The Lord may graciously help
me, I would turn your prayerful attention to Exodus chapter 20
and reading together verses 8, 9, 10 and 11. Exodus chapter 20, commencing
at verse 8. This is known as the fourth commandment. Remember the Sabbath day. to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour and
do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord
thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant,
nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made
heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested
the seventh day. Wherefore the Lord blessed the
Sabbath day and hallowed it. We've read together the fourth
commandment, which is part of the ten commandments, which were
given directly from the mouth of God to the Israelites at Mount
Sinai. They were not only given by the
mouth of God, which was not true of the other commandments, because
in line with their request, they were given first to Moses and
then Moses wrote them down. But these Ten Commandments were
given directly from the mouth of God to all of Israel. And
they trembled as they heard them. They were very important commands. These Ten Commandments were also
different than the rest of the law that was given around this
period of time. These Ten Commandments were written
by the finger of God. on two tables of stone. They were written twice, in a
sense, because the first set of tables were broken by Moses
when he threw them down when coming down from the mount and
seeing the golden calf and the people worshipping in that terrible
way. So these ten commandments stand
out from the rest of the law as an unchanging binding standard
of righteousness given at Mount Sinai for all time, for all men. And indeed, these Ten Commandments
did not commence at their giving at Mount Sinai. At Genesis, in
Genesis 2, We have two commands of these explicitly given. The
first being regarding keeping the Sabbath day holy, keeping
the seventh day holy as it was then, because God rested the
seventh day and hallowed it. We read that in Genesis chapter
2. So this was not a new command.
And yet it was a summary of all the commandments which showed
the holiness of God and his righteous standard, his unbending standard
of righteousness, which would be the standard of righteousness
through all time. And it was these ten commandments
in the two tables of stone which were not just to be put anywhere.
They were to be kept in a special place. And that special place
was the Ark of the Covenant. They would be kept there. The
rest of the law of God was not put inside the Ark. The ceremonial
law and all the civil laws which were, as it were for a time,
the ceremonial law was to be fulfilled with all the ceremonies
were looking towards Calvary and the accomplishment of what
took place there. But the law of God was to be
an unchanging, binding standard of righteousness. And it was
to be written in stone, in other words, unchanging and unchangeable. And it was to be kept in the
ark. And the ark, of course, was a type of Christ. He was the one that could keep
that law. Nobody else could. But Christ
came and perfectly kept that law as he came to this earth
for those 33 years. Kept the law, made it honourable,
so those two tables were kept inside the Ark of the Covenant. Well, the fourth commandment
as we have set before us is It is the longest written commandment,
as it were, and takes up the most number of verses of the
Ten Commandments. And it is, in a sense, a transitional
commandment. It brings together the first
three commandments with the latter six commandments. You see, the
first commandment is about who we should worship. No other gods
before my face. No other gods before me. who
we should worship. The second commandment is how
we should worship the true God. We should not worship the true
God in a false way, which was what they were trying to do with
the golden calf. They said, these be thy gods
that brought thee out of the land of Egypt. They were worshipping
supposedly the true God, but in a completely false and forbidden
way. So the second commandment is
about how we should worship God. The third commandment is how
we should reverence God's holy name. How we should speak of
him. We are not forbidden to take
the name of God upon our lips. But we are to use it with respect. And we should use it with meaning.
And we are to reverence the one who is such a great and an almighty
and a gracious God. We read in Hebrews for our God.
