This is our worship service for Sunday, 1-30-2022.
Countdown to Worship
“Lion and the Lamb,” Leland.
First Worship Offering
“Start Right Here,” Casting Crowns.
Announcements
Second Worship Offering
“Fires,” Jordan St Cyr.
Communion Service
Dana Smith.
“City On Our Knees,” TobyMac with Rev. Billy Graham.
Today’s message:
Hustle and Grind: The Theology of Work
“Learning to Relax”
Pastor Skip Heitzig
Closing Prayer: Ken Smith.
Sermon Notes:
Hustle and Grind: The Theology of Work
“Learning to Relax”
Pastor Skip Heitzig
If ever there was a commandment tailor-made for the overcommitted and overworked, this is it! Here, God gives His people an order to rest and relax. It’s pretty amazing that we serve a God who put this on His top ten list of important things. Today and next week we will consider what it means to rest and why it is good to do so. Moreover, we’ll see why it is essential to our worship.
Exodus 20:8-11 New King James Version
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
10 but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.
11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
I. Resting Is Commanded
Of the Ten Commandments, the commandment we want to look at for the Sabbath, or to rest– of the Ten Commandments, this is the tender commandment. This is God’s tender way of caring for you and showing you that he cares, it will bring you peace.
II. Remembering Is Clarified
The Ten Commandments are two tables of the law. And the way it’s typically divided is pretty simple. The first four are about your relationship to God. The second six are about your relationship to each other. Now why is that important? Because it shows us that the Sabbath– which is part of the first listing, our relationship to God– the Sabbath isn’t just a pause from work, but it’s a part of worship. It’s a part of worship.
III. Responsibility Is Conveyed
The fourth commandment tells us to devote a whole day to be occupied with Him.
So there are four words. Four words that sum up this fourth commandment, and that gives us our outline. Here’s the four words. Rest, remembrance, responsibility, and reason.
Rest, remembrance, responsibility, and reason. Let’s begin with the first, rest. Resting is commanded. Now let’s read through the entire commandment verse 8.
Exodus 20:8
"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it Holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work; you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle–" your pets get a day off– "nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens in the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath and hallowed it."
Resting is a command. It’s an order. It’s not a suggestion. God gives an order, a rule, a decree. It’s as if He said, relax, and that’s an order. Take a vacation from your vocation, and that’s an order. It is a rule.
It may very well be that God knew we would stumble with this. That may very well be why this commandment, this rule, this decree of God is the longest of any of the Ten Commandments.
God knows our nature.
IV. Reason Is Communicated
God takes rest seriously.
After rest is to remember. Resting is commanded, remembering is clarified. So let’s go down to verse 9 and notice something.
Exodus 20:9
"Six days you shall labor," now He delineates the command but He’s adding supplemental material. "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work," you, nor your son, daughter, male servant, female servant, cattle, stranger that is within your gates.
“To remember the Sabbath – it’s a very strong, positive command but what does that mean? Just sit around and think about it like, oh yeah, I remember.
No, we are to observe it, keep it Holy, and Live it.
"Remember the Sabbath to keep it," what? Holy. That’s the response you are to have. You are to remember so that you will keep it holy. That is, you will treat this day as different from all the other days.
Think of the Sabbath as an "I love God day."
An I love God day. You’re going to do the activities God likes. You’re going to consider the relationship you have with him.
Sabbath is a day where God is honored, and a day where men and women get recharged. Both together.
Now what’s strange about that is you would never know the Sabbath was designed for that purpose when you get to the New Testament. Because by the time you get to the New Testament, the Sabbath had become a wearisome burden to keep. It was a labor to keep the Sabbath.
Jesus said about the religious leaders, the scribes in the Pharisees in Matthew 23. He said, they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders. But they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
Some people’s day off brings more labor and more stress than their days during the week at work.
When God says, six days you shall work, but the seventh day you rest, here’s what He’s saying. I’m going to give you six days to get her done. I’m going to give you six days for you to do your own thing, but the seventh is mine. The seventh, I want uninterrupted time with you.
And there’s a further reason for these six and one patterns. And that is it is patterned after God’s work and Creation. We mentioned that but now we want to look at that. So look at verse 11. It’s part of the same material in the commandment.
Exodus 20:8-11
"For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day." So that’s what it’s patterned, on Creation. "Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath and hallowed it."
You will never find in scripture some verse of scripture that goes like this, tiredness is next to godliness. You’ll never find exhaustion is next to godliness. Not in the book.
In fact, what we do find is the Lord Jesus spotting with his disciples this tendency to overdo it and commanding them to stop doing it because they were exhausted.
Father, we thank You for Your word. We thank You for Your commandments. That You know us well enough to know that, yeah, these folks need a commandment to rest. You know human nature. You know how busy we can get.
And so often it’s just busyness about unimportant things. Of course there are seasons that demand our all and our focus and our attention, but we take this directive very seriously, like You did. You have given us a command to rest. To restore our bodies. And it’s spelled out, it’s clarified in this passage of what it means to think about it, to think about you, to be prepared to set it apart as something distinct and holy.
Lord, I pray that we would learn to balance responsibility, working six days or five days or four days, whatever our schedule might be. But also taking the time, not just to do more stuff, but to actually rest, to focus on You, think about You, bless You, give You undivided attention, be still and know that You are God. Because You did it. And not only did You do it, You commanded that because You did it, we should do it. So like Father like son, like Father like daughter, may we emulate You in this process. In Jesus’s name, we pray.
And God’s people said, amen. |
