Turn in your copy of the scriptures to Genesis chapter two, and then also a finger in Hebrews chapter four, Hebrews chapter four, verses one through 16. I’m wondering if you caught the content of our opening hymn. That is one to look at again after this evening service is over and perhaps think about during the week.
And then Isaiah chapter 58 compared to the Heidelberg Catechism we read together. It’s interesting how all these things go so well together. Genesis chapter two, verses one to three, says, thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. And then over to Hebrews chapter four. So you understand the Bible continues to speak of a future Sabbath rest. If you remember what God promised Abraham and his offspring and promised Israel in the wilderness, when I bring you into the promised land, you will find rest.
And remember when David finally established the kingdom, he had stretched its borders north to south, east and west. The borders were larger than they’d ever been. And his enemies were all defeated. And it says, and David had rest from all his enemies, the goal of the promised land. And of course, now the goal of heaven is to find rest.
And so Hebrews four speaks of that. And this echoes Psalm 95, come worship the Lord, hear his voice, but don’t harden your hearts and enter the rest while you can. And so now Hebrews chapter four, beginning at verse one. Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear, lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest as he has said, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.
Although his works were finished from the foundation of the world, for he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way. And God rested on the seventh day from all his works. And again, in this passage, he said, they shall not enter my rest. Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, today, saying through David, so long afterward, and the words already quoted, today if you hear his voice, Do not harden your hearts. For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Amen. This is God’s word. Oh wait, we got two more verses. Sorry. Uh, since then, this is first 14. We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens. Jesus, the son of God, let us hold fast our confession for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need. Amen. This is God’s word for us.
Sunday has become Saturday number two in our culture. Have you noticed this? Sunday has become Saturday number two. We spend. in our culture all day Saturday, shuffling the kids in nine different athletic clubs. It’s really true if you look around. And then on Sunday, we’ve got to catch up on shopping, groceries, and then getting ready for the week ahead. We have typically referred to in my lifetime, a Sunday as the Lord’s day.
And now it is barely the Lord’s hour. And I think since COVID, Sunday has become optional. Sunday has become optional because we can live stream it. We can watch it at our convenience. We can check it off. We can get it done. And the rest of the day is ours. We wanna think tonight about what the Heidelberg Catechism teaches. And I wanna suggest that it’s a good middle balanced view in many respects.
And it avoids the ditch of strict Puritan Jewish Sabbath keeping with lots of rules, regulations, and you better not break any of them. And then it also avoids the ditch on the other side of, we’ll just say having a lesser view of Sunday than Chick-fil-A, right? There’s a little saying that says, your view of the Lord’s day is not as good as Chick-fil-A’s, then you need to adjust your view of the Lord’s day.
Now, for many in today’s culture, Sunday is just another day. It’s Saturday number two. Church can be fitted in, but it’s no longer the day. It is at a minimum the hour in that even optional. We want to be careful not to put ourselves in a bind and say we must do this, we must keep that. So we’ll look at some principles for Sunday.
In my understanding and in my reading of the last, I don’t know, 25 years of what the Reformed and Presbyterians have been saying and believing and writing on the Sabbath, it is all over the map. Just maybe six weeks or so ago, I read an article by a younger fellow who had not really thought through his argument. And as I read through his argument, my brain was saying, what’s he really getting after? And apparently he was trying to justify eating out on Sunday as okay and biblical.
Now, we’re not just going to get into that whole business because we want to be happy when we leave tonight. But there is so many different views and people are self-justifying and trying to use the Bible to do it. It’s really interesting. It’s really sad.
One of the things that attracted me to this church back in 2014, when I sat down with the elders, Bill Haynes would be the remaining of those three, Gene Parks and Jim Knox were the other two. They wanted to see the church have an evening service again. I’m not sure how long it had been since there was an evening service, but that was one of the things they wanted to see the church put back and put into practice. They also wanted to see a prayer meeting. And in God’s good providence, we have had Sunday evening service, I guess for 11 years now in August. And then we added prayer in the Sunday night service. And then I think about a year ago, we made Wednesday evening our dedicated prayer time.
But that approach goes back to simple church life. It used to be across the globe, across denominations, across religious traditions within Christianity. that Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening were the staples of the church. Those were the times when the church gathered and in God’s providence, and if you weren’t hindered in some way, the people of the Lord would be there.
Tonight, we also heard from chapter two of Genesis. We read it directly, but also read it quoted by the writer of Hebrews. And it simply says, on the seventh day, God rested. Sometime ago, maybe the last 50 years, one of the European nations decided it wanted to do away with the seven day week and go with a 10 day week.
And they thought that people would be more productive. They thought that it would create industry, it would raise revenues. And what they found very quickly is that their experiment, not rooted in nature, but rooted in man’s greed, it found that people were worn out and weary. They were grumpy, they were less productive, and they were unhappy.
I’ve had all sorts of different jobs in my lifetime. One particular job I had was a six-day-a-week job. It was relentless. And for us, there was no Fridays coming. When is five o’clock on Friday? Because guess what? We were retail. We had to go work on Saturday, and that was, in fact, our busiest day, our biggest day.
But the pattern that’s built into creation, you might say it’s a natural law, in a sense, is six days of work, one day of rest. Elon Musk said in the last year and a half or so, maybe it was back when he was the head of Doge or government waste, whatever.
I remember him saying, no one’s ever changed the world on a 40 hour work week. I understand why we have labor laws. I understand why we have eight hour work days. I understand why we have limits to how many hours we can work and all the rest. But I do believe he’s right. We want to avoid overworking and not ever resting. God has built us six days of work, one day of rest, a seven day cycle. But really, think about it. I would love to have a 40 hour work week. I would love to hear a whistle blow and I go home. I have the sort of job that goes with you night and day.
It never seems to end and there are sometimes, some weeks where it just seems to go round and round and round and that will wear you out. But there are some jobs that require that. A surgeon in an emergency room at five o’clock when his shift is over and there’s a mass shooting in town or a large wreck out on the highway is not going to dust off his hands and say, well, I’ve got some burgers to grill. No, he is out of compassion and kindness and grace. He is going to stay and work through the night if that’s what it takes. But we live in a world that has the work week all messed up and we definitely have the rest period all goofed up as well.
Question 104 asks, what is God’s will for you in the fourth commandment? And remember these studies in the Heidelberg Catechism are an interpretation of the Bible’s view of these truths. We’ll look through the Lord’s Prayer after the Ten Commandments are over. Sometime back we went through the Apostles’ Creed, as the Confession teaches it. But we’re making our way through these Ten Commandments, and the Heidelberg Catechism is a church tradition interpretation of what the Bible teaches. I think when we read question 104, the answer, you heard lots of Genesis 2, lots of Isaiah 58, you heard lots of Jesus come to me, all you who are weary, you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
These are practical applications of the truth of the 10 commandments here, the fourth commandment. And in this first section, what is God’s will for you? In the fourth, it says first, that there be an event held. And then second, that people diligently show up to it. And so it says first that gospel ministry and schools for it be maintained. So it is the job of the elders. It reads this way in our ARP form of government. It is the job of the elders to determine when best to hold public worship, to call the people to it, and to expect them at it.
Some years ago, we had a lady in our church named Dottie Latta. She was from the old Northside Presbyterian crowd that migrated from across town. And she told of one of their ministers, I think his name was Charlie McNutt, who would say, we expect you to be at church unless you are providentially hindered.
Now, Boy, we can go weeks without seeing people. We can go stretches. I have this prayer every Sunday that everybody will be both healthy and here. We have about 100 people attached to our church. Probably about 90 of them are able to show up because they are not homebound or otherwise taken away from the ability to be at church. And so on a good Sunday, with some visitors, we ought to have attendance of somewhere in the 90 to 100 range. Most Sundays are somewhere in the 60s. And so that means probably about 30 folks will just be gracious and say providentially hindered.
And it’s a mobile society. We get to travel these days. It’s a busy world and sometimes we don’t prepare ourselves as we ought or we’re physically tired, physically sick, emotionally tired, whatever. So we want to be gracious. But God’s will for us in the fourth commandment is for the elders to provide the gospel ministry and schools for it. And so in our setting, we happen to have Christian education on Sunday mornings. We have morning worship. We have evening worship. We have a Wednesday prayer time. And then we consider the men’s stuff and the women’s stuff and the children’s class. And in the past, when we had a group of teenagers, we did catechism. We consider that to be the proper fulfillment of this admonition. Gospel ministry and schools for it be maintained. But what does it say next?
It says that especially on the festive day of rest, that Sunday, love that term, especially on the festive day of rest, I diligently attend the assembly of God’s people. I come to learn what God’s word teaches. I come to participate in the sacraments. I come to pray to the Lord publicly and to bring Christian offerings. for the poor. Let me summarize a different way.
