Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: The Lord’s Day and Exile
## Reformation Covenant Church | Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Well, we return to that encampment by the river Chebar in Babylon. We return to exilic life that this psalm just described for us and one of its implications. And I wanted to read, I’m going to be returning basically to last week’s message, but I wanted to read by way of introduction, I guess, Isaiah 42:5-8 and Isaiah 51:4-5. Please forgive my misspelling of Isaiah in the Lord’s Day bulletin. For some reason, my word processor doesn’t actually check the spelling on the headlines, but I should have done it.

Anyway, please stand for the reading of God’s word as we consider what it means to be light in the day of the Lord. First, Isaiah 42:5-8: “Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the Lord. I have called you in righteousness. I will take you by the hand and keep you. I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord, that is my name. My glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.”

And then Isaiah 51:1-5: “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you. For he was but one when I called him that I might bless him and multiply him. For the Lord comforts Zion. He comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her. Thanksgiving and the voice of song. Give attention to me, my people, and give ear to me, my nation, for a law will go out from me. And I will set my justice for a light to the peoples. My righteousness draws near. My salvation has gone out. My arms will judge the peoples. The coastlands hope for me and for my arm they wait.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you that you are indeed a light to the nations and your people are to be as well. Thank you for the admonitions of our Savior to not put our light under a bushel basket, but rather have it shine out. Help us today to think about your light. The first day of the week, the day of the creation of light in terms of the sequence of days and also the day in which you who are the light of the world come to be with us in a particular way that is unlike other days of the week. Help us, Father, to see from your light shining forth upon us salvation and victory that we then take as lightbearers into this world. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. I think on this picture on the front of your orders of worship, you can see maybe harps hanging there. Psalm 137 depicted for us. Remember that Psalm 137 is followed by 138 and 139. The promise is that God has exalted his word above the place where his name stood in Jerusalem. So we take God’s word with us away from Jerusalem. And God also is with us wherever we go. Psalm 139. And so this is the answer to that lament: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

But it is sadness. Exile is a time not at first in the sequence of rejoicing, but it is the place where rejoicing is found even in the midst of what appears at first to us to be great sadness. I want today to close the deal. You know, you got salesmen that open deals up and sometimes you have different salesmen who come in and close. I want to close the deal today on the Lord’s day and what it means to us. I wasn’t sure I was going to be returning to this, but there were so many discussions and comments, most of it very favorable, but people asked if I could return to this subject today. And so I’m going to do that.

And so this is why the verses are at the front of the sermon, the ones we just read from Isaiah. God intends to shine a light that draws nations to it. The mountain of the Lord will bring people up to it. That light comes to us, particularly on the Lord’s day. God is light. In him is no darkness. And we become—we are like Moses. We leave the mountain with our faces shining, so to speak. We become matured and glorified in our lightbearing capacity through observing the Lord’s day in its totality. I want to close the deal on that.

And to accomplish that, I want to remind us of our obligations when we hear sermons. In Acts 17:11, we know this verse about the noble Bereans. The Bereans were more fair-minded or noble than those in Thessalonica. We remember that these noble Bereans searched the scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. But the first part of the verse is that they were more noble in that they received the word with all readiness and searched the scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.

So there’s two sides of this. If the Bereans are given to us as an example of how to receive the preached word from God’s messenger, they are an example in two ways. The first is to receive the word with readiness and gladness. So you should want to hear the word today even if that word challenges you in some portion of your life. So I guess in a sense you’re to give the preacher of the word the benefit of the doubt. But, you know, there are errors on that side. We don’t want to go all the way to that side because then we’re not noble if we don’t search the scriptures out in the context of the week to make sure the things that were preached are right.

So those are the two obligations. And if we get one without the other, we’re going to fall into a ditch. We’re going to fall into difficulty and trouble. So I’m asking you to hear today what the word of God has to say about these matters—the importance, I think, of the Lord’s day in living in exile. But I’m also not telling you just believe what I say. Search the scriptures. We’ll turn to some of those scriptures today as we attempt to kind of close the deal, so to speak, on the Lord’s day and answer some of that stuff.

Now, you know, we have an opportunity to search the scriptures right away here after the worship service and people can bring questions and ask questions of me. Brad brought a question last week. I used the example in Jeremiah 29: we are told that living in exile involves ordinary life and it includes having children, increasing and not diminishing. And this brings back the language from Genesis 1. And I said that this is really a joyful thing. There are blessings. There are pastures in the habitations of dragons. Another verse in Isaiah. There’s pleasantness. There’s joy to be found even in the midst of the very sad truth that exile in Babylon was, particularly at the beginning, as we just read about and tried to say in Psalm 137.

And I used another verse, Jeremiah 31:19, that says: “Out of them shall proceed thanksgiving, and the voice of those who make merry, I will multiply them, and they shall not diminish. I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small.” And Brad pointed out quite correctly, as a noble Berean, that the text, the verse right before it says this: “Thus says the Lord, behold, I will bring back the captivity of Jacob’s tents. Have mercy on his dwelling places. The city shall be built upon its own mound, and the palace shall remain according to its own plan.”

So the point is the mirth that’s described in the text that I read last week is mirth really of return from exiles when they get back into the land. It’s the restoration. And so in the prophets, you know, you have this message of pending death but resurrection will occur and the full joy is found in that resurrection. So that’s absolutely true.

The primary reason I used that verse though was to look at the idea of multiplying and not being diminished as connected up with joy. So even though it’s joy out of captivity brought back into the land, it’s immediately linked to some of the same activities that go on in captivity in the exile—that is, having kids and going about ordinary Christian life. But you know, I probably should have used just the Genesis text so I didn’t confuse things by referring to a post-exilic reality. But still, the idea is joy is linked to increasing and not diminishing.

And the exiles are explicitly told by Jeremiah that, you know, first things first: just live normal, faithful lives to Christ or to Yahweh. And in the context of that, he will give you the same blessings that he promised you in Genesis and the blessings that are joy. There are blessings and resultant joy to be found even in exile through the multiplication of the people of God.

This week on the front page, I’ve given you another timeline, the same one. I just took out some extraneous materials. And again, the only point here is that as we look at life in exile, we should get to know the history a little bit of what we’re talking about. So I’ll provide some resources like this. I won’t go over them in any detail. This is a sermon, not a Sunday school class. But it is important to understand what’s going on here in light of the text we just read in Isaiah about lightbearing.

You know, again, the prophets are not primarily social reformers. They’re not primarily trying to fix Israel and fix Judah. They’re telling Israel and Judah that it’s over. You are going to go into captivity. You may postpone it for a while as God did in response to Hezekiah’s prayer in the temple, but it’s coming. It’s coming. Death is coming. And then the other part of the prophets of the Old Testament is this declaration that there’ll be resurrection life after that death.

So I’ve given you a timeline that kind of references this stuff. The death of Israel in 721 with the fall of Samaria. And you see there on the timeline that Jeremiah begins to prophesy, you know, almost a hundred years afterwards. There’s a big lapse between the death of the northern tribes and the coming of the death to the southern tribes. And so Jeremiah is not talking about the death to Israel. He’s talking about death to Judah. Now he references Israel. There are lessons to be learned in what happened. But this is much later in time.

And then Jeremiah is an old man when Daniel and Ezekiel are young men. They’re born in 623. Jeremiah is already prophesying. And Daniel and Ezekiel, of course, will go into captivity. Zephaniah also prophesies. So it’s a way to kind of put some of these books of the Bible in context. In 608 the great king Josiah, whose model we’ve taken, recovers the law and reconstructs things. He dies. Habakkuk prophesies. Babylon is rising as a world power. Remember, it’s Assyria that takes away the northern tribes. Babylon takes the southern.

And then chapter 1 of Daniel probably occurs in 605. Daniel is taken to Babylon. There were three different deportations of people from Judah. There was the final sack of the city that we read about and think about—the fall of Jerusalem and the death of Judah. But at first God had brought Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians as rulers and he wanted his people to submit to that but they rebelled and so the whole city is torn apart. But Daniel is in one of those deportations and then later in 597—8 years later—10,000 Jews are captured and taken to Babylon and this time Ezekiel and others among that group go.

In 593 we mentioned this rebellion that goes on, which then creates Nebuchadnezzar looking at home—they rebel against him, he comes and crushes them by killing them. The death of Judah happens in 587-586 in that timeframe and then the resurrection begins to be talked about by Cyrus’s decree in 537.

Now, you know, when God says that light is coming, that God will show his light to the world, a big part of that is this third wave of the prophetic message. The fact that they are resurrected and, you know, like Jackson Browne, I thought that it would kill me, but I’m alive. When God brings his people back to life and brings them back into the land, this is frequently compared in the scriptures to what the light is.

So Israel—and this is kind of linked to the Jeremiah text—Israel doesn’t have to go out and be really great lightbearers in the sense of doing big marvelous things. Israel’s existence as a people continuing in exile and then culminating in the return to the land, that is light to the nations. And so as we live faithful lives as Christians doing the simple things, we bring light to the world. Our very existence is what the prophets say is what this light is all about.

So our existence, living faithfully in the sight and hopefully in the sight of those that watch around us—your life itself is what brings light. We live in a culture that at various times and in various places increasingly despairs of meaning, rationale, hope. They’ve lost hope. And if you have, as a Christian, just live a simple life of having a home, having jobs, having children faithfully—not just doing those things, but doing them faithfully to Christ—you’re living a life of hope in the midst of a dark world. And that is lightbearing.

So the simple fact that the resurrection, the life of Israel restored from captivity and even in captivity, is what lightbearing is, at least in the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. This is really the main deal. So you know, this should be good news to us that the common life has such significance from it.

Now then, on the outline we’ve covered some of this. We covered most of this last week. The first half: exile is from the Lord. Remember the sovereignty of God—that’s the beginning place of this. God tells him: Nebuchadnezzar took you but I took you. I sent you into captivity. Even though he says at first Nebuchadnezzar is the one that did it, God is sovereign.

Secondly, ordinary life is what exile is all about. Obeying in the simple things: building and planting. And to do that, to live in the context of a culture like America or Babylon, it means you have to avoid perfectionism and titanism. And we talked last week about that. You know, you don’t become so cloistered off and so particular and scrupulous about all kinds of things that you can’t do what the simple thing you’re commanded to do, which is to have homes and to have vocation and to have families. So it helps us to avoid those things.

And as I said, we’re to believe that blessing is present in exile. It’s not just the time of sadness. Psalm 137 is answered by 138 and 139. It’s so important we remember not to take it out of its context and say at the end of the day all Babylonian exile is about is weeping. No, it leads to joy. It leads to the blessings of childbearing, et cetera.

Serving the city. It’s not enough just to do ordinary stuff. The end result of that is to be serving the city in which God has placed us. And there are aspects of this. First, you’re supposed to work for the city’s peace. So here we don’t want to be waylaid by temptations of retreatism. I mean, even if the idea of having simple lives isn’t enough to urge you to have contact with Babylon, now he says explicitly that you’re to pray and work for the people in which you exist. So we’re to pray and work for the peace of America. And peace only comes through, ultimately, through submission to Yahweh and to Jesus Christ. We’re supposed to do that.

We’re not just supposed to pray alone. We’re supposed to work. We’re supposed to engage—some of us more than others, everybody minimally—in political action. We’re to engage in the sort of conversations that, you know, test and promote worldviews and how we see things. You know, we’re supposed to do these things. We’re supposed to work for the peace of the city. We’re supposed to be involved in community development projects. Supposed to do various things like that. Okay.

So we’re supposed to work, but it’s not enough to work without prayer either. This is the two sides of the thing. It’s the same with the simple life. The simple life—living faithfully, working for the city, praying that the Lord God would bring peace to the city through conversion. And Paul picks up this message of prayer and working in 1 Timothy 2 and he says the primary job of the church is first to pray and to work for the peace because in their peace you’ll have peace. Same message, New Testament and Old Testament.

So the simple life does involve some degree—you know, mostly it’s about having kids and families and working in vocation and all that stuff. But there are points that will be more or less for people, whoever they are, involved in direct action in terms of the city, whether it’s political, whether it’s service in the community, whether it’s RCC or Kings Academy taking a park and cleaning it up, right? Serving the city that way. We do some work. We pray that God—when we do it explicitly faithfully for Christ—we let people know that’s why we’re doing it.

