Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Should Christians Sabbath? Yes. | Questions You're Asking | Isaiah 58.13-14

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

We're all busy. Who has time for an entire day of rest? Find out how Pastor Patrick Miller treats the Sabbath in today's fast-paced world. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including a ten-day devotional of Rest and Recovery and a discussion on how to Remember the Sabbath from our last series on Learning to Follow Jesus. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we're answering questions you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So follow 10-minute Bible Talks on Facebook, vote on your favorite questions, or you can just give your own, and you might hear it right here on the podcast. Real quick, before we hop in, I want to invite you to two online classes. Keith and I will be teaching this fall. If you sign up, you can join us live or you can receive the

videos after the fact. Let me tell you what we're offering. First, who would Jesus vote for? Over three weeks, we're going to answer some hot topic type questions and reflect on what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in a polarized political season. Second, we're going to be doing a women's Bible study called Skilled at Life. Although I think we should have called it life skills and I think about it. It's a four-week journey through Proverbs, tackling topics like friendship, finances, communication, and parenting. I hope that you will sign up for one or both of these classes because I really think you're going to get a lot out of it.

I know right now doing Bible studies in person is hard. It's hard to find. So rather than saying I have to do it online, why not say I get to do this? This is a great opportunity to grow in your faith. On today's episode, we're going to do something a little different, something a little fun. Keith and I in this episode and the next episode are going to take different views on the same question. We're going to ask, should Christians Sabbath, is it an ethical imperative? I say yes, Keith says no, I get to go first, which means he'll probably sound right because you always

believe the person who goes second. But let's hop in. Now, I know of no better place to start when it comes to the Sabbath than the Ten Commandments. In the world of pop culture, the best thing I have ever seen around the Ten Commandments was Stephen Colbert's interview with a congressman. Now, this congressman, he was lobbying to have the Ten Commandments placed outside of every courthouse in the U.S. And Colbert asks him to just go ahead, since he thinks the Ten Commandments are so important, just go ahead and name them. And the minute he asks the question, the guy gets a wide-eyed. He thinks about it. He takes a few stabs, and then he admits he doesn't know any of them. Now, I like to joke with Keith that he and that congressman actually have a lot in common,

he seems to have forgotten the Fourth Commandment. Exodus 20, verse 8. By the way, this is the longest commandment in the Ten Commandments. Remember the Sabbath 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 the sojourner that's within your gates. For in six days, the Lord made heaven and 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. Now, if Keith were here, he'd likely point out that the Fourth Commandment is the only commandment out of all 10 not explicitly repeated in the New Testament. But I don't buy that kind of sleight of hand. You see, the Second and Third Commandments are also not explicitly repeated. The basic principles are mentioned, but the actual commandments, they aren't re-quoted. But here's the bigger deal. Where's the Bible verse that says if one of the Ten Commandments isn't repeated in the New Testament?

It no longer counts. I don't know of a verse that ever says anything like that. This is only underlined by the fact that the Sabbath command is the longest command in the Ten Commandments. And it's not rooted in God's covenant just with Israel. It's rooted in creation. It's rooted in God's design for creation. Know what we just read. God says that we rest because he rested after he created. It's hard to argue that this is just just something that Israel was supposed to do, and for just a time, if it's rooted in the very way that God has designed all things. So why is a day of rest part of God's design? Well, I think there's a few things we could talk about. First, Sabbath reminds us that only God is limitless. Only God is limitlessly productive. Here's the deal. I love productivity. I love checklists. I start itching and

getting irritated when I feel like I'm not accomplishing something. Maybe some of you guys know what that feels like. But apparently God wanted me to know that my productivity, despite how much I might love it, my productivity has limits. And if I don't honor those limits, I'm going to burn myself out. I'll hurt my family. And anyone who ends up working for me, only God can be limitlessly productive. And even he took a day of rest after his creation. Now, I have to admit, this is so, so, so hard for me. I believe in Sabbath, but I can confess that I find myself sinning and say, sneaking in work, sneaking in productivity, far more than I would like to admit on my Sabbath days. I have to confess it.

But do you know what I'm confessing? I'm confessing my pride and my self-reliance. I'm confessing that I think I need to do everything. I'm thinking that I can do everything. I have to ask God to help me change. Sabbath is not easy. It's not about passivity. It takes a lot of work to take a rest.

A second reason why I think that we should be sabbathing. why God calls us to do it in his very design of creation. The second thing is this, Sabbath forces me to rely on God. One reason that it's really hard to rest, honestly, is anxiety. You know, if you take a day off, you start wondering, what's going to happen if I don't do X? How am I going to get Y done? And if I don't keep working on it right now,

am I going to pay for this later in the week? Sabbath forces me to trust God. You know what, God, you've got to be the one who manages my work and who manages the people who rely on my work. And the wild thing is that I found when I do a Sabbath, I accomplish far more in six days than I ever could in seven full days of work. If you're in business, just look at Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby. They are both highly successful companies that break every rule by taking a day off.

Jesus has the power to turn a few loaves and fishes into a feast for thousands. He can turn my six-day work week, your six-day work week, into something far bigger than that. He can turn it into something far bigger than a seven-day work week. That's part of relying on him. Now again, I like to joke with Keith. Keith told me the other day, hey, Patrick, I feel like I need an extra day in my week.

And you know what I said? You'd get it if you rested. So there's my thought. Okay, number three, Sabbath brings God's just order into the world. That's another reason why he's designed it this way, because Sabbath actually brings justice. I think it's really cool that in the Sabbath command, animals and servants and laborers, they are all explicitly commanded to get a day of rest.

