Tag: trust god

1 SAMUEL #25: HISTORY’S MOST EXCITING POTTY BREAK

On By Pastor TomIn 1 Samuel, Bible, Old Testament, Podcast, Religion, Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

David once again shows us what genuine trust in the Lord looks like. He apparently had an amazing opportunity to end his troubles and enter his destiny as God’s chosen king. However, David refused to take it, because it involved harming the man who was trying to kill him. It was more important to him to be right with the Lord than to achieve his ambitions. He trusted that the Lord would bring it about in His own time, and he, David, would not have to compromise to receive what God had promised.

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1 SAMUEL #25. CHAPTER 24:1-22

This is one of my favorite stories in the entire history of David. I think what David does, and what he refrains from doing in 1 Samuel 24, shows more courage, faith and heart for God than any of his amazing feats in battle. This is David at his best.

I want to briefly summarize the end of chapter 23, since we did not cover it in detail anywhere else. After David left the town of Keilah, he took his men and went into the wilderness on the other side of the Judean mountains. It may have been more green there 3,000 years ago, but these days, it is mostly desert. It was farther away from Saul, and in terrain that was significantly more rugged. Even so, Saul pursued David there several times, hoping to capture or kill him. During this time, Jonathan came secretly to David, and “encouraged him in his faith in God.”

I think I mistakenly said in an earlier sermon that the last time David and Jonathan ever saw each other alive was recorded in chapter 20. I was wrong, obviously. However this, here, in chapter 24, was indeed the last time the Bible records them being together. I want to focus for a minute on this last meeting of the two friends:

15 David was in the Wilderness of Ziph in Horesh when he saw that Saul had come out to take his life. 16 Then Saul’s son Jonathan came to David in Horesh and encouraged him in his faith in God, 17 saying, “Don’t be afraid, for my father Saul will never lay a hand on you. You yourself will be king over Israel, and I’ll be your second-in-command. Even my father Saul knows it is true.” 18 Then the two of them made a covenant in the LORD’S presence. Afterward, David remained in Horesh, while Jonathan went home. (1 Samuel 23:15-18, HCSB)

Remember, Jonathan, like David, had a heart for God. Like David, he was filled with faith, and confident that God would fulfill his plan. In fact, Jonathan was entirely at peace with the idea that David, not he, himself, should be the next king. What a contrast between Saul and his son! Saul thought David might be God’s next chosen king, and his reaction was to be filled with hate and fear, and to try and kill David. Jonathan thought the same thing, but his reaction was to encourage David. Jonathan’s faith is even more amazing when you think about the fact that at this time, David was running for his life. It sure didn’t look like David was ever going to be king. Even so, Jonathan had confidence that the Lord would take care of David, and that he would make sure his plan indeed happened. Jonathan himself encouraged David with this attitude.

I love that one line: Jonathan encouraged David in his faith in God. Even David, man of God, sometimes needed encouragement to continue to trust the Lord. If that was true of David, how much more so of us.

The people of the region betrayed David, as the citizens of Keilah had done. When you read the Psalms that David wrote, you will often find references to treacherous people, liars and friends who betray. This is because this sort of thing happened to David astonishingly often. In spite of his integrity and the help he brought to others, in spite of his faithfulness to God and respect for Saul as king, people were quick to believe the worst of him, and spread lies about him, and betray him to Saul.

