Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Commanded Joy

Sermon text today is found in Deuteronomy 14:22-29. Our subject is commanded joy. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Deuteronomy 14:22-29.

“You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year. You shall eat before the Lord your God in the place where he chooses to make his name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, of the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always.

“But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the Lord your God chooses to put his name is too far from you, when the Lord your God has blessed you, then you shall exchange it for money. Take the money in your hand and go to the place which the Lord your God chooses, and you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires, for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires.

“You shall eat there before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household. You shall not forsake the Levite who is within your gates, for he has no part or inheritance with you. At the end of every third year, you shall bring out the tithe of your produce of that year and store it up within your gates, and the Levite, because he has no portion nor inheritance with you, and the stranger and the fatherless and the widow who are within your gates, may come and eat and be satisfied, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hand which you shall do.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this text today. Thank you for this sermon by Moses on your fourth commandment. Thank you for helping us through these words understand the beauty, joy, blessedness and command that you give us in that fourth commandment. Bless us now. Help us, Lord God, to understand this word and to make application to our times, which are so different from the times in which this sermon was preached.

Be with us today, Lord God, by your Holy Spirit. Transform us and cause us to delight. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

—

Commanded joy. This is a statement that contains within it what you might call a tension, a balance. The scriptures are filled with what some have called tension between two truths—a commandment on one hand and a commandment to rejoice, which we don’t normally associate as being something we do in response to a commandment on the other.

So there’s this kind of inbuilt tension, and we’ll see going through today’s text there are a number of those sorts of tensions. You might call them balances—avoiding ditches, right? It’s another way to put it. But it’s very important in the Christian life to understand that these tensions exist in the context of God’s words in our life, and our job is to find joy in the tension, to not allow ourselves to spin off to the left or to spin off to the right, but to live in the context of that.

Now, we’re continuing today going through the fourth word, the fourth commandment. And we’ve decided to use the Deuteronomy 5 version of the Ten Commandments. We hear the Exodus 20 version typically. Deuteronomy 5 is the restatement of the ten words as they’re about to enter into the promised land. It’s of course closer to us chronologically, and it says things to us that help flesh out and help us to understand the original ten words or ten commandments.

And very specifically here in the fourth commandment, we’ve seen—we talked last week about the importance, the last two weeks about seeing the differences between the wording in Deuteronomy 5:12-15 and that found in Exodus 20. There’s commonality of course, but the emphasis in the Deuteronomy text—the center at the top of your outlines as I’ve laid it out again and have now for a couple of weeks for you to actually see—I think there’s this deliberate bringing us into the center of the thing through a structure. It starts and says “Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” and the last words kind of balance that: “you’re to keep this Sabbath day.” And then moving in: “the Lord your God has commanded you,” and moving in from the last bit of the text, “the Lord your God commanded you.” So there’s a deliberate inversion as we move to the end of the first two phrases.

And this is, I think, a very obvious example of God wanting us to focus on the interior and showing us a little structure that we’re supposed to meditate upon and be aware of. You know, God’s story is the best story. His words are the best words. His style is, of course, the style by which all other styles are normed. And so his style of writing is beautiful and he expects us to understand it, at least somewhat.

And I think if we look at it that way, then what we’re drawn to in the center is the additional language that’s found in the Deuteronomy version of the fourth word—that we’re not simply to rest. Yes, that’s part of it. To cease. That’s what the word Sabbath means: to cease, to stop an activity. But that a part of that rest, that joy of completed work, because we’re imaging God, is extending rest to those around us.

And so the heart of the Deuteronomy text is the motive, the motivation: “that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.” So we’re to help others come to that joy of culminated divine work that we enter into.

Now that doesn’t mean that it’s not still a commemoration and tied to creation. It is. This text begins by saying that you’re to obey the Sabbath day the way as the Lord your God has commanded you. So it intentionally draws itself back to Exodus 20. So if we’re to put Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 together as we look at the differences: In Exodus 20, as we said last week, it begins with redemption as the introduction to all of the ten words—”You, God, brought you out of Egypt.” And then in the fourth word, we keep the rest. We enter into that joyful culmination of divine work, imaging God who rested on the seventh day.

And so creation is the pattern that’s stressed, with a secondary emphasis on redemption. And here in the Deuteronomy passage, the stress is redemption and extension of redemption to others. Although creation is alluded to as well by going back to Exodus 20 and the six days, seven-day pattern. So it’s an emphasis—the emphasis is on redemption and more than that, the emphasis is upon imaging God by bringing others into that rest.

Both of the fourth words are very important because they remind us that the basic ethical requirement of God’s creatures is to image him correctly. You know, if you want to know what the law is, the law says: be like me. Be holy like I’m holy. And so that’s it. And here specifically, we’re told specific ways to image God. He rested on the seventh day as a pattern for us. We rest at the end of six days of labor.

