Keeping Sabbath

6 · Exposition of the first Sabbath invitation—Godward orientation

And so I want to look at 5 things related to the practice of Sabbath that I think we see still in the text this morning, things Scripture, God, and Christ call us to, but also freedoms and greater purposes they direct us towards. So these are the 5 things I think we should consider, 5 ways God instructs us and invites us in the Sabbath. The first thing is that Sabbath invites us to God. One of Jesus' primary frustrations with the synagogue ruler and the Pharisees is they have this myopic obsession with Sabbath rules. They've created this huge system of all these dos and don'ts, and now they're just waiting. They're just eager to catch Jesus slightly out of step with one of the rules of the system. Christ's frustration though is that all these rules have missed the greater purpose. The Sabbath was meant to be a day consecrated not to rules, but a day consecrated to the Lord. The Jewish leaders took this to mean that it was a day that should have all sorts of rules dictating how you consecrated it. If you're going to consecrate a day, you have to have rules, and now because you've got rules, it means it's consecrated. But that missed the entire point. It wasn't about making rules so a day appeared holy. It was about having a day that was holy to the Lord. In other words, a day where God's people intentionally assumed a Godward orientation. It wasn't rules that did this. It was a posture of the heart. We are doing Sabbath wrong. We're approaching this notion of rest before God wrong if our first impulse is rules and regulations and not thinking about the Lord. Listen to the description in Exodus 20. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. 6 days you shall labor and do all your work, but the 7th day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God, and on it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in 6 days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the 7th day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Similarly, in Leviticus 19:30, you shall keep my Sabbaths. And reverence my sanctuary. I am the Lord. The point is clearly that on this day we would orient our hearts towards God.

7 · Exegesis of Luke 13:13 showing how the healed woman glorifies God, fulfilling the Sabbath's true purpose, while the rulers obsess over violated rules

The synagogue ruler and the Pharisees, they're freaking out because Jesus has healed a woman and a man on the Sabbath. They're upset, I mean, the synagogue ruler indicts him publicly. They're losing their minds that he's deigned to do this. He's violated the Sabbath rules. But listen to how Luke describes what Jesus had done in verse 13. And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God. There's a way in which it drives towards the conclusion of that verse. And she glorified God. They're obsessed about rules, and she is healed, and on the Sabbath, she's the one that consecrates the Lord's Day. Jesus heals her because it's an opportunity to do on the Sabbath precisely what the Sabbath was created for, to restore a woman physically so she could be restored spiritually to bring her closer to God, to release her from the bonds of Satan and bring her into closer communion and fellowship with her Savior. Jesus declares in Mark 2:27, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And so the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath."

8 · Calls the congregation to embrace Sabbath as an invitation to Godward focus, praying to rest in God, seek His presence, and pursue His glory

Sabbath invites us to God. Keeping Sabbath is an opportunity to celebrate the goodness and the sovereignty of God's rule. It's about reclaiming some sense of what we lost in the garden. We don't keep rules, we seek to walk with God in the coolness of the afternoon. That's what Sabbath is inviting us to, that as citizens of the kingdom, we would turn our attention and our hearts again to the King. It would be very appropriate to just pray on the Lord's Day, Father, let us rest in you today. Help us to seek you. Help us to sense your presence. Help us to be about Your glory on this day. Sabbath is an invitation to turn towards God.

9 · Exposition establishing that work is God-ordained and good (Genesis 1-2), cursed after the fall, but that Sabbath rest was instituted before the fall—not because work became hard, but because we are finite, not God

Sabbath also invites us to rest. Now, work is something God has ordained, right? If we read the Scriptures in the very beginning of Genesis, God instructs Adam and Eve to work the garden and to keep it. It's something they're given before the fall ever happens. God views work as a blessing and as a good thing. It's part of what it means to be made in His image. We work and we create and we exert dominion over the world. But in our post-fall reality, after Adam and Eve disobey and get expelled from the garden, one of the things that happens is work becomes cursed. Work gets afflicted. And so for all of us, we experience work that's oftentimes chaotic, right? Schedules that are out of control, work that's exhausting and time-consuming, work that's demanding and draining. But God doesn't institute Sabbath after the fall. God calls people, God calls humanity, mankind to rest even before work has become frustrating. It's not just that work is hard. It's by the sweat of your brow kind of stuff now that we have to have rest. No, it's because we are human. We are finite. We are not God that we have to rest. And so while creation is still in pristine condition, God ordained that one day out of seven would be a day of rest. That's what Sabbath literally means. The word means to stop, to rest. That's where we get the word sabbatical from. Somebody takes a sabbatical from work, right? They're taking a rest, a break from work. