Profaning Sabbath 2

Matthew 12, if you just listen, so you don't have to stand. At that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. He said to them, Have you not read what David did when he was hungry and those who were with him?

How he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the presence, which it is not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests. Or have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice.

You would not have condemned the guiltless. For the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. We have spent a few weeks. Does anybody know where my water bottle is? Really bothering me. We have spent a few weeks on the Sabbath now.

Thank you. And most of what we have said about the Sabbath so far, I guess we could say it could be summed up in, hey, there's this fourth commandment and none of you are keeping it very well. And that's the nature of preaching. Thank you, brother. but in particular the way that we are not often keeping the sabbath very well comes in our doing things that we ought not to do on the day of rest on the lord's day on the sabbath day that god has given us so we tend to come up with lists of things we shouldn't do on that day that make us feel like we're being righteous.

And in some cases, we probably make some pretty good distinctions of things we shouldn't do. Some are kind of obvious. The error that the Pharisees were committing, that Jesus is going to literally blast them for here in Matthew 12, I should have said figuratively blast them for, it's figurative, isn't it? is that they were so concerned with the keeping of the Sabbath that they added rules that God had never made to the Sabbath that they imposed on other people.

Now, when I say they were so concerned about keeping the Sabbath, I don't want you to misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these were really good men who just wanted to please God so much. What I mean is that they saw that there was a law and their idolatrous hearts were excited to go ahead and make every little additional law they could make that they could impose upon other people so that they could satisfy their own need to feel self-righteous.

So in their zeal to keep the fourth commandment, although they had zeal, it was for the wrong reasons. and thus they ended up destroying what God had made for good and hurting people for whom the very law would have been in existence to help. So we're going to look through Matthew 12. So if you've been following along, we haven't done a lot of New Testament as we've gone through the Ten Commandments in particular.

So this is pretty exciting. And one of the arguments people will make about the Sabbath is, well it's not mentioned in the New Testament so therefore why should we keep it? They don't even say why should we keep it, they say therefore we don't need to. And so I'm very careful as I speak on the topic as well to share with you that there are a there is a litany litany is a singular word that means many things but there is a litany or there are a litany of men who deny the persistence of the Sabbath, who I would still consider to be Christian brothers who are worthy of listening to them teach on any number of topics.

And in fact, listening to what they say about the Sabbath, that it may strengthen your resolve therein. And so, you know, an example would be John MacArthur. He's an example of a person who I think is a very good Bible teacher, who many people have benefited from. I've benefited from him immensely by personal knowledge of people who know him. He is an amazing Christian man in every meticulous area of his life.

He desires holiness, and he's an excellent preacher. And he would tell you that he does not believe what we believe about the Sabbath. And so I thank God that in the list of sins in the New Testament that inherit someone eternal life, you do not see Sabbath breaking as one of them. So we trust that there is some understanding, at least on God's part, that people will have figured this out differently.

One thing you will notice, though, is most people that are Christians practice some form of it. And they worship on Sunday. And, you know, so there's some things that are written on our hearts. But let's look at Matthew 12 together. There was eight verses that I read. And then there's a section afterwards of six more verses that we'll try to look at.

At that time so something had just happened And we look at that later At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath So what the Sabbath in this case Kids anybody know What day of the week is it? This is Saturday still, right? So we haven't gotten to the point yet where we've shifted it to Sunday. It says, His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.

Now, there was a law in the Old Testament that said that you had to let people go through your grain fields. And if they could pick something or if they could pick grapes, whatever they could basically fit in their mouth, that was OK. But they weren't allowed to take a bag. So nobody could come into your property and take a bag of grapes or two bags or enough to go sell somewhere else.

But they were able to come and feed themselves. This was part of the provision for the poor. and so the disciples and Jesus are on the Sabbath going through the grain fields and they start to pluck heads of grain and to whatever extent they had to pluck them and then they had to rub them together to open them up and all the things that had to happen and certainly this stuff wasn't gluten free at the time but they had to do what they had to do so they were doing some amount of work Right. And so now the fourth commandment comes into place.

And now you see in verse two. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. So so the initial reaction you might think to this is is OK. These guys are diligently trying to obey God's law and enforce it. other people obey it. And my question is, why were the Pharisees there in the first place?

So literally, you've got Jesus and his disciples walking through grain fields, presumably on their way to worship at the synagogue on the Sabbath, and Pharisees who have apparently nothing better to do but follow them. And they're close enough to him that they're watching him. And so frankly, if anybody's already maybe in violation of one of their rules, it would be themselves, I'd say.

So don't, if I could title the sermon, Don't Be a Pharisee, I would. It's a terrible title of the sermon, so I won't, but don't be a Pharisee. Part of the Sabbath teaching is that we are going to learn about a lot of this together. There's very few people, I think, that think they have it all figured out. and so as you are growing in your faith and as Mr.

Thompson prayed, when you start to realize things and you notice that your brother or sister in the Lord is in violation of the Sabbath in some way that maybe you just figured out, let's be patient about it. It's not your job to hunt them down. We don't need to follow people around on Sunday to see what they're doing. I think that we want to exhort people and provoke them to love and good works and at the same time I think there is a little level of pedantic nitpickiness that we can get into which was one of the Pharisees' problems.

But so the Pharisees, they try to catch Jesus' people in law-breaking and if Jesus is truly the Jewish Messiah and Jesus is the God, Yahweh, of the law of God then keeping every jot and tittle of the law would have been absolutely vital for him to have had a single blemish upon him in regards to God's law would have been enough to make him worthless as a savior and you'd all be dead in your sins. And for him to have allowed his disciples to openly break God's law without rebuking them would have been himself a problem on himself. And so the Pharisees aptly point out, look.

And what they're really saying is, look, your disciples are breaking the commandment of God is what they're saying. And they want to see how Jesus reacts. They think they've got him. Jesus responds in typical perfect fashion. He said to them, have you not read what David did when he was hungry and those who were with him? how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the presence which it is not lawful for him to eat nor for those who are with him but only for the priests so Jesus responds to defend his disciples pulling off of grain on the Sabbath Matthew Henry writes this Christ's industrious explanation of the fourth commandment intimates its perpetual obligation to the religious observation of one day in seven as a holy Sabbath.

Still Matthew Henry continues, he would not expound a law that was immediately to expire, but doubtless intended hereby to settle a point which would be of use to his church in all ages. And so it is to teach us that our Christian Sabbath, though under the direction of the fourth commandment, is not under the injunction of the Jewish elders. To summarize Matthew Henry, what he's saying is this would have been a really good time for Jesus to say, who cares, the Sabbath is going away anyway after I'm resurrected.

But you have, like I said earlier, there is an entire class of Christians out there whose hermeneutic, whose biblical interpretive method that they have forced upon the text of Scripture forces them to believe that Jesus spoke about the Sabbath in a non basis throughout His time on earth more than any other topic so that after he died and rose again nobody would need it anymore whatsoever As if the only reason he talked about it was to waste his breath for a while, and the reason God recorded it amply was just so we'd have a lot of neat stuff to read about Jesus that has no bearing on our life today. Matthew Henry essentially says that's foolish. He didn't, I'm saying that. when you meet these liberal people and they say, Jesus didn't talk about homosexuality a lot or things of that sort.

Some of it's true, he didn't. Jesus talked about the Sabbath and he acted on the Sabbath. But, as Matthew Henry pointed out, this teaches us that our Christian Sabbath, though it is still under the direction of the fourth commandment, which, remember, was one in seven. It didn't say rest on Saturday. It said six days you shall labor and the seventh shall be a Sabbath.

That that Christian Sabbath is not under the injunctions of the Jewish elders. That your practice of the Sabbath is not to be defined by what the Pharisees said was the correct way to practice the Sabbath. And the way the Pharisees practiced the Sabbath was essentially making up rules that they could follow and then putting that yoke onto other people. by analogy your practice on the Sabbath the injunction towards you personally dear Christian is not based on what your pastor says it's not based on what some other guy says it's based on what the Lord Jesus Christ thinks and you derive that through counsel with pastors with other believers with husbands, with wives, within your home in Bible studies with Christians reading books.

But if anybody in here is looking for me to stand up again and give you a list of things you can and can't do on the Sabbath, you're basically declaring yourself to be a little Pharisee in your heart. And if I was willing to do it, I'd be declaring myself to be the same, and I won't do it. Now, if you want to talk one-on-one and ask me if I think you should do certain things on the Sabbath, I'll be happy to share with you what I think and maybe what I do.

Maybe you do things on the Sabbath that you're able to do in such a way that it is glorifying to God and it's restful to you. And in my case, it's not. I know one example people have brought up. I hate to get out of the text too much, but the Sabbath has a lot of implications for some people setting their clothes out for church the day before. is essential to their Sabbath observance.

Because finding clothing and seeing where it is and children being able to know where their clothes are and what they're going to wear and not fighting about it and all that stuff is absolutely vital to them being able to focus on worshiping the Lord that day. And in my case, I've got to be honest, I'm just not stressed about it. I open my closet, and in case you haven't noticed, I pretty much wear the same thing every week.

It's always there. So there's not a lot of stress for me. And so for different people, that's going to be different. I know Mr. Roberts told me once that driving tires him out. So he doesn't want to drive real far on the Sabbath.

I just drove seven hours on a couple of Sabbaths ago to be with you guys. And it didn't tire me out, but I also saw it as worthwhile labor if it did to be here. So let's let's continue. So David goes into the temple and there's this priest guy. and this is in the Old Testament. I don't want to go into this passage right now. But David and his men were hungry.

And Jesus lets us know that He knows more about the situation than we do. When David goes into the temple and his people are hungry and they've got this bread. And the bread was there for the priests. It was designed for the priests to eat. In fact, nobody else was supposed to eat it. But in the case of David's men coming into the temple to eat this bread, But it was allowable, according to Jesus, because it was more important than the worship purpose of the bread, which is just symbolic anyway.

It was more important to actually give it to people who were needy and hungry at the time. So you can research the passage. There's some interesting aspects about reading that passage and then seeing how Jesus comments on it. But the point ends up being this. A strict interpretation of the proper use of that bread in the temple by the priest would have caused David and his men to continue to starve.

And Jesus is saying that is not my interpretation of how these things are supposed to go down. He adds another argument to bolster the fact that what they're doing on the Sabbath is acceptable. in verse 5. Or have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I find it really interesting that he uses the word profane.

In another version it says they break the Sabbath. There is work to do as part of the church. there is labor that we do in order to make our worship happen. Some of you may not realize that people get here earlier than you to set things up. Some of us, partially because of that, we relax a little after and other ones of you are sweeping the floor and taking trash out. and if I could list all the things people in this church do to just make one Sunday go, it would be tiring.

And so I do hope that you are seeking rest in other ways and that when you are working for the church to worship that you are doing it with joy, that it might not be too draining for you That why I told the ladies if making a meal for Sunday night I don want you to make like the best meal every week that takes you hours and hours I want you to do things that you can still do and still find rest and that your husbands would find rest and not be stressed by what you doing on Sunday and that your children would be able to be given that rest from labor so Matthew Henry again one of the reasons you've got two Matthew Henry quotes is that being a Sabbatarian is actually somewhat of a minority in church history now in some cases being a minority in church history is bad in other cases it's kind of accepted or understood that it would happen early Christians were Sabbatarian so we'll go with that But listen to what Matthew Henry says about these labors. This intimates that those labors are lawful on the Sabbath day, which are necessary not only to the support of life, but to the service of the day. As tolling a bell to call the congregation together, traveling to church and the like.

He says Sabbath rest is to promote, not to hinder Sabbath worship. So one of the ways that you can, in your self-righteousness, think you're obeying the fourth commandment, while actually disobeying it would be to do nothing on Sunday in such a way as to be idle and do nothing that promotes religion. Do nothing that promotes your church's worship service. do nothing to help other people to be here to worship the fourth commandment is not about idleness it says remember the sabbath in deuteronomy it says observe the sabbath the fourth commandment is actually a call to proper work and action so while we are resting from our work at our jobs we are laboring to make worship occur.

We are laboring here as part of a church where we rent. Where part of our Sabbath worship is that we have to set up and we have to clean up. We can't just say we'll clean up Monday. I think with the distance some of us travel it's probably not a good idea anyway. And so Jesus Christ is telling these Pharisees, have you not read? In verse 5.

So this is like an old-fashioned insult in the Bible, okay? So we read it like, okay, just as, or have you not read the law and how this happened? Like, this is literally like as snarky as it can be, okay? And I don't mean to use that in a poor way. There are several forms of snarkiness which are utterly sinful, just maybe in and of themselves. Children, you're not to be snarky with your parent, probably ever.

I can't think of a good example right now. Maybe when you're an adult, you're messing around with them a little. But Jesus is literally just coming out with insulting. I don't know why I keep saying literally today. I have no idea why that word keeps coming. Jesus is being utterly insulting.

Have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? Jesus is letting the Pharisees know that in all their zeal, it's without any knowledge. He's pretty much calling them empty headed. He's talking to them as if they've never read what's obviously in front of them. In fact, the same book, the Torah, where they would have even learned of the Sabbath in the first place, would have told them all these other things that he's teaching them now.

I don't say that to necessarily promote sarcasm on a regular basis, but to point out that Jesus is kind of ripping them here. You haven't even read the truth. The Pharisees' error was not that they were so zealous for God and they just took it too far. Their error was that they wanted to make themselves the little gods. And so they ignored what was written by God and made up their own rules.

So this is why we try to look at what the Bible says to guide us into what we ought to do, for example, on the Sabbath. Jesus says that they profane the Sabbath and are guiltless. And then in verse 6, he says, I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. Can anybody tell me what it is? That's right. Jesus Christ, recognizing the Jews' affinity for their temple, the Jews tended to see the temple as an extremely special place, and it was for many reasons. and Jesus is letting them know this place where you formerly went to meet with God, something greater is here.

And what's really sad, we're going through Hebrews, you know, on Friday mornings, me and the men. And what's sad is that it took another 40 years. God finally had to get the temple destroyed so that they would just stop. Something greater than the temple's here. Jesus's point here is, I'm greater than the temple. So if the priests are allowed to go in the temple on the Sabbath and they're slaughtering animals and they're baking bread and they're offering incense and they're doing all the things that have to be done on the Sabbath on a regular basis and on these extra Sabbaths, too.

They're working like crazy to do the acts of worship that are required. And Jesus is saying, I'm even greater than this. I get to decide what happens on my day. That's why we call it the Lord's Day, by the way. Because right here, we'll skip to verse 8 for a moment. Jesus says, for the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.

And then throughout most of the New Testament, now this is called the Lord's Day. So if you want to talk to people about the Sabbath, you can say, Hey, happy Sabbath day to your fellow Christian, and they'll probably act confused. But if you go up to most Christians and say, happy Lord's Day, or did you have a good Lord's Day? They know what you mean.

And it could be an opening to talk about these things. So Jesus Christ declares himself to be the Lord of the Sabbath. Now, who instituted the Sabbath? God did. Jesus Christ makes an unequivocal statement at this point that he is God. he is God in the flesh and he is Lord of the Sabbath. And he is the one who will say what they can and can't do on the Sabbath and no one else.

Verse 7 is reminiscent of Psalm 51, where Jesus says, And if you had known what this means, he's speaking to the Pharisees right now, who seemingly are overly concerned with other people keeping the law of God. and he says, if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. The priests in the temple were making sacrifices. Nobody even thought about condemning them.

It was obvious that this was instituted by God and what they were doing was part of the Sabbath work that they were to do. And Jesus says, if you understood I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. This is a quote from Hosea 6.6. It's also reminiscent of Isaiah chapter 1 where God says, I hate your new moons and your Sabbaths.

I hate all your feasts. Turn to Isaiah 1. I want to quote it correctly. I know what he says, but I don't remember it. Exactly. Isaiah one around verse 18 here.

Yeah, 14, your new moons and your appointed feast, my soul hates. They become a burden to me. I'm wary of bearing them. 13, he says, I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. He says in 16, wool. He says, if you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.

I desire mercy and not sacrifice. Psalm 51. Do you remember Psalm 51? For you do not delight in sacrifice or I would give it. Right. The sacrifices of God aren't burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings, but they're a broken and contrite spirit.

That's what God will not despise. So listen, we did this when we did Psalm 51. God isn't saying he doesn't want our religious worship. He's not saying don't do communion because it's not what saves you. He's saying your heart has to be right first. He wants right hearts and your hatred of your fellow man that results in you walking by him on the way to church when he's in need. that's the kind of thing that God hates.

And for you to show up for Sabbath worship and think you're dotting every I and crossing every T of what worship looks like, but all throughout the week you're ignoring all the things of the law that God would have you do to your fellow man, what you show him is that you hate him and your fellow man. So it's not about not doing the sacrifices in the Old Testament. Those were important.

It's about people who did them with the wrong heart. You turn to Luke 11. I want to expound on this a little bit. Jesus' goal is not to convince people, hey, go ahead and do what you want on the Sabbath because his disciples were plucking grain okay This is not a hey let open things up let people be happy let them do what they want As long as people in their heart think they obeying me it OK That's not what he's saying.

He's letting the Pharisees know that there's a nitpickiness to the way that they're handling God's law. Look at 11, Luke 11, verse 42. I'll do 39. This is a context. And the Lord said to him, this Pharisee, now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish. But inside you are full of greed and wickedness.

And then 42. But woe to you, Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and every herb and then neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, he says, without neglecting the others. Jesus doesn't say it's either or. He doesn't say, I don't really care about tithing stuff. I just want you to love people.

He's saying you can't be religious and be accepted in my sight if you don't love people and do right by them. If you don't love justice and kindness and mercy and goodness. He says in verse 45 and 46, he says, one of the lawyers answered him. Now there's a lawyer talking to him, right? He says, teacher, in saying these things, you insult us also. I just love it.

Yep, he sure did. What did MacArthur say? You know, when a sinner is offended by God, he said, let them be offended. They've been an offense to God their whole life. This guy's been an insult to God his whole life. Listen to 46.

He said, woe to you lawyers also. So listen, for you load people with burdens hard to bear. And you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. The problem here is that the Pharisees, the lawyers, the religious people of the day. The problem was not that they taught God's law to people and expected people to live righteous lives. The problem was not that they thought that people should be held accountable for sin.

The problem is not that they wanted to define things properly. There's nothing wrong with wanting to proclaim God's truth and God's law, especially in a culture that needs it desperately. The problem is that they didn't proclaim what God had said. They were proclaiming what they thought. They loaded up people with burdens too much for them to bear. And then they wouldn't even lift a finger to help them with it. they gave people limits to how many steps they could walk on the sabbath that in some weird karen moment the pharisees jump out on jesus and the disciples on a sabbath look back at matthew 12 i don't want to do several weeks of this so we're i gotta get through it all here matthew 12 maybe i'll bring it to a close here everyone's like okay we'll see Matthew 12 9 right after he says I'm Lord of the Sabbath right so this is the part listen I'm not God I shouldn't be God and I don't speak for God except when I preach his word but this is the part where if I was God I would have said but by the way it doesn't matter anymore anyway okay instead of I'm Lord of the Sabbath it's I am Lord of the day we're not going to celebrate anymore, okay?

I would have made it so much more clear. So listen. Jesus is still Lord of the Sabbath because the Sabbath remains. It was there before us and it will be there after. It says here in 12.9, He went on from there and entered their synagogues. Now Jesus is in the synagogue and a man there has a withered hand and they asked him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him?

So if you haven't figured out yet that these are the bad guys in the story that should become obvious. They knew He would heal the guy. It was like Jesus was so full of goodness and mercy and compassion and power to heal that He couldn't walk by somebody without healing them. And it should be convicted. Can it be said about you? that you can't walk by someone without showing them mercy and compassion?

I'm not saying you're supposed to heal people. But are you doing the kinds of things that someone that follows the man who did that would expect you to do? But back to the Pharisees. This is so they might accuse them. They were just looking for a reason to accuse them of wrongdoing, so they bring a guy with a withered hand. I think it implied that they supplied the guy And he said to them in typical Jesus fashion he asked him a question right He says which one of you who has a sheep if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath will not take hold of it and lift it out?

So he knows these guys, if they drop their sheep, they're picking the sheep up, right? They're not going to let the sheep die, because it fell in a hole on the Sabbath. That's mercy toward the sheep. And as well, this is their money. He knows they're not going to throw away money. He says of how much more value is a man than a sheep.

So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. So not only is it lawful to feed yourself, lawful to feed others. Some of you guys have to feed people. I do suggest to try to find meals you can prepare beforehand. It's not a bad thing to force people to just eat lunch meat and cheese for a day. It won't hurt them, I promise.

