Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

For the sermon text today, we’re going to turn to Isaiah 58, all 14 verses. We’re continuing through the case laws, but I wanted to speak from this passage as it relates to the laws of the Sabbath and the festivals found in Exodus 23. So, stand please and I’ll read from Isaiah 58.

“Lift up your voice like a trumpet. Tell my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of me the ordinance of justice. They take delight in approaching God. Why have we fasted, they say, and you have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls and you take no notice?

“In fact, in the day of your fast, you find pleasure and exploit all your laborers. Indeed, you fast for strife and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high. Is it a fast that I have chosen, a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast and an acceptable day to the Lord?

“Is this not the fast that I have chosen—to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out? When you see the naked that you cover him and not hide yourself from your own flesh.

“Then your light shall break forth like the morning. Your healing shall spring forth speedily and your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness. If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noon day.

“The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. Those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and shall honor him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words.

“Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth, and feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father. The mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Let’s pray. Father, we yearn for this kind of demonstration of your covenant people in the context of our culture. We desire to be those people that rebuild the waste places. We desire to be those people that dwell in those streets of life and blessing. We desire the goodness of living in the garden of God in the context of our culture.

We pray that by your spirit, you would illumine our hearts with an understanding of this text that we might indeed be moved to praise you for what you’ve accomplished through Christ our Savior, to lament and to repent of our sins that keep us from this fullness of celebration of what he has accomplished and that you would indeed transform our lives and hearts.

That we’d be with the people described in this latter half of this very important chapter to us who walk in the paths of the Lord who call the Sabbath a delight and who are indeed those that reconstruct and transform their culture. We pray this through the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Please be seated.

We are moving to a conclusion in our sermons going through the so-called case laws of Exodus—the law of the covenant rather—of Exodus 21-23. The entire section concludes with this description of the festivals of God that we find in the latter half of chapter 23 and then a final epilogue: God promising to send his angel to them to guide them into all victory and the destruction of their enemies.

So, we’ve been talking about the Sabbath day that’s described for us in Exodus chapter 23. A day when you throw down what you do and you take a breath and get revivified as it were. A day when we enter into that rest and refreshment that is the day culminated in the Christian Lord’s Day or Christian Sabbath. A day when we’re not to use our laborers to work, but rather to give them refreshment as well.

The case law talked about in the progression then—or excuse me, the law of the covenant—yet they went on to talk about the three festivals of the year that they were required to keep before God. In verse 14 of Exodus 23 we read: “Three times you shall keep a feast, celebrate to me in the year.” And then he describes three feasts and concludes it in verse 17 by saying, “Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God.”

So we have this idea that the Sabbath is one of these feasts of God. The Old Testament calendar is fulfilled in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and it all pointed to that, of course. And that work is celebrated in what some have referred to—the Westminster Confession of Faith, for instance—as the Christian Sabbath and what is appropriately called in the New Testament the Lord’s Day, the day of the Lord when God comes to be with his people. The Lord comes both judging and restoring and refreshing.

So all of these things we’re studying in the Old Testament had their fulfillment, their climax in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the New Testament Lord’s Day. And what we said last week, you know, we’re getting up to a discussion now of what this day is supposed to look like, which we’ll talk about today, and how we should prepare for it.

But the context that God has set for us in this law of the covenant as well as in the last two sermons is to understand that what we find in the scriptures by way of what we’re to do in terms of the Lord’s Day and how we’re to prepare for it—these things are not onerous or burdensome requirements on us so much as they are a preparation for celebration, a preparation for throwing aside work, a preparation for vivification, life. God giving us life through the sacrament and the word. God giving us refreshment in this day.

The Sabbath is not to be seen as a day of burdensome overlaid with all these rules that we have to do, but rather we’re to say that God directs us with a few things that he commands us in terms of this day that we might indeed enter into the fullness of the joy of the Christian Lord’s Day. So we said that joy is to mark this day. That the purpose of this festival season is that God knows us better than we know ourselves.

And he has said that counterintuitively to what we might think—the way to mature or to be sanctified is not primarily fasting, but it is rather feasting. He gives us a calendar in the Old Testament filled with feast days. And he calls us to enter into the feast day of the Lord’s Day as the way in which we’re transformed—the way we’re transformed individually and the way that we’re corporately transformed as a group as well.

And it is, as some have said, a program for national character building, for national discipleship. It starts with this sabbatical cycle so to speak of the Old Testament, the Lord’s Day cycle of the New Testament—that is a cycle of celebration and feasting in the context of our Savior. So today is to be seen as a day of joy. It is a day of obedience to God’s word that leads us into the fullness of the joy of the day.

Now God requires us to enter into this sort of joy. This is a commanded joy. These are laws still in the law of the covenant. And we still have the abiding application of the fourth commandment to enter into this day. So it is a day of required or commanded joy—which again seems somewhat counterintuitive to us, does it not?

We think of joy as the result of feeling a particular way. But God says, for instance in Isaiah 58, to call the day a delight, to call the day delightful, to decide to celebrate in this day. And it can be a difficult thing for us to do. But God knows this is the way that we are transformed. When you come here and bad things have happened and difficult things to understand—God understands all of that and doesn’t want you to put a smile past it on your face—but he does want you to enter into the joy of the Lord. He wants you to open your mouth nonetheless and to sing forth praises and have your heart transformed by that celebration of what he has accomplished in the work of our Savior.

It is a commanded joy with clear implications for how we’re to worship and what we’re to do on this particular day. I have a very good friend who went through some very dark times in the last few years. And he spoke with me about this truth—that joy is an action we’re commanded to enter into, that worship is a verb. It is something we do that we put our wills to accomplish. This was an important way in which he moved through a very difficult time of his life and entered into the fullness of God’s blessing on the other side of some very severe trials.

The trials are real. You cannot deny them. But God processes them, so to speak, through Lord’s Day worship in which we praise him, acknowledge his sovereign hand in spite of our inability to understand why he’s working in ways he works. And as a result of that, God transforms us and brings us through the dark days of our souls into the lightness of his blessing as we obediently respond to this commanded joy from him.

So it is a command to engage in joy and it is also—it is a regulated joy. It is a joy that has particular context to it. These celebrations always happen in the context of the Levitical ministers of the word. Much of them happen in two-week celebrations. They happen in Jerusalem in the particular presence of God. They happen not in isolation. They happen in community. So the joy is regulated.

There’s an old Dutch word—glimmerings of something. And the Dutch word that we can translate as glimmerings means a way to think of it is the impression left in the sand after someone has walked there. He is gone, but we see the impression left in the sand as a glimmering of him. So, it isn’t really—he’s there anymore. It’s a glimmering.

This discussion of this Dutch word entered into the discussions of various men and how to interpret the canons of Dort, which I won’t go into. But the point is the canons of Dort talked about man has a glimmering in relationship in terms of understanding who God is—doesn’t everybody has a little light in their soul. It means that God has revealed himself. Now he’s gone from that footprint, so to speak, that glimmering.

Here’s my point in that. When we think of joy and celebration, our Adamic bent is to look at the impression the foot has left and rejoice in that as opposed to rejoicing in the one who made the footprint. Glimmering, I think, is the basis for our word glamour. And glamour is the stuff that this culture tries to draw us into and gets us to rejoice in glamour as opposed to reality.

You know, it used to be glam rockers who would dress up real fancily in terms of their appearance and stuff and put on a lot of sequins and bobbles and baubbles. Glamour. And the idea of that is that our joy and celebration is not to be the joy and celebration of the world that goes after glamour—that goes after the impression that God has made in terms of the created order but removed from his presence.

We want you know, the things that give us delight—on money and food and all that sort of stuff. Those things are good when seen in relationship to the one who leaves the impression. Gold is a picture of the luster of God, the brilliance of God and his value and the beautiful value of his word. The word is compared to fine gold. Food is the same thing. His word is to be tasty to us. These things are good and to be celebrated and rejoiced in.

The problem is as soon as I tell you that to avoid the ditch of asceticism and saying the flesh is bad, then we go over here and say, “Okay, good. It’s okay to rejoice now in the glamour, in the footprint, as opposed to the one who made the footprint.” So, we want to have our celebrations regulated by God’s word and very explicitly pointed to God’s presence in our midst.

