TEN COMMANDMENTS
REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY AND KEEP IT HOLY
DR. JIM. DIXON
EXODUS 2011-20
FEBRUARY 16, 1992
One day, our Lord Jesus and His disciples were walking through a wheat field and the disciples were hungry, So they plucked the wheat. They rolled the wheat in their hands, and they separated the grain from the chaff, and they ate. Somehow the Pharisees heard about this, and they were indignant. They were mad. It was not that the disciples were wrong in taking wheat from a wheat field. Any hungry traveler in Israel was permitted to do that The problem was it was the Sabbath Day. It was the Sabbath Day and the Pharisees believed that the disciples of Jesus had violated the Sabbath law. They considered the plucking of wheat to be reaping and they considered the rolling of that wheat in your hands to be thrushing. They considered the separating the grain from the chaff to be winnowing. In their developed laws, reaping, thrushing, winnowing was all illegal on the Sabbath. Day because it constituted work. They were enraged and they were indignant. They came to Christ in judgement. Jesus had three responses and you have to examine both Matthew’s and Mark’s account to see these three responses. But first of all Jesus said to them. He told them that He was Lord of the Sabbath. An unbelievable statement. Lord of the Sabbath. Surely, they were indignant because any Jew knew that only God was Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus was clearly claiming deity, having the right to do on the Sabbath whatever He chose, being Lord of the Sabbath. Then Jesus said to the Pharisees He said, “The Father desires mercy rather than sacrifice.” Indeed it had been in mercy that God had created and established the Sabbath. It was part of His mercy to mankind. It was not meant to be a day of sacrifice. Of course, the Pharisees had made the Sabbath an incomprehensible sacrifice. They had developed thirty-nine different categories of work. One of those categories, for instance, was burden bearing. Burden bearing was a category of work, one of the thirty-nine categories. They had developed hundreds of regulations with respect to that one guideline of burden bearing. They decided you could not carry so much as a needle in your robe on the Sabbath as that constituted burden bearing, It is amazing that they let you wear a robe and therefore, of course, you’ve violated the Sabbath law. They had made the Sabbath itself a burden, an incomprehensible burden, and they had made it an unbelievable sacrifice. Something almost to be dreaded rather than rejoiced in. Finally, Jesus said to the Pharisees He said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man.” They had misunderstood. The Sabbath was not an end in and of itself. Nan was not created to serve the Sabbath. The Sabbath was created to serve men. The Pharisees had misunderstood the whole intent of the Sabbath, the whole purpose of the Sabbath. I wonder this morning if you understand the intent and the purpose of the Sabbath. Biblically, the purpose of the Sabbath is two-fold. First of all, the Sabbath Day was established that we might find rest and relaxation. God wants His people to be responsible in taking time for rest and relaxation.
Now, a couple of years ago, we had something go wrong with our garage door, our automatic garage door opener. We looked through the phone book to find somebody to come and repair our garage door. We just picked somebody at random. We called this person. He came by the house, and he said “Sure,” he would be able to fix our garage. He asked me what I did. I told him I was a minister. He said “Oh, that’s great.” He said, “I’m a Christian.” “In fact,” he said, “I’m a Christian garage door repairman.” He showed me his card and it had all kinds of Christian symbols on it I knew I was in trouble. Now do not get me wrong. I’m sure that there’s a lot of garage door repair people out there who are Christians and some of them may have symbols on their cards and be fine. There might be a lot of you who have businesses, and you might have the business cards with some Christian logo or symbol on it I’m not knocking that I’m just saying I’ve always had bad luck with people who’ve had Christian logos on their business cards. This guy, you know, he immediately, after he examined the garage, he explained to me that the problem was worse than I thought. It’s always worse than you thought, of course, and he explained what it needed, that the automatic garage doors needed new wheels, knew rollers that roll over the racks. They needed new bearings in those wheels, new bearings in those rollers and that the garage doors needed new springs because they had last their tension. He said our garage was really old. Of course we had only lived in the house for five. years. He said it all needed to be repaired. He said it was going to cost about $350. He said he was sorry that it was going to cost so much. but we said “Alright. If it needs it, it needs it.” Barb and I took off for lunch. We came back to the house, and we noticed he was not there. His car was gone We came into the house, went into the garage because we could not get the garage doors up. We went into the garage. We were amazed because it looked like just a disaster in our garage. It just looked unbelievable. Drywall was all over the place. You know how the racks that the garage doors roll up over. Those racks are connected to the wall with 2 x 4’s that are bolted into studs. Well, those racks had just been pulled out of the wall The doors were hanging down. We had holes in our garage door, like with hammers. It looked like somebody had just kind of “lost it” there in our garage. So this guy did not come back. I called him that night and he said “Pastor Dixon, you’re not going to believe this but when you left, I mean it was just like Satan took over.’ He said “It’s like when you left, Satan just came into your garage. Pastor. Dixon, I want you to know the devil destroyed your garage. The devil destroyed your garage.” I am thinking “Oh. man!” I explained to him that the devil might have destroyed my garage, but he was going to have to repair it He finally did. He came back and he kind of repaired it but it occurs to me, and Barb has always felt this way too. Good work is really hard to find. Good workers are really hard to find. I think God must… I mean God wants us to be good workers. “Six days shall you labor..”. He wants us to be good laborers. He wants us to be good workers but sometimes think, with God, maybe the biggest problem is not so much had bad workers. That is a problem but bad resters. We really have bad resters. We do not know how to relax. This is kind of the other extreme. We have a whole generation of people and even a whole generation of Christians at this close of the 20th century that do not seem to know how to rest. They don’t seem to know how to relax and really don’t understand the intent and purpose of the Sabbath Day.
You know, March 4, 1849, was a very unusual day. March 4, 1849 was the day that Zachary Taylor was to be inaugurated as President, the 12th President of the United States of America but he refused to be inaugurated that day because March 4, 1849 happened to be a Sunday and Zachary Taylor was devoutly religious. He called Sunday the Christian Sabbath and he refused to be inaugurated on March 4. This, of course, created a problem. He was not going to be inaugurated, therefore, until Monday, March 5 but the 11th President of the United States, James K. Polk his term of office expired at noon on March 4. It would be a violation of the Constitution to extend Polk’s term of office. So who would be President on March. 4, 1849? Who would be President on that Sunday? Well, the Senate established that a man named David Rice Atchison, the Senator from Missouri, and the President Protem of the Senate, he would be President that day. And he was President that day. He did not seem particularly impressed, however, because David Rice Atchison slept the entire day. He had been so exhausted from the prior week with all the political activities of it that he just slept away his term of office. He just kind of slept through the Presidency. He spent that whole Sunday sleeping. Now I do not mean to be irreverent, and I don’t want to be guilty of any sacrilege, but I must say I think it’s possible that David Rice Atchison understood the intent of the Sabbath more than Zachary Taylor. A lot of people seem to think of the Sabbath as a list of don’ts. Don’t do this Don’t do that Don’t do the other thing because it’s the Sabbath. The real issue is what does God want us to do on the Sabbath? One of the things that God wants us to do is simply rest, relax. Sleeping is perfectly legitimate on the Sabbath. You see, physiologists tell us that a night’s rest, a night’s sleep does not completely repair the body from a day’s labor. As we go through the week, physiologists tell us, we build up a kind of energy debt, a deficit. We need to just take a day every week that is set aside where we cease from work and labor. “Sabata,” the word from which Sabbath comes, that word means “to cease, to stop working and it means to rest. It even means to relax.” God understands this. It is in mercy that He established the Sabbath. One of the things that God wants us to do is learn to rest. You know, I have been struggling the last few weeks with an infection and I’m taking antibiotics. This infection is chronic in my body. It is always there but it is asymptomatic normally. Yet on occasion, it becomes acute, and it flares up. The doctor told me as I went in to see him two or three weeks ago… He said “You know, you’re exhausted and when you’re exhausted, your., immune system doesn’t work right. That is when this chronic infection that is perhaps normally asymptomatic can become very symptomatic and become a problem.
