Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

And today we’ll consider the sanctification of the Sabbath. Next week we’ll talk about the Sabbath and debt. And then the following Sunday, Lord willing, we’ll return to the Psalms from where we began this long excursion, diversion into the confessional statement. So this morning we’ll consider the sanctification of the Sabbath.

There’ll be a slight change to your outlines. Under point B, let’s see, under section one, point B, action, item number three will be moved to item number five. The other two will move up. We’ll do that as we go along here though.

I guess what we’re going to talk about today then is practically how can we put all this stuff that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of months into practice, into work, into reality for us. What does it mean to sanctify the Sabbath?

Now, what was interesting last night as we were talking—I was talking to my family about the Sabbath and the fact that tomorrow is Sunday, the day we get together. And Lana said, my older daughter said that it’s a day we can praise God. She gets to see her friends at church and she doesn’t have to do the dishes. So Sunday is a real happy time for her. Those are the reasons she thought of why it was a happy time for her.

And really, that’s not a bad little outline. We could use those three points for an outline as well. We won’t. We’ll go to the scriptures. But those are three important aspects of the Sabbath.

I bring that up because Lana, of course, will continue to grow in grace as she matures in her understanding of the word of God, and she’ll understand more about the Sabbath in those three simple points. And that’s true of all of us.

And I’m not going to give you any kind of exhaustive answer this morning in terms of what you can or can’t do on the Sabbath day or on the Lord’s day on Sunday. What I am going to do though is try to give you some general outline or guides to that.

Now, hopefully we’ve all got to the place now of asking the question, well, what are we to do? And I’ve said for a number of years since we started this church several years ago that when we get people to the place of asking, well, what is it to set apart Sunday, then we’re at a very good place with those people. And I’m far less worried now in terms of their obedience to the scriptures, because I know that God will answer that as they continue to grow in grace as well.

And so this isn’t exhaustive this morning. It’s to kind of get us going in terms of our thought patterns, in terms of what the sanctification of the Sabbath means.

Now, to sanctify something in the scriptures, of course, means to set it apart. Set it apart unto something. And so we’re going to consider this morning some proscriptions from the passage you read this morning for the sanctification of the Sabbath, some prescriptions, and then some promises.

Now, first of all, proscriptions. It’s a word that maybe we’re not terribly familiar with. To proscribe something—pro means to go around something. Describe is to draw. To prescribe something is to draw a circle around it and say you cannot do that thing. Proscribe means you can’t engage in that sort of activity.

Now, you can think of that term when you hear that word in the future in terms of, for instance, the Levitical priesthood. We’ve talked about how there were a series of concentric circles and the interior of those circles are proscribed for other people. The holy of holies was proscribed for all the rest of Levitical priests aside from the Aaronic priesthood, the high priest. And so to proscribe something could be because it’s holy in itself and it doesn’t want to be defiled by other people.

But in this sense, we’re using the term this morning to proscribe things means to draw circles around them and say inside this is not appropriate or not good behavior on this particular day. And there are things about the Sabbath that are proscribed to us.

Verse 13 says, “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day,” and continues later in the verse saying, “not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words.” Those are proscriptions from God’s word, things we should not do.

And the first thing I think describes an attitude we shouldn’t have. So the first proscription is our attitude or our mental state as we approach the Sabbath. We know that the scriptures tell us, “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.” And that our Lord tells us that out of the heart, out of what a person believes, his attitudes, his thoughts about things, there flow forth his actions. The issues of life spring forth out of the heart.

I remember several things about when Jay Adams was here a number of years ago, brought to town by another church. He talked about the need to discipline our minds and our thoughts. And we think about discipline normally in terms of our actions, but he was talking about disciplining our minds. He said, “Your mind is kind of like a dog on a leash. And sometimes dogs like to get into garbage, you know, and if you have a dog, you have to kind of pull them back when you’re walking your dog from doing things you shouldn’t do or getting into things you shouldn’t get into. And so it is with us. Our minds can stray into thought patterns that are bad or into attitudes that are bad in particular specific areas. And so we have to discipline our minds first of all to have the correct attitude and approach toward the Sabbath.

Now I say that’s how this verse begins because the phrase here “to turn away thy foot from the Sabbath,” although some people may think that’s a reference to not taking long journeys or not walking long journeys or even a reference to the course of our life in terms of doing our pleasure instead of God’s pleasure—I think the phrase really, explicitly, from the commentaries I’ve read anyway and the people that understand the Hebrew language far better than I do, that the phrase here means that you should quit trampling upon the Sabbath. Okay? You want to turn your foot away from the Sabbath. Don’t step on it. Don’t have an attitude toward the Sabbath of despising it or seeing it as a burden or something to be not treated highly.