You know, so often Christians want to serve but not really have the lightbearing of that—”this is the Lord’s work.” Love Inc., right? Love is the work helping people who are destitute and Inc. is in the name of Christ. So work for the people in the name of Jesus. Work and pray. Do the ordinary things of life but do them faithfully to God. And that’s the way. That’s what life in exile is all about and that’s what will produce the conversion of Nebuchadnezzar. The simple things have tremendous implications.

So working and praying, having a goal of conversion—we talked about that last week and people asked about this. There’s a question that came up. I’ve got no year of exclusion in this war. Well, does that mean the year of exclusion is totally gone? No, I don’t think so.

In the Old Testament, when you first got married, the man was supposed to spend the first year cheering up the wife, causing her to delight in the marriage. And that year was kind of cementing the family at the beginning of the relationship. And that didn’t mean he didn’t work. He had his normal vocation. But what it says is he didn’t take up any extra business.

So here at RCC, we practically put that into place. When people get married, you know, Daniel’s not going to do the Reformation Party this year. His brother’s taking over McCoughlin for a year. He’s supposed to build up his family, make his wife rejoice in the relationship. And so there’s that year of exclusion. I’m not saying that’s gone. But my point was that even in that first year for people that are newly married, they’re actually doing things that will accomplish the results of the broader—what we might say warfare of political action or serving people, whatever it is—to bring conversion.

The simple establishment of the home has tremendous implications. The text tells us in Jeremiah 29 to bring about that conversion. You see, so what I meant was that even though you know the dads or husbands are not supposed to take on extra stuff from their work, but rather to really focus on building up the home, that doesn’t mean isolation. It means having people over, building the base of the home that way, too. But when they do that, that is engaging in the activity of simple life that Jeremiah says is the very thing we’re supposed to do in exile that will bring change and conversion to the nations.

This is something else I should say. There are a couple of reasons why God’s people go into exile in the Old Testament. One is sin. We’ll talk about that at the end of the sermon today. And specifically in 2 Chronicles, it says specifically the sin that created the need for God to punish his people and take them out of the land was Sabbath breaking. Jeremiah says the same thing.

But in any event, the point is, yeah, there’s a judgment aspect to exile, but at the same time, God leaves the worst of the people, the bad things, in Jerusalem to be destroyed and he takes the best of them out like Daniel, Ezekiel, et cetera. And that’s why they’re there. And they’re there not just to weigh out God’s judgment upon Israel. They’re there to be the light to the nations that God always intended Israel to be, and it was not anymore.

When we read the prophets talking about Israel’s sins against the poor in their nation and against widows and orphans, and then we read about pagan kings not being merciful to rulers they conquer, you see, there’s a relationship. The pagans are still responsible, but Israel is supposed to be a light to the nations, showing mercy and beneficence to those, you know, who have problems. Israel had failed to do that. So yes, she’s being punished, but she’s also become a light now in the context of the whole empire.

God has raised up this empire, and God’s going to bring it to conversion through the insertion of his people. They’re like that—I don’t know, in some old computer games there was a poison pill and if you ate it then you would transform the person. Well, see, Nebuchadnezzar has eaten Daniel and his friends and the end result will be the transformation of Nebuchadnezzar and he represents the empire.

So they’re there for judgment but they’re also there to be lightbearers and the lightbearing capacity focused on in Jeremiah 29 is mostly the simple things of life. And so, you know, when Daniel sets up his home and he gets his wife to rejoice and he creates a good family and he has people over in that first year, he is absolutely still involved in what we could refer to as spiritual warfare affecting the conversion of the nations.

Ordinary life means putting God first. I didn’t get to this much, but this is so important. You know, we in America—we’re good humanists here. We put men first. But just listen to a few verses here. Isaiah 48:11. These are, you know, prophets again and, you know, exilic prophets, post-exilic prophets. Isaiah prophesies about the destruction of the north, but also of God’s judgment on the south and then about restoration. He kind of covers it all.

But in Isaiah 48:11: “For my own sake, God says, for my own sake, I will do this thing. For how should my name be profaned? I will not give my glory to another.” So why is all of this happening? It’s not ultimately for the well-being of his people. It’s for the sake of his own name. Now, that involves the well-being and blessing of his people. But never forget that the triune God says this is for his sake primarily. It sets the proper priorities up in this simple living. It’s not just work. It’s got to be prayer. It’s not just living. It’s got to be faithful—faithful to say that God gets the glory for this. And ultimately, what we’re doing is for the sake of his own name.

Isaiah 43:7: “Everyone who is called by my name, whom I have created for my glory, I have formed him. Yes, I have made him.” God has made us for his own glory. Why did God make you? In all things? For his own glory. Some of our little kids say it that way: for his own glory. That’s the Westminster Little Children’s Catechism. One of the first things they learn—some little kids in this church—is for his own glory. And that’s what this verse Isaiah says.

That’s very important. It’s not ultimately for our, you know, what seems good to us. Ultimately, we’re here to serve God and for his glory. Now, part of that is praising him. In Isaiah 43:21, we read: “The people I have formed for myself, they shall declare my praise.” Okay? So for his own glory. How does it work? Well, he’s formed us for himself, for his purposes. Okay? And we’re made for his purpose and were made explicitly to give him praise or to sing forth his praises. Isaiah 42:10 talks about this: “Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the ends of the earth.”

So, you know, you’re out there in exile. Sing forth his praises. Don’t be downcast. Yeah, it’s tough. Loss is real. It was a horrible experience to go through. You’re not in the special place of God’s dwelling. But look, I’ve taken you into all the world. I put you in exile for my sake, for my glory to focus on me what I’ve made you, he said, and to specifically to sing forth my praises in all the earth. You see, that’s lightbearing for Yahweh.

Verse 11: “Let the wilderness and its cities lift up their voices, the villages that Kedar inhabitants. Let the inhabitants of Sela sing. Let them shout forth from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory to the Lord. Give glory to the Lord.” We got into this exile through, I would say, some of the same things that Judah did—for sin, for not giving glory to God, for going about religious activities, but not focusing on his glory, not remembering we’re a people for his praise.