He brought us out of Egypt and caused that rest to be a joyful culmination and celebration of redemption. And he expects us to image that as well by bringing others out of bondage and slavery and sin and oppression and difficulty, and extend redemption as well. So that’s kind of the big picture here.

And we can get all lost in the current controversies of the day about the Lord’s day and what does it mean and how does it relate to this, but I think it is rather obvious—and we won’t deal with it today, we will at some point in future sermons address some of the objections—but it’s rather obvious, I think, that this day of convocation given to us in the law directly informs our Lord’s day activities. And the Lord’s day is the celebration of the created, the second, the new creation affected through the resurrection of Christ. And the Lord’s day is the commemoration and celebration of divine work accomplished—redemption has now been accomplished through the work, the death of Jesus and his resurrection.

So we have this tie back to who we are and the image of it in the instructions given to us in the commandments about the Sabbath.

Now what we’ve decided to do then is to use the Deuteronomy version and then proceed by looking at the rest, most of the rest of Deuteronomy, which is a sermon by Moses or a series of sermons expressing, taking the commandments and articulating them better for us. And so here, that sermon part of this thing begins—we think—at the last half of chapter 14, verse 21.

We talked about that last week: “Don’t boil a kid in the mother’s milk.” And it extends on for several chapters. And the basic pattern of how it worked itself out is that in the next couple of chapters we have an emphasis on the Sabbaths (plural) that God instituted under Mosaic law, and then the festivals, right? And so that’s kind of how we’ll organize this—the two headings for this sermon by Moses—and we’re talking about this first section on the Sabbaths.

Now, it’s important to recognize here that, as we’ve said, the Sabbath—the one day in seven—it doesn’t mean Saturday. It doesn’t say Saturday. It says the day of ceasing and rejoicing in finished work. Okay? Many people think that it actually was like your birthday. It rotated from Saturday to Sunday to Monday. It doesn’t say Saturday. So let’s not get hung up about that. It says six days, seventh day rest. But that’s a creation ordinance.

And Jesus turns back to that creation pattern as he discusses that pattern as well in the New Testament. And man was supposed to image God by resting every seventh day as part of the creation, not part of Mosaic law. What changes with Mosaic law is what we’re getting into now, and that is that there are multiple Sabbaths (plural) now. And there are multiple festivals throughout the year. There’s a whole Mosaic Levitical calendar that’s established.

And so we go from one Sabbath to multiple Sabbaths and festivals, which we’ll be looking at in the next few weeks. And then when Jesus comes, it funnels back to one Lord’s day.

Now, it’s just like worship, right? There’s one offering: Abel’s lamb. And then in the Levitical pattern, we got multiple offerings. And then when we get to Jesus, it’s back focused to one. The Levitical law is a prism. It takes a single truth, prisms out the various aspects of it. And those things then inform us what happens when Jesus, the true light of the world, comes. So Jesus’s single offering has lots of components that Leviticus instructs us about. The Lord’s day has lots of components that this sermon by Moses will instruct us about.

We are no longer to keep the Mosaic calendar. That’s very obvious and true. And that’s the explanation for all the several verses in the New Testament that people use to say the Lord’s day and Sabbath are completely different. Don’t ever do Sabbath things anymore. The change happens in moving not away from creation Sabbath—although there is a change of day that’s prefigured by all of that. But the big change comes from not doing Levitical Mosaic calendar, multiple Sabbaths (plural), festivals and feast days (plural). Now we have a single day.

So that’s what’s happening here. And another thing that’s happening that the text tells us about—you heard the phrase that I mentioned several times: you have to go three times a year. It doesn’t say that here. We’ll see it in later texts. You got to go to the place where God places his name, meaning Jerusalem. There is now a centralized sanctuary, right?

We begin, after Adam rather, in the patriarchal period—there are lots of places they worship. And then when Levitical calendar comes along, now we have centralization of worship location. Okay? There’s one place the Lord’s going to put your name. Now, it’s decentralized somewhat too because there are synagogues and those are days of holy convocation, but a certain element of it is centralized. And in the New Testament it becomes decentralized again like it was prior to Moses and Levitical instruction.

And again, there’s this change that happens.

And so now we’re talking about the administration of the tithe. When Moses starts to talk about the Sabbath, he begins immediately to preach about the tithe. And the tithe is set specifically in the context of convocations, times of getting together with other people. So you don’t send your tithe in during the week. You went to the holy convocation, particularly three times a year. Other convocations set up in your towns every third year. And that’s what you do with your tithe.