But it's also okay to take care of people's necessities. You'd be a really bad, even abusive parent if you didn't change diapers on the Sabbath, okay? We have to be able to think critically about these things. and Jesus of course heals the man and look at 14 though but the Pharisees went out and conspired against him how to destroy him for healing a guy Pharisees did not love God's law they loved themselves they were the Jews of Romans I think chapter 9 who sought salvation through their own righteousness and not by faith but so Jesus Christ the Lord of the Sabbath recognizes that these lawyers are putting burdens on people that they cannot bear he recognizes that even if the lawyers and the Pharisees didn't exist the burden of God's ceremonial law alone is too much to even understand and handle to keep the law in all the points would have still been very difficult even for a diligent Jew the burden of God's moral law was even worse nobody in the history of time could keep it even the perfect Adam only the God man Jesus Christ kept God's law perfectly so if you turn back a page to Matthew 11 I don't think it's any accident that Matthew 11 comes right before Matthew 12's teaching on the Sabbath one of my fears as a teacher of the Sabbath is that I will load on people burdens that are not the ones God has given them is not what I want to do at all the opposite and equally frightful fear is that i will not preach it in such a way that people are convicted of the things they're doing that legitimately displease god on the sabbath and so here i am trying to teach it in such a way that we can understand what god has said but regardless of whether we can agree on some of the details of the sabbath i think what we can agree with is that we are all lawbreakers.

That even those of you who have a desire to keep the Sabbath, find yourself regularly breaking even your own ideals of what it would look like. Honestly, I'm wondering if unless I just turn off everything in my house for the day, it's like impossible. but in Matthew 11 25 Jesus declared I thank you Father Lord of heaven and earth that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children so just remember that next time somebody's trying to argue with you about the Bible and they've got a degree after their name and they're called doctor so-and-so and maybe they're even a professor at a seminary somewhere. Maybe they have a little bit of a lisp and when they drink, their pinky goes up.

They're real sophisticated. Just remember that. Jesus hid these things from the wise and understanding and reveals them to his little children. It's those who are weak who come to him for strength that get it, not those who think they're strong and smart and intelligent and are the debaters of this age. He says, yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.

All things have been handed over to me by my Father and no one knows the Son except the Father and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him Praise God for that But now listen to these words Interestingly, they're a bit of a quote from the Apocrypha, which as Protestants we tend to sometimes think ill of, but the Apocrypha is writing that we should all become familiar with. In fact, our confession talks about it as being worthwhile reading, but just not on par with Scripture. But listen to what Jesus says to those who people have put unnecessary burdens on.

And even people who the burden that God has given each and every one of us by His law can't handle it. He says, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me and for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls. He says, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

If your attempts to be observing the Sabbath, which I think you should do, are resulting in burdensomeness. If it's resulting in a yoke you cannot bear, I urge you to lay it on Christ. You may be adding to God's law, making things harder than God intended them to be. and you will do it to others as well then if you're doing it to yourself it's also possible that what you're experiencing is the normal result of the Christian who still has this flesh trying to follow God's law which is that your flesh hates it and your flesh will fight against it and you will war against that flesh.

And your war will be lost unless you rely on the Spirit of God to enable you. You have no power over your own flesh. If you did, we wouldn't need Jesus. Your power comes from faith in Christ and understanding through His Word how His Holy Spirit works sanctification in your heart. And so if you're burdened today, come to him. Come to Jesus today.

He says, come to me. There's a lot of gospel calls in the New Testament. But it always comes down to come to me. He literally did everything already for you. So trust in him. Father, your holy word is filled with exhortations and admonishments and rebukes and commands, and yet it is also filled with compassion and mercy and the strength to carry out our duties.

We pray that you would, by your grace, give us the joy of the heart that comes through knowledge of Christ and faith in Him that puts us in a position where we desire righteousness and we know that if we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we will be satisfied. You will give us the satisfaction that our hearts desire. Help us to war against the flesh.

Help us to edify one another with love, with compassion, with a desire for one another's good. We pray, Lord, for those who do not know Christ, that you would draw them to him. Draw sinners to your son. And for those who do know Christ, those who even in their Christianity are heavy laden and they labor, we pray Lord that you would give them rest that even if it's just that one day a week that we might experience that blessed rest we look forward to one day when it will be eternal rest I thank you Father for keeping these things from the wise and understanding and showing them to children humble us that we may believe your word Amen Thank you.