This is the opposite, by the way, of what Pharaoh did to the Israelites when they were in Egypt. He worked them ruthlessly. They got no days off. And so when God rescues them, he brings them the justice of Sabbath. I mean, can you imagine being a slave who's working seven days a week and then you get to Mount Sinai and you hear this good news? Guess what? I am your new king. And as your new king, give you a day of rest every single week. Now, this is why I'm committed as a manager to banning work on one day a week. People on my team know that we don't email, we don't slack, we don't message each other on Saturdays. We work at a church, so Saturday is our Sabbath day. And I tell them, look, this is a day of rest. We don't work. We don't communicate with each other. And what we've

discovered is that doing this, everybody doing this, it brings life and justice to our team. I think if you're a manager, you should consider doing something similar in your work if you can. Now, I think this draws us to the heart of Jesus' critiques of the Pharisees who kept the Sabbath in their day. One of the things that people will say, say we shouldn't practice the Sabbath, is the truth that Jesus had a lot of critical words that he gave to the Pharisees when they tried to critique Jesus for not practicing the Sabbath the way that they did. Now, you have to understand this. The Pharisees had created hundreds, I mean, literally hundreds of non-biblical rules around the Sabbath. And in effect, it turned the Sabbath into a badge of personal righteousness. But those rules,

they often prevented Sabbath from being what it was supposed to be. Instead of teaching you to rely on God, their Sabbath taught self-reliance, right? It focused on the productivity of human works before God. And if the Sabbath is supposed to be something that brings life and justice, well, ironically, those rules were being used to prevent Jesus from doing miracles. from bringing life, from bringing justice on earth. The problem with the Pharisees wasn't that they were practicing the Sabbath. It's that they didn't understand what the Sabbath was for. They weren't allowing the Sabbath to produce a God reliance. They weren't allowing the Sabbath to produce life and justice. They weren't letting the Sabbath do what the Sabbath was supposed to do.

The problem wasn't with the Sabbath. The problem was with their practice of it. Okay, so check out Matthew 12, 9. This story kind of summarizes it all. He, Jesus, went on, from there and entered a synagogue. And a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, this is the Pharisees asking Jesus, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him? You see how they're using the Sabbath? It's no longer a day for justice and life bringing. They're trying to trick the guy, Jesus, into healing so that they can accuse him. And he, Jesus said to them, which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value.

is a man than a sheep. So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. Then he said to the man, stretch out your hand, and the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other. Do you see what Jesus says to the Pharisees? Or maybe what he doesn't say. He doesn't say, hey, Pharisees, no more Sabbath. I'm getting rid of the Fourth Commandment. Jesus never says that. He's showing them how the Sabbath is supposed to function. He's correcting them. He's saying, look, humans weren't made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for humanity to bring life, justice, and reliance on God. And you guys don't seem to understand that.

You're mispracticing. You're abusing the Sabbath. When Jesus calls himself the Lord of the Sabbath, he is calling himself God and king over the Sabbath. He's showing us how to do the Sabbath right. When Hebrews 4 says that Jesus fulfills the Sabbath, it's not saying that there was a prophecy that one day the Sabbath would end because Jesus would fulfill it. There's no prophecy like that out there in the Bible. It's saying that Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of the pattern of the Sabbath.

In other words, he shows us perfectly how to Sabbath, how to cease productivity. He just look at him going into these places of solitude throughout the gospels to go pray and worship and rest. He shows us how to trust and rely on God. Just look at him in the Garden of Gassimony, praying to his father. get me through this. Only you can. I rely on you, Father. He shows us how to bring justice in life. We see him healing on the Sabbath and teaching the Pharisees that their Sabbath laws are non-biblical and unjust. Jesus fulfills the Sabbath by showing us what the Sabbath was made for, by living out the Sabbath in an ideal way in his life. Let me end here. When Jesus begins his ministry, he begins by quoting a section from the book of Isaiah. And this little quote that he gives, it comes from the middle of a longer

section of Isaiah. Now, the part that Jesus quotes, it talks about his calling to bring good news, to set prisoners free, to do justice in the world. But he knows the broader context. He knows that he's pulling a little passage out of a far bigger passage. And that far bigger passage is about what's going to happen when the kingdom of God comes. So it's no surprise that Jesus is quoting from this particular verse. He's saying, I am the king bringing the kingdom of God. But if we look at the wider context of Isaiah, what does it look like when God's kingdom comes? What does Isaiah say is going to characterize his people? You want to know one thing? Sabbath keeping. Five different times in this section that Jesus quotes from to summarize his own ministry, five different times, Isaiah says that

keeping the Sabbath is going to be a characteristic of God's kingdom coming to earth. Isaiah 58, 13 to 14. If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight in the Lord's Holy Day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you're going to find joy in the Lord. And I will cause you to ride, to ride in triumph on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father, Jacob. It's so easy to use the Sabbath not to worship, but instead to work, to go shopping, to just wrap up house projects. I get it. It's a temptation. It's a difficulty for me too. None of these things are bad things, but they aren't the

worshipful rest and recreation that Jesus is calling us into, a rest and recreation that forces us to rely on God, to cease our productivity, and to bring life and justice into our world. It would take a whole other podcast to talk about how to do the Sabbath, a principle that we live through throughout the week, or should we Sabbath for an entire day? If we Sabbath for an entire day, which day should it be? What should we do? What shouldn't we do? If you're looking to figure that out, I'll encourage you just to check out our show notes, because there's a great series of sermons by a pastor in Portland named John Mark Comer, and he talks about this exact topic. But here's the big picture. God is calling you to cease productivity, to trust him with your work,

to rely on him to manage your life, to use rest, to bring life, and to bring life, and injustice, not just for you and maybe your family, but for the people who worked for you or around you. Will you try obeying him in that way? Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.