Jeffrey C. Long

The following sermon was preached on June 4th, 2006 at Filer Mennonite Church.

Ten Commandments: Neglected. Very important to us as Christians.

Useful for holiness

Conviction of sins. Romans

Used to judge people. As we will see.

One of them is important to us today as we continue with our study of Luke.

Exodus 20:8 Lists the Fourth commandment: 8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 You shall labor six days, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God.

Sabbath means to rest. But we don’t just rest as an end in itself. We rest to give our attention to God.

Fairly basic instruction.

However, what has constantly gotten the practice in trouble has been the phrase “keep it holy.”

This inspired 1,521 different laws that the Jewish people had to obey,

for example, you had to remove your false teeth. Eventually, to not profane the name of God, they ceased saying it at all.

But the Jewish people were not the only ones who got hung up on how exactly keep the sabbath day holy. Possibly as early as 1781 so-called “blue laws” were enacted in various United States colonies that restricted certain activities on Sunday.

For example the Blue laws of Conneticut read

CONCERNING THE SABBATH:

The Sabbath Day shall begin at sunset Saturday.

No one shall cross a river on the Sabbath but authorized clergymen.

No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep houses, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath Day.

No one shall kiss his or her children on the Sabbath or feasting days.

Winona Lake’s Blue laws read:

No manufacture, sale, consumption, or possession of alcohol

No swearing or spitting in public

No boating, carriage rides, or swimming on Sundays

No dancing with members of the opposite sex

No conducting of business (except food service) on Sundays

No card playing or wagering of any kind

In Texas a blue law was in effect until 1985 prohibiting selling housewares such as pots, pans, and washing machines on Sunday

Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota car dealerships continue to operate under blue-law prohibitions in which an automobile may not be purchased or traded on a Sunday.

It’s important that we find a balance in how we approach sabbath keeping. We’ve seen examples of how it has been overly legislated. But in our day the danger is probably more in not giving it enough attention.

Today we’ll learn from Luke how Jesus approached the sabbath and also learn some ways that we can make Sabbath keeping more meaningful.

Read Luke 6:1-5

1 Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first, that he was going through the grain fields. His disciples plucked the heads of grain, and ate, rubbing them in their hands. 2 But some of the Pharisees said to them, “Why do you do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day?”

3 Jesus, answering them, said, “Haven’t you read what David did when he was hungry, he, and those who were with him; 4 how he entered into the house of God, and took and ate the show bread, and gave also to those who were with him, which is not lawful to eat except for the priests alone?” 5 He said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

Read 6:1 and 2 again.

1 Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first, that he was going through the grain fields. His disciples plucked the heads of grain, and ate, rubbing them in their hands. 2 But some of the Pharisees said to them, “Why do you do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day?”

Let’s look first at what it was that the disciples did that got the Pharisees all rankled.

What was it exactly that they had done on the sabbath?

Was it the fact that they were walking on the sabbath?

No. You were allowed to walk, so long as it didn’t exceed two thousand cubits, about a 1/4 of a mile, which was called, appropriately a sabbath day’s journey.

Another possibility was that they were in a grain field on the sabbath. One of the sabbath laws said “it is not lawful for a man to visit his gardens or his fields to check on their progress.” In other words: it is work if you are checking how things are going. But the disciples weren’t checking up on the crop because it wasn’t theirs. They just happened to be passing through.

Perhaps we wonder if the trouble was that they were taking food that didn’t belong to them. Were they stealing? No. Even taking food from a field was allowed in Deuteronomy 23:25 “When you come into your neighbor’s standing grain, then you may pluck the ears with your hand; but you shall not move a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain.” It is ok to snack at a man’s field but it is not ok to harvest. I wonder if the same applies to eating an apple off of someone’s tree.

The problem wasn’t walking on the sabbath, or being in a grain field on the sabbath, or taking food that didn’t belong to them. The problem was that they plucked the grain and rubbed it in their hands on the sabbath. They were harvesting and threshing. The Jewish rule was “he that reaps (on the sabbath day) ever so little, is guilty of stoning, and “plucking of ears of corn is a derivative of reaping”;” and is punishable with the same kind of death. Philo the Jew said that the rest of the sabbath not only reached to men, bond and free, and to beasts, but even to trees, and plants. He wrote “it was not lawful to cut a plant, or branch, or so much as a leaf”, on a sabbath day:

So the Pharisees were astonished at such a blatant disregard for the law and said to Jesus “Why do you do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day?”

Jesus answered in verse 3 “Haven’t you read what David did when he was hungry, he, and those who were with him; 4 how he entered into the house of God, and took and ate the show bread, and gave also to those who were with him, which is not lawful to eat except for the priests alone?”

It was allowed of David because of necessity. 1Samuel 21:6 So the priest gave him holy bread; for there was no bread there but the show bread.

So Jesus is hear saying to the Pharisees that in the same case there was a necessity of the disciples to eat and so while they were breaking the ceremonial laws that had been added to the original fourth commandment, they were not in fact breaking the commandment.

But then He completely scandalized them by adding in verse 5: “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

Which means that He was the creator of the sabbath and so He can do with it what He pleases. Saying This was easily more blasphemous then plucking grain on the sabbath. Jesus was again equating Himself with God.

If it was true that He was lord of the sabbath, then it did of course give Him the authority to do what He pleased on the Sabbath

John Gill writes: The Jews so far agree to this, that he that commanded the law of the sabbath, could dispense with it; For example: the day on which Jericho was taken was the sabbath day; and that though they slew and burnt on the sabbath day, the God that commanded the observation of the sabbath, commanded the profaning of it”.”

And since Christ is equal to the Father in power and glory so as he is Lord of all other things, he is of the sabbath, and has a power of dispensing with it, and even of abolishing it.

This helps to explain how the Gentile church changed the observance of the sabbath into observing The Lord’s Day.

The church began meeting on Sunday instead of saturday because it was the day that Jesus rose from the dead.

One of the early church fathers, Ignatius, wrote “We No longer keep the Sabbath but living according to the Lord’s day, on which also our Light arose”

Barnabus called it the eight day, the day after the Sabbath. As the first day of the week was the beginning of the first creation, they called the day after the sabbath the day of the beginning of the new creation. “We keep the eighth day with gladness, on which Jesus arose from the dead.”

Let’s look at some reasons why the Gentile church moved away from ceremonial observance of the seventh day as the sabbath.

When the Jewish Christians learned that the Gentiles had come into a saving knowledge of Jesus they were called upon to decide if the Gentile Christians needed to follow the Jewish laws. They convened a council to discuss it and made a lits of what they called “the necessary things”

Acts 15:28, 29 28 For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay no greater burden on you than these necessary things: 29 that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality, from which if you keep yourselves, it will be well with you. Farewell.”

No mention of keeping the seventh day as a sabbath. And so the gentile Christians were under no obligation to keep the seventh day as a sabbath.

In Colossians, Paul warned against those who would judge based on whether or not people kept the sabbath day.

Colossians 2:16 16 Let no man therefore judge you in eating, or in drinking, or with respect to a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day, 17 which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ’s.

As a matter of individual devotion a man might do as he pleased (Ro 14:5, 6, ), but no general rule as necessary for salvation could be compatible with the liberty wherein Christ has made us free.

In fact, even though the Christian’s worship was held on Sunday it did not even sanctify Sunday any more than a regular Wednesday service among us sanctifies Wednesday. John Calvin even proposed to adopt Thursday in place of Sunday. In fact the first church services were held in the evening, not in the morning. Should we then only meet on Sunday evening?

For many Christians meeting on Sunday morning is a simple impossibility. One member of our young adult small group works at Target at 3:00am making Sunday morning worship impossible for him. So Wednesday night _is_ his church. He is just as much a part of this church as anyone who attends on sunday.

So if Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and observance of the seventh day as the sabbath is no longer a command, then how should we observe the 4th commandment?

The puritans have some instruction to us. Their position generally was that the commandment teaches the principle that one day in seven is to be given to God, without in fact naming the day of the week. It says “Remember the sabbath day..the day of rest,” not “Remember the seventh day of the week…”. This is what distinguishes the ceremonial from the moral – the commandment reminded them that by ceremony, the seventh day had been marked out as the weekly Sabbath. But the identification of the specific day was not the essence of the commandment. The moral substance of the commandment was the principle to keep one day out of seven to the Lord.

So what we need to do is practice the principles that go with the sabbath, which are rest from work and worship to God.

Let’s look at each of these.

First rest from work.