is a consuming fire. We are to take his name on our
lips in a right way. But the fourth commandment is
therefore talking about a time set apart for that worship of
this God that so much deserves our praise and our adoration. There is to be a set time given
to the worship of our God. I came across an interesting
illustration in preparing for this, to speak on this, and it
was regarding a godly man who lived some time back and he was
concerned about his neighbour. His neighbour was doing unnecessary
work in his garden on the Lord's Day and he felt that he should
speak to this man and try and talk to him about what was going
on. So he went up to his neighbor who he was friendly with and
started talking to him and said, if I had worked all week and
gained seven pounds, some time ago, gained seven pounds in that
week and on my way home from work I met a very poor man and
I said well here we are you can have six pounds and you need
some money so this godly man said to his neighbor what would
you say if I did that he said well I think you'd be very kind
to do that and I think the man should be very very thankful
to receive those six pounds from you he said okay what what would
you say then if This man who I'd given this £6 to, then hit
me over the head and took away that last pound that I'd not
actually given him and took it for himself. What would you say
to that man then? Well, he said, I'd say that he
needs punishment, this man. Firstly, because he's not been
thankful for the £6 that he was given. And then, also, because
he'd stolen. that which was not his. And so
this godly man said to his neighbour, you're right, but actually that's
what you're doing by not keeping the Sabbath day holy. God has
given you six days to do your labour, to do all the things
necessary in your garden, in your estate, all that needs to
be done in your family. Six days have been given for
that purpose. One day I've kept for myself
to worship Him and if we do not then give Him that day, we are
not giving Him but we are taking what does not belong to us. We
are using for the purposes of furthering our own ends that
which God had given for the purpose of worshipping Him. So in that
way we see that the necessity is of keeping the Sabbath day. The Sabbath day is a wonderful
blessing. I was not sure what to actually
take as my text, because I was so struck by Isaiah 58, where
it says, this is Isaiah 58 verse 13, 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 shall 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, and so on. It's
a wonderful part of Isaiah there, but saying so much that we are
to delight in this day. Remember, the Sabbath day. We are to remember it. Clearly,
therefore, if we are to remember something, it's something that
wasn't new at the Ten Commandments, and indeed it wasn't. In Exodus
16 is the first reference we have to the Sabbath day, and
that was in connection with The Sabbath day, actually calling
it the Sabbath day, that is. And that was to do with when
they were gathering the manna. They were not to gather the manna,
although manna would not be there on the seventh day. They were
to gather that manna on the day before, twice as much. And therefore
there was to be a stopping of that work. But the word Sabbath
really means to rest and to cease. from our labours to cease. But you see we are not just to
cease from our labours as it were and use it as a day just
to be idle. There is to be work done but
different work. The idea of ceasing from our
labours is not so we do nothing but so we can spend that time
doing other things which we would not have time to do in our busy
schedule in the rest of the time. It is like that if you go to
an important person, say a doctor or somebody like that. You book
an appointment with them. They've got a busy schedule of
all these people to see. But if you want to see them,
you book an appointment with them at a certain time. And that
is so you can see them and then talk to them about your concerns
and your needs. Well, God, if you like, has taken
our diaries and blocked out the Sabbath day, so that we can not
use it for doing our own pleasure, not using it for seeking our
own wealth and furthering our own ends, but that we may seek
Him and His glory. In Leviticus, Leviticus 23, it
talks about the Sabbath in this way. Six days, this is Leviticus
23 verse Three. Six days shall work be done,
but the seventh day is the Sabbath of rest, and holy convocation. In it ye shall do no work therein.
And that word holy convocation, I looked up in this, I've got
a new Westminster Bible that's just come out from the TBS, and
that word holy convocation means a summons to worship. That's what's written in the
margin as the meaning of that holy convocation. It is a summoning
to worship. You see, if you're busy doing
your daily work, you can't, as it were, come together for a
worship service, can you? You can't come together with
the Lord's people. But there is to be that partitioning of
one day in the week so that we can come together. Now, some
of you may say, In the Old Testament, the Sabbath day was the seventh
day, but we keep the first day of the week instead. In Matthew's Gospel, when there
was a lot of criticism, Jesus received criticism about what
was going on on the Sabbath day, because he went through the cornfields
with his disciples and his disciples took a few ears of corn and ate
them as they were travelling from one place to another, to
the synagogue actually, on the Lord's day, on the Sabbath as
it was then. But Jesus, and Jesus defends
them, and they were allowed to eat on the Lord's Day. The idea
of the Sabbath was not to be a problem to man, it was to be
a blessing to man. It was so that man could cease
from all his earthly pursuits, which need to be done. As it
were, we can't live with a seven-day Sabbath, could we? We wouldn't
have food if the farmers never went into their fields and all
the other jobs that need to be done, and they didn't do that
at all. Well, we would have nothing to
live and so forth. There needs to be labour, but
there needs to be a petitioning of that labour so that it doesn't
take over the entirety of our lives. But you see, when Jesus
was criticised, he makes this statement, for the Son of Man
He's Lord even of the Sabbath day. He was Lord. He was in control. And indeed when God made creation,
He rested the seventh day. But Jesus was not coming to establish
the work of creation. which was a great work, which
of course scientists are trying to understand today, all the
intricacies and the hugeness of the universe as we know it
in our little measure compared to what it really is. But Jesus
was not coming for that work. If only we could understand it.
He was coming for a far greater, far greater work, the work of
redemption. And at the completion of the
work of redemption, the Lord being the Lord even of the Sabbath,
then changed the day at which the church should worship. to
the first day of the week, as he rose in triumph on that first
day of the week, as we are to remember it on every Lord's Day,
the fact that the Lord is risen indeed. So as in the work of
creation was a great work, Yet the work of redemption was so
much greater. The work of creation for God,
as it were, was easy. We see him majestically saying,
let there be light, and there was light. But we never read
in his work of redemption that he said, let there be redemption,
and there was redemption. No. He left his glorious throne
in high. He came. made himself of no reputation,
sweat as it were great drops of blood, hung on Calvary's cross,
heaved in shame, derision, his visage marred more than any man. This is the same God. This is the God that spoke, let
there be light, and there was light. No wonder he has that
prerogative to change the day from the 7th to the 1st in recognition
that redemption has now taken place. Obviously the Old Testaments,
they look forward to redemption. They look forward to a time when
Christ would suffer, would die. But now when Jesus rose from
the dead in triumph over all the sin, death, hell and the
grave. He was declaring that the work
was done. Redemption was complete. And
now he ever liveth to make intercession for his people. So we have here,
remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. The Sabbath, a rest,
a ceasing. But there is another picture
to think of here. You see we are busy in our daily lives and
I remember it was particularly was applicable to us as a family
as we moved house into our current house we are now and we got involved
with doing lots of work in the garden and quite often for some
time it looked a complete mess to be honest. There was stuff
everywhere but it was a lovely thing on the Lord's Day, to go
into the house of God, to leave the garden in a complete mess
as it were, and to come and worship God. Not feeling guilty, not
feeling guilty that we really should get on and sort this muddle
out. No. Put God first, come and worship
Him. And that's so with all our work,
with our homework, with our natural work. I realise there are works
of necessity that need to be done. And Jesus made that very
clear too. That there were acts and things
that could be done on the Lord's Day. If there were, for mercies,
for example, caring for people in hospital and so forth. There
are jobs that need to be done on the Lord's Day. But the point
is that we want to do as minimum of those jobs as possible, in
terms of just do the bare minimum, but as many people as possible.
And we are responsible, as it says in this commandment, to
make sure that people under us are not having to work on the
Sabbath day for our benefit, which could possibly be avoided.
So, the seventh day is the Sabbath. Now, so we rest from our labours,
as I was saying, but we went to chapel in those times with
a garden in a mess. But that's a little picture,
in a sense, of our lives. We each will leave this earth,
in a sense, with many things undone. Our families, if we are
blessed with families, they will still have many needs and many
concerns. A house, everything, we have
to leave it all. So in a sense, with our leaving
our natural things once a week to go to worship, we are going
through a picture of what each of us will go through when we
have to leave this world with everything in it and pass from
time into eternity. So that's why it says, therefore
there remaineth a rest. And it's been translated like
a Sabbatism to the people of God. There is a Sabbath, a rest
for the people of God. No, it will not be a 24 hour
period then. No, for the Lord's people it
will be forever. and forever. They will leave
all their work, all the house that they, all the cooking that
they were doing every day, all the things that they were doing
rightly and justly here below. They'll leave it all. And they'll
be involved. in something far more eternal
and something far greater than all these earthly things. Although
we are rightly to labour and to do our work here below, it
says that six days shalt thou labour. It's a command that we
should be labourers, we should labour, we should be involved
in work as God gives us help. But the seventh day is the Sabbath
of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not do any work Thou,
nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant,
nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. So
anybody we have control over, basically, if we're in a position
of control, we need to be concerned that we're not making people
work unnecessarily on the Lord's Day. Because they need to have
a day of rest for their bodies, but also a day to be involved
in the work of God. And the reason given is for in
six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that
in them is, and rested the seventh day. Now clearly those people
that claim to be Christians, but also claim that creation
didn't happen in six literal days, would have great difficulty
in understanding this verse. For in six days the Lord made
heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is, and
rested the seventh day. No, if it didn't mean six literal days,
it wouldn't make sense. Wherefore the Lord blessed the
Sabbath day. God has blessed a day when we
can come aside from all the busy scenes of life and consider our
end. It is indeed a wonderful privilege
to do that. And as I had in Isaiah 58, you
see, Isaiah was saying to the people of God that they were
not keeping these things as they should. They were not keeping
this Sabbath day in the way it should be kept. You see, if our
Sabbath today is a picture of eternal glory, if we are trying to minimise
the worship of God on his day, if we're trying to do as little
as possible of worship on his day, indeed if we find it a burden,
if we find it, oh, we read in one of the prophecies, when will
the Lord's day be over so that we can get on with our buying
and our selling? If that's our attitude, we need
to think, are we really heading for an eternal Sabbath in glory? Is that what we're heading for?