It’s to treat the Sabbath lightly, is to have your foot upon it and to tread upon it and trample it. And so we’re not to do that. We’re to esteem it rather highly.

One of the implications of this, of course, and we’ve talked about this many times over the last couple of months, is that many people when they come to the Sabbath can see it just as a set of regulations, as a burden in which we have to perform certain things. And that certainly is what the Pharisees did at the Sabbath in the time of our Lord.

Remember we talked about Jesus and the Sabbath and his discussion with the Pharisees in the field. They had done that. They had made the Lord’s holy day, a delightful day, into a day of burdens. When we do that, and we think about when our attitudinal approach toward the Sabbath is one of a burdensome thing, that’s to trample it underfoot. It’s to despise it and to not treat it, not to think of it correctly.

In Amos 8:5, it said that the apostate nation couldn’t wait for the departure of the Sabbath so that they might buy and sell again the next day. That’s to despise the Sabbath. That’s to trample underfoot.

Kuyper and Dich in their commentary on this verse basically say that our attitude toward the Sabbath is to see it as a delight because it leads to God and not to see it as a burden because it leads away from our normal affairs of life. You see the shift in emphasis—and that’s the emphasis the scriptures give us. Don’t trample it. Don’t despise it. Don’t see it in terms of not being able to do our own particular things we do the rest of the week, but rather see it as a delight because it leads toward God himself.

Now, the great goal of our very existence, of course, is the Sabbath rest that we talked about from Hebrews 4. That’s the goal to which all creation is moving—is final rest, final order in God at the consummation of all things.

Remember that God told Abraham that he was Abraham’s exceeding great reward. Abraham’s reward wasn’t in the ultimate sense the land or the property or the covenant blessings that God would shower upon him. Those were manifestations of something even greater than that, which was God himself—to know God and to rest in God’s finished rest. God is our exceeding great reward.

And if you understand that, then you understand how the Sabbath should be a day in which we prepare ourselves to meet God in that special way. That the Sabbath should then be a pattern for the rest of our lives.

And you know, you’ve got to say, if that’s our understanding of what the Sabbath is—pointing toward the final consummation of all things, we delight fully in God—that if you don’t delight in the Sabbath, well, you know, what are you going to delight in? You see, if you don’t delight in setting aside a day to meet in a special way and to focus your thoughts in a special way upon God, then you’re really, your whole sense of priorities is way out of whack as a Christian.

God is our exceeding great reward, and he gives us a day in which we’re to ponder and to meditate on him and the things of him.

So, first of all, proscription is our attitude toward the Sabbath. We shouldn’t despise it. We shouldn’t trample it underfoot. But also then, we shouldn’t just claim to have a good attitude and then do wrong works.

And so the scriptures go on in Isaiah 58:13 to say, “It is a sin to do thy own pleasure, thine own ways, to do thy own, speak thy own words.” Actions that are proscribed also by the word of God in terms of the Sabbath. Our attitude has to be correct, but our actions must be correct as well.

And there’s a series of instances of specific prohibitions from certain activities. I suppose all of these though, the word here are summed up in the word “doing thine own pleasure.” Some of your more modern translations may translate that word “pleasure” as being “business.” But that really is only partly what that word entails in the Hebrew. It entails certainly vocation, but it also entails avocations or hobbies that somehow are not focused upon God, that are your normal state of affairs.

And so God says that your normal state of affairs for six days is to be set aside for a special state of affairs. It’s supposed to be different. And if you don’t understand how it’s supposed to be different yet, at least keep in your mind that it has to be different somehow, set apart from the rest of days of your week. And that’s what that verse says: to do thy own pleasure is wrong on the Sabbath. It’s to be different.

It’s to be different number one in that we’re not to do work. Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, the Ten Commandments, of course, the statement of the Sabbath law in the fourth commandment says we’re not to work on that day. We’re to rest on that day. And so it’s wrong to engage in occupations on the Sabbath day.

It’s wrong according to Isaiah 58:3. We’ll be talking more about the structure of Isaiah 58 in a couple of minutes here, but well, we’ll just mention it now, I guess. Isaiah 58 really has two sections: verses 1-12 which talk about our relationship to obedience to the second tablet of God’s law in terms of our actions toward other people, and then the last two verses which talk about the obligation in terms of the first tablet of God’s law, obligations to God.

In Isaiah 58:3 they were sinning. The people were sitting and suffered a rebuke here because they were doing, finding their own desire on that day, driving hard all your workers. And so an employer, it’s greatly sinful to exact employment from your workers on the Sabbath day. So work, of course, is wrong. We probably know that pretty well by now.