According to a raft of recent studies, Americans are working more and enjoying it less. Between 1995 and 1999, the number of people calling in sick because of stress more than tripled. “I’ve got a lot of clients coming to me from Silicon Valley,” says Pam Ammondson…who runs a Santa Rosa…workshop to counsel…burnout [sufferers]. “It’s a dream to make a million dollars overnight. But these people are not happy, their relationships are miserable, and they’re taking a step back to ask what it’s all about”…. http://www.timesizing.com/1vacatns.htm

Sherman James, a researcher of epidemic diseases at the University of Michigan, describes a personality type named John Henryism. The name refers to the American folk hero who, hammering a six-foot-long steel drill, tried to out-race a steam drill tunneling through a mountain. John Henry beat the machine, only to fall dead from the superhuman effort.

Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, (W.H. Freman and Co., 1998), p. 332–333; submitted by James Lindberg, Cha

We need to be exceptionally cautious as Americans that we not fall victim to John Henryism: working so hard that we lose our life under the mistaken notion that with enough effort and determination we can control our world.

It is exactly to this tendency that the sabbath rest speaks to us. We need rest.

Our farmer friends at Menno Mennonite Church said that if they work on Sunday, the machinery will break on Monday. While this is a little superstitious it is a reminder that God wants us to rest.

We need rest. We need a break from our work during our work day. We need sleep to regenerate from our work. And we need a sabbath day of rest to break from our work. It is a reminder that we are not little gods over our worlds.

What about our worship. How does keeping the sabbath holy affect our worship?

Leland Rycken says “Earlier in this century, someone claimed that we work at our play and play at our work. Today the confusion has deepened: we worship our work, work at our play, and play at our worship.” Leland Ryken, quoted in Critique (1997, No. 7), p. 9; submitted by Aaron Goerner, New Hartford, New York

Rafael Antonio Lozano is a man with a mission, albeit a strange one. The 33-year-old computer programmer from Plano, Texas, is on a quest to visit every company-owned Starbucks on the planet.

Lozano, who calls himself Winter, began his mission in 1997, when there were 1,304 such stores worldwide. Today, there are over 6,000 in 37 countries. As of October 31st, 2005, Winter had visited 4,918 Starbucks in North America, in addition to 213 others around the globe.

Despite his impressive pace, Winter is realistic about the nature of his quest, saying, “As long as they keep building Starbucks, I’ll never be finished.” He is also realistic about the importance of his mission. “Every time I reach a Starbucks, I feel like I’ve accomplished something,” he said, “when actually I’ve accomplished nothing.”

Jayne Clark, “Sooner or Latte, He’ll Get There,” USAToday.com (10-13-05); submitted by Sam O’Neal, St. Charles, Illino

One of the great concerns for how we treat the Lord’s day is that while we go as often as Lozano visits Starbucks, we may not actually be accomplishing anything.

As Annie Dillard says “Christians aren’t sensible of the conditions. The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”

In Isaiah 58:13, 14 God says “If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord.”

The temptation for us is the same as it was for the Pharisees. To make keeping the sabbath all about rest from work and to them minimize the focus on our devotion to god.

Richard Baxter, Puritan pastor and author says “It is a day for heart work, [not merely rest]. your principal business is with heaven; follow your hearts therefore all the day and see that they be not idle while your bodies are exercised: nothing is done if the heart do nothing. Follow your hearts therefore all the day and see that they be not idle while your bodies are exercised: nothing is done if the heart do nothing.”

Here are some ideas that he gives to prepare for the Lord’s day.

1. Do your work during the 6 days. Dispatch all your business

2. Shake off the thoughts of worldly things and clear your minds of worldly delights and cares

3. Call to mind the sermon you heard the last Lord’s day so that you may be prepared to receive the next.

4. Go seasonably to bed that you may not be sleepy on the Lord’s day. Acts 20:9 A certain young man named Eutychus sat in the window, weighed down with deep sleep. As Paul spoke still longer, being weighed down by his sleep, he fell down from the third story, and was taken up dead.

5. Repent of the sins of the week past as particularly and seriously as you can; and seek pardon and peace through Christ that you come not with guilt or trouble upon your consciences before the Lord.

Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. We need to not be worried with keeping the law ceremonially. But we need to follow it as a rest from our work and focus of our attention on God and our heart.