[0:00] Exodus 20, verse 1, the Ten Commandments. You probably know these verses pretty well. Verse 1, and God spoke all these words.
[0:13] I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
[0:26] You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
[0:43] You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.
[0:54] Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.
[1:11] For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath and made it holy.
[1:21] Honor your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor, you shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
[1:45] When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke and trembled with fear, they stayed at a distance and said to Moses, speak to us yourself and we will listen, but do not have God speak to us and we will die.
[2:01] Moses said to the people, do not be afraid, God has come to test you so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning. The people remained at a distance while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.
[2:15] This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray, let's ask for God's help as we study this together. Gracious God, speak to our hearts this morning.
[2:27] We want to hear your word in the pages of scripture. We want to hear it clearly. We want to not just comprehend it with our heads, we want to comprehend it with our hearts so that we are changed, so that we become like your son, Jesus.
[2:43] That is our desire, that's our hope and we ask that you would grant it by the power of your spirit working through your word this morning. And we ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.
[2:55] So we are continuing in our series in the Ten Commandments. We're actually going to have a little bit of a break. So we've done what's traditionally called the first table of the law, the first four commandments. Over September, there's actually a whole lot going on, so we've got a bunch of other people preaching over the month of September and then we'll pick it up again in October.
[3:13] But today we're at the last command in the first table of the law, the fourth command, the Sabbath command. Now I am old enough to remember, not as old as some of you, but old enough to remember when everything shut down in the country because it was a Sunday, because it was the Sabbath.
[3:32] So the Dutch Reformed Church's kind of subculture, which is a very close cousin of Scottish Presbyterianism, had very, very, very strict views of the Sabbath, what you could and couldn't do on the Sabbath.
[3:45] And the residue of that religious culture actually persisted for quite some time in our country. When I, just to give you an example of this, when I moved to the City Bowl in 2009, there was only one bottle store selling alcohol on a Sunday.
[4:00] Now those of you who've been here in the City Bowl for a long time, you know which one that was because you all used to bump into each other over there. There's a, there's actually, there's a joke that goes, Jews don't recognize Jesus, Protestants don't recognize the Pope, and Baptists don't recognize each other in the bottle store.
[4:21] Now, while Presbyterians are not particularly squeamish about being in the bottle store on Monday through Saturday, you probably could actually add another layer to that joke that goes something like this, Presbyterians don't recognize each other in any store on the Sabbath.
[4:40] That whole question about shops, should shops be open or closed, is actually more of a discussion on the subject of church and state relations in a kind of country where you've got a majority of people who identify as Christian.
[4:51] Our concern today is not that. Our concern is to look at how Christians might actually obey this fourth commandment in the Bible. Or maybe if you come in here this morning, the question for you is, should Christians obey the fourth commandment today?
[5:05] So have a look at the command, verse 8. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
[5:18] On it you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.
[5:35] Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. There were basically two components to observing the Sabbath day for the ancient Israelite.
[5:47] Rest and worship. So actually later on, Leviticus chapter 23, verse 3, makes this very clear. Moses says this, he says, there are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of Sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly.
[6:02] You are not to do any work wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord. So there's a cessation of work on the one hand, and then there's the sacred assembling of God's people on the other hand.
[6:13] So rest and worship. To keep the Sabbath holy was to give yourself to those two things. On the seventh day of the week, in the Jewish calendar, there was Saturday. Now if you, you might notice this, but if you take out your phone right now and you look at your calendar app, you might be surprised to notice that it's not Saturday, it's Sunday, and we are in sacred assembly right now.
[6:39] So what's going on? Notice that this command gets a longer explanation than any of the other commands, and it's the commandment that more than any of the others has caused the most debate amongst Christians.
[6:53] In fact, even Christians within the same kind of theological tradition. So I'll give you an example of this. The Westminster divines, those are the ministers in the 17th century who got together to write the Westminster Confession of Faith, the standard of faith for the Presbyterian church.
[7:08] They don't seem to be in complete agreement with John Calvin and what he wrote about the Sabbath in his famous work, The Institutes, in the 16th century, even though Presbyterians basically root their entire theology in the system of thought that John Calvin had.
[7:23] So there you've got guys that are on the same team coming to different conclusions about how to apply this fourth commandment. And then if you kind of go further out, in the broader Christian world, you've got groups that are extremely, extremely anti-Sabbatarian and would say that the Old Testament Sabbath has absolutely nothing to do with Sunday and Christian worship in the New Testament, absolutely nothing.
[7:45] And then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got people like Seventh-day Adventists who would say the Sabbath is completely binding on New Testament believers. In fact, we should move our day of worship back to Saturday like it was under the Old Covenant.
[8:00] So it's very, very contested ground. And so the next few minutes, let's try and solve close to 2,000 years of theological disagreement. Here are three things that I'd like you to consider this morning as you think about the Sabbath and how it relates to New Testament believers.
[8:18] Number one, the Sabbath begins at the very beginning. It doesn't begin at Sinai. The Sabbath begins at the very beginning. It doesn't begin at Sinai.
[8:29] Look at verse 11. What is the reason for keeping the Sabbath holy? Verse 11, For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, but He rested on the seventh day.
[8:40] Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So God says, keep the Sabbath day holy and that is set aside a sacred day of rest one day in seven. Why? Well, because I created the world in six days and then I rested on the seventh day.
[8:56] God had a Sabbath rest, so we should have a Sabbath rest. That's the logic of the passage. But then that means, I think, that the concept of Sabbath comes long, long, long before Israel get to Sinai.
[9:10] It comes all the way back in creation. It comes right back before everything. And that is incredibly important because it means then that Sabbath observance is not intrinsically tied to what we might call this temporal mosaic covenant, this national covenant agreement that God is making with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai.
[9:32] And certainly as you read on, as you read in Exodus, Leviticus, you'll see all sorts of ceremonial and civil, so pertaining to the nation-state relations of God and His people, civil aspects all getting added to the keeping of the Sabbath.
[9:47] But that core idea of rest, one day in seven, set aside for Sabbath, that predates the law of Moses.
[9:59] Which means you cannot say, I don't think, well, you know, guys, as New Testament believers, we're not under the law of Moses anymore, therefore the Sabbath has no bearing on us. I don't think we can say that. I don't think wherever you land on the spectrum, you can't say that.
[10:12] The Sabbath comes long before the law of Moses. The Sabbath is what we might call a creation ordinance. God's design for rest is built into the fabric of creation itself.
[10:27] There's a Jewish author by the name of Judith Shilovitz, she wrote a pretty well-received, popular-level book on the history of Sabbath in both Jewish and Christian culture.
[10:38] And in one of the sections of the book, she writes this, she says, my mood would darken until by Saturday afternoon I'd be unresponsive and morose. My normal routine, which involved brunch with friends and swapping tales of misadventure and the relentless quest for romance and professional success, made me feel impossibly restless.
[10:58] I started spending Saturdays by myself. After a while, I got lonely and did something that as a teenager, profoundly put off by her religious education, I could never have imagined wanting to do.
[11:09] I began dropping in on a nearby synagogue. It was only much later that I developed a theory about my condition. I was suffering from the lack of a Sabbath. There is ample evidence that our relationship to work is out of whack.
[11:25] Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement. We can't help admiring workaholics. Let me argue instead on behalf of an institution that has kept workaholism in reasonable check for thousands of years.
[11:40] Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking.
[11:51] You cannot downshift casually and easily. That is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful.
[12:03] They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will. One that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.
[12:16] Now that's a fascinating piece from a largely irreligious person who looks at the Sabbath and says, hey guys, I think we missed something here by getting rid of the Sabbath.
[12:28] Something of immense value. It's almost like we were built or designed to observe Sabbath. You see friends, we can debate until the cows come home about how or what you can and you can't do on the Sabbath.
[12:43] But at a very, very, very fundamental level, I think we need to agree that breaking the fourth commandment has dire consequences for our own well-being. God has made us this way.
[12:55] And so to go against that is to do so at great peril. Maybe you come in here this morning and you're exhausted. Maybe you come in here this morning and you're shattered emotionally, psychologically, physically.
[13:09] It might be because you're not observing Sabbath. And as Shilovitz says in her book, it takes a level of effort to actually do that well.
[13:21] It means working wise, working smart over six days so that you can properly rest on the seventh. It means getting your work life and your home life in order Monday to Saturday so that Sunday can be fully devoted to worship and to rest.