I don’t know about you, but this encourages me. I think my natural expectation is that if I surrender my life to Jesus and have integrity in letting him live through me, people will see it, and like it, and praise God for it. I expect a positive response to God’s life shining through me. I expect good results, and favor with people. But Jesus said we ought to expect the opposite:

18 “If the world hates you, understand that it hated Me before it hated you. 19 If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you. 20 Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will also keep yours. 21 But they will do all these things to you on account of My name, because they don’t know the One who sent Me. (John 15:18-21, HCSB)

He explains that there is blessing for us in this situation:

10 Those who are persecuted for righteousness are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. 11 “You are blessed when they insult and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of Me. 12 Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt 5:10-12, HCSB)

Peter, in his first letter, also talks about this:

19 For it brings favor if, mindful of God’s will, someone endures grief from suffering unjustly. 20 For what credit is there if you sin and are punished, and you endure it? But when you do what is good and suffer, if you endure it, this brings favor with God. (1Pet 2:19-20, HCSB)
13 And who will harm you if you are deeply committed to what is good? 14 But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear or be disturbed, (1Pet 3:13-14, HCSB)

Seeing the life of David, and hearing what the New Testament says, gives me hope. Being a person with a heart for God is not necessarily a way to get a whole bunch of people to like you. It isn’t a road to sure success. It is often the opposite. But I cling to these promises that there is great blessing for us in those sorts of trials, sooner or later. At this point for David, he experienced the persecution, but not the blessing.

At one point, David was almost caught. He and his men were in a valley or canyon, and Saul and his men were coming down another valley on the opposite side of the mountain. They were gaining on David. But before they could close, messengers found Saul, reporting that the Philistines were attacking elsewhere in Israel. Saul had to break off the pursuit. Once again, I want to point out that David did not know what his future held. He didn’t know for sure what God was doing, and he might very well have been caught. In that particular incident, it must have seemed like it was merely lucky timing that saved him.

And then we come to the incident described in chapter 24. Saul was back to his new hobby of trying to find David and kill him. He and his men were traipsing around the rugged desert and mountain terrain where, according to rumour, David was hiding. They weren’t having any luck. David appeared to be miles away. One day, Saul had to relieve himself, and he went into a cave alone for privacy. It just happened to be the cave where David and some of his men were holed up.

I want to make sure we understand the scenario. David was anointed by Samuel to be God’s chosen instrument. David and his brothers (who were there at the anointing, and with him in his trials) probably assumed that the anointing also meant that he was supposed to be Israel’s next king. Jonathan certainly thought so, and so did Saul, and probably, along with his brothers, the rest of David’s men. Israel’s present king – Saul – who was no longer God’s instrument, has been trying for a long time to kill David. Now Saul was alone, unarmed and unaware, standing right in front of David, sun-blind in the dark cave, back-turned with his pants down. Saul could not have been more helpless.

David could not have possibly have had a better opportunity to kill Saul without hurting anyone else.

David’s men believed that this was a gift from God. Surely Now was the time for David to kill Saul, and become king himself. I suspect that nine people out of ten would agree with David’s men. Killing Saul at that moment would have been easily justifiable self-defense – after all, Saul was there for the express purpose of killing David. Saul was acting contrary to God’s stated will and purposes – he was trying to kill God’s chosen instrument. So killing Saul would be not only self-defense, but also protection of God’s work in the world. I don’t believe there was a person living at the time who would have blamed David.

Hopefully, you have read the scripture. You know what happens: David creeps forward, knife held low and ready. He raises his arm to strike…and then lowers it, and quietly cuts off the corner of Saul’s robe. He creeps back to his men, and a furious but quiet argument ensues. Now David’s men, seeing that he will not kill Saul, are eager to do the deed themselves. Once again, who could have blamed David if he had let one of his men do it? Not only would he have the justifications listed already, but he could always claim that it wasn’t actually him who killed Saul, and he really didn’t want it to happen. But David argues vehemently, and commands his men not to touch Saul. Finally, Saul leaves the cave and the opportunity is lost.