It’s also wrong, of course, to fail to convocate together—to absence yourself from the convocative worship services that God has prescribed in the scriptures is proscribed as well. In other words, you’re not to do that activity that would take you away from a convocation with God’s holy people. And of course, you should know all about this by now. The basis for that, of course, is in Leviticus 23—the Sabbaths are days of holy convocations. Hebrews 4 and Hebrews 10 say that when you hear his voice, come into the special worship services of God.

And so we’re proscribed under this portion of scripture to hear other voices on the Sabbath. Now, those other voices could be family matters, for instance, that might take us away from holy convocation with God’s people. They may be business. It may be recreational activities we want to engage in. It may be our own voice of idleness or sleepfulness Sunday morning when we wake up, or it may be our own voice of embarrassment. For whatever reason, you don’t want to see somebody at church that day and so you might hold back from attending God’s worship services.

The point is all those voices should be drowned out by the voice of God Sunday morning calling you to special convocative worship with the people of God. To let those other voices drown out the voice of God is proscribed. It’s forbidden by this passage of scripture.

Third, and here we’re changing the outline. As I said a couple of minutes ago, it’s wrong to point the finger. And I changed this now in Isaiah 58:9. It says, “Then shalt thou call and the Lord will answer. Thou shalt cry and he shall say, ‘Here I am.’ If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, okay, you don’t want to be oppressing people, making them work on the holy days of God. And take away the putting forth of the finger and speaking vanity.”

And so we say the pointing of the finger is also a wrong thing to do on the Sabbath. It’s proscribed by God in terms of our actions toward other people.

Now, it’s good to convocate the rest of the Sabbath day as well with other people from God—to get together in the evenings with other families from church, to get together in the afternoons. But it’s wrong if you’re going to use those occasions to point fingers at other people in the congregation. It’s wrong to use the Sabbath day in a most severe way. It’s wrong to use that day to gossip or to talk about the faults of others without addressing them themselves.

It’s wrong to point the finger on the Sabbath, and it’s wrong to talk our own talk. The next point we want to make, it says in Isaiah 58, here in verse 13, “from speaking thine own words,” in the last portion of verse 13, that’s prohibited on the Sabbath—to speak thine own words.

And the Hebrew here has the implication of speaking talk—is the idea here, you know, just talking vain talk, foolish talk. It may be related to the pointing of the finger as it is in Isaiah 58:9, that we just read. You know, it’s wrong to you have to “put off in the midst of thee the yoke, put off the putting forth the finger and speaking vanity.”

And so it could be related to gossip, and that sort of talk is obviously prohibited on the Sabbath, but vain speech as well is prohibited. Getting around and talking about nothing in particular. Our words themselves on the Sabbath day are to be special words, God’s words. And we’re to focus our speech itself on things of God and not on foolishness and vain speech.

So there are certain proscriptions there in terms of attitudes and actions. But then there are prescriptions in the verse before us as well—things we are to do. The verse goes on to say we’re supposed to call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable, and we should honor him in our Sabbath. And again, this entails, first of all, a prescription, a command by God to have a correct attitude toward the Sabbath.

We’re to call the Sabbath a delight. The “Queen of Days” is a common phrase in rabbinic literature about the Sabbath. I think we’ve talked before about how some of the rabbis would put on their wedding garments in preparation for the Sabbath to meet the Queen of Days as it were—the great day of rejoicing before God at the end of the week. They’d go out to meet the great Queen of Days. And that’s the correct attitude.

Now, I want to mention here, by the way, that this is really important things to teach our children. Now, most of us grapple with what’s proper and improper on the Sabbath because we haven’t been trained in that. We’ve been trained to disregard the Sabbath day, to trample it underfoot. And so I think if we teach our children how to esteem the day correctly, that goes a long way toward building in them then an attitude of obedience to God’s word in terms of the Sabbath.

We’re to teach our children then to delight in this day. Number one, we should go to prayers with our children Saturday night. We should tell them, “Wake up tomorrow with a joyful song in your throat to sing forth praises to God. The Sabbath day comes tomorrow, and God’s special day of meeting in his presence with his people, a day to set apart our thoughts from our recreations and our work, comes tomorrow in which we can think on the things of God.”

Teach your children to delight in the coming Sabbath day. That should be easy to explain to them, of course, in terms of the basis of the Sabbath and redemption and recreation that we’ve talked about for the last couple of months. Don’t teach your children just the obligations of things not to do on Sunday. Teach them rather the positive thing, that they’re to delight in the Sabbath and to look forward to it with great anticipation.