You know, Judah became selfish-oriented. And as a result, she didn’t pay attention very well. I mentioned this last week, but in Jeremiah 29, he gives several reasons why these horrible things happened. And the first one he gives is in verse 16: “They did not pay attention to my words, declares the Lord, that I persistently sent to you by my servants, the prophets, but you would not listen, declares the Lord. And then he says, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, all you exiles who have sent away from Jerusalem to Babylon.’”

We fall into exile because we’re inattentive to God’s word. We don’t hear and obey. We don’t listen carefully. I’m asking you to listen carefully today. I’m asking you every Lord’s day to listen carefully to the preaching of God’s word. Read your scriptures carefully. You see, be attentive to the voice of God. Hear my word, all you exiles. We’re here because we weren’t careful. God says, “Now, I want you to be careful. Real careful.” And specifically from last week’s sermon, ordinary life starts here and now, on the Lord’s day. It starts here and now on the Lord’s day.

We have, you know, in terms of the culture in which God has placed us, we’ve got a temptation around us that is increasing week by week, month by month, year by year to not properly prioritize praising God, setting the day apart. The Lord’s day apart is for consideration of him, not focusing particularly on him, making sure that his glory is our primary purpose. We’re sucked away from that by our culture more and more.

Now, we mentioned several things last week. Let’s throw in a few more. Sports leagues—increasingly sports leagues, which used to never meet on Sunday, now are having Sunday afternoon games, and people in the context of the hearing of this sermon, they start to do that stuff. What’s the big deal? It’s really recreational. We said recreation’s okay, but if you’ve been to a sports league, you know, it’s not just recreation. Those kids are competing hard, okay? And it distracts from having a primacy of focusing on the Lord Jesus Christ. When things distract from the day being the Lord’s day, the day of the Lord, his day, then they’re distracting us from beginning our witness bearing and the blessings of God upon us for it in terms of what we do here.

There’s a—and now I don’t get this wrong. Now, Hitler actually planned Hitler Youth meetings the same time as the Catholic Church had its youth meetings. He was rather explicit about it. He figured it out. We got to get those kids away from there. Let’s make them part of our youth meetings. And I’m not saying that’s what’s going on in America, but there is a new religion that’s developing and has developed of pluralism, secularism, I’m okay, you’re okay, all multi-faith sort of stuff and sort of a consciousness of, you know, the community being very important but not necessarily Christian.

There’s a new religion at play in the context of our world. And it is interesting how it increasingly focuses on Sunday activities. We mentioned this with the park event. Now, the park event in North Portland was an opportunity for churches to be engaged and bear light. But probably most of them didn’t take advantage of it. So we don’t want to retreat, but we don’t want to be like another church did in North Portland and said, “Well, today if you don’t go to worship someplace, you can just go to the park event instead.” See, that’s not good.

More and more events like this will happen on the Lord’s day and it will start to become less and less defined as the Lord’s Day. I don’t know what this group is. I don’t know any songs from them, but there’s a group called, I guess, Taking Back Sunday. And now maybe they mean it from a pagan perspective, taking Sunday back from the Christians. Or maybe they’re Christians and mean we should take back Sunday from the pagan culture. I don’t know. But it’s a good phrase. But what I’m trying to encourage us—the deal I’m trying to close today—is we should be explicitly trying to take back Sunday that has drifted off its moorings in our lifetime. It’s drifted off its moorings.

If this is kind of the place where we especially come to focus on God this whole day, then it’s got to look different. It’s got to look focused on the Lord Jesus Christ. I hear on the news all the time stuff that’s going on Sunday. What was it the other day? Oh, tryouts today, I think, for some movie or something from 11 to 5 on Sunday in Portland. More and more events are happening on Sunday. The day isn’t distinguished and in fact it can be distinguished as sort of a community day where they sort of pick up the fruits of Christianity without having the roots of dedication to Yahweh.

So it’s going to happen more and more. I think the PRC has scheduled a golf tournament fundraiser for the Lord’s day, for instance. People don’t—and if we don’t, if we have an understanding that this is not what we’re supposed to be doing with the day, we need to, you know, make that light shine. We can’t blame the evil, wicked Christians out there who aren’t keeping the Lord’s day if we haven’t talked about it a little bit and tried to live lives of hope and delight and blessing on the Lord’s day in response to what’s going on.

Turn to Nehemiah 13. I’ve made this point several times, but I want to make it again. The prohibition against transaction of business is not just some minor thing that we read in Nehemiah 10 where they covenanted not to engage in commercial transactions. The book of Nehemiah concludes with chapter 13 and this is the chapter, as you sort of scan down the page, you’ll see that several times in this page that he asked God to remember him for his work. Verse 14: “Remember me, oh my God, concerning this.” And then if you scan down the page again in Nehemiah 13, it occurs again in verse 22: “Remember me, oh my God, concerning this also.” And then towards the end of the page, towards the end of the chapter, he says: “Remember me, oh my God.”

So he’s got the chapter divided up into these important reforms of Nehemiah. And what happens is he’s gone away. They set up the reforms. He’s gone away. He’s been called back away to Persia, Artaxerxes’ court and stuff to do stuff. Now he comes back and three conditions are what he takes care of. The first is the temple province and the bad guys are living in the temple. The storehouse has been empty. The Levites aren’t getting the tithe anymore. And he restores what we would say is Lord’s Day worship through Levites and through the proper use of the temple to be a storehouse for God’s purposes. And that’s his first “remember me”—is for his restoration of the Levitical order in temple worship.

And the second thing he does—well, the last thing he says, nearly the last big element that he discusses in 13, is the restoration of Christian marriage. He says that he comes back and he finds that some people have married their kids off to people of the land and they speak with two different tongues. Well, it doesn’t just mean they have two different languages. They don’t know much Hebrew anymore or they know the language of the people that were there in the context of the land. It’s not just they don’t know Hebrew. It means their confession, their lip, what they’re thinking is being mediated or watered down by marriage outside of Yahweh—followers of Yahweh followers of Yahweh.

They’re marrying and getting in marriage sons and daughters to people who weren’t Christians. We would say that as a result the witness of those children has become ameliorated. It doesn’t go completely away but it starts to wane and he corrects this and says no you’ve got to marry in the context of the faith. Remember me God for this.

So we would say yeah, worship establishment of homes and families—these are great. And in the middle of those, the second set of reforms that he says “remember me” for—the middle one—is the Lord’s day itself. And this is the extended description of how they’re not supposed to carry burdens and they’re not supposed to sell and vendors are coming. And he says, “You can’t do this anymore.” And he sets the Levites to guard the city. No more commerce on the Lord’s day. And then the vendors are waiting outside the door. And the people inside Jerusalem are thinking about commerce. And he says, “Get out of here or I’m going to lay hands on you. I’m going to grab you and beat you if you continue this stuff.”

And it’s evident, if we look carefully at the text, that these are Jewish vendors as well as non-Jewish vendors that are buying and selling. So Nehemiah says that the consecration of the whole day—separate not just the worship of the temple but the whole Lord’s day, this whole Sabbath day—and it is called the Lord’s day in the Old Testament too. That day, the consecration of it, all the prohibition of buying and selling on it, is one of his central reforms. It’s in the same list of these three reforms where he restores worship properly, he establishes homes, Christian homes and Christian marriages, and in the middle he reestablishes Lord’s day. You see, it’s that kind of significance.

We don’t know our Bibles. Now, there’s some verse in Nehemiah about buying and selling. Well, it’s a small thing. Who knows if it’s really important to us or not? But in terms of the book of Nehemiah, it’s the capstone of the book. It’s the payoff. It’s the closer of Nehemiah’s argument. This is what’s needed for reconstruction in the context of a culture or a land. Exceedingly important.

So people have asked me, “What can we do on the Lord’s day? We can’t go to the mall, can’t buy and sell, can’t go to the gas station, can’t do this, can’t do that, can’t sleep in. What can we do?” Well, the answer is almost everything, you know. Let’s look a little bit now at—well, first of all, I want to sweep away some distractions on your outline. I’ve got some verses there, right?

I have been sadly disappointed in several conversations about this subject over the last few years with covenant kids who have been raised in the context of—I’m not trying to make anybody feel bad. Don’t try to figure out who it is. But I’m saying that the covenant kids at RCC, one of the things they tell me when I start talking about this is, “Can you show me from the New Testament that the Lord’s day is important?” Now, I can do that. But what if I couldn’t? This church, one of the central building blocks of what we came to believe was we should rip out the page that says New Testament in our Bibles. We used to talk about it jokingly. James B. Jordan talks about we ought to do it literally so our kids don’t pick up those Bibles somehow and think there’s this horrible discontinuity between the New and the Old.

We knew that God didn’t have to repeat everything he said in the New Testament. The New Testament must be understood on the basis of the Old Testament. There’s essential continuity in God’s revelation. It changes. It modifies. With Christ, the new creation has come into being and all that. Yeah, there’s discontinuity. But God doesn’t have to repeat commandments in the New Testament that he’s given us from the Old, particularly if they’re not tied to the Levitical system and the Sabbath isn’t. It’s a creation ordinance.

So this whole hermeneutic, you know, I hope we’re teaching our children: look, we have a whole Bible. We’re not New Testament Christians. I’m not a New Testament Christian. When people say that, they mean cut off from the Old Testament. There was an actual conspiracy in German theology to take away law and grace, to talk about them separately. The Old Testament is law, the New Testament is grace. They did it explicitly so the civil state wouldn’t be bothered by all those verses about law in the Old Testament about the king. Now, that was explicit. It’s not so explicit today in our culture.

But don’t let this law/grace thing, Old Testament/New Testament, God of wrath/God of love—don’t let that get into your heart, boys and girls, young men and young women. Don’t ask me to prove it from the New Testament. The New Testament has to transform things, right? The word of God—everything changes in it, transformed by the coming of Christ. That’s a good question to ask. How does this transform as we come into the new creation? But don’t say that I’ve got to have a New Testament verse.

But let’s deal with a few New Testament verses. Romans 14:5-6: “One person esteems one day above another, another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind.” So people say, “Well, see, you think the Lord’s day is more important, but I think Monday’s more important.” Well, why do you think that? This is talking about the day of the Lord? This is talking about man’s days. This is talking about the 4th of July, Mother’s Day. This is talking about, you know, secular observances, Martin Luther King Day, President’s Day. One man esteems one day, another one a different day. But God has declared blessing upon a day. So this is not talking at all about the Lord’s day. This is talking about men in their cultures, in their situations, what they want to do. Okay? So that’s not a verse that’s got anything to do with the Lord’s day.

If it was just that Dennis said the Lord’s day was important, well, sure, then the verse applies. But if God says the Lord’s day is important, then it doesn’t apply. Another verse, Galatians 4:9-11: “Now, after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements to which you desire again to be in bondage? For you observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you lest I labor for you in vain.” Okay. So it’s legalism the Lord’s day because Paul says we’re set free from Sabbath. Well, does he? No. What does he say?

You observe days, months, seasons, and years. And he’s talking about the beggarly elements. He’s talking about the Old Testament now. Now, he is talking about God’s law. He’s talking about the entire calendar system of the Old Testament. And he’s saying that was not part of what you’re supposed to do.

Now, said Old Testament—I shouldn’t do that. For a long time, what you’ve got is Sabbath begun as a creation ordinance. God rests on the seventh day. Man rests as a sequence of days—the seventh day. Abel and Cain bring forth their offerings. It’s set up one day in seven. Then we get into the promised land and everything changes. You got simple officers in the Old Testament, simple tithe, but in the context of the land, the tithe is described in three dimensions. Officers become multiple. And the sacraments, food and drink ordinances, become multiple in the New Testament—in the Old Testament Levitical system. And the observance of the one day out of seven becomes a whole system, a calendar to tell us again what it refers to in its broadest sense, to inform us. That’s what he’s talking about.

In Hosea 2:11, listen, attend carefully. God says, “I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, her Sabbaths, all her appointed feasts.” Same set of days: feast days—those were annual feast days. New moons—monthly celebrations. Sabbaths—weekly celebrations, but a number of them, but they were doubled up in some cases, et cetera. And the Old Testament, or the Levitical calendar system. These are all her appointed feasts.

So we start simple—one day in seven. We get complex for good reasons in the Levitical system. And when Jesus comes, it gets simple again—one day in seven. Paul isn’t saying that the one day in seven is done away with. He’s saying the whole calendar system of Leviticus is done away with. You know, food laws, all the different ceremonial washings, the food and drink ordinances, all those boil down in the New Testament to the Supper and all those calendar systems boil down in the New Testament to the day of the Lord. It’s when Jesus appears to John in Revelation—the Lord’s day.