I picture that the cave was up on the slope of a hill or something. After Saul has gone down a little ways, David emerges, and calls to Saul. He bows low to the ground in respect. Then he shows Saul the corner of his robe and says:

11 See, my father! Look at the corner of your robe in my hand, for I cut it off, but I didn’t kill you. Look and recognize that there is no evil or rebellion in me. I haven’t sinned against you even though you are hunting me down to take my life. 12 “May the LORD judge between you and me, and may the LORD take vengeance on you for me, but my hand will never be against you. 13 As the old proverb says, ‘Wickedness comes from wicked people.’ My hand will never be against you. (1Sam 24:11-13, HCSB)

All this wisdom from a man not yet thirty years old. But of course, it wasn’t really David’s wisdom – it was the Spirit of God at work within David. I think the key is verse 12: “May the Lord judge between you and me, and may the Lord take vengeance on you for me, but my hand will never be against you.” David literally refused to take matters into his own hands. Remember when Saul was about to lose the entire southern portion of Israel? His army was deserting him, Samuel wasn’t showing up, and so Saulheld a worship service merely for the purpose of getting people to stick around. Saul took matters into his own hands. But David would not do that. His trust was not in what he could do, but in what the Lord said the Lord would do.

We tend to look at circumstances as if they “prove” what God wants us to do. I think this is a very dangerous tendency. I knew a man who thought God was calling him to have an affair, because he felt that circumstances had so clearly put him and the other woman together. He thought it must be God. I am not making this up. It might be better to wonder if circumstances are being used by the devil to tempt us. Now, I’m not saying that circumstances never align with God’s will, but it should not be our default position to think that.

However, there is a natural question. When God sends your enemy into your cave with his pants down, unable to see in the dark, facing away from you, how do you know that it isn’t God’s will for you to kill him? I mean, we’ve already offered many reasons why no one would condemn David for doing it. So how did David know he shouldn’t do it?

I think there are two answers. The first is one that I never get tired of talking about: we need to live in a day-by-day, moment-by-moment relationship with the Lord. The ten commandments told David not to murder, but it would have been easy to justify it as self-defense, or war, not murder. David, like us, had to rely on a connection of faith with the Lord. Through that faith, the Lord communicated to him that it would be wrong. In the first place, let’s get real: if stabbing an unarmed, unaware person in the back isn’t murder, what is? David knew that the word of God was against murder.

We might say also, that David knew in his heart that to kill Saul was wrong. However the reason he knew it in his heart is because he knew the word of the Lord (in this case, “do not murder”), and he knew the Lord himself. It isn’t some mystery. If we want to know the will of the Lord, we too need to know His Word (the Bible) and spend time with him in prayer, worship and fellowship with other believers. Without that, what we “know in our hearts” might be very, very wrong.

I also think that for David, the Lord guided him in this situation through other “ordinary” factors. David, at least for a while, viewed Saul like a second father. Though Saul seemed to hate David, David did not hate in return. He still respected him, and had affection for him, and he was sad that they couldn’t have the relationship they used to have. In addition, I think David probably thought something like this: “How could I ever look my best friend Jonathan in the eye again, if I kill his father?” These might seem like very ordinary, “unspiritual” factors to go into such an important decision, but I think that the Lord uses exactly such things to guide us at times. He made each one of us. He knows the way each of us tends to make decisions, and honestly, I think we are too quick to put things into the category of “spiritual” and “unspiritual.” In my own opinion, everything is spiritual, because all of life belongs to the Lord.

Another thing is this: I think the Lord allowed David to see that to kill Saul at this point would be taking matters into his own hands, rather than trusting. I believe that there are times when God calls us to act speedily and courageously without hesitation. But there are also times when the Lord calls us to let opportunities pass by, and trust Him to bring about his purposes in his own way. Personally, I think the second way is harder, and in our culture we almost never think that way. We typically assume that if we see a means to meet our goals, it is God giving us that chance, and we should take it. Sometimes, that may indeed be true. But sometimes the Lord calls us to wait and trust so we can receive it from him, not get it by our own effort. Especially in our world today, I think we need to consider waiting on God as a first option, and only act if we are sure God wants us to. I say this because our culture will never encourage us to do that. We are taught by everything around us to act rather than wait.