When, for many, I think several years, when the church started, we were playing Russian tapes in this portion of the service and during that time I would go out and try to teach the kids what he was teaching them on those tapes at their level—not an easy task with some of Reverend Ashley’s material. But we would start the Sabbath school at that time with a poem from Isaac Watts’s *Divine Songs for Children*, which unfortunately is out of print. It’s called “The Lord’s Day Morning,” and I’ll just read it. And this would be a reminder to the children as we begin Sabbath school downstairs of what the Sabbath is all about:

“This is the day when Christ arose so early from the dead. Why should I keep my eyelids closed and waste my hours in bed? This is the day when Jesus broke the powers of death and hell. And shall I still wear Satan’s yoke and love my sin so well? Today with pleasure Christians meet to pray and hear thy word. And I would go with cheerful feet to learn thy will, O Lord. I’ll leave my sport to read and pray, so prepared for heaven. Oh may I love this blessed day the best of all the seven.”

And at that time the children in the Sabbath school memorized that, and we would get together and say that together every Sunday. And they would—we would practice with our kids, of course, at home and we’d talk about that Saturday night. We’d recite that poem on the way to church in the morning, driving in the car, to get them in the correct attitude toward the Sabbath day, the day of holy convocation in God’s presence. It’s the blessed day, the best of all the seven.

This is the day that’s been sanctified by God. And that’s why we’re called to sanctify it. God put his special mark of approval on it and gives it to us as a great holy day, a high holy day, a true vacation day from all other pleasures to consider the pleasures of God in that day. And so it should be seen by us in that attitude.

But then that attitude should reach forth into actions. The Sabbath is to be seen as honorable. We should honor God in the Sabbath. And that speaks then to our actions. And so there are prescriptions for our actions as well.

Now, I’m going to say some things here, but I just wanted to preface this. I was thinking of this last night, and I was thinking that there was a Star Trek that I saw—I’ve seen it several times, I guess. I don’t remember the plot exactly, but basically this other race was saying that, well, humans, you guys are real savage, and we’re savage. And so I remember it was a computerized war is what they’d come up with on this planet. And Kirk at the end of it destroyed their computer that would do this computerized war. And he said, “Yeah, I know we’re savages. I know we’re men that like to kill other men, but we can decide today not to do that. Just for today, let’s decide we’re not going to kill anybody today. And then tomorrow, of course, we’ll decide that again.”

And it sounds a little silly, I suppose, but really that’s kind of what it’s about in terms of the Sabbath as well. Today is a day when we strive particularly hard to avoid sin and to turn instead to the positive things that God’s word enjoins us to do. So you get up in the morning, you say, “Today we’re going to decide to honor God in a special way in which we don’t honor God the rest of the week. We’ll try harder today particularly to do these correct actions.”

Well, what are those actions? The Westminster Confession of Faith sums up our Sabbath responsibilities in this fashion. Says we must not only observe and holy rest all the day from our own works, words, and thoughts about our own worldly employments and recreations, but also take up the whole time in the public and private exercises of his worship and in the duties of necessity and mercy. That’s what the Westminster Confession of Faith says.

To take up the whole time in the public and private exercises of his worship and in the duties of necessity and mercy. Now, it doesn’t sound that bad to me, but you know, it’s interesting that I’m told by very reliable people that there is probably not an elder or a pastor, well maybe a handful in this country who affirm the same confession of faith, who believe what it just taught us about Sabbath observance.

Sabbath observance isn’t seen that way anymore. It’s been relegated by many people to the hours when we get together for church and the rest of the day becomes something else. So there’s controversy over exactly what it is that we’re supposed to do on the Sabbath. Now there’s no controversy, of course, about the fact that we’re supposed to rest from work. The Confession says that most people would agree with that today. There shouldn’t be any controversy. But the second action we’re supposed to do, the convocation in God’s presence, most Presbyterians would assert that as well who hold the confession of faith. They’d say that it is to be a church day. But then there are controversies of what you do the rest of the day. That’s the real problem, isn’t it? We all know we’re supposed to be here from 10 to 2. What do we do at 2:30?

Well, the third specific thing—and you should have picked this up probably a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about the Lord of the Sabbath—is we’re to have works of mercy and justice. Those are completely appropriate works to be done on the Sabbath day.

First, in terms of mercy, remember Jesus in the cornfield reminded the Pharisees of the passage from Hosea that God wants compassion and not sacrifice.

A verse that I hadn’t come across then but I came across my studies this week is in Nehemiah 8:10, in which it’s said that they were to, on a high holy day, they were to send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy unto the Lord. And so you’ll see their work performed for those people that didn’t have any preparations, didn’t have food to rejoice before God on that day with.

And there was specific command from Nehemiah and from his people to send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared. And that’s the verse that the Pharisees should have been obeying, of course, in relationship to Jesus and his men being there on a mission from God, being there apart from their home and apart from their normal means of sustenance.