If the worship of God is such a drudgery and such a dreariness
to us, then what evidence have we had that we are heading for
an eternal Sabbath in glory? You see, the Sabbath, the occupation
in heaven, will be spiritual. It will be glorifying God. It
will be what we desire to do in our limited measure here below,
worshipping God. But there we do it to perfection.
So that means that we need to remember the Sabbath day. We
need to prepare for the Sabbath day. You see, if we're prepared
for something, it doesn't come upon us unawares and we make
sure everything's ready before that Sabbath day is upon us.
We get everything ready so that on the Lord's Day, as it's called
in Revelation, the Lord's Day, that we can spend as much time
as possible in those things which are associated with spiritual
activities. When we talk to our families,
we talk to one another. Are we just talking about earthly
things? About what happened last week
and the next week just on an earthly level? Or are we concerned
for one another's spiritual good? Are we seeking that each one
might know the Lord? Are we putting the place of worship,
you see, in a right place? It doesn't say, remember the
Sabbath hour to keep it holy. Did you just give me one hour?
No. The Sabbath day is a whole day, 24 hours. Not just, well,
in Christian circles often, today there's a thought, well, if you
come once in the morning to chapel, the rest of the day is for yourself.
It doesn't say that. Remember the Sabbath day to keep
it holy. We are to use the Sabbath. The
Puritans used to call the Sabbath the market day of the soul. And in those times, the market
day, I believe there was one day a week you had a market day
in your town. And that was the day you went
to shop. I mean, today we have the shops
open, well, sadly, seven days a week, but at least Christians
can go and buy six days a week of their vegetables if they so
wish. But it was not so in those days, in the Puritan days. There
was a market, I believe, once a week in your local village,
different days it went to different places. And if you wanted to
get your provisions for the week, you went to the market on that
day. And if you didn't go to the market that day, you were
without food for that week, unless you had a lot in store. And the
Sabbath was referred to as the market day of the soul. It was
a day when they go and get provisions for the rest of the week, so
that they may be able to think upon the things which are eternal.
We are involved in this world and we are to work for our daily
living, we are to do what is right in the sight of God. But
we can get earthly minded and we can forget that we are citizens
of no mean city. So God has set aside one day
in the week whereby we can rightly stop all their labours. Children
can stop doing their homework and not feel guilty that they're
not revising for their exams even if the exam happens to be
on the Monday morning. No, leave that aside. Those who
honour me, I will honour. And those who despise me will
be lightly esteemed. God's honour, God's blessing
Put me first. Put God first in our lives. Give
him the best of our times. And you see, if we are interested
in the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, we would be keen to
get up in good time, so that it's not just a day spent, as
it were, in bed. It's a day to worship the Lord,
to make the best use of our time in the worship of God. But the key that I really wanted
to come to in Isaiah 58 is to call the Sabbath a delight. If the Sabbath to us is a dreariness,
if there is no delight in the Lord's day, if we do not enter
into his courts with thanksgiving and into his gates with praise,
in a sense we've missed the real sense of it all. It is to be
a delight. And I ask you then, if it is
not a delight, what makes you think you're heading for an eternal
Sabbath? There's a little riddle that
somebody said, which has some truth to it. They said if you
don't get to heaven before you die, you'll never get there afterwards. In other words, if you don't
have sweet foretaste of the eternal Sabbath, here below, what evidence
have you got that you are going to that place of an eternal Sabbath? What makes you think that you
are going to spend an eternity in worshipping God, being freed
from a body of sin and death? It's just a wonderful thought
to a child of God. to be freed from the body of
sin and death. To love Him with unsinning heart
is a wonderful thought. You see, here below in our worship,
we seek to do things according to God's will, but sin is mixed
with all that we do. There are so many things to drag
us down, so many things to pull us back, but in glory, you see,
there will be this uninterrupted worship. of God, worshipping
God all the day long. So in Isaiah 58 it says, if thou
turn away thy foot from the Sabbath for doing thy pleasure, it doesn't
mean that we don't delight in his day, it's saying that we
don't do the things as it were in our own business, for our
own ends in that sense, doing thy pleasure on the holy day
and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable,
and shall honour him. You see, if we come into God's
house and delight to be there in good time, why? Because this
is the best day of the week. This is the time we get to serve
the Lord. You see, if you were going through
a very important interview, you might say, well, I need to make
sure I get there in good time. I mustn't be late, I might lose
the job. Are we saying that the worship of God is of less importance
than getting a good job. Is that what we're saying? We