We all need rest and God’s commandment includes that we rest. This rest and relaxation is not simply manifested in sleep. I mean taking a nap on the Sabbath might be good but there are other ways to relax. You see, the Sabbath was to be a family day. That is part of relaxing with your family. In ancient Israel, the Sabbath Day would begin with the blowing of the ram’s horn, the chofar. As that ram’s horn would sound, the Jews would head for the synagogue and would worship there and find spiritual nurture. Then they would return to their homes. The mother of the family would light a candle of joy. Then they would have the great Sabbath meal that had been prepared the day before. It was the greatest meal. It was the greatest feast. It was the biggest meal of the week. The family would enjoy it together and then the father would say the blessing. It was called the Kadoosh. Then the family would talk about the Lord and how good He had been His protection and His provision, both in the life Of Israel and in their own family’s life. They would talk about the things of the Lord. Then the afternoon would be spent just enjoying each other, relaxing together. Jewish families would literally have games that they would play on the Sabbath, enjoying each other, relaxing together. Somehow in our culture and in our society, we’ve kind of lost this, Many families have just lost this. My mom and dad sold their place out in Aurora. They had a little condominium out there that they would stay in sometimes when they would come here to Colorado. Out in Heathridge. My mom and dad told my brother, Greg, and I that there were certain things they wanted but the rest of the things we could kind of see what we liked. We went over there. Upstairs in the loft, my dad had built this incredible model railroad layout. HO gauge. I do not know how many of you know anything about model railroading, but this was a tremendous model railroad layout. It had tracks within tracks and this massive transformer. My dad is great at building these kind of things. I remember when I was a kid and my brothers were young, we used to do these things with my dad. My dad still loves model railroading. This transformer, you know, would run all the different tracks. There are all these different buttons you can push. Some buttons would deaden certain portions of the track and flip switches throughout the layout, a neat deal Drew and I really kind of wanted that, you know, to have it at home and kind of do a father/son deal We thought Heather might enjoy that too. My dad thought that would be great. Greg thought that was great because his children are out of the house now. So we brought it down to my house to try to put it in the basement and the layout was too big. We could not get it down to the basement. We tried every which way, even took out part of the drywall We couldn’t get it in the basement. We should have had that guy that worked on our garage. He could have gotten it down there… Anyway, we could not get it in the basement, so we wound up having to take it to my brother’s house and he gets the layout. He could get it in his basement, no problem, and he’s enjoying running trains and stuff on that thing. When my dad found out about this. I mean my dad was glad that Greg had this, but he really wanted Drew to be able to use that thing. My mom said my dad cried when he heard that. My dad called me about a week ago. He said “You know, Mom and I want to come out They’re going to come out in May and they’re going to build a model railroad layout in our basement so Drew and I will have one of those things. I just want to say that is the kind of thing you ought to be doing as part of the Sabbath. Doing a little bit of that with your child, spending some family time. You might notice in the bulletin this morning that we have got “Dad, the Family Shepherd” conference coming up that first weekend in March. I want to encourage you dads to sign up for that so you can be good dads and fulfill what God requires of us as dads. This is part of the reason God established the Sabbath. Rest and relaxation for the family together.