So that is not a verse that disputes or would be can be used properly to say the Sabbath is gotten rid of. In other words, so there’s there’s one other verse—another, the other, the third verse is what is it? Colossians, but I don’t seem to have it here in front of me. I have the reference on your handouts. I won’t turn to it now, but if you look at the Colossian text, it’s the same thing. It has to do with the calendar system of days during the week, monthly festivals, new moons, and feast days, which are annual festivals.

So it’s the whole calendar system of the Old Testament that those two texts in Colossians and Galatians say is now done away with. Don’t go back to those things. It’s like being circumcised. It’s like keeping, you know, the day of atonement yearly. It’s like any of that stuff. No, don’t do that. So none of those verses can be used.

God has said from the beginning of the Bible that there’s one day in seven that’s to be observed and nothing has changed in the New Testament. So I don’t need a New Testament verse to support the assertion there. This is what it is. But I got one anyway. Hebrews 4:9 says, “There remains therefore a rest”—King James version—for the people of God. ESV, the New English Standard Version, trying to be much more accurate with the Greek: “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” Sabatismos. This is the only place in the New Testament it’s used. And what it means is a Sabbath observance. Sabatismos. That’s what Sabbath comes from—this, you know, transliteration of the Greek word. So Hebrews 4:9 explicitly says that Sabbathkeeping is what we’re about.

Now, it’s pointing to the consummation, right, of all things. There’s an eternal Sabbath rest. But because we’re not there yet, there remains therefore also a weekly Sabbathkeeping for us. So there is a New Testament verse. Don’t need it. Don’t have to have it, but it’s there.

So clearing away those things. And here’s the second issue: observance changes through history. And I’ve got actually printed for you on your handouts the text of the fourth commandment from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Now if you look at Deuteronomy 5, don’t do it now, but there’s a list of the ten commandments and most of them are identical to Exodus 20. Identical—few changes, but one of the changes is the fourth commandment.

Okay, Exodus 20: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor” and he gives as the reason for it the creation of the world and six days. So that’s Exodus 20. But if you look at the Deuteronomy 5 text, it doesn’t say “Remember the Sabbath day.” It says “Observe the Sabbath day.” Now, he doesn’t want you remembering something from the past. He wants you doing something in the present. So there’s a change of emphasis from Exodus 20 to Deuteronomy 5.

Six days. And he says, “Because the Lord your God commanded you.” He’s referring back to Exodus 20, but bringing it into a new context when they’re going to enter the promised land. Now things change and he says “Six days you shall work and do all your work. Seventh day is the Sabbath the Lord your God. You shall do no work you and your son.” And now it says explicitly—and this was implied before—but he says explicitly here in verse 14 that “your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.”

Now that was implicit in Exodus 20, but now it’s become explicit. You’re going to have a whole land. You’re going to exercise dominion and you want to give people rest by not having to work on Sunday. This is why Sabbathkeeping was so popular in America originally because people were working seven days a week and the church says you get a day off. People said hallelujah, amen, let’s be Christians. Okay, that’s what it was.

Now we got a forty-hour work week. We got two days off. You put it all together, we got all kinds of days off, vacation, holidays, et cetera. And now it’s like, well, why do we got to do anything different about the Lord’s day? But this was the point, right? To give rest to your servants. That changes here. And then the third thing that changes is that you’re to remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out of from there with a mighty hand by an outstretched arm. What you’re memorializing now, he says, as you’re going into the promised land is the Exodus.

What you were memorializing before was creation. And the emphasis was rest as God rested on the seventh day. But now in Deuteronomy 5, the emphasis is on memorializing through ritual action the deliverance from Egypt, Passover, et cetera, the, you know, the sacrificial system all that’s a memorialization of deliverance from Egypt and the transformation they become a heavenly people. So as they go into the promised land, the observance of the fourth commandment, fourth commandment’s in place forever, but its observance changes through time and it’s changed now.

Do we memorialize the Exodus at this meal? No. Is this what we remember as the creation? Not primarily. It’s a creation ordinance. It’s a redemptive ordinance. We remember that. But it’s also we point to the consummation, the marriage supper of the lamb in heaven. We point toward that here. So in the New Testament, the observance of the day changes. There’s no doubt about it. And it’s a good question to ask how it’s changed. And one way it’s changed is a deemphasis on rest and a re-emphasis on ritual action in terms of worship.

People ask, well, you know, it doesn’t seem like a day of rest. Well, it’s because it’s not supposed to be. I mean, there’s that element to it. There’s a restful element to it, but it’s not primarily a day of rest anymore. It’s primarily a day of memorializing the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and looking forward to kingdom come. That’s what it is now. Change in emphasis. So worship first, rest becomes secondary.

That’s why you don’t get to sleep in Sunday morning. You got to go to worship. And then recreation and other events come after that. So the day changes and it’s good and proper to think about how it changes. We can have lots of discussions about that. But what we can’t discuss is if we’re supposed to do anything with the Lord’s day that’s different. That seems absolutely locked in. There’s no New Testament evidence against it. In fact, there’s New Testament repeating of it.

That’s closing the deal. I don’t want to get to closing the deal with you in terms of what you can do the rest of the day. A lot of that is your choice. But I do want to close the deal that this is a day set apart from all other days. This is the Lord’s day. Tomorrow is your day. Is it your day exclusively? No, it’s still the Lord’s day. But one day out of seven, he wants us to do something different.

What are we supposed to do? Isaiah 58:13 says there’s two things we do. There’s a putting off and there’s a putting on. That’s Christian sanctification, folks. If you’re going to grow in grace in any activity in your life, you got to deny yourself. You got to put off a dynamic nature and sinful behavior and you got to put on something new. Now, when you put things off, that’s death. That hurts. That’s hard to put away things.

You know what it’s like, men, women—you know, things that are besetting sins, you know, it’s hard to put them off. Well, Sabbath observance, it’s the same thing. It’s key to our sanctification. And God says, “Today, you’re supposed to put some things off.” And I know the emphasis seems to be that I’ve done in this church to my own shame is that we’ve emphasized putting off and not putting on. What do we put off?