And so Jesus reminded them of their failure to act in obligation to show mercy on the Sabbath. So the Sabbath day should be a day when you know people who have trouble—don’t tell them, “I can’t talk to you today. I’m busy meditating on the things of God.” You go out of your way to help them get their ox out of the ditch, as it were, to help them to have peace with God that day as well, to help them by feeding them if necessary and clothing them, and certainly by counseling them from the word of God.

So works of mercy are extremely important to see—that is an element of the day that is completely proper and good. At one time there were people in the church who were considering maybe having a ministry to nursing homes on Sunday in which we go around and visit certain people or other people that we know who can’t get out of their home, and that’d be a completely appropriate thing to do with the rest of the day on Sunday.

But secondly, there’s also a consideration there. In Isaiah 58:10, it says that if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity and thy darkness be as the noon day.

And remember, Isaiah 58, the first 12 verses—this gives you a lot of direction in terms of how to keep God’s holy days correctly. And it says in doing that, then we’re to give ourselves to the hungry. We’re to satisfy the desire of the afflicted. It’s works of mercy that we’re to engage in on the Sabbath.

But secondly, there are works of justice also that are proper works and related to works of mercy. In verse 6 of Isaiah 58, we read, “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke.”

It is important to understand that works of justice are also completely appropriate for the Sabbath—to loosen the bands of wickedness.

There was a rally yesterday, a pastor’s protest, although I don’t think there were too many pastors there, but there were at least four of us pastors there speaking. And it might not have been more than that. I’m not sure. But one of the things that I tried to stress in my talk was the need for imprecatory prayers to be prayed in churches for God’s curse upon people. And that’s a sabbatical work of justice and mercy that we’re supposed to do. That’s loosing the bands of wickedness. It’s imploring God to answer the prayers that he’s commanded us to pray to him in the Psalms, to ask that he break the arm of the wicked people in our land.

And so imprecatory prayers and seeking God’s justice are correct Sabbath works. We’re to let the oppressed go free and undo every yoke. We’re supposed to preach the gospel of peace, of course, and we’re to teach people about what the peace of God entails in terms of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In Isaiah 57:19-21, we read the following: “I greet the heard of the lips. Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him. But the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.”

We’ve talked about this verse before—about the fact that the wicked have no peace on the Sabbath. They have no rest because they don’t believe in the providence of God. And so they have no peace. They’re under God’s curse. But it’s important to recognize here that the peace and rest that we’re to experience on the Sabbath is peace seen from God’s perspective. It’s not simply a cessation of striving activities.

Peace—and Reverend Rushdoony when he preached through the Sermon on the Mount talked about this: God’s peace. And he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The peacemakers are those people that brings God’s peace, which is God’s order to the world. You see, it’s not simply a cessation from something. Rather it’s putting things in correct relationship under King Jesus. God’s peace is order in the world.

And so justice is an important part of our works on the Sabbath to create and to rest in God’s peace.

Isaac Watts’s little poem that I read earlier is a good poem. The only problem you may have with it, or one problem you might have with it, when he says that “I’ll leave my sport to read and pray and still prepare for heaven”—the end of all our activity is not simply a preparation for heaven out there. Remember we pray that God’s will be done, that heaven, that God’s heavenly peace would also take place on the earth. “But thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”

And so it’s important to see that preparation on Sunday is not simply for something postponed. It’s to bring about God’s peace and order on earth as well. And so to preserve justice and to do righteousness in Isaiah 56:1-2 is described as taking hold of the Sabbath. Let’s read that verse. We started with that many couple of months ago when we started this series of messages on the Sabbath. Isaiah 56:1-2:

“Thus saith the Lord, keep ye judgment and do justice. For my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed. Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the Son of man that layeth hold on it, that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and keepeth his hand from doing any evil.”

You see the correlation there? To do justice, to seek justice, to seek God’s peace and righteousness on the earth is described in those two verses as taking hold of and understanding the true meaning of the biblical Sabbath.

It is a sad commentary that there weren’t very many pastors at that meeting yesterday. It’s a sad commentary that most churches in the United States are absolutely dead to the cries in this land for justice. The cries from the unborn, the cries from children that are abused by children’s services division, for instance.

Yesterday when we had lunch after the meeting, Pam was telling me about a series of reports on child abuse on channel 2 on the news a couple of weeks ago. And they were talking about what happens when you get a report from CSD and what happens then and they take your child and you have to have a hearing within 24 hours to try to get your child back. And they have some kind of juvenile justice referee or something. And they showed one of these ladies that’s a juvenile justice referee in Multnomah County, and this is the person you have to go to try to secure your children back if you think the CSD has taken them wrongfully.