need to put first things first. We need to honour God. God will
provide. He says, those that seek me early
shall find me. Seek ye the Lord. And all these
things should be added unto you. If we put God first, God can
bless us, and He will bless us. He said here in Isaiah 58, if you do these things, not doing
thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasures, nor speaking thine
own words, then, this is a promise, then shalt thou delight thyself
in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places
of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father,
for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." God has promised,
God has promised with his own word, with his own mouth, that
those that honour his day, to make it the best day of the week, not being alone, because there
is a call to worship, you see, a call to corporate worship on
that day. But Jesus, on the Lord's Day,
I must come to this, on the Lord's Day, Jesus did not just preach,
he was also taught, and he also healed. He healed, he did lots
of good on the Lord's Day. And we are to be kind to others
on his day too. You see, if we come to our God
and we delight that He relieves the poor, He has mercy on those
that are oppressed, should we not be like Him? We are to, you
see, we are to resemble. We were made in the image of
God. Sadly, we fell so badly in Adam, but we were made in
the image of God. And if we love the fact that
God looks down in mercy upon us, that heals the broken-hearted
and relieves those that are oppressed, shouldn't we do in our little
way what we can to do that to others? Should not we seek to
do good to those that are disadvantaged and are in trouble? Jesus did.
Jesus cured and healed on the Sabbath day, much to the frustration
of the Pharisees. Because you see, they added to
the law of God. They added loads of things which
were never in the law given by Moses, of all that he could and
couldn't do on the Lord's day. And it didn't make the Lord's
day a delight. It made it not a blessing to man. And you see,
there was this Jesus said, if you have an ox and it falls in
a pit on the Lord's day, or on the Sabbath day, you go and pull
it out. Yes, you do. And they allowed for that. But can't you help others that
need, human beings that need help? And of course, there's
another thought as well. You can take an unusual circumstance
and make it the norm, and then that's wrong. Just a little example,
when I was going out with Vicky years ago now, we were up at
the farm one day, one Sunday, and we got a phone call in the
afternoon that the new bullocks that had arrived a few days before
got out. and they rampaged really round
that part of Hertfordshire up there and they ended up eventually
on the A1M. It was a difficult Saturday afternoon
but we obviously needed on that occasion to chase round and try
and control them, although we didn't do very well really, and
they ended up needing to rescue them from the A1M with a cattle
truck. But the point I'm making is this,
that was an act of necessity. It wasn't planned that that was
to take place, and it was obviously some sort of a bad fence that
they managed to get out of. Now, if every Sunday afternoon
you heard that we were chasing cattle around Asheville area,
you might come to the conclusion that something needed to be done
to the fence. In other words, the Puritans said this, if your
ass is always down this hole, perhaps you need to have a better
fence to stop it falling down. In other words, we shouldn't
use the unusual to become the norm. In other words, if something
unusual stops you getting into the house of God in time, a puncture
for example, that's reasonable. But if it's just you left late,
that's unreasonable. That's not honouring God. We
need to honour Him and put Him first. Are we serious about the
worship of God or not? You see, six days shut their
labour and do all their work, but the seventh is the Sabbath
day. Well, I just wanted to finish
with this, a quote from Revelation, as to what is the occupation
of those in glory on the Lord's day. Well, it's an eternal Sabbath. And they sung a new song, this
is Revelations 5 verse 9. And they sung a new song saying,
Thou art worthy to take the book and to open the seals thereof.
For thou was slain and has redeemed us to God by thy blood out of
every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And has made
us unto our God kings and priests and we shall reign on the earth.
And behold, and I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels
round about the throne, and the beasts, and the elders, and the
number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands
of thousands, saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb. that was slain to receive power,
and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in
heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and such as are in
the sea, and all that are in them, heard I say in blessing,
and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon
the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. This is a
little glimpse of what heaven will be. And this is what God
has left on record that our Sabbath, our first day of the week, should,
as it were, be looking to be a little picture of this worship
of God, free from all the secular labours of the week, apart from
those acts of mercy, and be able to dedicate ourselves to the
worship which we will be involved with throughout and never ending
eternity if we are truly those that fear God. May the Lord bless
you.