I spoke to James B. Jordan several years ago, one of the first several times he came out. He said that if there’s one thing he would do different in Tyler, Texas—they got together for a lot of celebration, a lot of good times together—but he said the one thing that he would have done different looking back on it is that those times would have been times marked more with the word of God and prayer in the midst of them.

See, when we say let’s have celebrations in the context of the cycle that God has given us and the need for human beings to celebrate, what we want to remember is those celebrations must be seen in connection not to the empty footprint when God is gone—you know, not to that glamour sort of stuff that draws our eyes to it—but rather to the one who is behind that, who made those impressions, and who gave it to us to call us to remember him and not the thing itself.

So, it’s a regulated joy that we need to think about quite seriously in the context of the life of our church. As I’ve said, we’ve been marked as a church that knows how to celebrate, knows how to rejoice. But see, to us, the danger for us as a community will not be to fall into the ditch of asceticism. Our danger will be to fall into the ditch of celebrations without the word and prayer, without self-consciously thinking how we do these events that we do and celebrations in a way that is pleasing to God and makes it different from just a celebration that’s empty and removed from the context of the one who leaves the footprint.

So we want—we don’t want glimmerings of celebrations. We want full-fledged celebrations, delighting in what God has given us delight in, but doing it in the context of remembering who he is, that ultimately he is that which we’re delighting in the context of.

Let me also make one more application before we move on to the specific subject for today’s sermon. When we see this pattern established in the context of the sacred or religious calendar of Israel—that we see this pattern of celebrations as we’ve talked about the last couple of weeks—remember that what happens on the Lord’s Day is the pattern for what we do with the rest of our lives.

And I sort of pointed to this at communion last week where we’re to keep the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity. And the idea is that we can make an application of that to the Lord’s Supper. But what it means is that our whole lives are to be lived by means of keeping the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity. What it says is that our lives are to be eucharistic. Our lives are to be lives of celebration and joy.

Now, I know that again—understand—I’m not saying that we don’t weep with those that are weeping. We do. We don’t just tell them to buck up, put a smile on, and get on with it. But what we say is that the general tenor of our lives is to lead toward joy in life. So, the application of the celebration times we have in the church is in other areas as well. And specifically, what I want to point out here is it has an explicit relationship to our families.

Our families are to be places of joy. Now remember that I’m the one who handed out the C.S. Lewis article that talked about the family is fallen and it’s difficult and we do things there that are terrible. And that’s just the point for me bringing up this application: that the family and household is supposed to be a place where we let the pattern of Lord’s Day celebration enter into our homes.

Why is the husband to enter into that first year of exclusion? What’s the point? The point is joy. The point is to get his wife to rejoice, to enter into the celebration of Christian marriage that comes from the celebration of Lord’s Day. What is the husband told to do in the Proverbs? He’s to rejoice in the wife of his youth. She’s older maybe, right? She’s still the wife of your youth, same person. And you’re to rejoice in your wife.

A wise son brings joy, celebration to the parents. And the parents are caused to lead their children into the nurture, admonition, and fear. Fear is reverence, worship, celebration of the Lord. So the whole family is marked by relationships that culminate in joy.

So husbands, love your wives. What does it mean? Well, I do my work for her, you know, and I provide and all that stuff. I do my duty and that’s love. Love is the keeping of the commandment. No, love is the joyous keeping of the commandment. To love your wife is to rejoice in her. And sometimes you may not feel like that. Sometimes you may not feel like coming to church and singing a hymn, but God says, “Do it. Do it and you’ll be transformed. Rejoice in your wife and you’ll find yourself rejoicing in her more.”

And wives are not to submit in the sense of “Oh yeah, I’ll do what he tells me to do. I did it, so I’ve submitted.” No, submission is a joyful entering into a desire to follow the lead of the husband. It’s joy, wives. Joy in your husbands.