Now, this text before us—some people have seen in it multiple tithes. That’s not true either. We know that the tithe predates Moses. We got Abram and Melchizedek. We have Jacob patriarchal examples. Then we have tithe in Levitical period. And here it’s talking about different aspects of that tithe. And then we come back to a single tithe in New Testament. The same way the thing’s been prismed out.

The tithe in Deuteronomy 14 and other places is prismed into different aspects. People have thought, “Well, you got three different tithes. You got 30% of your income or 23%.” No, it’s just talking about different aspects in a centralized sanctuary in Levitical time that help us to understand the full use of the tithe. It’s the prism again.

And when we get to discussing our single tithe now in the New Testament, it has aspects to it that this text will help us to understand. The pictures, the coloring, picture and the liturgy covered to today are about these rejoicing times together. Specifically, they’re illustrations of the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Tabernacles, the great culmination of the three major feasts that Deuteronomy speaks of. And so it’s a time of getting together. It’s party time. I wore my party tie today. This is joy.

You know, it’s funny. Somebody told me this week—I hope they were kidding, I think a little bit tongue in cheek. They said when the first time they came to RCC, I was preaching on the Feast of Booths, but they thought I was saying the Feast of Booze. That’s the church for us. So, and we’ll talk about that today.

There is a sense in which it is a feast of booze, not drunkenness, but we’ll see that in just a couple of minutes.

So, that’s what we want to look at here. You know, I wanted to put it in context as we think about this. The outline’s really quite simple. I’ve just taken particular words here that will help us to walk through this piece of text and get a sense of the tensions that are in play. And living in the context of these tensions is the way to find true joy and satisfaction.

So, first of all, what’s discussed is the tithe. The tithe—it’s sort of like Sabbath. It doesn’t mean something specific. It just means tenth. And so it means 10% of your income. And very specifically the detailed language is all agricultural oriented, right? Because this law, this case, is set in the context of an agricultural economy. And we sometimes find it a little tough to make application to non-agricultural economies like ours. But for the most part, it’s simple, right? For the most part, it’s very simple. 10% of the increase year to year, week to week, is given to God for a particular purpose.

One day out of seven is given to God. 10% of your income—not income, you know, increase, which is your income for most people—is given to God. So it’s pretty simple stuff. And it’s kind of like the part for the whole, right? It’s not as if the other six days of the week you can live for yourself. This is a special day of convocation with special things going on, but clearly it represents the whole of one’s consecration to Christ throughout our lives. The tithe is the same way. It’s special money. Special things are required of it, but it’s really God’s claim on the whole. He wants you to be a good steward of all your money.

So tithe is what we’re talking about. And as I said, there are different aspects of the tithes here, but the tithe predates Moses, which means it postdates Moses into the New Testament period. And the tithe’s basic meaning is to support Levitical ministries. That’s its basic function. We could go to lots of historical cases of that in the Old Testament. Times of reconstruction were times when God’s people tithed again so that Levitical ministers could stop working their non-Levitical jobs, get back into studying the word, teaching it, preaching it, leading worship, etc.

And in the New Testament, you know, the same thing’s true. There are particular people that are supported by the gifts of God’s people. Tithes—a set percentage laid aside—and that’s to support the work of the preaching of God’s word and the liturgy of the church, etc., which produces societal change. So that’s the basic purpose of the tithe, but there are other aspects of it that are given to us here as well, which we’ll talk about now.

So we have: “You shall truly tithe all the increase.” So it is increase. The second word that’s given is eat, that I want to stress. “You shall eat before the Lord your God in the place where he chooses to make his name abide.”

We had a great meeting at Schmadia with the officers and a couple of other guys to talk about future plans, and we’ll be given an update in a couple of weeks. You know, we were going to schedule a household meeting for next Sunday, and it turns out Super Bowl Sunday, after that, is Valentine’s Day. So it’s the 21st, and you can have parish meetings afterwards, and the conversation of the congregation may flow into that. But we’ll bring a report from our Schmadia meeting to that meeting.

But we had a great meeting, and I may mention some things about it today as we go through the text. But we talked a lot about food again. You know, I mean, not the whole time or anything, but there was discussion about the agape and about the kitchen and about issues that we continued to discuss for 25 years. And you know, you could feel like, “What’s wrong with these people? All they just argue about food. What’s going on.”

Well, that’s because food is really important to the faith. The first thing it says about the tithe is you’re supposed to eat some of it. You know, the fall begins with food. When we get back to reversal of the fall, we eat right here every Lord’s day, which we’re supposed to do. Adam was born hungry. He was given a world to eat. You know, I like those t-shirts for guys: “I’m hungry. We eat the world.” Yeah, we do. That’s because God wants us to eat the world.

