Gospel Prism

Here’s the message I spoke on the Lord’s Day:

Introduction
As we study the Ten Commandments, I’ll be reminding you continually about the first commandment which is really the foundational commandment for all the others: You shall have no other gods before me. The second commandment then can be seen in relationship to the first as well: By refraining from using any graven images of God, you show that you have no other gods. The third commandment is the same: By taking God’s name with gravity and seriousness, you show you have no other gods. And this commandment is the same as well: By setting apart one day as holy and committing your time to Him, you are showing that you will worship no other gods. So regarding this commandment, I’d like to tackle three questions. The first question is this, “Why do we remember the Sabbath as the Lord’s Day on Sunday?�

Why do we remember the Sabbath as the Lord’s Day and on Sunday?
If you read verses 8-10, it says, “Remember the Sabbath day. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.� You should notice that this commandment refers to the Sabbath and not the Lord’s Day. It also says the Sabbath is on the 7th day, which is Saturday. And yet, we do not worship on the seventh day, but on the first day. So why is this the case?

We need to remember that as Christians, we understand the 10 commandments in light of the of Christ. It was Jesus Himself who transformed the Sabbath. According to Luke 23:53-54, Jesus’ followers prepared for Jesus’ burial on the Sabbath (Saturday) morning. So when Jesus arose, He not only rose from the dead, but He would forever transform the way in which believers in Him would worship. Thus, this day of worship was no longer the Jewish Sabbath, but rather a celebration of the work of Christ and His Day, hence the Lord’s Day.

According to Acts 20:7, the church met together, celebrated communion together on the “first day of the week.� When Paul writes to the church in Corinth in 1 Cor. 16:2, he says: “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come.� So an offering was to be collected as they gathered together on this first day. And so B.B. Warfield summarizes this change from Sabbath to the “Lord’s Day� well, “Christ took the Sabbath into the grave with him and brought the Lord’s Day out of the grave with him on the resurrection morn.� For the rest of this message then, I’m going to use the word “Sabbath� interchangeably with the “Lord’s Day,� assuming what I just shared about the Sabbath.

Why should we remember the Lord’s Day at all?
So that explains why the Sabbath is called the Lord’s Day and it is now celebrated on Sunday rather than Saturday, but the fundamental question is this, “Why should we remember the Lord’s Day at all?� Here is why…

1. To remember God

Let’s take a look at the text again. This day is about remembering God which assumes that we will forget Him. We will first and foremost forget God in our lives, even if our very job is to “work for Him.� God created the Sabbath so that people will remember Him because far too often we do not believe we have time for Him. Bill Gates in a Time Magazine article had these words about why He didn’t believe in God: “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.� I think Mr. Gates makes an important observation. He makes the connection that faith in God is connected to the Lord’s Day. If only Christians could realize this same relationship. God created the Sabbath as the one day out of seven for people who trust in Him, to actually put into practice what they say they believe. It is that day that we reflect on His goodness, His character, His mercy, His grace, His holiness, and His power together. And on this day, God sets apart for us so that we will remember Him.

I love how Thomas Watson describes this heart of God. He writes as if God were saying to us regarding the Lord’s Day: “’Six days shall you labor and do all your work;’ as if God had said, I am not a hard master, I do not grudge you time to look after your calling, and to get an estate. I have given you six days, to do all your work in, and have taken but one day for myself. I might have reserved six days for myself, and allowed you but one; but I have given you six days for the work of your calling, and have taken but one day for my own service. It is just and rational, therefore, that you should set this day in a special manner apart for my worship.�

God is just and rational and this makes sense to me. God longs for us to worship Him all the time, but He allows us to do the very many things that we do in this life. I find that I am busier than ever before. So I have begun the process of paring away unnecessary time killers in my life. I used to be in three of four fantasy sports leagues. I have dropped them all because I simply do not have time. Shua and I used to watch at least one, sometimes two movies a week on video (forget the theatre and TV, those days are long gone). Now, we barely get one movie in a month, and even that’s rare. A wife, four kids and a church full of souls, and my own soul which needs care, have led me to see that time really is precious. But thank God that He knew this fact when He created the world. He knew that you and I would be so busy with life, with work, with family, that we would falsely believe that we do not have time for God. And so, what did God do? He created the Sabbath. Thus, Jesus says these blessed words in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.�

According to verse 10, the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. The Sabbath is meant to be a day given to God as His. And this day symbolized to the world (as Bill Gates noted), that we are God’s people. When the Israelites kept the Sabbath, they were the only people in all the world who had one day set apart for the worship of their God. And without this day, it would mean that they did not worship and follow God. In fact, Jeremiah 17:19-27 tells us that Israel completely disregarded the Sabbath and therefore acted as though God was not significant to them. Ezekiel 20:20-21 says this: “And keep my Sabbaths holy that they may be a sign between me and you, that you may know that I am the Lord your God. 21 But the children rebelled against me. They did not walk in my statutes and were not careful to obey my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live; they profaned my Sabbaths.� Without the Sabbath, they forgot God and really suffered the consequences for their forgetfulness. We might feel that we are too busy to worship Him on Sundays. But may I say that we are too busy NOT to forget God on His Day. Notice that you can always find more things to do to become more efficient but you never truly get less busy. Rather, the question we should ask ourselves is this, “Does what I do lead me to true greater joy and satisfaction not just for the moment, but also for eternity?� The Sabbath is God’s way of saying, trust me by worshipping me through your time and schedule, and I promise you greater joy than you could ever know through your busyness.

2. To remember work

Also, we remember the Lord’s Day to remember work. I know you’re thinking, “Isn’t the Sabbath about rest?� I’ll get to that, but in assuming rest, it also assumes work. On six days “you shall labor.� God worked before sin ever entered the world (Gen 2:2) and He rested before sin entered. According to Gen. 2:15, Adam worked before there was sin. Sin created the futility that sometimes comes from work, but sin did not create work itself. In other words, work is a part of our created nature. Something about work reflects our image of God, a God who by the way, as we see in Genesis 1, is a working God.

So God has given us six days to maximize our time for work. We are meant to utilize that time for family, for our jobs, for our study, for our recreation as well. But this commandment is a call to all of us to be diligent with the resources and gifts and time and tasks that God has given to us. The Sabbath is a command against laziness and aimlessness because the God that we worship was and is diligent and purposeful with His time. And as the Psalmist observes: “He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. 4 Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.� (Psalm 121:3-4) Thus with our lives, we must work diligently.

But of course, this runs contrary to a world that strives not to work, but to “retire early,� thinking that is the best life has to offer. How wrong-headed that is! I know one person who made millions in his thirties and so he no longer works. He plays all day. And his girlfriend who lives with him wants to leave him because he has no purpose in life. Contrast this with Sandy, a widow and a grandmother of 7 children who currently spends 10 months out of the year in South Africa visiting the homes of women and children dying of AIDS. She visits with them and gives them medicine, prays with them, and tells them about the only true hope, Jesus Christ. When I asked her how she felt about leaving all of her kids and grandchildren behind in these her last years, she noted that she has so much more work to do for her God and for the orphan and the widow. She didn’t have time to “retire.�

Sandy is a person who understands that the Sabbath teaches us to use our days diligently so that God will be honored, and the Sabbath will then actually mean rest.

3. To remember mercy

Also, in remembering the Lord’s Day, we remember mercy. Interestingly, the commandment demands that all who reside in one’s household, including the beasts of burden, must be granted rest. The essence of this aspect of the commandment was completely missed by the Pharisees. They continually hounded Jesus, even if he healed on the Sabbath. When he healed the man with the withered hand in Luke 6:6-11, and the Pharisees criticized him for this act, Jesus responded: “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?� This question flows from the spirit of the commandment where God demands mercy for the weakest in one’s care. The Sabbath was a reminder that God is a merciful God who cares for the weak (Deut 10:18) and we must never forget His care for them. Working servants and animals and foreigners to death where they are working 7 days a week is tantamount to ignoring a God of justice and mercy.