You know, I believe that the proper emphasis on the wife’s relationship to the husband is not so much respect—that is a word used once in the New Testament—but it is submission. And submission involves this idea of a joying in, a desire to follow your husband. Your husband’s not going to be the smartest, strongest, best guy in the world, but he’s still a source of joy for you because, for you, he’s the best guy, the best one that God has placed in your life to bring you into the fullness of the joy of the Savior.

And you may say, “Well, I don’t understand it. So, it’s God says to do it. Worship is a verb and submit in the context of joy.”

I saw—I don’t know. Some may get upset with me for talking about videos and stuff, but there was—there’s the artist formerly known as Prince has this video and it’s about the most beautiful woman in the world. And apparently he put ads out and got just ordinary women to come. And some are heavy and some are thin and some are really pretty and some are not so pretty. But he made them all look beautiful in the video.

And I think the point is that this man who probably has no relationship to the God of the scriptures still knows enough to try to tell people that your wife—heavy, thin, short, tall, beautiful, or not beautiful—to you should be the most beautiful woman in the world. You’re to see her that way. You’re to put on those thoughts about her. Now, if that fellow who apparently is pretty pagan can tell us that, can’t we see that the word of God that tells us to love our wives, who is sovereign, who gave us that particular wife, can’t we see that he would cause us to rejoice in that?

I was at a celebration the other night and I noticed an older child talking to their mother in kind of one of these ways that’s so typical in our homes. The discussion was about DVDs, DVD players. And the child thought—and I don’t know, correctly and correctly—that her parent didn’t understand what a DVD was and kind of was sort of snippy. And it wasn’t really mean or nasty, but there wasn’t the joy of respect of the parent there that characterized that relationship.

And as soon as I saw that, I recognized that goes on in all of our households, right? Goes on in my household. I’m sure it goes on in yours to some extent. And what we want is to train our children to rejoice in their parents. And what we want to train, and how we do that, is to have parents rejoice in their children.

We carp on our children. We criticize them all the time. I mean, not all the time, but you know what I’m saying. Our Adamic tendency is to leave out joy, to exercise headship in the family, but in a way that doesn’t rejoice in the subjects therein. God rejoices in his people and what he’s causing them to be. Now, he disciplines us too, but he rejoices in us.

All right, I’ve gone on too much about that, but the point is that the central aspect of celebration is an important one for us. It’s a very important one. We should come here today and enter into celebration.

What prevents us from doing that? Well, I ended last week by talking about two things that can prevent us. First is a lack of knowledge, and second is a lack of preparation. Our primary problem is ethical, not intellectual. Nonetheless, there is an intellectual component to our lives.

So, let’s talk about what the scriptures say in terms of how we are to celebrate the Lord’s Day, the Christian Sabbath. And I’m going to talk mostly from the last couple of verses of Isaiah 58, which we just read.

How do we celebrate this? If you don’t come here today and celebrate the day of writ, and we all don’t to some degree, part of your problem may be knowledge. Okay. And what we want to say first in the context of the outline is that there are certain proscriptions. There’s certain things you’re not supposed to do on the Lord’s Day as we glean from the laws of the Sabbath of the Old Testament.

First of all, you’re supposed to have a particular attitude toward the Sabbath. You’re proscribed—you’re forbidden to have a particular kind of attitude toward the Sabbath. You’re not to trample upon the Sabbath. Verse 13A says, “If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath.” And it’s kind of hard to know what this means, but it seems like what probably this verse means in the Hebrew is that when you don’t have a correct attitude toward the Sabbath, you’re trampling it underfoot.

So turn away your foot from the Sabbath. Correct your attitude in the context of Lord’s Day worship. Don’t look at it as a burdensome requirement. It may feel that way to you certain Sundays, but don’t look at it that way. Don’t allow yourselves to have that kind of attitude toward it. Rather have an attitude of calling it a delight, a delight.

So don’t trample it in terms of your attitude.

Second, there are certain prescriptions in terms of actions given in verse 13 as well. Don’t find your own pleasure. Don’t speak your own words. So there are certain actions we are proscribed—forbidden to engage in—on the Lord’s Day. And by way of extension, we would say that work is part of these commandments. And this is rather obvious.