We eat too much, drink too much? No. Well, you can eat too much, of course. But man’s purpose is to take the created order, to transform it. And there’s a sense in which eating things does that. I mean, it’s a little strange maybe, but you know, you take a bunch of wheat, you make bread, and you take the bread—and now the wheat and the energy received from the wheat that God blesses you with sings praises to God. There’s a sense in which that’s kind of what’s going on.

Food’s a big deal. We could go over and over. As you read your Bible this year—those of you that are doing it—look for food verses. Try to keep a list. You won’t be able to. They’re all over the place. Food’s important. And if it’s important, we’re going to end up talking about it a lot. Nobody should feel bad about that. Okay, chill out. It’s a good thing to talk about here.

It’s the first thing you’re told what to do with your tithe. You’re supposed to eat it. Now, that’s really a very significant truth. You know, David Dorsey several years ago was at our family camp, and he had these visuals where he showed the temples of the false gods and the kind of layouts they would have for their temple structures. They were huge, right? They make you need big buildings to worship these gods. And then you look at the temple, and it’s a tiny little thing comparatively.

The gods of the people are part of the tyranny of men, is what it really is. And those gods, the big deal with the false gods is “feed me, feed me, feed me.” They’re like that plant, right, in Little Shop of Horrors. They insist on being fed all the time, and they want your sacrifice to feed them. That’s pagan stuff. That’s what it is.

And God says he’s commanding you to use some of your special money not to feed him, but to feed yourself. You’re supposed to eat it. That’s a very wonderful truth. That’s a cool deal. That’s a great fact. We’re talking about the Lord’s day is a time of celebration. That’s the characteristic of it. Why? Well, because we think about the kind of God we have, and he’s not like, you know, “feed me, feed me” Seymour. He’s like, you know, “come here and I will feed you. I’ll use the money you’ve provided that I’ve blessed you in order for you to get it all, right? And I’m going to give you—I want you to eat it in my presence. Okay?”

That is the second part of that. You’re supposed to eat in the presence of God. So it’s kind of a—it’s not normal eating. It’s in the presence of God, but you’re supposed to eat.

The third word I want to mention here is fear. You know, here comes some of the tension. So we’ve got this tithe and we’re supposed to eat and have a good time with it. But the end result of doing it in the particular way God tells us is verse 23: “that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always.”

See, when we think of fearing God, we can think of the pagan examples and what that’s all about, and kind of a slavish fear. And the other ditch though would be no fear of God at all. And that’s the ditch we’re in, our culture, today. No fear of nothing. No concern about his judgments against sin.

Talking to Katie Wilson earlier, you know, there’s an element of our culture that they know the system really well, and they know where on the matrix their sentencing lies and when they’ll get prison time or not, and how much they can carry or not before they get thrown in jail, and how much jail time it will actually happen. And they know that, you know, more often than not, they can gin that system, commit crimes and misdemeanors, and not really have any punishment for it except having to appear at a court hearing. So that’s the way it works today. There’s no fear of God. There’s no fear of his just retributions against us.

And so the proper use of the tithe of Lord’s day worship has this aspect—do it—that we’re brought together to fear God properly. Not like some kind of, you know, oppressive dad that’s always beating on us. We got a dad who calls us to get together with him so that we can eat and have a good time, but he’s dad, still, right? And so the fear of the Lord is part of the tension of what the fourth word and its application to us is all about.

The fourth word is crave. Well, so now we get more specifics in terms of eating this stuff. And in verse 26, we read that you shall spend that money. So you got to go to the centralized sanctuary in this particular period of covenant history. And you can take your agricultural increase—which is what you’re always going to have—convert it to money. Go to that place and you buy stuff to eat. And what it specifically says is “you shall spend that money on whatever your heart desires, for oxen or sheep, for wine or strong drink, for whatever your heart desires.”

And the English Standard Version translates the second “whatever your heart desires” differently than the first. And I’m sorry to say that I didn’t do a word study on those two things. But that’s what they say. You’re craving certain things.

So not only does God say use your special tithe—that little bit that is your tithe, 10%—he says that to use a portion of that money to eat, but it isn’t just, you know, normal eating. It’s for what you really like to eat.

Right now, we have a family camp every year, right? And it’s sort of like the Feast of Tabernacles. You know, churches aren’t theonomic, or they don’t read their Bibles all that much in the Old Testament, but they still are God’s people, and the spirit moves in particular ways. And usually the spirit—a lot of churches have a Bible conference in the summer, and they go away and they live in structures that aren’t as big and nice as their normal houses. They live in booths, we could say, and they have a good time and they’re relaxed and they get Bible instruction in the context of that.