Well, among other things, Isaiah 58 tells us this. He begins by the putting off in verse 13: “If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day,” we are to put off doing our pleasure on the Sabbath day. And, “uh-oh, now it’s a hard sell. And now, how is that going to be good? It means it’s a day of dreariness and rest.” No, it is. If you keep reading in Isaiah 58 through the rest of the verse, you find out you put out a great deal more delight and pleasure than you had originally.

But you don’t get to that. You don’t get to calling the delay of delight in for it actually being a delight to you if you don’t put off certain things. So there’s a putting off of our own pleasure. Now, specifically in context, Isaiah 58, they regarded it is pleasurable to oppress one another. That’s what it says in verse 3 of Isaiah 58. So in the immediate context, we’re supposed to put off having fun at other people’s expense, which is a good thing to remind ourselves of on the Lord’s day.

But there are proper pleasures. This same word is used properly for pleasure. Pleasure isn’t bad, but on the Lord’s day, the pleasure is to be focused on God in a particular way. So you put off doing your own pleasure and then you put on an activity called the Sabbath with delight. Verbalize it, name it and claim it, whatever you want to call it. It begins with our speech—the putting on stuff.

The speech reflects the heart. If you call the Lord’s day a day of exclusion from doing anything you want to do, you’ve already erred. You’re supposed to consider it, to put on in your speech to one another, in the little talk you have with yourself in front of the mirror on the Lord’s day. This is a day of delight. I’m going to call it a day of delight. Right? That’s what the sequence says you’re supposed to do. Stop what you normally do on your own pleasure for six days. Put on a verbal attitude and a verbalization of calling the Sabbath a delight. The holy of the Lord, honorable.

You see, you call it a delight. He immediately says, don’t worry about putting away your own pleasure. It’s going to be a delight for you if you do this thing. And then he says, honor it. Not doing your own ways, not seeking your own pleasure, not doing his back or talking idly. It’s okay to talk idly. It’s okay to seek your own pleasure. It’s okay to do your own work. In fact, you have to do that during the week, right? That’s just what you’re supposed to do. But on the Lord’s day, you’re not supposed to do that.

What does that mean? It means that you take your speech and clean it up particularly. You direct it toward encouraging remarks to other people. You direct it in calling the day a delight. You take your normal pleasures and you sanctify them somehow on the Lord’s day. Okay? You treat it differently on the Lord’s day. And it then says that then you shall take delight in the Lord. You’ll take delight in the Lord. The idea is most of the things you do during the week—and there’s a few you can’t do: transaction of business, carrying heavy burdens, a lot of sweat and stuff. Sweat’s a mark of the fall. You don’t want to do that. Most of the stuff you do though, you know, you can do in this way by calling it a delight to the Lord and you will delight yourself in the Lord.

Example: so somebody was telling me the other day they like to kind of clean up their car on Sundays. It’s a fun activity. They enjoy it. They make orderly their car that day. I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. But if you clean your car on Sunday the same way you clean it on Saturday, that’s wrong. When you’re cleaning your car or making your bed or straightening up your house a little bit maybe on Sunday, you don’t want to get into work and labor and you sure don’t want to command your kids to do work. But you know, if it gives you pleasure to order your home that day, do it in a way of explicitly acknowledging the Lord. Okay? It’s different. It’s a different day. You’re supposed to focus directly on the Lord on his day.

This is what I was saying last week about birthday celebrations—should be different than the way we do them during the week. We should be saying, talking, using Jesus speech in our talk on birthdays downstairs or in your homes. You know, bring Jesus explicitly into your speech. Now, you know, people that want to do that all their lives and you know, it’s kind of odd, but on Sunday, you’re supposed to do it. You’re not supposed to talk your normal talk. You’re supposed to talk in a distinctively Christian way.

Now, what this does is it creates not just delight in the day because you’re actually focusing on Jesus and there’s no more delightful thing than what he’s done for you. But the other thing it does is it brings delight into your week because the next time you clean your car during the week, you will have set up a set of associations of making God’s peace, his order in the world. You would have thought about that car as a blessing from God to transport you places. You’d think about it differently.

And if you have a birthday celebration during the week and you already had one on Sunday, you’re going to think about it a little differently. Okay, I think this is just normal Christian sanctification. Sunday, you can do most of the things you do during the week, but you do them differently. You put out a heart attitude of focusing explicitly on Jesus. And the end result of that is that it changes the rest of your week. So the idea is you go from Sabbath to Sabbath, Sabbath to Sabbath, and you’re growing. It’s a spiral up like this. And every time you click over to the Lord’s day, you’re delighting yourself explicitly in God and in Jesus and in the Holy Spirit and the Father and that drives your whole sanctification process up up.

So you can do a lot of things on the Lord’s day. Got your car gassed up? Drive to the beach. But think about it a little differently than you would when you normally drive to the beach. Put on explicitly Christian thoughts. Music. Nothing wrong with listening to music, but you know on the Lord’s day, people, you know, it kind of you sort of put on more music that’s more explicitly got to do with Jesus.

I thought it might be fun having movies here occasionally on Sunday night and show movies that are sort of explicitly teaching us about what the Sabbath is like. Chariots of Fire, Trip to Bountiful, importance of Sabbath observance. We were talking earlier in Sunday school class, we could show a little cartoon, old Disney cartoon where Goofy sings, “Well the world owes me a living,” as an example to our kids about sloth. We’re explicitly taking a hold of the visual medium and using it on that day in a way that’s explicitly Christian.

You see, so I’m not here to tell you can’t do anything. I’m here to say that I hope that I’m going to correct what may have been an improper emphasis on the things you can’t do on the Lord’s day. You can do all kinds of things, but you do them explicitly in a Christian way. John Frame has a yet unpublished book on the Sabbath and I got a couple of chapters of it from a friend and Frame writes this:

“On Independence Day, many Americans take seriously the meaning of the celebration of the founding of the United States. But in doing so, they enjoy barbecues together. They watch fireworks. They play ball games. They go to the beach as well as saluting the flag as it passes by. Celebration of the nation’s founding is the focus. Other activities revolve around that focal point. The Sabbath, I think, is much like that, though at a more intense focus on its object. God is the focus. But there is enjoyment also in the dancing, the feasting, the drinking, the merrymaking and the circle around the focal point. And in that enjoyment, we anticipate the prosperity promised in God’s covenant, the delights awaiting us in the new heavens and in the new earth.”