The Old Testament is characterized by a cessation of work. So, you enter into rest. In Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20, we have the versions of the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments explicitly tell us that the Sabbath day is to be a day of rest.

Now, certain labors are unavoidable—labors of necessity. You know, we can enter into certain labors. And in a particular kind of culture, the first century church, they could not get time off from work, so to speak, on the Lord’s Day. So, you know, they weren’t supposed to give up their vocation if they couldn’t find other work.

But the idea is that we’re supposed to try to achieve a schedule that we can enter into and the kind of vocation that would free us on the Lord’s Day. Now, there are nurses and doctors and other technological things that have to go on in a seven-day cycle. And the scriptures provide for that and works of necessity. And specifically in the Old Testament, the Passover had two Passover days. In the cycle of the Old Testament church, there was the normal Passover day and then later, several months or so afterwards, there was a second Passover day set up for those who were providentially hindered from attending Passover on the first day.

So what we want to see long term are churches that have alternate Lord’s Day services set aside in the middle of the week or a day that’s convenient for nurses, doctors, people who—their technological improvements end up working on the Lord’s Day or those who are providentially hindered because they can’t find a different job. But the point is we’re supposed to try to put away work in the context of Sabbath activities.

Remember, this sounds like you know you can’t do that. But what it is saying is: “Hey, don’t work today. Celebrate today. Try to arrange your time so that on the Lord’s Day you can celebrate, that you don’t enter into physical labor.”

Second, prescription in terms of actions is a failure to convocate. Leviticus 23 tells us specifically that the Sabbaths of the Old Testament were days of holy convocation—getting together. Hebrews 10:25 talks about the requirement of people to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together. Don’t forsake the convocating of yourselves together. Sometimes you don’t feel like being around other people, and that can keep you from the Sabbath. But if you know that God says the way to enter into Lord’s Day celebration is to engage in convocation—to estay, to get rid of the idea of being isolated or alone—that’s a good thing.

You know, we’ve been discussing in our world history and church history class the early aesthetic period of the church in the second and third centuries. And you know, the idea was the world is so bad, the churches are so corrupt, let’s just go be monks and live out in the desert by ourselves. The only problem with that was people go insane when they live by themselves. You know, they would have visions of weird demons after them and stuff. Jerome would go out, and no matter how far he got away from the city, he kept thinking of Roman dancing girls. You know, you just cannot by isolating yourself move in the context of sanctification.

God says sanctification is accomplished in the context of community.

By the way, I think that’s one reason why we’re supposed to have single people into our homes, you know, particularly those that can’t labor because if they’re by themselves all the time, it’s really not good for them.

So, convocation—you’re not to have a failure to convocate would be a violation of the Lord’s Day regulations.

Buying and selling. In Nehemiah 10 and chapter 13, this is a very important part of the restoration or reformation that happened in Nehemiah’s day was Sabbath day observance in terms of getting rid of buyers and sellers. The people wanted to buy things. So, he says, “Don’t buy them anymore.” And it’s a violation of the kind of day of celebration that God wants you enter into when you enter into economic transactions.

I think one reason for that—and you know, if you don’t like this explanation, that’s okay. But I’m going to tell you what I think. In the book of Revelation, I think that buying and selling there is used as a metaphor for worship. We come together and buying and selling—it is we consecrate ourselves to God and he gives us these gifts.

Remember in Revelation 2 and 3, Jesus comes to the churches and says, “You know what? I’ve got the sharp two-edged sword and you need it. You need to exercise discipline in your church.” He says, “You’ve got various sins going on and I’m the guy that has what you need. Buy from me.” He says to one of the churches, “Save for your eyes. Buy garments from me.”

See, worship is transactional. We’re coming acknowledging our neediness, acknowledging that God gives us what we need. We can’t really offer anything to him. But there’s a sense in which our Savior characterizes it as transactions. And I kind of think that’s one reason why they’re prohibited on the Lord’s Day. First, it causes people to labor, but secondly, it’s not of the celebratory nature of the day that reminds us that all transactions are ultimately pictures or symbols of our relationship to Jesus Christ and him providing all that we need in him.