And the one they were interviewing then was, by her own admission—now okay, this is not gossip or rumor, this is by their own admission—admittedly has been abused as a child herself in the past. So that makes her real objective, right? She has been—she’s an ex-alcoholic supposedly. So she’s a drunkard in essence, and hopefully she’s controlled that now. We don’t know. And then she’s a lesbian and she’s not controlling that at all, of course. So you’re now to go to a lesbian who, of course, has no appreciation of biblical family to try to seek justice for your family in terms of the civil courts.

Churches across this land don’t understand these things. They are deaf to the pleas of people, men and women, to lose their children to lesbian judges and a system that is just inundated with state control of children.

The theocracy is what the scriptures talk about in terms of the end goal of Sabbath keeping—God’s peace, God’s order in the world. And we have to be attentive to that by doing works of mercy and justice on the Sabbath.

And what about the rest of the day as well? We can’t do that all day long either. What do we do the rest of the time when we get home after we’ve done those works of mercy and justice in church and outside of the church as well?

Well, first of all, I’d like to say this is a whole day affair. Remember that the Sabbath is spoken about as a day, not as a portion of the day. Six days you work, one day you rest. So it is a whole day.

One other consideration there, by the way, is that you find the term “preparation day” in the gospels. The preparation day was spoken of as the day where the people would get ready or prepared for the Sabbath. And so I think probably one thing to set up our correct attitude on Sunday is to make Saturday a day of preparation as well. To get ready on Saturday so that you don’t have to break the laws of God on Sunday—to get gas in the car, for instance, to get groceries for your home so you don’t have to go out to eat on that day or go out to buy groceries, to get to bed early on Saturday so that you can come to church early Sunday morning with a fresh mind ready to worship God with a mind that is alert and active.

So Saturday should be a day of preparation. We should teach our children that as well, of course, to try to get them ready for the coming Sabbath day. It’s perfectly appropriate to maybe spend a little time reading the scriptures Saturday evening and get ready for again meeting with God in his special holy day on the Lord’s day.

Now, beyond that, then, we said earlier that we’re not to speak vain talk, but we’re to speak God’s thoughts, or God’s words rather, on the Sabbath day. And it’s important, I think, that we see the rest of our day as characterized by that kind of action. Speaking God’s words, thinking his thoughts.

Family devotions are a great thing to have on Sunday when you get home from church. To read the scriptures is a good thing to do the rest of that day. To read books about the scriptures, to read and meditate upon God’s works and their implications for various activities in life, to meditate upon the scriptures.

Now, you know, I frequently hear from various people in our church—men that we’re also busy, that it’s real hard to find time to read the Bible. Well, there’s some truth to that, and we are very busy. But we should never, of course, let that crowd out our study of scripture. And that’s particularly true in light of the fact that we have every Sunday from 2:00 in the afternoon till late at night, whenever you go to bed, to read those scriptures, to talk about those scriptures with our families and with our wives.

And so if you find yourself, like me, desperately seeking more time to read God’s word and to meditate God’s word, then Sunday is the time to do that, assuming, of course, that you’re not involved in some of these other works of mercy and justice. God in his grace has given us a day to do that on. We shouldn’t waste that day then by sleeping late or by going to bed real early. We shouldn’t waste that day. We should use that day to think God’s thoughts, by reading his scriptures.

Another thing I hear frequently in our church is it’s hard to get time to spend with our children about the word of God. That the busy things in involved with tend to crowd out our interaction with our children on the word of God. And again, Sunday is one of the big answers to that. You can sit down with your children and go over the sermon and try to put it in their words. That’s what I’m doing right now in our home school when I teach Bible. I’ve decided to teach them all the studying I’ve done in preparation for the sermon throughout the week after I’ve given the sermon.

And you can certainly do that in a truncated fashion on Sunday afternoons or evenings. You get together with your children, explain to them what Pastor Tuuri was trying to say that morning and what he was trying to teach us from the Bible. And maybe what things you’ve thought about or studied out in that area or maybe some even some areas where I’m wrong. Try to correct that with your children if they’ve come under this teaching.

Spend that time with those children and use that time wisely. It’s a great gift of God in which we’re to build family unity based upon the scriptures. Sing songs with your children on that day. We started singing a song on our way to church this morning, and you’ll hear more about that toward the end of the month, hopefully. Just a little clue there. We’re going to have something special planned, hopefully.

But in any event, in any event, get together in the afternoon with your children, sing songs, maybe take home the order of worship and sing some of those songs if you can know the tune well enough. Teach your children what those songs mean that we’re singing every Sunday. It’s a great thing to do with them.

One other thing I hear about frequently in our church is that not only does our scripture reading time get kind of crowded out by activities of the world, not only does time with our children get crowded out by activities of the world. And this is something I don’t hear a lot, but undoubtedly it’s true. Our time with our wives gets crowded out by that as well.