Well, that’s like the Feast of Tabernacles. That’s what happened. That’s what we do. And so we’ve encouraged people based on these verses to use a portion of your tithe to finance your convocations together, including family camp. Perfectly appropriate to use a portion of your tithe. This is what we would call the rejoicing aspect of the tithe. It’s a separate tithe. You got 10%. Most of it’s going to support Levitical ministries, but some of it—God not only allows, God wants you to use—to bring yourself joy on the Lord’s day or on the special churchly convocations that we have. Family camps, not like Feast of Tabernacles. It’s not required, but it kind of reminds us of that aspect of convocations.

And most of us when we go to camp, you know, when your kids are little particularly, you buy them, you know, whatever candy they like—you know, peanut butter cups, or, you know, I don’t know what it is for you. I can’t remember anymore. We used to get—we were young—you know, whatever it is your kids like for candy. A lot of people would bring them to camp, right?

And at our house still, we don’t do it quite as regularly, and of course all the kids are grown up, but I like it too. Every Lord’s day, I get a peanut butter cup or a Hershey’s bar with almonds, and particularly now that I’m diabetic, I like it a lot better because I can’t eat that stuff during the week most of the time. So you know, this is the idea. There’s stuff you really like to eat. Now, here it’s, you know, steaks. And so this again is part of the tension.

We want a celebration here. We want an agape that is part, that is sort of picking up this joyous aspect of the convocations. Again, it’s not required, but in a way, it’s, you know, it’s very tightly linked to the kind of Lord’s day convocations that are required where the meal is here. But what we want that day to be like is—we want people, you know, bring what they really like to eat. Okay.

So there’s a proper emphasis on the part of the church: “Hey, you know, if you can afford to bring steaks and not make the pastor go begging”—he gets none of your tithe. You don’t use all your tithe. But if you can afford that with a portion of your tithe, bring them. You know, and now we bring that to a communal meal and we kind of share it, right?

So it’s really good for people that really like tasty food and whose wives really like to cook that kind of stuff to bring it and rejoice in that meal. But remember that the tension is that the day is to be a day of celebration and redemption for people as well. And we’ve always wanted wives to feel, you know, if they’re the morning cook—and they normally are—that this is the day they don’t got to cook, and we don’t want them feeling guilty about the kind of food they bring, right? So you know, bring what you think would be really cool or bring what you think would make your heart rejoice today because you don’t got to worry about people trying your food and spitting it up.

You know, if that’s what you cook, don’t bring it. Bring something pre-made or whatever. You know, if it’s a burden to you, we don’t want you to be burdened on the Lord’s day. So it’s the tension, right? But we’re supposed to come together and party hearty. That’s what I say here. So I got the tie on.

Not only does it say you’re supposed to have things you really like to eat, it says there’s stuff to drink here. Wine or—well, the New King James says “similar drink.” Well, you know, the word means beer. That’s what it means. Well, we don’t know, but there were no distilled spirits at this time. Very, very possibly.

So you are—these are things God has given us: alcohol, wine and strong drink, that makes the heart happy. You tend to relax a little bit with it. The Jews in their commentary said, “Well, you know, in the Lord’s day or the Sabbath you can drink enough wine to give yourself just a little buzz, starting to feel a little relaxed. Any more than that is drunkenness.” And we’re not encouraging drunkenness here.

And you know, when you got people that aren’t used to wine and beer or strong drink, we’ve have had problems with that, right? In our family camps in the past, there were people that got drunk. They’re not used to it. Well, you know, this is what the Bible says is a good thing to do. And nobody should make you feel bad about drinking wine or beer at the agape. Or—well, we can’t at camp directly. We have to go outside. But the point is, you know, it’s a good thing. And God has given us food and drink to make our hearts happy and joyful.

And this is what God says the Lord’s day is about: celebrating and celebrating with good food and good drink. And when Asa brings Asa Lopez brings me a glass of wine, I’m real happy about it. I always feel a little guilty that I remember to bring wine myself, but it’s a good thing.

See, so this is God is commanding us here, right? That we’re supposed to bring this stuff and to eat stuff we really like. That is very good, right? That’s wonderful. This is the sort of God we serve. Okay? And it’s really bad that so often the Sabbath is associated with blue laws and the removal of pleasure and celebration.

You know, there was this old story. I probably used it here before, but he said back in Puritan America, you know, a guy pastor had to ski to get to church one day because his horse and wagon couldn’t get through the snow and everything. And the deacons or elders, you know, “Well, is this okay?” “Well, as long as he didn’t enjoy the skiing, it’s okay.” True story.

So you know, we’ve done that, and boy, I just pray that the Lord would forgive me for whatever I’ve said over the last 25 years that you end up thinking of that kind of burdensomeness, right? It’s a day of celebration and joy. And it’s a wonderful picture of the difference of the true God who created this wonderful world as opposed to the false gods like Seymour who insist, “See more, feed me, feed me.”