[13:39] It means God a calendar so that your Sabbaths aren't regularly getting interrupted by work trips or events or other things. Don't be surprised if you constantly go against God's good design for your body, your mind, and things start to come apart in your life.
[14:01] Sabbath is a creation ordinance. It's fundamental to who we are. And so that's the first thing. The Sabbath begins at the beginning, not at Sinai. Second thing, number two, the Sabbath is part of the moral law.
[14:19] Sabbath is part of the moral law. I think this is a factor that is often neglected by people who want to say that we shouldn't observe any sort of Sabbath as New Testament believers.
[14:30] So the command, you've got to see where it is, where it's situated. It's given as part of the Ten Commandments, as part of God's eternal moral law, as we looked at when we started the Ten Commandments series. There might, there certainly are, there might be civil and ceremonial aspects to Sabbath observance, but the basic command is given here in the Ten Commandments and not in all the kind of case law and civil and ceremonial law that follows in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy.
[14:58] Now that by itself I think has to give pause to even the most ardent anti-Sabbatarian. I was actually pretty, a pretty ardent anti-Sabbatarian when I first started out in ministry.
[15:14] Now how much of that anti-Sabbatarianism had to do with the deep study of Scripture or how much of it had to do with the fact that the elders and the deacons at my church had a go at me for playing football in the Durban Sunday League.
[15:26] I'm not sure. I actually posted, well, Lindsay posted the advert for Should Christians Obey the Fourth Commandment on Instagram last night and I reposted it on my stories and a friend of mine who's in a church in Durban who played in that Durban Sunday League messaged me and said, so have you answered your questions yet?
[15:49] I said, sort of. Either way, whatever my views were back then, I don't think I fully at that point wrestled with the Fourth Commandment's placement within the Ten Commandments.
[16:01] Because let's be honest, we're not going to debate the other nine commandments, are we? There's no debate about murder. There's no debate about theft. There's no debate about lying. There are no serious Christians going around sleeping with other people's spouses and going, I'm not under law, I'm under grace.
[16:16] If you are doing that, stop that, repent and read your Bible properly. If the other nine commands have this abiding moral force, why not the Fourth Commandment?
[16:30] Now, some anti-Sabbatarians will protest and they'll say, well, if you look at the other nine commandments, Jesus explicitly reiterates all the other nine in the New Testament, but he never explicitly reiterates the Fourth Commandment.
[16:44] Friends, I think that is a very, very poor argument from silence. And I think it's a very bad way to interpret your Bible. Just because Jesus does not explicitly reiterate an Old Testament command does not mean you are free then to just ignore Old Testament commands.
[17:02] Jesus never says anything about sexual relationships with animals. The Old Testament does. So does that mean you can now marry your dog? The moral force of the Old Testament, and particularly the Ten Commandments, only ever changes, here's your rule of thumb for understanding the Bible, only ever changes if we have clear and explicit direction in the New Testament to change it.
[17:28] So for example, we have clear statements from Jesus and from the apostles about the food laws of the Old Testament that they no longer apply. So you can go home today and you can eat crayfish and you don't have to feel guilty about eating crayfish today.
[17:41] We don't have any clear or explicit statement in the New Testament calling for an end to Sabbath observance. We just don't.
[17:53] In fact, to the contrary, what we have is we have Jesus talking about the good of the Sabbath for God's people in Mark chapter 2. We have Jesus telling us about how to use the Sabbath for deeds of mercy and compassion in Mark chapter 3.
[18:07] He has plenty of run-ins with the religious leaders of his day over the issue of the lawful use of the Sabbath. In all of those situations, what he could have just done is he could have just said, guys, let's not debate about this.
[18:24] Let's not debate about what is lawful and what's not lawful on the Sabbath because I'm just going to take it all away. I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. I'm just going to take it away like I'm going to take away the sacrificial system and I'm going to take away the food laws.
[18:35] I'm just going to take it away. But he never says that. He has numerous opportunities to say it and he never says that. Paul never says that. Peter never says that.
[18:45] The author of the book of Hebrews never says that. The New Testament never says that. And so because the fourth commandment then is embedded in God's eternal moral law, we need to have a very, very, very, very good reason to not observe it in some form today as New Testament believers.