So I think that’s a good way to think of it. There’s a focal point to this day that must be brought into all of our activities, but most activities fit into the context of what that is all about.

What can you do? What can we do on Sunday? You can have a good time. You’re supposed to. In the book of Nehemiah, Ezra reads the law. The people weep and God says, “Whoa, don’t weep. It’s a day of rejoicing. Your sins are forgiven. The stuff you feel bad about, the disappointments you have. You trust God on the Lord’s day in a particular way. You eat the fat. You drink the sweet. You rejoice together. That’s what the Lord’s day is.”

Go to Eli’s website and search on Marlon Deweiler. I did this last night. Marlon is the owner of Veritas Press, a CRC elder. I’ve been at his home rejoicing with him. He knows how to rejoice. And he’s got a website called abundant—or Abante or something. He spells it funny. But Abundant Living—it’s about how to have really cool rejoicing Sabbaths together with good wine and good food and good people and having a really good time. So go to that website if you’re having a hard time figuring about how to make Sunday a day of delight for you.

You know, I was talking to my son Ben last night. Christmas—I always wish we had a Christmas night service here because you get up Christmas morning and for us that’s when we do all the whole present thing and we think about the coming of Christ and all that, but then in the evening it just sort of tails off, you know, and I never know what to do with my day and somehow the day ends on the downside. And I think with some of us that’s the way the Lord’s day has become. Yeah, I get to go to church. We’re going to put on stuff, but we haven’t quite figured out what to put on in the afternoon or the evening.

Last week, I guess some people went, some people went and had a birthday party focused on Psalm 139—God’s presence with these kids from the time they were conceived. Another group is at a different park singing psalms outside together. Praise God. Good times, delightful times with friends and family with the focal point, the Lord of the Day. It’s the Lord’s day. So you know, that’s the sort of thing we want to do. We want to do all kinds of great fun things, but the focal day is the Lord. That’s this coloring picture again. These kids are having a good time, but they’re doing it in a way that’s sort of different on Sunday. They’re dressed a little different. They’re acting a little more mature than they would normally.

That’s the Lord’s day for us. We act a little more mature. We explicitly put off our own pleasure. We try to think about how our conversation should change, how our delight should change, how our fellowship should change, how our recreational activity should be a little different with a focal point. Now, that’s what the Bible says we’re supposed to do. I pray that the Lord God gives us that because, you know, ultimately it’s very important.

One last point before we conclude here, and I know I’ve gone long, but one last point: what this means is you got to be diligent. You got to make preparations. If you just hang out today and then just all of a sudden at three or four, “What going to do the rest of the day?” Probably not going to work out too good for you. It might, but you know, you got to make some preparations.

In the New Testament, Friday was called the day of preparation. We were talking about this in Sunday school class earlier. The sluggard doesn’t make preparations for anything. We become a culture that is needful every day to go to the store for this or that or gas or whatever it is. We become an improvident, undisciplined people. And if we discipline ourselves to make sure the tank is gassed up, to make sure we got some good wine, good food, whatever it is at home, got candy bars for the kids to really have a great time and to eat the sweet or eat the fat, have good drinks, have a good meal ready or whatever it is—see, that means preparation’s required to do that.

But if we do that, it makes us different people. Now we’re people that thinking about how to prepare for other things. You see, every week we’re reminded to get in a cycle of life that involves thinking about more than what we need for the next two hours. And in this culture, that’s pretty important because in this culture, the next two hours is all you got to think about. There’s something around wherever you want it, around you immediately, in the store, whatever it is.

So proper preparations are required for making this day a real delight. But proper preparations will then cause us to delight in other parts of our lives. And that’s kind of the point. The Lord’s Day is so important because it drives us as a community into the rest of our week. And begins to transform us in small yet over time very discernable ways to be more explicitly Christian in everything that we do—in our pleasure, our work, and our speech the other six days of the week as well.

You know, Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 17, is talking about, you know, why these bad horrible things happened and Jeremiah explicitly tells them that the reason for it was their failure to keep the Sabbath and he says that because they didn’t do this he says “If you will not heed me to hallow the Sabbath day such as not carrying a burden when entering the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath, then I will kindle a fire in its gates and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and it shall not be quenched.”

The fire—2 Chronicles 36 he says he brings the Caldeans against Jerusalem to do just what Jeremiah said it would do. And he says in this he says that they’ve taken away—Nebuchadnezzar takes away all the articles and they burned the house of God. They broke down the walls of Jerusalem. They burned everything in it. And this is said to explicitly to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. Her Sabbaths, as long as she laid desolate, she kept Sabbath to fulfill seventy years. And then along comes Cyrus.

From these two verses, the reason why the negativity of the exile happens is the failure to keep Sabbath with God. So there’s an eschatology to this thing, folks. If we don’t maintain Sabbath, if we don’t build Sabbath, if we don’t teach other churches about the Lord’s day, if we don’t bring up our children honoring this day, you know, we will suffer as a result of it. God will have the Sabbath kept. The seventy years itself of Babylonian exile is explicitly linked to giving the land itself rest for her Sabbath violations by God’s people. There’s an eschatology to Sabbathkeeping.

Isaiah 58 says the eschatology of doing it right is delighting yourself in God, writing on the high places of the earth and eating the wonderful things that God has for us in terms of the created order. In 2 Chronicles and Jeremiah remind us that the negative side of the eschatology of the Sabbath is very real. And when we think of the exile, we should think about those very things. God has given Jesus Christ as a light to the Gentiles. He will make his people to shine forth as light. This is the day when the light of Jesus Christ comes to us in his word and in his presence. And this is the day that should kindle a fire in our hearts, in our homes, in our neighborhoods that results in lightbearing capacity into the week.

What can you do in the Lord’s day? All kinds of neat stuff. Rejoicing by having a focal point of Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.

Father, help us today in the rest of our day today to have this focal point of Jesus. Transform us, Lord God, by your light, make us lightbearers in this week. Thank you for giving us such a wonderful day to delight in Jesus Christ and the life we have with him. Continue to give us, Father, explicit ways, thoughts, imaginations about how to make our Lord’s day more delightful that it will transform the rest of our week as well. We thank you for this day, Father. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.