You feed me. And then comes the specific command: “You shall eat there before the Lord your God.” So again, this isn’t about drinking by yourself or even with just you and your family. It’s about convocation in the presence of God. So it’s special day stuff or feast week stuff. It’s Lord’s day. This side of that triangulation, that prism effect, it’s really focusing primarily on Lord’s day activities. And this is what’s going on here.

And it says, “You shall rejoice.” Now, I don’t think this is a descriptive term. I don’t think it means, “Well, if you do this, you’ll really be happy.” I think he’s commanding us to rejoice. It’s commanded joy.

He commands us to tithe. It’s not a suggestion. He commands us to use a portion of that tithe to cause to eat good things and to drink things that’ll make us feel happy. That’s what God commands. And so he’s commanding us to have joy.

That’s really interesting. We sort of need that though, right? We need both elements of that tension. We need to be reminded that the Christian life is about joy. But we also need to be reminded that the way we would normally in our flesh achieve joy is not what the Lord’s talking about. He’s commanding us. There are commandments that are linked to how we will rejoice. Okay? It’s a command, and it’s a commandment that’s fleshed out with other things we’re supposed to do. Okay? And that’s what the Lord’s day is.

And if all you do is focus on the command—what I can’t do and what I have to do—going to church, you’ve missed the whole thing. The whole thing is that God is commanding you to rejoice. And as we enter into the burdensome, the non-burdensome yoke of Christ, setting us free, we’re going to do things that will cause us to rejoice.

Now, if people don’t rejoice, then we got to work it through and help them to think it through—and what’s going on. And maybe we’re doing something wrong. Maybe you’re doing something wrong. Maybe it’s just a hard time for you. There’s all kinds of deals to that. But the idea is this is what God is saying. Here’s the remembrance—this is the beginning of Moses’s sermon on the fourth commandment. That’s what we’re talking about here.

And this is why I think that the little symbol at the heading here, the end of verse 21 that we talked about last week, “Don’t boil a kid in the mother’s milk”—you can do that a couple of ways. If you fall off from the tension and you say, “Well, there’s no real commandments here. Do what you want to do.” And you know, if you get together on the Lord’s day, great. And if you don’t, that’s okay. You know, you would be using what’s supposed to nurture your kids ultimately to bring them into a joyless state.

On the other hand, if we take the Lord’s day stipulation commandments and administer them in a harsh way to our children, we’re using what is supposed to bring our hearts to joy and celebration and delight in the God we serve and an appreciation of who he is—that’s behind all of this. God brings us together to see who he really is as opposed to how we often think he is. And when we do that, you see, if we don’t do that, if we have people who just—”it’s okay. You want you to obey the commandments. That’s it. Just get together, do this, do that, do this, do this. Your food’s no good, etc.”—we got the wrong picture of who God is. And we’re using the very thing that’s supposed to nurture us, mother’s milk, the church’s milk, right? To nurture the children of the church to help them to see who God really is and to cause them to rejoice and be satisfied. We’re using that in a way that’s killing our kids.

So that’s why that little symbol there is so important.

So it’s a commanded joy with tension. The sixth word is household, right? So what does it say? It says you’re supposed to do this, “you and your household,” in verse 26. So you know, here again, there’s a tension. It’s not you and your household going off by yourself to do this. It’s you and your household coming to the convocative assemblies with a whole bunch of other households. That’s the specific way that’s described in the text.

So there’s a tension here between you and your household and the convocated host.

Now, first of all, we don’t know what household means here. We tend to just think of it as what we think of it as. And it’s difficult to know exactly what’s being said. The word basically means house. You and your house. And it doesn’t mean the physical structure. It can mean that. It does mean that. But it’s being used here clearly to talk about a group of people. But a group of people isn’t just necessarily the nuclear family house. How it can be used to describe all of Abram’s descendants at a particular point in time and all his servants as well. Hundreds of people are his household. So it’s extended household. And beyond that, it can be used to describe the house of Israel, the house of treaties, right? Used to describe a clan through history and time. That’s a household as well.

So don’t think of it in, you know, American terminology necessarily, but it does say here that your household—whatever that means—is important. So when you get together in convocation, it’s not as if you pretend you’re alone and your only relationship to God is through everybody else. That would be wrong. Households, families, are important. On the other hand, your household is coming together with a bunch of other households, and you’re doing that in convocation.

It’s very interesting to me as I’ve been thinking about this the last few weeks. There are ten commandments, and so far we’ve had commandments about relationship to the Father primarily, the Son the mediator, the Holy Spirit, not having empty witness. And then we’re going to start talking about honoring your father and not stealing and not killing, not having adultery, etc. These—most, I think—I’m not sure, but as I meditate upon it, I think all the other commandments can be applied legitimately individually between you and God—well, your parents, but they represent God in the context of the verse—so there’s a sense in which the law starts by talking to you as an individual and your relationship to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And then it brings you to the convocative command. Okay. I think that this convocation that Moses is going to talk about for several chapters is highly important to the fourth word. It’s very significant, and it’s a convocation that involves your household and other households. Very important.