A healthy view of the Sabbath is one whole day in seven set apart for rest and set apart for worship and set apart for giving attention to needs of mercy. If you paid attention in Isaiah 58, there was a heavy dose of, it is our duty on the Sabbath to be merciful, to be kind and gracious. and to assist the poor. So we have one day in seven for rest and worship. We like to say here, we’ve come to the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day to meet with the Lord’s people and to be under the Lord’s ordinances. I’m a Westminster Shorter Catechism person long before I understood and read the Heidelbergs. Maybe the German reformers will forgive me if I use the Westminster to interpret the Heidelberg. But in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, after you’ve gone through the Ten Commandments, there’s a question that says, what does God require?
And it says he requires of us perfect obedience to his revealed will. Then the next question, can any man keep God’s commandments perfectly? And the answer is no. We do daily break God’s law in thought, in word, and in deed. We, by our sin nature, are destined to be Sabbath breakers, not Sabbath keepers. But what is required, or what is the next question is, what is the, punishment due to us for our sin and disobedience. And it says that we will encounter, we will receive the wrath of God that is due to us for our sin. And then there’s the good gospel question, what must we do to escape God’s wrath and curse due to us for sin? And it says this, repentance unto life, with a diligent use of the means of grace.
And to say it another way is we repent of our sins and come to faith in Jesus. And then the rest of our lives, we spend in the ministry of the church, growing in the grace and knowledge of our savior, worshiping God, being with his people, receiving the sacraments, making our offerings and helping the poor.
And we could very quickly on a night like this, speaking of Sabbath keeping, we could very quickly get into rules. My family, we were part of a church in another town where they were strict Sabbatarians. And when I say strict, nothing like you’ve ever seen. Well, our family was used to going to morning and evening church. We’re a preacher’s family. That’s the way I grew up. It was just in the DNA of our family.
And so we go to join the church and the elders get really, you know, stern looking and say, now you do know we require you to come back to evening service and you can’t join the church if you’re not gonna come to evening service. And we said, we already come and we like coming and you don’t need to browbeat us into coming because we’ll be here.
We want to be here. Our heart desires it. It’s part of our life. part of the way we want our children to see walking with the Lord. And so we want to see the Sabbath as a delight. We do not want to see it as a curse, a struggle, a set of rules to keep. We want the Sabbath to be the market day of the soul. We want it to be the day when we show up to receive God’s graces and we can live another week out of those graces and for the Lord. Now, there are some principles that we can find in the Old Testament. There are principles that we can find in the Sabbath laws of the Old Covenant. Here’s just my quick view. I think the Sabbath is a creation ordinance.
Every human being, even before the fall, was made to work six days and rest one. And so even a person who does not know Jesus and look to him in faith, even unsaved human being needs a cycle of work and rest. One of the hardest things I think to watch in our culture today is a very erratic work schedule.
People are jerked around in their work schedules. They do not work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, or even Monday through Saturday. They work here in the morning, there at night. Some people work second shift, some people work third shift. And they make very little money. Now, today, it’s hardly a living wage in some cases. And so people are forced to work.
And they may make a 12 or 13 day run of working, working, working, and working. and then they get sick, and then they don’t get sick pay, and all the rest. It’s something, I think, to cause concern. But we should so order life that we have that cycle of six days and one, six days and one.
I grew up on the tail end of the Sunday blue laws. I can remember on Sundays, if you needed gas, you had to use what was left in the lawnmower can. Gas stations were not open. I can remember living out on the edge of Burlington in the 1980s, and when Interstate 85 was, you know, not very old, and then it was widened, I think when I was in middle school, we would hear the constant humdrum of the interstate, but not as much on Sundays. I remember we could sit out on the porch at night, and we were hundreds of feet from the interstate, and the whir and the whatever of trucks was at a minimum on Sunday night.
The only thing I can liken it to now is go outside on a Sunday evening, a particular Sunday evening called Super Bowl Sunday, and there will not be a person stirring except perhaps the Domino’s pizza driver. Christmas Day is something like that when you see the world stop, although retail is now open 24-7. Perhaps the other time And I’m being serious, I know y’all think I gotta throw this in. The other time that I think life stands still, at least in our region, is the night of the Duke Carolina basketball game, those two nights. It really is, go outside and it’s pretty quiet because everyone is glued to the TV, no one is out traveling, at least in this part of the world.