[19:10] Now you might rightly then say, but if it's such a strong moral force behind the command then why are we sitting here on a Sunday and not on a Saturday? That's a good question. And it's a question that the New Testament does answer.
[19:23] We don't find the New Testament abolishing the Sabbath, but we do find the New Testament dramatically changing the Sabbath, I think. So here's the Apostle Paul.
[19:34] This is Romans chapter 14, verse 5 and 6. In this section of Romans, Paul is talking about disputable matters between Christians and he's trying to say, listen, don't judge each other over these disputable matters.
[19:46] And here's what he writes. He says, So there you read that and you think, well, Paul seems to be loosening it up there a little bit in terms of observing a sacred day.
[20:17] But does he have the Sabbath? in mind. Colossians 2 helps us out here because here Paul talks about some of the specific Jewish holy days. Colossians 2, 16-17, he says, Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink or with regard to a religious festival, a new moon celebration, or a Sabbath day.
[20:39] These are a shadow of the things that were to come. The reality, however, is found in Christ. Now there he explicitly mentions the Sabbath. So I think what we do is when we put these two passages together, what we can take from these two passages is that the strict observance of the Jewish Sabbath, with all of its ceremonial and civil bells and whistles that you find in the Levitical law, is no longer required for Christians this side of Jesus.
[21:11] Okay? That's you and me, living this side of Jesus. Jesus. But that's not all the New Testament says. It goes further. Because we find the earliest Christians meeting for sacred assembly, not on the Jewish Saturday, but on Sundays, the first day of the week.
[21:32] We see this in Acts chapter 20. We see it in 1 Corinthians chapter 16. And then in Revelation 2, we see them giving this day a special name. We see the Apostle John calling it the Lord's Day.
[21:46] We see some sort of deliberate attempt by the early Christians to take the principles of Sabbath, rest and worship, and to move them from Saturday to Sunday to the Lord's Day.
[22:00] Why? Why are they doing this? What is driving them to do this? Is it just kind of pragmatic? What's driving them to do this? Well, if you read the end of all the Gospels, all of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all the accounts of Jesus' life, they all tell you that Jesus' resurrection takes place on the first day of the week.
[22:24] Now, interestingly, in all four of them, there is this curious little detail. It's the same phrase in all four of them. It says, in your English Bible, it's normally translated, on the first day of the week.
[22:36] Jesus' resurrection was on the first day of the week. The woman went to the tomb on the first day of the week and found the tomb was empty. But the Greek literally actually says this. It says, on the one Sabbath, on the one Sabbath, on the Sabbath plus one, really, four times, on the Sabbath plus one, the tomb was empty.
[23:00] It seems very much like the Gospel writers are trying to say that the Sabbath, Sunday, sorry, is the Sabbath plus one. It's not less than the Sabbath.
[23:12] It's more than the Sabbath. And it's the first day of the week. This Sabbath, this plus one, this Sunday, this resurrection day, it's this day that is given the name the Lord's Day.
[23:30] This is now our day for rest and for worship because this is the day the Lord rose on. In fact, Jesus then appears to his followers on consecutive Sundays after his resurrection.
[23:43] And if you're not completely convinced by that, we actually have quite clear commentary from some of the earliest Christian writings that come just after the end of the writing of the New Testament. So we see in the writings of Justin Martyr and in a very early document called the Dedache, we have some explanation of this move from Sabbath to Lord's Day, to this day of Christ's resurrection, the day of Christian's rest and worship because of that move.
[24:11] So friends, while Paul, I think, makes it very clear that we certainly don't observe the Sabbath in the same way as it was observed under the Old Covenant, I do think the moral force of observing a Sabbath still remains, calling us to rest and to worship our resurrected Lord on his day, the Lord's Day, what I think we can then rightly call the Christian Sabbath.
[24:39] That is to say, the neglect of the Lord's Day worship, I think, then is to transgress God's moral law. I don't think it's an optional extra, something we can just kind of do when we want to and not do when we don't want to.
[24:54] We can debate some of the details, and Paul says we certainly should be careful when it comes to judging how people regard certain days, but I do not think the Bible permits us to neglect Lord's Day worship and rest.