Let me put it another way. You always want—”What’s wrong with why does the church not want to do fourth word?” And there’s some scholarly reasons in the last 20 or 30 years. Before that, it was just they dropped the subject. They just stopped doing it. It became unpopular. But there’s—and I don’t know chicken and egg—but my belief is that the fourth word is why we’re here today. Apart from the fourth word, the command, the blessed command to convocate together once a week at the end of six days, goes away. And I think there’s a direct relationship between the abandoning of the fourth word and moving now to the abandoning of the church as a worshipping community.

I think they’re inextricably tied, and you can’t have one without the other. And that’s where we’re at. One reason why people don’t like the fourth commandment is because they don’t like church. They don’t like to get together with other Christians, or they want to do it whenever they want to do it and in the way they want to do it. This is commanded joy. This is commanded convocations. And this is what’s good for us.

We don’t know what brings us joy. You know, the stuff you—I mean, if you’re honest about it, if I say, “What would really make you happy today? What do you crave?” You probably give me something that probably isn’t right for you, you know, or may not be. So we tend to not know ourselves, right? The Bible says you can’t know yourself. Bible says here’s the way to get joy. And I think that this fourth word is quite significant in terms of addressing households and addressing corporate convocations.

The Lord’s day is that. And so I think it’s very important to see the significance of the relationship between the fourth word—the memorializing the redemption and new creation in Christ—to the requirement of weekly Lord’s day worship.

Do you with the fourth? I think the only thing you got left for Lord’s day observances is the power and authority of your local session. That’s it. We say you got to do it. Huh. Well, that’s interesting. You and what army? So here it’s the word of God, right? Okay. So it is a convocated thing.

Seven—you got to remember the Levite. And you know, part of it is this is remembering that these convocations are in the presence of God and his particular representatives. So the day is spun by the Levites’ presence with word and sacrament we might call it today. And so that’s important.

But at this particular time the Levites had no land. They had no, really—there were Levitical cities, but they didn’t have the kind of stuff to rejoice in that you would. And twice when it’s mentioned here about the Levite, the point is bringing him joy. So you want to make sure, you know, the most important thing to remember today is to make sure your pastors are really happy.

No, that was a joke. But you do want to remember the Levite.

And you also want to remember the vulnerable. Now, I don’t know if that’s the right word to put, but I wanted to come up with one word like I’m trying to do with most all the outline. And what it goes on to say is that in the third year the emphasis is different. It’s now not so much your own personal rejoicing, but it’s bringing—just like the fourth word in Deuteronomy says—bringing rest, celebratory celebration of completed dominion work, continued divine work—you’re to bring people that wouldn’t normally celebrate that way into that. And specifically, it’s the stranger, the widow, and the fatherless. Okay?

And now, why them? Well, in part, they’re vulnerable. The stranger doesn’t know the language, doesn’t know—he doesn’t have the currency. You know, you think of Paul Simon in that song, but you know, it’s not his deal, and he’s kind of vulnerable and easy to be tricked, etc. So you go out of your way.

I don’t know—clearly widow and fatherless are in a vulnerable state in that culture and continue to be today.

Another important thing to remember though is that these are kind of symbolic deals going on. You can hardly read about the much in the Old Testament without a reminder from God that you were a stranger in Egypt, and therefore you should show grace, mercy, and joy, celebration, to strangers where you live. So there’s a reminder to us of God’s grace to us when we grace the stranger.

The same thing’s true of widows. There’s a sense in which the church is described as a widow after Adam’s fall. Jesus in the gospel says, “Well, there are many widows. Elijah went to one of them.” And so he describes himself going to the Jews as going to a widow. Okay. So the church is related to a widow. So we’ve been shown grace by God, our, you know, Jesus marrying us, and we’re to grace widows.

And clearly, in Ezekiel and other places, we’re described as a baby aborted, left for dead after its birth—whatever it is—we’re the fatherless. And God has become our father to us. We’ve been adopted into the household of Christ. And so we’re the fatherless, and so when we extend grace to the fatherless, we’re reminding ourselves that freely we’ve received, freely give.

So there are reasons behind it, but there’s also importance of just doing it right. This is commanded stuff. And so it’s really good to remember, you know, strangers, immigrants. Now, here in the context of Deuteronomy, I think those are faithful believers in Yahweh, right? So it’s not really evangelism. It’s people that are there because they wanted to be in contact with God’s people, and it’s widows and children in the context of their own communities. But still, it’s important for us to have special consideration, particularly for widows and children in the context of our lives. And that’s why we do the sort of things we do.