Okay. So, in any event, I mean, you know, whether you like it or not, seems to me that these prohibitions from the book of Nehemiah against buying and selling in the Lord’s Day are still a proscription to us. We’re not to buy and sell.

Nehemiah went to the gates of the city. There were guys that were going to come in and sell to the Israelites and they were camped outside the gates. They were coming in selling. He closed the gates. Then he camped outside the gates. Nehemiah went out there and said, “If you keep it up, I’m going to lay hands on you. Get out of here. And I mean it.”

See, he doesn’t want God’s people distracted from the celebratory nature of the day by thoughts of commercial transactions. And so our days as well should be days at which we throw it down, lay it down. Don’t stop at Winchell’s in the morning on Sunday morning. Don’t go out, you know, to the restaurants Sunday afternoon. You know why restaurants are open Sunday afternoon? It’s for you. It’s the primary audience. At least a few years ago, it was. I don’t know if it still is or not.

But one of the biggest reasons why certain restaurants stay open or stores as well—market stores—is for that rush of Christians coming out of worship service. You know, they’re there for an hour or two and they, you know, they got to go buy something, got to go somewhere, enter into commercial transactions. They got to go have dinner together to give the wife a break.

Well, that’s good. We’re trying to provide a way to give wives breaks in the context of the meal that we provide here. And the provision that we’re telling husbands—loosen the hand a bit, you know, use some of your tithe money if necessary. Let your wife buy stuff that’s easy to prepare. Unless they really want to put the work in on Saturday so they can have that day of rest on the Lord’s Day without causing, you know, cooks at the restaurants to buy and to work as well.

The extension of the prohibition against labor extends to our servants. So it extends to those people we would buy things from as well. So commercial transactions, I think, are proscribed.

Fourth, an action that’s proscribed is pointing the finger. You know, it says this explicitly in Isaiah 58: “If you take away the yoke from the midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness. If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noon day.”

What kills celebration on Lord’s Day is to have a critical attitude about other people, to point the finger at them. You know, if they’re failing or if they’re sinning in some way, don’t point the finger today. Encourage them. Encourage them to the joy that is covenant keeping, that is related to the keeping of the covenant. Pointing of the finger is proscribed specifically in Isaiah 58.

Talking. In verse 13 of chapter 58 we read that you’re not supposed to find your own pleasures nor speaking your own words. And that “speaking your own words”—the literal translation would be “talking talk, quit talking talk, quit”—the sort of talking that is characterized in an okay way the rest of the week, but on the Lord’s Day try to have your speech formed in a different way to rejoice in the work of the Savior.

I want to be careful, you know, and not lay down regulations here in terms of what you should say to one another today, both here and when you go home or when you go to your prayer meetings. But I would just say this: you know, speech is important. And the way to transform our speech from what one might call secular speech that never has a consideration of the Lord or his law or his people or his ideas in the context of it—one way to transform the secular speech the culture molds us in the context of is on the Lord’s Day making a special effort to enter into speech that considers the relationship of God’s word and his people and the Lord Jesus Christ and his kingdom to whatever subject we’re talking about.

Now, in a way, that’s kind of what we do all week. But on the Lord’s Day, it’s a day when we’re not going to enter into normal speech. Our speech is going to have a self-consciously godly influence on it. And I don’t know, you know, how to—I don’t want to lay down what you should or shouldn’t say. It’s not my point here. My point is simply to get you to consider that when God corrects a people for the way they violate the day of celebration and turned it into, by the way, a fast, and by the end of Isaiah 58, what’s he doing? He’s causing them to rejoice and be fed and watered in a garden.

The way to move it from fast to feast, among other things, is to move our speech. To move the way we talk from “and not doing your own pleasure” to have our pleasure regulated, in a sense, on the Lord’s Day in a special sense so that then we enter into our other pleasures based upon that in the rest of the week. So it’s a day of transformation.

You know, another song I like a lot is by a modern artist. And in this song he moves you through a cycle of the kind of hecticness of the world that we live in. You know, “I got mobile phones, I got color TVs, I got, you know, two cars, got all these blessings. Why is it that I still feel so unhappy?” And he moves through that. And by the end of the song—this progression of songs that he sings—he talks about going up to the mountain and going up there where the water runs and it’s cool and it’s clear and it’s crystal clear water running from the mountain. And he then, in his performance of this song, just everybody’s quiet, the audience, and he just takes a couple of breaths. See, he’s refreshed.