[25:09] In fact, I think the book of Hebrews actually makes this incredibly clear. Hebrews 10, verse 25, it tells Christians not to, and I quote, not to give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing. That's not just general meeting because the word there is don't give up synagoguing together.
[25:23] It has religious sacred assembly ideas behind it. There is an abiding moral force to the fourth commandment, which means, then, that we neglect Sabbath rest and worship not just to the detriment of our own emotional and physical and psychological well-being, because it's a creation ordinance, but we neglect it also to the detriment of our spiritual well-being, because it's a moral command from God.
[25:49] Number three, the Sabbath is about salvation. If you've been following this series from the beginning, then you might know that the Ten Commandments appears in two places in the Bible, in Exodus 20, and then there's another list again of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5.
[26:10] Exodus 20 is the initial giving of the commandments at Mount Sinai. Deuteronomy 5 is when, 40 years later, the people are about to go into the land, and Moses is standing there, and he retells them the Ten Commandments.
[26:23] The commandments are exactly the same, but Moses actually changes some of the details when it comes to the reasons given for the commandments. So, in Exodus 20, the fourth commandment is rooted in creation.
[26:36] But in Deuteronomy 5, Moses says this. So, he starts off, he says, Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
[26:50] On it you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, or any of your animals, nor any foreigners residing in your town, so that your male and female servants may rest as you do.
[27:04] So, basically the same as in Exodus 20. But then he says this. Verse 15. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and outstretched arm.
[27:19] Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. So, instead of rooting the command in creation, he roots the command in Israel's redemption.
[27:33] Moses is, in effect, saying the reason we obey this command is not just because God rested from creation and gave us a pattern to follow. The reason we obey this command to rest is because God rescued us from oppressive enslavement in Egypt.
[27:47] We were being worked to death. We were being pushed down by this oppressive tyrant, so God rescued us for rest. And so the Sabbath day is a visible marker of our redemption.
[28:04] In Hebrews chapter 4, the author makes a very detailed case that the way Christians enter into true rest, into true Sabbath, is by believing the gospel of Jesus Christ.
[28:15] We who have believed enter that rest, he says. Foreshadowed in weekly Sabbath observance. Now think about this. It makes complete sense.
[28:27] God creates the world, and then he rests. And what happens to that beautiful rest? Well, that beautiful rest gets destroyed, doesn't it, by Adam and Eve through their sin, and they plunge the world into unrest.
[28:39] And it's that unrest that you and I experience every single day. It's that unrest that makes diaconal ministry necessary. It's the unrest of our guilt, of our sin, of our shame.
[28:52] It's the unrest that creates in us, all of us, I think, are yearning for a deeper rest that even the very, very best physical rest cannot provide. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captures this yearning for true rest in one of his poems.
[29:11] He writes, Come read to me some poem, some simple and heartfelt lay that shall soothe this restless feeling and banish the thoughts of day.
[29:22] Not from the grand old masters, not from the bard sublime whose distant footsteps echo through the corridors of time. For like strains of martial music, their mighty thoughts suggest life's endless toil and endeavor.
[29:37] He says, I don't want to hear a poem from any famous poet or writer. I don't want to listen to them.
[29:47] You know why? Because they all write about our daily experience. And our daily experience is one of endless toil. That's the reality of that.
[29:57] I want something deeper. I long for a deeper rest, he says. Now in Christ we have that deeper rest. Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, that's how he describes himself in Mark's gospel.
[30:12] Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, enters into our sinful unrest. His experience here on earth was anything but peaceful and restful.
[30:23] He's crucified by sinful men. And yet through that crucifixion, he atones for our sins. He brings rest.
[30:33] He brings peace between us and God. And then he turns to us. He turns to you this morning. Matthew chapter 11, 28.
[30:44] He says, come. Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. We place our trust in him.
[30:56] He gives us rest. He gives us the rest that comes from forgiveness, knowing that your sins are taken away. He gives us a rest from our constant striving to be free from our debilitating sin.
[31:12] He gives us a rest from trying to justify our lives through our own works. Friends, you can see as you listen to the sermon, I'm not on the anti-Sabbatarian side anymore, although I actually think it's okay to play in a Christian Sunday league, provided you go to church beforehand.