That’s why it was important last week to talk about bringing redemption, you know, to babies who are fatherless. For whatever reason, their fathers can’t stop their murder in the womb, and their mothers have become either incredibly cold-hearted or deceived—more usually they’ve been oppressed by being told it’s not really life, and they’ve been brainwashed. You know, 15-year-old girl, parents, school teacher, Planned Parenthood counselor, armoring and I said a little bit of flesh—she doesn’t know she’s killing her baby.

I mean, at some deep level she might. And as a result, she’s being oppressed through the process because she has guilt over this and doesn’t even know why. And so it’s important to continue working with PRC and with prayer and other ways to see an end of abortion and ministry to women who have been deceived into aborting their own children.

It’s important too, beyond that, to care for single moms. You know, I really want to encourage you—two weeks from this Friday, February 19th, Nate Wolf’s charity concert will be held. Lori Gibson’s the headline. We sent out an RCC email, and I know a lot of you don’t read those anymore, but two weeks from Friday, it’s not a church deal. The church is a venue. It’s not a Christian deal. Some of the artists aren’t Christians, but it’s a concert to raise money—or raise food actually, specifically for Shepherd’s Door, which is a ministry of the Portland Rescue Mission to single moms and to help them. And it’s not just giving them food. It’s a 12- to 18-month program of recovery for them who come in really dire straits.

So we want to really encourage you as a direct application of today’s text, you know, to come here Friday night, two weeks from this Friday, support that concert, and continue to have an idea of helping the vulnerable.

Ninth, it says that the end result of this is that you will be satisfied. Satisfaction is the result of all this. As the text goes on, you give these things to the stranger and the widow who are within your gates, “that they may come and eat and be satisfied, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hand.”

Again, we don’t know how to satisfy ourselves. We don’t really know how to satisfy other people. To bring satisfaction—as part of this, bringing people into the joy of Lord’s day rest, victory, and celebration of the finished work of redemption and creation, and of the work we’ve accomplished during the week as well. God says this is the way it’s going to happen. If you tithe faithfully, if you use that tithe to remind yourself to get together in holy convocation once a week, and that convocation is a celebration—food’s involved, good times are to be had—it’s, you know, a celebration and a party, we could say, even involving strong drink and really good food, not drunkenness, of course, but it is a feast of booze in moderation. Okay.

You remember to do that, and you remember that part of this whole thing is thinking particularly about people that are on the out, the edges of our culture: the widows, fatherless, strangers. God says, “Do that and you’ll bring them to satisfaction and you’ll be satisfied in the work he’s called us to do.”

It’s the route of satisfaction. I’m old, old, old. And all this song reference—I feel so old and dated when I use song references. But you know, us old people can hardly think of this verse without thinking of Mick Jagger. “I can’t get no satisfaction”—or not quite so old. DEVO did the same thing. So there probably have been more covers in the last 10 years. I don’t know. But anyway, that’s true.

And you know, the Rolling Stones song was in a way a commentary on modern culture, which is priceless, and a consumer culture particularly, and everything is promised through advertising—media guys who know what they’re doing that make you salivate all the time, and you grab for that, and it doesn’t satisfy. There’s no satisfaction in it.

Well, here God says you want to get satisfied? Do church right. Do it right. Do the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath, right, and you’ll be satisfied.

And then finally, the last word is work. “You’ll be satisfied and you’ll be blessed in all the work that your hand has done.”

So remember, this is one day out of seven. The way to accomplish this is also to follow the command to work six days, and that work produces the sort of celebration and joy that we have on the Lord’s day. You know, this is a picture of who God is, right? God is a God who wants us to know that he doesn’t call us together to feel bad. He begins and ends our convocation together by telling you not to feel bad. And you get there by confessing your sin and having him tell you, “It’s okay. I’ve forgiven you.”

The text that Doug read for the call to worship: “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden”—we know you are. Many of you are. Come here. God’s going to feed you good stuff. He’s going to give you good company today. He’s going to give you a new mind about things through the preaching of his word. He’s going to cause you to rejoice and to celebrate. That’s what the Lord’s day is all about.

That’s the joy we enter into. That’s the satisfaction that makes our work make sense.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Lord God, for, more than anything else, for the revelation of who you are as we think about this particular command and the delights of it to us. We thank you, Father, that you are a God who is life and not death. A God who is joyful ultimately, and a God who wants us—having been extended joy by you—to bring others to joy as well.

Bless us, Lord God, as we continue to study the implications of the fourth word in our lives, and bless us today as we continue to rejoice together in your presence with our households and with the convocated host. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.