4. To remember resting in Christ

And so in remembering the Lord’s Day, we remember rest. God didn’t need to rest. But His rest is a gracious rest. When God rested, He knew that we would need to rest in Him, so He stopped creating. But rest also has another distinctive reason found in Deuteronomy 5:12-14 where this commandment is repeated but with this difference in verse 15: “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.� The rest was to teach the Israelites that before, they had no rest from their labor. Slavery in Egypt meant that they were forced to work every day. But the Sabbath was to remind the Israelites that they no longer had to work without rest. Because of the Lord’s rescue from Egypt, their rest would help them remember a time when they had no rest at all. This rest from work was supposed to transform their thinking. It was supposed to teach the Israelites that their complete dependence on God for all things was the only means by which they were to live with full joy. But as human beings so often do, they failed to understand this act of grace from God. Instead, they turned God’s gracious Sabbath rescue of rest and turned it into a work.

How did they do this? They enacted rules and regulations that undermined God’s original intention of the Sabbath, that is, a sincere dependence on Him for all of life. This is why Jesus continually was harassed by the Pharisees on the Sabbath. Everything he and his disciples did was scrutinized more than the paparazzi watched Princess Di. In Matthew 12, Jesus’ disciples were hungry and picked heads of grain to eat. This was against Pharisaic law which had 39 ways that tradition had established the Sabbath law could be broken. Edmund Clowney had a Jewish friend who said that stacking the dishwasher on the Sabbath for an orthodox Jew would break the Sabbath, but throwing the dishes in without order would be lawful. This is what Jesus was up against and so He responds in verse 7-8: “And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.�

Jesus came to bring back the true Sabbath. The old Sabbath was to remind the world that God brings rest after creation. But Jesus does something even more glorious than the first creation. Through His blood, He would recreate that which has been disfigured by continual rebellion and sin. Thomas Watson describes so beautifully, “Great wisdom was seen in making us, but more miraculous wisdom in saving us. Great power was seen in bringing us out of nothing, but greater power in helping us when we were worse than nothing. It cost more to redeem than to create us.�

How should we remember the Lord’s Day?

So in light of this, how should we remember the Lord’s Day?

The Lord’s Day is that one day that God’s people gather together to worship Him. Please do not make light of how critical this is to your individual faith. Thomas Watson notes: “The heart, which all the week was frozen, on the Sabbath melts with the word.� We all need to meet with God’s people on the Lord’s Day. This commandment is not merely a law, but a word of grace. God knows that apart from the Sabbath, we will as Hebrews 3:12-14 teaches us, fall into the deceitfulness of sin. And if you have ever missed a Sunday before, you know how easy it is to get into the habit of not meeting together. And you know how quickly your heart does freeze over towards God.

Let me show you four ways in how you can remember the Lord’s Day by worshipping together:

1. TARGET

Think of the Lord’s Day as your target for the week. Pastor Alistair Begg tells of how making the Lord’s Day his “fixed point� of the week has brought to him many new ways in which he can be even more productive during the rest of the week.

When this fixed point is not established, then the Lord’s Day will become one additional item on
the schedule. Alistair Begg adds: “If a family does not establish corporate worship as a fixed point, then worship will have to fight for a place on the schedule along with the swim team, travel soccer, band practice, and sleepovers. Once the principles are in place, then exceptions can be addressed by learning to ask the right questions:

1. Is this activity a selfish indulgence?
2. Am I just doing as I please without reference to God and His Word?
3. Will participation be a help or a hindrance to delighting in the Sabbath?:
4. Am I helping others to take the Lord’s Day seriously by engaging in this activity?

These questions help determine our hearts concerning worship, rather than the dangers of becoming legalistic through rules and regulations. They help us to answer this question: Is the Lord’s Day my fixed target as I plan and think about my week?

2. TRAINING

Also, the Lord’s Day must include training oneself and one’s family. If you believe this commandment is true, that God’s grace is for those who come to worship Him in corporate worship, then training oneself to have this fixed target is for blessing and grace, not for showiness and legalism. You will long to come and worship and have your family worship not because you have to, not because people will judge you if you don’t come, but because you long to and know without a doubt that even when you don’t feel like coming and worshipping, or when you think there is something better to do on this Sunday, that in coming, you will receive His grace. So you train yourself and you train your family.

How do you train yourself? It is a good thing to prepare your heart the night before. What you do the previous night impacts your Sunday. What you do before coming to church impacts your day of worship.

Also, may this Day be a priority for you and your family. I hope for those of you in marriages, you will long for your spouses to understand how desperately you need to be at church on Sunday, for your family’s sake. Wives, if you are not feeling well, or you have just had a baby, please shoo your husband off to church. For your sake and your child’s sake, that man needs the grace of God received on Sunday to lead you towards the Father and vice versa.

