LAW HOMILY: Sunday Doesn't Belong To Us

The Fourth Commandment and the Sabbath as God’s Day

We go through the commandments every week, the Ten Commandments, because we want to understand what God has to say to His people. And the sermon's going to dive into this even a little bit more on why the Ten Commandments are so important to the people of God.

But today we're in the fourth commandment. I'll read it. It's verses 8 through 11 of Exodus 20. This is what it says. Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God.

In it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.

Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. This is the word of the Lord. Now we're told to remember the Sabbath day, which is already an indictment upon a culture that is so addicted to productivity and busyness, especially in December.

Who is more tired now than you were in November?

Yeah.

But God does not say to us, remember the Sabbath if it fits in with your schedule. Or remember the Sabbath unless it conflicts with your plans for Christmas. Remember the Sabbath unless you still need that one more thing from Target or Walmart or wherever.

He says six days you shall labor and do all of your work, not his, your work. You have six days to do it. Then he says the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God, which means that it does not belong to you.

It belongs to him.

Your calendar and your traditions and my traditions and our sense of holiday urgency do not belong to us on this day. And yet every single December, Christians discover a fascinating new application of remember the Sabbath in December.

Apparently God created the world in six days and he rested on the seventh and then revoked that pattern so that we could participate in online shopping deals. The fourth commandment comes as,.

Sorry, that was,.

I tickled myself, I'm sorry. The fourth commandment becomes a seasonal suggestion like drink water, try to relax. It's more of a do it if you have time kind of thing instead of an actual matter of obedience that the Lord has put down in his word.

And the commandment is painfully specific. Six days you shall labor. God gives us six whole days to do our work and then to shop and decorate and cook and plan and host and hustle and burn yourself out.

Do it to the glory of God. Go to bed tired for six days and wake up tired and go after it. You have six days. But instead of using those six days wisely, I think, and I can speak for myself here, what we often do is we treat what could be done in six days as if it could be done in seven.

We are less productive than we could have been so we give ourselves the allowance that on this day, on Sunday, on the Lord's day,.

We'll catch up.

Repentance for Misusing the Six Days

One of the things I'm thinking through in this passage is how can I be a better steward of my six days so that I can give myself more faithfully to the Lord's day. And I would ask that all of us even reflect on that.

Where is time in your week where efficiency maybe has leaked out, where doom scrolling has taken over, where we could have been more faithful with the things that God has given us, but we've put it off.

When we tempt our flesh, we'll grab it Sunday and we'll try to make it our day instead of his. Let us come into Sunday going to sleep on Saturday night saying, I left it all out on the table this week.

I did everything that I could. Now this day is for the Lord. So with that, because all of us has somewhere in our week that we could say, I need to repent. Let's repent and let's ask the Lord to forgive us.

The Law, Repentance, and Grace in Christ

Lord, we thank you that the law of God, the moral law of God exposes every pretense that we have, exposes all of our justifications that we make, exposes the heart of the matter, goes past the meat to the bone and to the marrow.

Lord, thank you for that. Lord, as humans, it can become a, it can become a very frustrating experience to every week have our sins laid bare. And that's sort of the power of what sin does to us. It causes us to hate being exposed, to hide it in the darkness and in the light.

Lord, I pray that we would have in this church and in each of our hearts, Lord, we would have a mind of joy that we can lay our sins down at the cross each week and trust and know that Jesus will forgive us.

And Lord, I also pray against the tendency of the antinomian that we know we're going to sin, so we sin. We know we're going to be forgiven, so we go through the motions. Lord, help us not to take your grace for granted.

Help us, Lord, as we repent to fill the sting of it and help us, Lord, as we leave this place to fill the love that you've given us in forgiving us in Christ. And Lord, because you've done so many infinitely great things for us, let us be, as Spurgeon once said, that I would not want to do anything to harm my best friend, Christ, who has given me everything.

Lord, help us to have that attitude towards our sin, to learn to hate it, to learn to love righteousness, and when we fall short, to come to the only righteous one. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.