Well, see, that’s what the Sabbath is about. We’re to come away from all the stuff that surrounds us—that are good footprints from the Lord—but which we turn into glimmering without connecting them to the Lord. We turn them into the glamour, you know, the sizzle. Some people call it the sex appeal of electronics and all this sort of stuff. You know, that kind of approach. They’re talking about glamour without seeing it related to God. We come away from all that stuff. We go up to the mountain. We celebrate the presence of God and we talk differently. We consider things differently. So that when we go back down now, we enter into the fullness of the joy of all the blessings that God has given us because we’ve connected them back to the crystal clear water of the word and the spirit coming to us through the mountaintop that brings us refreshment and vivification—the giving of life to us again.

So we’re not to talk. Our talk should be different.

And then there are prescriptions. What are we supposed to do? Well, we’re supposed to have a good attitude. We’re supposed to call the Sabbath a delight. I’ve talked about that, and that’s important for us. You know, you take control of your emotions by assuming a proper attitude. I make my children smile at certain times. And God says he wants us to come together and he wants us to have this attitude—to call the Sabbath a delight.

Secondly, there are actions we’re to engage in. We’re supposed to convocate. We’re supposed to do that in convocation. These actions involve convocation. They involve rest. No laborous work on the Lord’s Day. They involve works of mercy.

As we read through Isaiah 58, you saw that, I’m sure, that we engage in works of mercy, feeding the poor, clothing the hungry. I was at a woman’s house who lives right around the corner from us in Cani yesterday—a frail woman, older woman. And she has a ministry of food and clothes in a little apartment. She’s got a carport and all her clothes are covered there with the carport from the rain. And she’s got a crisis line that’s listed in the Cani phone book. It’s listed in the paper every week. They do that for her. People call her right now. For instance, she’s got a schizophrenic fellow who lives on along the water there, I guess, by the river that goes through Cani, and he comes every day and has coffee and goes back and sleeps in his place. And she’s trying to minister to him in the name of Christ.

And you know, we can consider a woman like that. And this is not a ministry so much of her church. And she’s got, you know, some interesting ideas. She was raised Catholic, so she’s kind of got that flowing. And I mean, you know, you might think of her as kind of like—why you could look at her and see everything she’s doing wrong and miss the huge sign that she is to us that in her particular situation—calling us single—that’s a big thing. She can take and minister in the context like Isaiah 58 tells her to do, clothing people and feeding them out of a little apartment with a carport.

See now, you know, we’re waiting for the building. Please, you know, I’m not trying to make—I’m not—we’re waiting for a building to engage in a lot of works of necessity. I long for the day when we have some kind of ministry that this woman has, and when we go about doing it in ways that we would think are right. In other words, challenging people to put down their sin in addition to getting, you know, receiving food and clothing from other people. I mean, to go about doing it in an Isaiah 58 sort of way that would repair the breaches and not just hand out food and clothes to people.

Okay? So, I long for that day. But don’t miss what this woman is doing. She’s doing a great work. And don’t miss the opportunities that we have in our homes, in our communities that we could engage in some of this stuff.

God says that it adds to our celebration if what we’re doing is ministering to people with particular needs. We’re to do works of mercy. And the church is always—Westminster Confession of Faith, the Continental formers—works of mercy are one of those okay things to do on the Lord’s Day. Jesus healed on the Lord’s Day. And so we’re to engage in works of mercy on the Lord’s Day. Good thing to do.

Another action that’s prescribed for us are recreation and festivals. Talked about that. And then the last thing is a holy day. You’re to call this a holy day. It’s the holy day of the Lord. My point here is that it is a day—a holy day. This is yum. This is the day that God has prescribed as the holy day, and it is a 24-hour day.