[31:32] I think Christians are morally bound to keep the fourth commandment by observing the Lord's day, that Sunday being set aside for rest and worship should be non-negotiable, that it should be rare that you miss Sunday worship and give your day to rest.
[31:52] But this day will not be of any eternal benefit to you if you do not cease from the work beneath the work. The work of trying to justify yourself before God or before your peers or even before your own heart.
[32:07] The work of trying to find acceptance. The work of trying to create meaning in your life. The work of trying to atone for all your sins and your failures. You have to cease from that work.
[32:19] You have to cease from that work and trust in the one who has done all of that work already. You have to trust in your Savior, Jesus Christ, and His work on the cross. It is that work that justifies you.
[32:29] It is that work that gains your acceptance from the Father. It is that work that fills your life with an unshakable meaning. It is that work that covers over every single sin and failure you will ever make.
[32:43] It's that work that you need to trust in. And so the Sabbath is a sign of that great salvation. That rest from the work beneath the work.
[32:57] You know the number one reason why we don't observe the Christian Sabbath? The Lord's Day. Why we find it so hard to put down our tools and truly, truly rest.
[33:12] It's not primarily a workaholism problem, although we have problems like that in this city. It's not primarily that there isn't enough time in each week to do everything that we need to do in advance.
[33:23] It's not primarily overbearing bosses or a corporate culture that demands every single last drop from you, every moment of waking moment.
[33:33] It's not primarily all the events and activities that are outside of our control that get in the way of our Sabbaths. It's primarily a trust problem.
[33:45] We don't trust Christ enough to put down our tools, physically, mentally, and gather for worship and rest.
[33:58] We don't trust that he's actually got this whole world in his hands. He's got our lives in his hands. We don't trust that our boss at work is not king.
[34:12] Christ is king. And so we think, you know, I've just got to do an extra little bit of work this Sunday afternoon because if I don't do it now, my life's going to fall apart.
[34:23] I've just got to miss worship this next Sunday because if I don't get this one thing done, if I don't go to that one event with my family or friends, well then it's going to disrupt the relationship.
[34:36] We don't trust Christ enough to put down our tools. We don't trust that he truly gives us the status, the acceptance, the justification that we're so desperately trying to build through our careers and our social lives and our romantic lives.
[34:57] We're still doing the work beneath the work. And running off to Hermanus every third or fourth weekend is not fixing that problem. Sorry, I rail in Hermanus a lot in this church.
[35:09] It's got nothing against Hermanus. We're still doing the work beneath the work, the work that Christ has already done for us.
[35:22] And so friends, I call on you this morning to obey the fourth commandment. Keep the Sabbath holy by placing your complete trust in the Lord of the Sabbath. Let's pray.
[35:37] Gracious God, we have hearts that are in states of unrest so much of the time. Some of us, we're sitting here, and even myself as the pastor, I'm not immune to this, but we're sitting here and we're thinking about work on Monday already.
[35:51] We're thinking about tasks that have to be done. We're thinking about arrangements that need to be made. We're thinking about relationships that need to be maintained. And we are not resting. We are not worshiping and we're not resting.
[36:05] And yes, Lord, this world does push all sorts of pressures on us. I don't want to deny or minimize it in any way. All sorts of really difficult, awkward pressures that are hard to navigate, and we need much wisdom.
[36:17] But at the same time, Lord, I fear that we don't have this deep trust in you, that you have this. You've got it. Lord, you've got our lives. And we ought to rest in you.
[36:28] We can put down our tools and we can rest in you, emotionally, physically, spiritually. Father, that act of rest is most evidence, actually, when we gathered here for worship on Sundays, where we say to the outside world, I'm not going to participate in everything else that you've got going on right now.
[36:48] I'm going to the house of the Lord. I'm going to sit with the saints, sing songs, pray prayers, listen to your word, eat and drink the communion elements, fellowship with my fellow believers.
[37:03] Because you've got this world. You've got my life. You've got everything. Lord, give us that level of trust, we pray. And I ask for anyone here this morning who comes in, who's weary and burdened and who has never found that true rest in Christ, I pray that through repentance and faith they might find it this morning.
[37:23] We ask these things in Christ's holy name. Amen. I'm going to vice versa. Amen. Amen. Amen.