Parents, we have our kids join us for worship on Sunday because we want them to see your worship. But let me tell you, that to train your kids to love God and love to worship is not a Sunday thing. When they’re sitting there and you’re telling them to keep still and they are not keeping still, don’t be surprised. If you are not teaching them during the week what Sunday worship is about, reinforcing the necessity for them to sit next to you and worship through song, and keeping focused, telling them to shush on Sunday will be a losing battle. You need to teach your kids during the week by praising them for what they have done well, and letting them know ways they can be better as well.

3. TARDINESS

If the Lord’s Day is not your target for the week, tardiness will set in. Although there are those few exceptions, tardiness to worship on the Lord’s Day si simply because this day is not our fixed target. We are squeezing in all sorts of things, sleep, errands, meals, nap times, homework, TV, making ourselves look overly presentable, shopping at the mall, before worship. Our target is not remembering God on the Lord’s Day but rather remembering what we need to buy, study, look like, and work on around the house. Trust me, when you are preparing for His Day, suddenly a wave of “pressing matters� will come upon you as you prepare for worship. All of the sudden, you will have this “God understands� mentality and soon you’re regularly walking in through the “Worship through Song� time believing that as long as you make the sermon, you’re fine. My friends, this happens only when we forget the Sabbath and keeping it holy. I am not asking you to come on time because it’s polite, or what you’re supposed to do as civilized culture, or because it won’t interrupt the worship. I’m asking that you ask yourself instead, “What is my morning like as I prepare for worship that keeps me from arriving on time?� I find that if you plan to arrive on time, you will always be late. Why not plan to arrive 15-30 minutes earlier to talk with others, to prepare your hearts, to settle your children in so you can talk to them about our Lord and about worship and preparing for worship? I think you’ll find incredible fruit for you and your family as you consider this.

4. TRAVEL

Lastly, will you consider the Lord’s Day during your vacations as you travel? Traveling is a wonderful mercy that God has given to us. The fact that we can go to beautiful places and visit family in other locales is a blessing. May I address two points in regard to travel? First, if the Lord’s Day is your target, then please consider traveling, if at all possible, on other days. Some of us have no qualms with missing worship on Sunday so they can buy the cheaper ticket to travel on Sundays. Or to save time, they will drive on Sundays, never once stepping foot in a church to worship. This only happens if we forget the Lord on His day. Think of what we’re saying? We’re essentially saying, “Lord, it’s inefficient to worship you this day because it will cost me more money or more time and it will be inconvenient to do so.� Bill Gates is right. To worship God is inefficient, if God is about making money or giving you more time to be self-centered. But if worshipping God is about true joy and an eternal home with the one who can satisfy us fully, then Gates is dead wrong.

Also, if you do travel or on vacation, please attend a local church’s worship by planning ahead for it! I know that when Shua and I went to Hawaii last year, I spent hours researching places to see, things to do, restaurants to eat at. But also on my research list was a church to attend. Some of you have done that as well. Tim and Donna went to Maui last year and Tim emailed me asking to help him think through some churches they should consider attending. You don’t think this way unless you want to remember God on His day. I am not saying don’t miss Wellspring ever. But for your life in Christ and for your joy, I am saying remember the Lord’s Day. It is His great grace for us as believers so that our hearts will not freeze over.

The Sabbath has been transformed by our Lord from being a day that we remember God’s creation to also being a day that remembers God’s recreation. Through His beloved Son, God longs for us to remember that though we were far from Him, “a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.� (Hebrews 7:19) And now, on the Lord’s Day, we join with the disciples who were stunned on a Lord’s Day long ago by an empty tomb and a visit from a risen Savior. And my friends, our coming together on this Lord’s Day, looks back to that Day when the disciples were gathered together in an upper room, and looks forward to a Lord’s Day as John saw in Rev. 1:10 when countless will surround the throne of the Slain Lamb saying, “Holy, holy, holy.� Without the Lord’s Day today, we would not remember the Lord’s Day of the past and we would not look forward to the Lord’s Day of the future. So may you treasure each Lord’s Day that we have from today till we see the Lord face to face.