LAW HOMILY: Reinterpreting The Sabbath?

The Fourth Commandment and the Sermon on the Mount

Today on our law homily we're going to look at the fourth commandment. Every week we look at the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to his people and we want to understand how we as his people are supposed to obey.

So today I'm going to read the fourth commandment, at least part of it, and then I'm also going to skip forward to the Sermon on the Mount and I'm going to read a passage from Matthew 6, 31 through 32.

This is the word of the Lord. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work.

And then in Matthew 6, therefore do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

All.

It goes on to say, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything will be added to you. Now, this is a kind of peculiar habit among modern Christians. When the Ten Commandments come up, and they do come up usually in some culture war argument or we notice them hanging above a courthouse wall, we speak of them with great reverence.

This is the Ten Commandments. We insist that they must be posted in public squares. We cite them as the bedrock of Western civilization, foundation of law. We fight, we litigate, and we'll march to defend them.

And then Sunday morning comes, the alarm goes off, and we decide that one commandment no longer holds the same status as all the others. The one that God saw fit to explain and justify with the most language out of all the commands, the one that he grounded in creation specifically, the one that he said that is consistent with the fabric of reality itself, is the one that has been most interpreted with flexibility, negotiating with God, and arguing whether or not we obey it depends upon our schedule.

We have become very creative theologians on this command. That was the old covenant, we'll say. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. Every day belongs to God, right? So what makes Sunday special? I worship God while I work.

Paul said, don't let anybody judge you based on Sabbath day, so don't be judging me. Notice something in all of this. We don't apply that kind of creativity to murder, the commandment about not stealing or the commandment about not committing adultery.

No one says the prohibition on adultery is flexible. No one argues that Jesus is my fidelity, so I don't need to be faithful to my spouse. That's the same thing we do with the Sabbath. No one ever claims every day is a no-murder day, Kendall, but that's what we do with the Sabbath.

We reserve our most sophisticated, theonostic arguments for the commandment that costs us something, specifically money and time. And that, dear brothers and sisters, is precisely where the law must do its work, its cutting work.

The Sabbath as a Day of Cessation and Communal Protection

Let's read carefully. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or your sojourner who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath and made it holy. Notice the structure. Six days have been given to you to do what you can do, to live, to work, to strive, to earn.

And one day is given to God. Not one day for rest and then church in the morning and back to the store or back to the job by noon. Not a take it easy and skip the hard labor, but catch up on the emails.

Not a slightly reduced workload with a worship service sprinkled in in the morning. What it's talking about is cessation, a full stop for a day. And notice who the commandment protects. It protects you, your son, your daughter, your servants, your livestock, your sojourners.

The Sabbath is not merely just a personal spiritual discipline. It is a structural, communal, societal changing kind of command. There's a great book by Terry Johnson, and I think it's just called The Sabbath, where he traces for the last hundred years, the theology of the Sabbath and how it is waned.

And at the exact same time with perfect correlation, the morality of our society has waned consistent with our view of the Sabbath. The Sabbath has massive cultural consequences, and yet it's the one that we play fast and loose with.

It's the one that God spent the most words on, and yet we challenge it as if those words don't mean what they mean. Now, ask yourself, would your current practice pass the test of Exodus here? When you take a Sunday shift, when you say yes to overtime, when you make Sunday a catch-up workday, what are you teaching your children about what is worth protecting?

What are you teaching your family about the worth of God? The Sabbath is not merely a gift for us and to us. It is a witness often against us, and we break it. So with that, I want to end here, and I want us to say to ourselves that God cares very deeply about this command, that He spends great effort describing this command, and often we have not taken this command as seriously as God does.

So with that, I think all of us have room to be able to say, Lord, help me. Help me to care more about what you care about. Help me to love what you love. Help me to stop making excuses in the name of financial stewardship or responsibility, or I've got this bill and I have to take the shift.

That excuse didn't work for Israel. God said no. I think the Lord says no. I think the Lord says this day is His day, and I'm praying even for myself that I would have a heart to love it like God loves it.

The Sabbath as Delight, Rest, and a Foretaste of Heaven

So let us all pray that way. Lord, you call the Sabbath a delight in your word. You tell your people that you gave them the Sabbath as a gift in order to bless them. You gave the Sabbath to the land in order to bless the land and make it fruitful and multiply it.

Lord, you took a Sabbath not only as a faithful adherent to the law of God every day of your, or every week of your life, but Lord, you also on the Sabbath, on Saturday, rested in the tomb from your labors, and then Lord, on Sunday, rose as author of a new creation.

Lord, help us to see how you have so carefully, even yourself in flesh and bone, honored the Sabbath, even arranging your death so that you could rest on the Sabbath. And Lord, help us to see that the intentionality behind that is not coincidental.

And help us, Lord, to see that this day is a day for you. Not a day to sleep and snooze, but a day to orient us towards a different kind of work. A work in the kingdom of God. A work for the advancement of your kingdom.

A work for discipleship and sanctification and prayer and praise. A day that is set apart as a gift that is wholly given to us to come and be in your presence and to hear your word and to sing your word and to pray your word and to feast on your word and to fellowship with people who love and submit to the word.

To go out from here as ambassadors of the word to build your kingdom, especially on this day. Lord, help us to see all these things not as burdens, but as delight. You call the Sabbath a delight. And Lord, I pray for me and I pray for all of us that our heart for the Sabbath would become happy and delighted.

There is no better picture of heaven and eternity than the Sabbath. You've given us a single day out of seven to worship and celebrate you in a very unique and glorious way. Not that we don't worship Monday through Saturday, but you've given us Sunday in a special way.

Lord, in heaven every day will be that and better. So Lord, if we yawn at the Sabbath now, what is our view of heaven to come? Lord, give us a delight when it comes to the rest and the worship and the praise and all of the kingdom tasks that need to be done on Sunday.

Lord, help us to have a trust that all of the bills will be paid, that all of the work will be completed. Lord, help us to rest in you as we rest on this Lord's day and on the Lord's days to come. Lord, it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.