Consider this: if David had killed Saul at this point, he might always afterwards wonder if God really wanted him to be king, or, if he had simply made himself king. And there was something that was more important to David than reaching his goal of becoming king. It was more important to him to be right with the Lord than to achieve his ambitions. So he said, “Yes, I’d like the Lord to judge you Saul, for what you’ve done. But my priority is not to judge you, nor to make my goals happen. My priority is to be right with the Lord.”

I want to point out that David did not meekly accept the way Saul was abusing him. He confronted Saul about how unjust he was being. He had proved his loyalty, and proved Saul’s own suspicions to be false, and he pointed those things out to Saul. He confronted Saul with the truth, but he left judgement to the Lord. So, when we are treated badly, it is not necessarily wrong to  speak out against it. It’s not necessarily wrong to get out of a bad situation if we can. But like David, we can leave judgment to God.

So, today, what’s your priority? Think of something that you really, truly want. Now imagine that you have the power to make it happen, right now. It would be easy. Would you do it, even if you knew in your heart that God didn’t want you to?

Now, I don’t want the message to be that we are just not as righteous as David. That’s not actually true. David wasn’t any better than us. He just learned to trust God, and he made that trust the primary and most important part of his life. But he wasn’t perfect. In fact, we’ll see in the next chapter that David forgot every thing he had demonstrated here, and had to be reminded of it. So, the message is: Trust God. I’ll say it again: Trust God. The thing that you want so much, the thing that you are convinced is even God’s will for you – God will take care of that. David eventually did become king. It didn’t happen that day. In fact it was still years away. But God did take care of it. He worked it out the best way possible.

I want to add something else. Maybe you’ve tried to trust God, and you haven’t been able to do it like David did. Understand this: David trusted God by the power of the Holy Spirit. If we want to trust God, it is more about surrender to the work of the Holy Spirit in us than about us trying hard. It’s about giving permission to the Lord to lead you. Once you give that permission, and you surrender your choice to God’s best will, search the scriptures, and if you have no definitive answer from that, do what seems best, trusting that the Lord is leading you.

Also, we need to remember that when we fail, we have the Anointed One, Jesus, who trusted God perfectly, on our behalf. He did what we could not do, so that when we fail (not if!), we can trust that he has made it right between us and God. To do better next time, the main thing we need is more trust.

So trust him.

A DAY OF RULES, OR A DAY OF REST?

On By Pastor TomIn Bible Teaching, Christianity, House Church, Jesus, Matthew, Podcast, Religion, Sermon1 Comment

sabbath rest

 

What the Pharisees did was to change the Sabbath from a picture of God’s holiness into a series of steps you could follow. It was no longer a challenge that made you turn to God in desperation. It wasn’t even any more an invitation to rest in God’s grace and trust Him to take care of you. Instead, it was a series of boxes that you checked off in order to feel good about yourself

 

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Matthew #38 . Matthew 12:1-13

I think that one of the most frequently misunderstood things in the gospels is Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees. Many people think that Jesus had a particular problem with them because they were religious and traditional. In a way, that is true, but it’s not quite as simple as most people make it. Also, far too many people go on to take that as a blank check to reject anything they want to call “religion” including things like being a part of a church, or worshipping regularly with other believers.

The truth is, what Jesus rejected was a particular kind of religiousness, and a particular way of using traditions. It is good for us to follow in his example, to understand and avoid those same types of dangers; however it is also good not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Let me back up and set the stage for the religious behavior of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. In the middle part of the history of the people of Israel, the time of the judges and kings, a majority of Israelites did not live according to the covenant that God had made with them. During the time of the judges, they continually turned away from God, and God continually got their attention by allowing the nations around them to oppress them. Then, for a few generations under Samuel, David and Solomon, the nation of Israel lived generally true to their faith, and they flourished. After Solomon, however, they turned to the worship of idols. There were good kings who led them back to worshipping God, but the overall trend was for them to get further and further away from living like the people of God. Finally, God allowed Assyria and Babylon to totally conquer the people of Israel, and a huge proportion of them were taken away in exile.