But it used to be the Sunday Blue Laws, they were called that because they were written on blue paper. They were from the Puritan Sabbath in the early days of our colonies. There were laws forbidding commerce and alcohol and entertainment. Well, just look at us now.
There’s no longer really Monday night football. Only the good teams get to play on Monday night. And when ABC, I think it was, was in the seventies and eighties looking to move football from Monday night to Sunday afternoon, The discussion was held and someone made the comment, but you won’t get the Baptist. Well, guess what?
They got the Baptist. They got everybody else. Uh, there are all these jokes. You read the Babylon B and whatnot. And there are these jokes that church has to get out early enough so that you can get home, not just to watch NFL football, but also to participate in your fantasy league. It has become such a thing. And then there’s sports for our children, travel ball. Some of you have read the book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Ted Tripp. Sometime back, he came to town and spoke at one of our local churches. Our family went to hear him.
And as he was giving his talk, he said, you know, one of the things I’ve noticed in my ministry, which spanned, I think the seventies, eighties, nineties, and early two thousands, he said, I noticed on a Sunday, little, little Timmy shows up to church in his baseball jersey. And he says, I’m thinking to myself, little Timmy just got a baseball jersey and he’s really proud of it. But then he said, I realized halfway through the sermon that I had studied and prayed over and was meant for every member of my congregation, I realized little Timmy was sheepishly sneaking out of church and there trailed his parents behind him. And then he said, as time went on, the decades went on, little Timmy never showed up to church nor his parents for 30 weeks or so out of the year, there was travel ball. The Babylon Bee the other day had a really good funny It’s also a sad reality. It says family spent $200,000 on child’s travel ball and he got a $500 college scholarship. What does every parent believe about their child?
They’re the next LeBron James. They’re the next Barry Bonds. They are the next Caitlin Clark. They are the next whatever. And so they forego Sunday. They forego Christian education. They forego worship. And it’s so tempting. It ought to break our hearts. I don’t say this with the spirit of, oh, they’re wrong. We need to go whack them over the head. It breaks your heart to know there are people that go very long stretches, not in God’s house, not with God’s people.
And so on the festive day of rest, We have our duties. But there’s another side to the Sabbath that I think is really important and probably something we’ve not heard, maybe not been taught, but really ought to understand. And that is the second thing. It says, every day of my life, I rest from my evils, from my evil ways. And I let the Lord work in me.
There is a sense we come to Jesus weary and heavy laden. We cry out like the Egyptians and say, Lord, rescue us from our taskmasters. And Pharaoh or Satan is a wicked taskmaster. You think about a stretch in your life where you did not pay attention to the things of the Lord and you look back and say, I wasted my strength. Here’s a small way to think about it.
You get on Facebook and two hours later, doom scrolling. You cannot get that time back. And what did you watch? You watch cats, right? You watch people that said, I’m going to make this video, this content, because there are people that will mindlessly watch it. And on and on, we could go, there are times and stretches and seasons in our life that we cannot get back.
And we just wearied ourselves in amusement. We wearied ourselves in sinful things that did not serve others or edify us. Now, Facebook’s not bad. It’s not that great either. And those other social medias, but every day of our life, we need to rest from our evil ways and let the Lord work in us through his spirit.
Let me challenge you with this concept in mind, but reach back to the Sunday rule. Give it a try. I’ve heard people over the years say, well, I really need Sunday evening to get ahead and be ready for the week. Okay, I agree with you. God has given it to you and it’s not to get out your crackberry, your blackberry. It’s not to get out your daytime or it’s not to get out your to-do list and get ahead that way. It’s to finish the day in complete rest.
Just get up a tad earlier in the morning, if that’s what it takes. But if you will give Sunday a try, but also give this principle a try, every day of my life, I’ll rest from evil and I’ll let the Lord work at me through his spirit. You will find yourself, I think like the Israelites who were told to gather manna every day of the week, but only gather enough for the day.
If they gather extra, what happened to it? It molded. But on the sixth day, on the day of preparation on Friday, what were they to do? They were to gather extra for the Sabbath because the manna would not appear on the Sabbath. And so if they saved a little extra any other day, it got maggots and bugs and mold and mildew. But on the Sabbath, if they gathered, it was there for them. It was there for them on that day.