We stress child rearing a lot this last year, year and a half, and that’s good and proper. But it’s never proper for the husband to think that he can focus simply on the children and ignore the helpmate that God has given to him, that God has said he is one with.

Now, we have an obligation as husbands to teach our wives the scriptures, to make sure that we answer the questions that they’re to ask us at home about what they hear on Sunday that they don’t understand. We have an obligation as men to help our wives grow in grace and maturity in the scriptures and to show them love and compassion.

And so Sunday’s going to be a time too, and maybe if your children are a little bit older and can take care of themselves for a while, you can get off with your wife by yourself and talk about the scriptures. Talk about her life this last week. Here’s some of her concerns. Try to bring some mercy and compassion into the home itself for the wife who might be quite busy from the week in the past and not been able to speak to you about various things.

We have an obligation to speak with our wives of things of God and to teach them the scriptures and to rejoice with them and to pray with them in the life that God has given us and our families.

Psalm 119:172 says, “My tongue shall speak of thy word,” and our talk on Sunday should be characterized by a consideration of God’s word and its application. And that’s then the foundation as we try to restore those relationships with our wife, with our children, and then in God’s word itself. God’s word is the foundation for all those things.

And so the holy day of the Sabbath should be spent in consideration of God’s word and God’s thoughts and then extending that word and thought out to the rest of our family to our wives and our children.

One other area of extension of the family—we have single people in this church, and for them Sunday can be quite a lonely day, as you can imagine. We tell them not to do things they normally would do on the rest of the days of the week. We tell them not to get together with non-Christian friends to do non-Christian vocations, avocations or hobbies. And yet I think it’s important that we as families recognize we have a responsibility to these people to help them also to rejoice in the word of God, to get together with them and to have them over occasionally to speak of the sermon and God’s word and what it’s meaning in their lives, to help them also rejoice in the Sabbath day.

So we have obligations along that line.

Now, these are various obligations that God has given to us. He gives us proscriptions. He tells us what not to do on the Sabbath. He tells us what we should do on the Sabbath. And then he also gives us promises.

And so, actually, you know, I recognize now, but I made a mistake because I changed the outline. I didn’t cover the final point under proscriptions, and I think we ought to do that. And I’m sorry I didn’t do it in the correct order. But that’s what I get for changing the outline at the last moment.

We didn’t cover the fact that a proscription on the Sabbath is to buy and to sell. So we’ll go back to that part of the outline.

Buying and selling is also said to be proscribed or not to be done on the Sabbath. Nehemiah 10:31 says, “As for the people of the land who bring wares or any grain of the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath.” That was part of the covenant that was retaken at the time of Nehemiah.

And that, by the way, was the specific reason why we included a sabbatical statement in the covenant statement of our church. The time of Nehemiah, the Sabbath was frequently desecrated or trampled upon, and so they went out of their way to signal out the Sabbath, and Sabbath observance is an important thing. The Sabbath can be seen as a summation of all the first tablet of the law, as I said before—as an obligation that we have to God—and in the time of Nehemiah was important to include in the covenant statement.

Now, Nehemiah 13:15-22, I want to read a couple of verses there in terms of proscription from buying and selling of the Sabbath and talk about their application to us today. Nehemiah 13:15-22:

“In those days saw I in Judah some treading wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and lading asses, as also wine, grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I testified against them in the day wherein they sold victuals.”

Now, what’s happening here is this is sometime later. Now they’ve taken this covenant. They said, “We’re not going to buy and sell on the Sabbath.” And now Nehemiah says, “They’re buying and selling on the Sabbath.”

Verse 16: “There dwelt men of Tyre also wherein which brought fish and all manner of ware, and sold on the Sabbath unto the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem. Then I contended with the nobles of Judah, and said unto them, ‘What evil thing is this that ye do and profane the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers thus? And did not our God bring all the evil upon us and upon this city. Yet ye bring more wrath upon Israel by profaning the Sabbath.’”

“And it came to pass that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the Sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut and charged they should not be open till after the Sabbath. And some of my servants set I at the gates that there should not burden be brought in on the Sabbath day. So the merchants and sellers of all kind of ware lodged without Jerusalem once or twice.”

“Then I testified against them and said unto them, ‘Why lodge ye about the wall? If you do so again, I will lay hands on you.’ From that time forth came they no more on the Sabbath. And I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves, that they should come and keep the gates to sanctify the Sabbath day.”

“Remember me, oh my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to the greatness of thy mercy.”

Now, that last line there is important to understand in terms of the importance of what he’s just said. Nehemiah correctly here asked God to remember his positive works for righteousness that he has done. And that positive work is delineated for a number of verses there in this portion of scripture as prohibiting the buying and selling of goods on the Sabbath.

