peculiarly to the Sabbath. And yet that there may be little in all of this of the real sanctification of that holy day.

Sanctifying the Sabbath. Remember the command was keep it holy. Sanctifying the Sabbath does not consist merely in abstaining, however rigorously, from one class of employments and giving ourselves however laboriously to another. The husband that desperately wants other women but just stays away because he happens to be married is no husband to be praised.

He's certainly not bringing comfort to his wife. No doubt, Robert Gordon writes, The Sabbath cannot be sanctified where worldly employments are not given up and religious exercises engaged in. But it is also true that the Sabbath is kept holy only insofar as the great subjects which it is designed to present are entertained and dwelt upon with satisfaction and delight. okay so to sum that up for you you're supposed to delight in the Sabbath the Sabbath isn the day that you reluctantly don do the stuff that you really want to do And you kind of trudge through it and you sort of grumble about it and then well now that you not doing it you just thinking about it well, I guess I'll do this tomorrow, or what time can I start?

One of the questions we have to try to answer is, when does the Sabbath start and end? I mean, it's a reasonable question. you're supposed to dwell upon the great subject of God with satisfaction and delight it should be a delight to you what a relief all week long you've worked all week long you've labored and everybody in here works I don't care what type of work you technically do according to what you put on a form Everyone's supposed to be working six days, and you're tired. And God's given you one day to simply enjoy the fact that Jesus Christ came into the world and suffered and died so that a sinner like you, who for the most part now has endured over 2,000 Sabbaths if you're over 40 years old, can start to realize, wow, he really died for a lot for me.

Maybe I can give him a few. Maybe I can stop thinking of Sunday as my day and me day and my time, and I can start thinking of Sunday, the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath, which we'll discuss why it switched from Saturday to Sunday too. Maybe you can start thinking of it as that's his day along with the other six that he actually lets me do the other stuff and the worldly enjoyments and the recreations.

God took a break from creation. You can take a break from recreation, I think. He says Robert Gordon And did those subjects the ones we supposed to be meditating upon occupy the place in our hearts which they ought to occupy? Did we feel it to be a delightful exercise to meditate with admiration and gratitude on God's wonderful work of creation and His still more wonderful work of redeeming love? did we see it to be a most precious privilege that we are permitted to hold fellowship with Him in His ordinances, and were the hope of at last entering into His rest the main source of our consolation and comfort amidst the various ills of our present sinful condition, then we would have in our own minds a rule to guide us in the sanctification of the Sabbath.

Even the longing desire of engaging in its sacred duties because it is a delight to us and because we expect to find in it a season of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. God has granted you a day where you are free of all of your worldly obligations, where no matter who tells you what you're supposed to do or asks you to do something, that's his day. You don't have to check your emails.

You can just focus on the fact that Jesus Christ came to die for you Kept the Sabbath perfectly Was he 33 years old? So 1,500 Sabbaths or something like that. Maybe it was good. I don't know if it was bad math or not off the top of my head. Jesus Christ perfectly kept the Sabbath. Even as a baby.

The amazingly impeccable Savior. So meditate on that. So today, remember that you are expected to be a Sabbatarian. You may not have known what that was an hour ago. I may have said a bunch of really hard things. And you know what?

There is nobody in this room who is a little bit more concerned with how poorly he keeps the Sabbath right now than the guy talking to you, because I'm the one that studied it all week. I've been studying it for a little while, and this week kind of blew the doors open. and I didn't know how much of a blasphemer I was at heart either. So that's one of the reasons we just moved on from that one.

But here we are. We want to know how to do this together. We want to help one another to be able to grow in the likeness of Christ. And so today, just repent in your heart of your apathy toward the Sabbath. And as I invite the men to pray, I pray that the men would pray for one another in that way. Pray loud and clear. and let's together strive to enter into His rest.

Let's strive together to live through, live this life keeping the laws that we know that God has given us to keep. And maybe we'll see what He does through that effort.