And so we really, need to look at the Sunday rest. We need to look at our rest from our weariness and our sins as an opportunity to trust God and to say, Lord, you know, better, you know, that in the wilderness, the people’s shoes did not wear out. There was no rack room or Nike store out in the wilderness, but for 40 years, they had shoes. Lord, you provided for your people. The mobs did not destroy their clothes yet. They had water.
They had manna, they had quail, and it was in abundance. And I think there is a principle for us in the Sabbath that we perhaps have not been taught or we’ve forgotten or we’ve overlooked. The Sabbath is a opportunity to trust the Lord fully. He’ll make those other six days such a blessing.
What a wonderful thing. Think about in our culture, where we’ve seen Sabbath keeping, I think Chick-fil-A, Just recently, after a very long stretch, became the second most profitable restaurant. I believe Jersey Mike’s passed him, or passed Chick-fil-A. But Chick-fil-A, for my entire life and then some, has not once opened on a Sunday. and they have been one of the most profitable restaurants. The Lord blesses that. My grandfather ran a furniture business for really the entirety of his adult life, never opened on a Sunday. That was the day of rest. That was the day of worship.
For some reason, a song by the country band Alabama came to mind. There’s a song that talks about the family living in rural farmland during the depression. And they said they were living in high cotton. And one of the phrases from that song says, uh, we were living in high cotton, old times, not forgotten, uh, family home, all the rest. But it says something about, uh, the little boy remembered that Sunday was the only day that dad did not work.
You watch the Andy Griffith show and you’ll see, you know, there’s church, there’s Sunday lunch. Now, we can’t forget Gomer and Barney and all sleeping and snoring in church and chasing flies and all the rest. But there is something that is missing from our culture.
We rush around, we’re busy, we’re attached to gadgets and all the rest. But it used to be something that brought some, I don’t know, gentleness to our culture, gentleness to our Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary and I will give you rest. It is very hard for us to put down our gadgets. It’s very hard for us to turn off noise. It’s very hard for us to take a whole day and to give it to the Lord and to give it to our souls. Something about the Sabbath to compare.
We love to go on vacation. We set aside a week, we make our reservations, we’re gonna go on that trip, come hell or high water. And as the day approaches, the night before we leave, we are working furiously to make sure the timers are set, the newspapers stopped, someone’s gonna pick up the mail, feed the cat, whatever else. So that when we get in the car and leave town, we can decompress, we can go on vacation, and we can enjoy it.
And there’s a sense, maybe we can learn some principles from the old covenant, where we ought to prepare for Sunday. Lay out our clothes, have our tithe, find our Bible, get our car keys. You know, Satan has a fun field day on Sundays. I can always tell who had a good fuss on the way to church. You know, they couldn’t find the keys. They couldn’t, you know, something just wasn’t working. Satan loves Sunday morning. He loves to cause a good stir in a household. before church, but there’s something like we prepare for our vacations, we should, in some sense, prepare for our Sabbaths.
Well, the last thing to consider, it comes up in the bottom part of question 104, as we rest every day from evil ways, as we let the Lord work in us by His Spirit, we so begin in this life the eternal Sabbath. God promises to us rest. And it is an everlasting rest. It’s not just a Sunday rest or a night’s rest. It is an everlasting rest where we will live in Eden. We will live in a new heavens and a new earth. We will live with no sin in our souls and no sin in the environment where we live. That is the high point of rest.
And we get a little down payment on that. I don’t know if you feel this way, but when I wake up on Sunday morning, I feel like it is a different day than other days. This is a day to really strive to live for the Lord. But we also feel like when we’re in this room, And maybe especially now since it’s been fixed and it’s different than it used to be, when we’re in this room, nothing can stop us. Well, some things can, but nothing can stop us from thinking about the Lord and receiving his goodness.
And these are little bitty foretaste of heaven. These are little bitty down payments on what is to come. And so the challenge for us, I think, is to consider the Sabbath and make it a priority, but most especially make it a delight. Let’s go to God now in prayer.
Our Father, we thank you for the day of rest, the day of gladness, for the market day of the soul. We thank you for this room, this place, and these people that weekly we get to gather with. We thank you for this morning and the site both before and after the service where people lingered in one another’s company, happy to be together, happy to reunite, happy to talk, happy to encourage one another. Lord, if that’s a taste of heaven, we are in for such a treat and we give you thanks. Bless our church family and bless each of us to take delight in the gifts that you have given. We pray all of this in the name of our savior. Amen.