Now there is a second purpose of the Sabbath. I think the second purpose of the Sabbath is not going to be a surprise to you. The second purpose of the Sabbath is worship and spiritual nurture. This is the second reason. that God established the Sabbath that we might take time for worship and for spiritual nurture. We have already seen how the Jewish people used the Sabbath to go to the synagogue for worship and for spiritual nurture. Even at home they had a time of spiritual instruction. This was part of the Sabbath. We should understand, of course, the Jewish Sabbath was not on Sunday. It is not on Sunday today. The Jewish Sabbath is the 7th day of the week, and the 7th day of the week is Saturday. Sunday is the first day of the week. Now when Jewish people became Christians in Israel. they continued to practice and observe the Sabbath Saturday.
But when the gospel was taken to the gentile nations and if you read Acts, Chapter 15, and you see the Council of Jerusalem and the instructions to Paul as he went forth to take the gospel to the gentiles, it was not required that the gentiles observe the Sabbath. It was not required. Many of those gentiles could not observe the Sabbath anyway because many of them were slaves and they were not free to rest and relax or break on Saturdays. So this obligation, this responsibility, was not laid on the gentiles. Well, you might recall as the Apostle Paul wrote to the churches in the gentile nations an in those churches, there were some Jewish Christians and there were some gentile Christians. If you read Romans, Chapter 14, or Galatians, Chapter 4, or Colossians, Chapter 2, you’ll see that Paul’s instructions were very diplomatic as he had Jewish and gentile Christians. Paul said, “Some of you observe one day as special in the Lord.” Paul said, “Others of you view all days as alike.” Paul’s caution was that they honor their conscience in the Lord and that they honor the Lord in all things. Well, the gentile Christians began to make Sundays special. They called the first day of the week the Lord’s Day because it was on Sunday, the first day of the week, that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead. In the gentile nations, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week was kind of set aside. Among Jewish Christians, they initially observed Saturday as the Sabbath. and Sunday as the Lord’s Day. They kind of did special things on both days.
By the third century, when Constantine the Great declared Sunday the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s Day had pretty much replaced. Saturday as the special day set aside. But, you see, the point really is not whether you honor the Sabbath on Saturday or Sunday. That is not the point. The point is whether you’re honoring and obeying the intent of the Sabbath, whether you’re honoring and obeying God in His intent in establishing the Sabbath that you are taking time each week for rest and relaxation and you are taking time. each week, setting it aside each week, for worship and spiritual nurture. This is the intent of the Sabbath, and it has been required of all Christians in every generation, gentile or Jew, that you take time each week for worship and spiritual nurture. I think Christians struggle with worship, struggle to understand worship. I think we confuse worship as form and we think “Well, when we worship, should we stand? Should we sit? Should we get on our knees? Should we fall on our face? Should we raise our hands? Should we close our eyes? Should we dance? Should we be still before the Lord?” That is not really the issue. There’s a multiplicity of ways to worship but what’s important in worship is the inward heart and whether your inward heart is really focused on the Lord. You know, I mean if your inward heart isn’t right, it doesn’t matter if you fall on your knees or fall on your face, it doesn’t do you any good. Truly if your inward heart is right, you don’t need to fall on your knees or on your face? There is nothing wrong with it but, you see, it’s the heart, the heart, that counts. That heart in worship must be focused on God. But understand this in worship we focus on God, but worship is not for God. Worship is for us.
The reality is that God doesn’t need your worship. God does not need my worship. God has joy and completion in Himself. God doesn’t need me to praise and adore Him, but God knows I need to do that God knows you need, to worship. Here is the strange thing. I mean it is only as we worship that’s why the Sabbath was set aside. It is only as we worship that we begin to find wholeness and joy and life. You know, we live in a world where everybody just kind of wants to be worshipped. We live in a world where people seek self-worship. I think this is a particular problem in the ministry. A. lot of people in the ministry want to be worshipped. They want adoration. They want praise. It is a problem in the political arena. I mean a lot of politicians kind of want to be worshipped. It is a problem in Hollywood. There’s a lot of actors and actresses. They seek adoration. They seek worship. It is I think, a problem throughout our society, certainly in athletics as athletes so often seek virtual worship. Of course it was Satan, who, in the beginning, sought worship and to be worshipped. “I shall ascend,” he said “above the stars of God. I shall set my throne on high. I shall make myself like God.” Of course, you know, the strange thing is that when we seek to be worshipped, it just produces emptiness. It destroys us. That pursuit to be idolized, that pursuit to be worshipped it is like a cancer. It just destroys people from the inside out It produces depression and emptiness and vanity. It is a kind of waterless crowd or an empty well. There’s nothing there when you seek worship. But the beautiful thing is that when you focus on God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and you worship Him, you begin to find joy and you begin to find life and you begin to find fulfillment. You begin to find wholeness. God feels we need this because there’s like a vacuum in each of us that only when we focus only on God through Christ only then is that void within us filled as we worship the Creator.