When the Lord engineered the return from exile, it seemed like the remaining Israelites had learned their lesson. The Jews became much more strict in their observance of the Law of Moses. At some level, they understood the consequences of turning away from God, and they wanted to avoid repeating history. There were some Jews, however, who were much more secular, and whom embraced the ways of the conquering Greeks. (the Greeks controlled the region for a while after the return of the exiles). After a struggle, a group of observant Jews succeeded cleansing the temple, and then in taking control from both the secular Jews and the Greeks (they were led by Judas Maccabaeus). Jewish independence under the Maccabeans only lasted a few generations, but the lesson seemed clear to many: the way to freedom as a nation was to strictly follow the Laws of Moses.

Another thing began to happen during the two centuries right before Jesus. The Jewish people concerned about following the law began to ask questions about how to do it. Moses had said:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: You are to labor six days and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. You must not do any work — you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the foreigner who is within your gates. For the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then He rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)

That was all well and good, said the Jews, but what does it mean, practically speaking? What, really is work? What makes a day holy? What constitutes rest? The Jews began to make up rules that explained in excruciating detail what it meant to properly observe the Sabbath. They came up with a certain number of steps that you were allowed to walk. They decided that lighting a lamp or candle was “work” and so the mother of the house would light these things on Friday night, and let them burn until Saturday night, so that she wouldn’t “work” by messing with lamps on the Sabbath. They basically created a new set of rules that you were supposed to follow, and if you just followed them, then you had done your duty to God.

The Jews did this with almost every command given by Moses. So you see, observing the Law no longer meant living in faith by trying to follow the commands in relationship with God; instead it meant following the rules made up by Rabbis. In general, those rules might have been irritating or inconvenient, but anyone could do them.

There are two major problems with this. The first is that the commands of the moral law given through Moses were meant to show us God’s holiness, and, in comparison, our sin. The law was supposed to show us how Holy God is, and how far short we fall. It was meant to show us our true and desperate need for God, and to make us seek a Savior. But what the Jews did was to turn this picture of God’s holiness into a series of steps you could follow. The Sabbath was no longer a picture of God’s holiness. It was no longer a challenge that made you turn to God in desperation. It wasn’t even any more an invitation to rest in God’s grace. Instead, it was a series of boxes that you checked off in order to feel good about yourself. Every law became similarly debased by man-made steps. Every law became just a manageable checklist. If you checked most of the boxes, and went to the temple and made sacrifices for the ones you missed, you could call yourself holy. Now there was no need for savior – if you just followed the rules of the Rabbis, (which were easier than the actual law) you were righteous.

The second thing that this rule-making did was to make following God about performance, rather than heartfelt repentance, worship and relationship. All you had to do was follow the steps. Your heart could be filled with murder, lust, greed and bitterness, but if you just did the steps, everyone would consider you to be holy. You could even hate God, but if you followed the steps laid out by the Rabbis, you were holy. What all this meant, is that God wasn’t even really in the picture any more. You could do the entire Jewish religion without God.

The great Israelites of the past followed God in faith. Abraham believed God, and God counted it to him as righteousness – not because he performed well, but because he trusted wholeheartedly in God’s promises (Genesis 15:6, Galatians 3:6, James 2:23). Moses interacted with God face to face. David worshipped God heart and soul through music and poetry and personal prayer, as did many others (just read the Psalms). Ruth and Naomi trusted in God’s gracious provision. Elijah prayed and trusted God.

But most of the Jews of Jesus’ time had reduced the life of faith to checking off boxes on lists of rules.