We make a big deal about how the use of this particular Hebrew word in Genesis 1 and 2 refers to six sequential 24-hour days. And it does. But don’t miss the implication then: when God says it’s six days he worked and the seventh he rested, and you take a Sabbath of rest, don’t think it runs from 10 to 12 Sunday morning. Don’t think it runs from sun up to sun down. It says the whole day right now.

Some people keep the day from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday because that’s the way the Old Testament did it. It was evening and morning, the first day; evening and morning, the second day. I think that the reason the church has almost universally held instead to a day that goes from sun up to sun up Monday morning is because of the transition from the lunar cycle of the Old Testament to the solar cycle of the New Testament.

The Lord Jesus Christ, the greater light, has come and he’s moved us from evening to day. The Old Testament happens in the evening. They’d have lunar festivals because it was light out then, kind of like daytime. You could celebrate in the moonlight. But in the New Testament, what do we see? Jesus rises up at the opening of the Lord’s Day, the resurrection. And the Lord’s Day seems to have moved then from evening to morning. That’s why we have a solar calendar. It’s why our calendar doesn’t match the Jewish calendar of the Old Testament. It was 28 days, lunar months, and we’ve got solar months.

But I don’t, you know, I’m not going to argue with people about that. If you want to go evening to evening, okay, as long as you’re consistent in marking off the whole day as characterized by what these texts of scripture tell us it’s to be characterized by.

So it’s a whole day, not part of the day. It is the whole day. And then priorities. The priorities of the Lord’s Day are to delight in God. Again, this is a regulated celebration. And we’re to delight in God. And God says if we do that he gives us tremendous blessings of victory in the context of the day.

When we do these kind of things—we put aside the work, put aside buying and selling, put aside isolation—we enter into community, we enter into works of mercy, we enter into a day off, a whole day off where we celebrate the presence of God—he says that then you shall delight in me. And I’ll cause you to ride upon the high places of the earth.

“If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, stop trampling it. If you don’t do your pleasure in my holy day, and you call the Sabbath a delight in your attitude, the holy of the Lord honorable, and honor him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, what happens then? You shall delight yourself in the Lord. Your celebration is increased.

“Your celebration is increased by a proper understanding of God’s word and entering into that celebratory day. And I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father. The mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

So you’re moved from the pharisaical fast—which was really oppression—to the day of complete rest, no purchasing, no making other people work, no criticisms, pointing of fingers, no idle talk, chatter chatter without a relationship to the Lord and his kingdom. And God said, “As you do that I move you from that fast to feast. I’ll feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father.”

So knowledge is a problem, and hopefully that has cleared up at least as a beginning effort some of the knowledge problems with observance of the Lord’s Day. And the other problem we can have is a failure to prepare correctly. And so I want to talk just a little bit about preparation.

How should we prepare for celebration? You know, you’re going to have a party at your house and you invite people over and they show up and you say, “Well, what should we do now?” You haven’t prepared correctly. So, one other reason why we don’t enter into the celebratory nature of the day is perhaps our preparations aren’t correct.

And very quickly, we want to prepare for—I’ve laid it out here—for three things: for the King’s presence.

First of all, when we get ready to enter into the Lord’s Day and specifically the worship services of the church, we want to recognize that we are coming into the context of the presence of the one who made us, who redeemed us, and who is our covenant God and who is our King.

Now, Psalm 95, if we wanted to take the time, gives us these three descriptions of God. He’s our Creator. He’s our King. And he is the one who brings us into covenant. He’s our Redeemer. So, he’s a Redeemer, he’s a King, and he’s a Creator. And when we come to worship God, the triune God of scriptures on the Lord’s Day, we’re coming before our Creator, the one who made you. And secondly, we’re coming before the King of all kings. And we’re coming before the God who has redeemed us and brought us into covenant through the work of the Savior.

And our attitudes and actions should reflect an understanding of who it is that we come to. We prepare by properly considering who it is that we’re getting together with today. I love getting together with you all. I really do. Lord’s Day comes, I’m done with my Sunday school talk and people are coming in and I want to say hello to everybody. I rejoice in seeing you. It’s a great thing to get together with each of you. But that’s not the focal point of the day.

Ultimately, we’re getting together with Jesus. We’re getting together with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We’re going into the throne room where the King—