So the Sabbath is set aside for us and worship in the truest sense is our greatest need. Spiritual nurture I mean how much we need spiritual nurture in this time The world is confused as it is I think there are so many Christians that go out into the world with so little nurture, with so little instruction, with so little strength, with so little feeding. This world is so fallen. It is a hard world for Christians to live in I think of Bill McCartney, University of Colorado. What a controversy has risen up about him this week in this world. He has been called a self-styled Ayatollah by Pat Schroeder. He has been called a hatemonger. He made, from society’s standpoint, the horrible mistake of calling homosexuality sin. Some have suggested. Well, perhaps, he could have done it in a different way and tried to separate himself from the University. Some have suggested, maybe he could have said things more lovingly and pointed out that God loves everybody as, indeed, God does. Some have suggested, maybe he could have pointed out that we are all sinners as, indeed, we all are. Sexuality is only one of many sins. Perhaps Bill McCartney could have done these things. But, you see, in essence, what Bill McCartney said is true. Homosexuality is sin. The practice of it Twenty years ago, that would not have caused controversy, that statement. Forty years ago, he would have had universal approval for that statement, but the world is changing. The World views itself as becoming increasingly enlightened. The world thinks it is getting better and better. The Bible prophesized that as we approach the consummation and the end of the age, the world won’t be getting better and better, but the darkness will grow. The Bible says we will seek to change the laws of God in the end times. It’s a hard world to live in It takes a lot of courage to stand up in this world. You kind of go against the tide. We need to be strong. We need to be rooted in the word of God. We need to be getting fed daily and weekly. We need that nurture because we have been called to go out as light in this enveloping darkness. Part of the purpose of the Sabbath was that you might come into the light, that a week would not go by but what you didn’t bask in the light so that you could go out into a world of darkness as light. Do not neglect that nurture. Now I recently heard the story of a man who was on a business trip to Europe. He went to France. When he was in Paris, he thought “Well, I want to buy a gift for my wife.” He thought, “Well, I’ll buy this little matchbox.” It was a beautiful matchbox. It was made there in France. It was supposed to glow in the dark. He brought the matchbox home and gave it to his wife. She looked at it and she thought it was beautiful indeed. He explained that this is a special matchbox and it is supposed to glow and be beautiful in the dark. So that night, you know, they set the matchbox out and nothing. I mean it did not glow, it did nothing. He thought “I’ve been taken.” He said “I’ve been cheated. This thing doesn’t work.” Then his wife noticed some print on the matchbox. It was in French. As neither one of them spoke French, the next day he found a friend who did speak French. The friend told him that the words said, “If you want me to shine in the dark, keep me in the sunlight all day.” So the next day, that day, she set the matchbox in a southern window where the sun hit it and that night, it was beautiful The lights were out, and the darkness surrounded it. It was just glowing, and beautiful Christians are like that If we’re going to shine in the dark, we need to bask in the light and that’s part of what the Sabbath was established for. The intent of the Sabbath is the important thing that every week we’re finding rest and relaxation and every week, we’re finding time for worship and spiritual nurture. This is the command of God, and it is ours to obey. Let’s close with a word of prayer.