Recognize here—and I’ll just—we could really spend a couple of weeks going over just this portion of scripture. But just in summary fashion—that profaning the Sabbath by buying and selling is described as an evil thing in this passage of scripture. It’s a profanation of the Sabbath, is to trample the Sabbath underfoot. Curses from God in this passage are said to be the result of that. Nehemiah says this is why God’s brought all the curses upon us up to now, and you’re going to increase the wrath of God upon us by buying and selling on the Sabbath.

If we see ourselves in a position of being cursed in this nation today and of falling away from righteousness and then seeing God’s curse upon us, we should recognize that the Sabbath is one of the things that brings God’s curse upon his people—a profanation of it, specifically by buying and selling, is adding to the wrath of Israel to buy and sell on the Sabbath.

And then Nehemiah initiated an economic boycott of people that would sell on the Sabbath. He said, “Look, we may not be able to stop these guys from selling, but we can sure stop our people from buying.” And so he initiated an economic boycott. He followed up on that economic boycott, and the fact that even though they had now united in not buying things, still there are people trying to tempt them into disobedience.

He then, as governor, imposed civil sanctions against people from selling on the Sabbath. And he told them, “Don’t you camp outside this wall. I’m going to lay hands on you.” He was the governor. He could lay hands on them. And then of course it says they didn’t do that anymore. They’ve been threatened by the governor. He imposed civil sanctions with the threat of physical force on sellers on the Sabbath day.

And then he asked for the priests to guard the holy day. And you see the priestly function of guarding there again, keeping the actions holy by keeping the gates and making sure no burdens were carried in or out.

And so right there in that little chapter of Nehemiah, you have a tremendous example of what not to do in terms of buying and selling of the Sabbath and how disobedience to that command brings the wrath of God, and how it’s proper then for the civil magistrate in terms of keeping peace in the land to prohibit the buying and selling of goods on the Sabbath day.

Sorry, we had got that out of order. Now, those are some of the proscriptions. Can’t buy and sell. Can’t do work. Can’t have a bad attitude toward the Sabbath. Can’t do any of these other things. Can’t do vain talk. You shouldn’t gossip about people, et cetera.

There are some prescriptions we’ve talked about in terms of doing God’s work, finding pleasure in God’s things that day, speaking God’s thoughts, coming together in holy convocation, resting from your labors. And then finally, this passage of scripture ends—as many passages of scripture where God gives us both a negative and a positive, a negative rebuke against things not to do, a positive command of things to do. He then follows it up with promises.

And so verse 14 says, “Then thou shalt delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee at the heritage of Jacob thy father, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

He says here that two things in terms of a promise. First of all, that if we turn aside from our own pleasures and we call the Sabbath a delight—and that means to amend ourselves into its pattern that God has established for it—He says that we will delight ourselves in the Lord. Okay?

Now, to delight there is the root word from which the “pleasure” that’s used other places in that verse comes from. To delight yourself in the word of the Lord means to be pliable unto the Lord. Okay? And we’re told in the scriptures that if we delight ourselves in God, He’ll give us the desires of our heart if we conform ourselves to God. And this verse says that if we delight in the Sabbath, then we will be delighting in God.

And so he calls us to do correct actions. And he promises us then that we will delight in God as a result of those actions.

And you know, several years ago after I became a Christian, it always troubled me to read the passage in Revelation in one of the letters to the churches about how the church—I believe it was at Ephesus—had abandoned their first love. And I remember hearing people talk about that. And I always felt kind of guilty, you know, because I didn’t really love Jesus in that sense. I didn’t have that delight in Jesus, that feeling of desire to do his will. I mean, I wanted to obey. I’m not saying I didn’t want to be a good Christian, but I didn’t have that delight or love that seemed to be talked about in Ephesians.

And I think that may characterize many Christians in our land today, and for good reason. The scriptures say that one of the ways that God has given us to cause ourselves to delight in God, to return to that first love in terms of our love for our savior Jesus Christ, is to obey in terms of the Sabbath.

If you have problems delighting in God, if you don’t find yourself with that kind of delight to do his will, then perhaps you should examine your Sabbath activity. If we keep the Sabbath and if we call the Sabbath a delight, God says, “Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord.”

Now, this same thing is said in Job 22. We are told in Job 22 to return to the Almighty and then you shall be built up and then you shall delight yourself in it. We repent. We turn back from sinful actions. We do what’s right. We do what God tells us to do in terms of the Sabbath specifically. And then you delight in God. We meet him in a special way on this day. And our love and delight for his ways grows in proportion to our obedience then to this command. It’s a promise by God attached to the positive commandments that he has given us in terms of the Sabbath, and he will fulfill it.