Now, we come to Matthew chapter 12. The disciples are walking through the fields on the Sabbath – with Jesus. What could make the Sabbath more truly holy than the presence of God in the flesh? Their day is set apart for spending time with the Lord. The fields were apparently fields of ripe grain which had not yet been harvested. For a snack, the disciples were pulling of heads of wheat as they walked, and munching on the whole wheat berries. It was equivalent to finding crab apples on a hike, and picking one or two, eating them as you walk.

But the Pharisees saw them and said: “Picking heads of wheat is technically harvesting grain, and harvesting grain is working; therefore, you are violating the rules of the Sabbath!”

But Moses never said, “Don’t even grab some wheat berries as you pass through the fields on the Sabbath.” He said, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Don’t do any work on that day.” It was the Pharisees who defined what the disciples were doing as work. It has as little resemblance to work as tossing a football around with the family in a private backyard resembles the practice-work of a professional football athlete. The disciples weren’t toiling at their livelihood; they weren’t threshing or grinding, or even cooking. They were relaxing with Jesus, and snacking from the readily available bounty of His creation. They were in fact, honoring the Sabbath and resting in the Holy Presence of the Creator Himself.

Jesus could have responded to the Pharisees in a number of ways. He chose to direct their attention the scriptures. First, he reminds them that when David had need, he ate the bread that was set aside only for the priests; yet David did no wrong in doing so. He then reminds them that priests work on the Sabbath. Since he says “the priests of the temple,” he is probably referring to the offering of sacrifices on Sabbath days, which was part of the work of a priest. He adds:

But I tell you that something greater than the temple is here! If you had known what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” (Matt 12:6-8, HCSB)

He is making two points. First, the important thing is not to follow man-made rules about the Sabbath – what God really wants is “mercy, not sacrifice.” In other words, the Lord is after a changed heart, not an external conformity to man-made rules. Second, he says that he (when Jesus says “son of man” he is referring to himself) is Lord of the Sabbath. Once more this is a claim to be Divine. He is saying, “I made the Sabbath, I think I know what is appropriate for it or not.”

Matthew records another confrontation over the Sabbath. This time, the Pharisees are actually using the Sabbath as an excuse to accuse and discredit him, to prove he is a bad Jew. There in the synagogue on the Sabbath was a man with a paralyzed hand. The Pharisees say to Jesus, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Once again, what they are doing is insisting on viewing the Sabbath as a checklist of dos and don’ts, instead of an invitation to trust and rest. They are insisting upon their own, man-made version of the Sabbath, instead of taking God’s word through Moses in faith and trust.

Most of the world, at that time, including Galilee, was largely agricultural. Jesus points out that if someone has an animal in trouble on the Sabbath, they help it. How much more worthwhile to heal a human being in need! Again, Jesus’ response is to get to the heart of the Sabbath.

I want to point out something that is often misunderstood: Jesus is not abolishing the Sabbath here. He is not saying, “The Sabbath no longer matters; do what you want every day of the week.” But he is saying this:

“The Sabbath, like all of the Old Testament, is all about me (Jesus). It shows you your need for me, and it is fulfilled by trusting me and living your life in relationship to me. There is still rest that you need to take, and that rest is found in me alone.” He is not against the Sabbath, or any of the Old Testament law, but he is against the man-made rules that the Pharisees have made about it.

I have several pastor friends whom rarely take a day set aside for honoring the Lord by resting. When we talk about it, they sort of take an “aw, shucks,” attitude. Sure, they’d like to rest, but they’re just too busy doing the Lord’s work. In America, we’re inclined to give people like this a pass. How can working hard be a sin? In fact, we are inclined to admire people who work hard and are too busy to take a whole day to rest.

My friends are good men. If I told them that I regularly stole money and didn’t feel bad about it, they’d be shocked. If I told them I was committing adultery, they would urge me to repent. Yet the command to keep the Sabbath comes in the ten commandments, just like the commands to avoid stealing and adultery. It is no more holy for them to not take a special day of rest than it is for me to steal.

Let me say it again: Jesus does not abolish this command. He points out the error of how the Pharisees have turned it into a mere man-made checklist. He makes it clear that the true rest is found in trusting in him and being with him. He is clearly against a legalistic set of rules defining how the day must be spent. But he does not say, “forget the Sabbath.”

Returning to my friends who do not set aside a “Sabbath,” a time to rest and honor God, let’s consider a few things. They may feel like they are honoring God by working, however, what I think is really going on is that they are dishonoring God by not trusting him. They don’t trust that everything will be OK if they take time out. They act as if everything depends upon their hard work, as if their churches will fall apart without them. The Sabbath shows us, among other things, that God is in charge, it is up to him, and we can trust him. When we don’t take it, we are missing the chance to strengthen that trust.

Ironically, the Pharisees had turned the Sabbath into things that had to be done, rules that had to be followed, so that rest and trust no longer had much to do with it for them either. This is what Jesus criticizes them for. Never taking a Sabbath on the one hand, or insisting upon strict rules for how to implement it on the other, are two sides of the same coin, and that coin reads: “In ourselves we trust.” I want to make sure you understand what I am saying here. In today’s world, a Christian who does not set aside a day to honor and trust
God through rest, is essentially the same as a Pharisee in Jesus’ time who used rules to take the honor and trust and rest out of the Sabbath day. Even though the Pharisees outwardly looked righteous, they had gutted the real substance of the Sabbath. Even though non-resting Christians outwardly don’t look like Pharisees, they too, have gutted the real substance of the Sabbath, which again, is to remember and enter into God’s holiness through trust and rest.

Like so many things in the Christian life, what we need here trust and balance. Jesus clearly shows us that it is wrong to create a Sabbath checklist, a set of rules to show us we’ve righteously observed the Sabbath. On the other hand, the Sabbath, like the other commandments of the moral law, remains important for Christians. Though it may look different for different people, it is important for us to set aside a day that belongs to God, in which we honor and trust him by resting.

Let me use an example that may be helpful: Is it OK to mow the lawn on your “Sabbath?” (by the way, I don’t think the particular day of the week is as important as simply having some day that is set aside for trustful rest in the Lord; again, Jesus shows us not to be legalistic about such details). The answer is, first of all: stop trying to figure out a set of rules for the Sabbath. Trust the Lord. Accept that you need rest, and if you take it, the Lord will take care of what you are not working at. If you need specifics, ask Him first what it should look like for you.

Now, I’m aware that my first answer may not be immediately satisfying. You may genuine want to know, “how do we do this?” So here’s another answer: it depends. For me, mowing the lawn is a chore. It isn’t restful for me, and I usually end up wanting to curse at the lawnmower. So I don’t mow my lawn on my Sabbath (nor do I make my children to do it). But I have a friend who finds mowing the lawn enjoyable and restful to his soul. For my friend, mowing the lawn might be one of the most God-honoring and restful things he could do for a Sabbath; for me it is the opposite. The point is not to have a rule about a specific activity – rather it is whether that activity helps us to rest and to honor and trust God. So my friend sets apart the day as restful and holy by mowing the lawn; I set apart the day as holy and restful by not mowing the lawn.

Here’s another one. I often find writing restful. However, there are times when I find myself getting anxious about my career as an author. The result is that on some Sabbaths I write, and on others, when I’m finding it difficult to trust God with my writing, and it feels like work, or that I would be doing it because I’m worried about it, I avoid it. Do you get the idea here?

What about you? Have you been prone to the error of the Pharisees, making rules to control the Sabbath, or some other part of the moral law, thinking “if I just do a, b and c, I’ll be fine,”? Hear from the Jesus that He is the point of it all. Learn to listen to him and not lose sight of the point.

Perhaps you are on the other end of the spectrum, thinking you can safely ignore God’s invitation to remember his holiness by resting and trusting? Learn from Jesus that these things matter, because they are all about Him.

Let the Holy Spirit speak to you today.

~

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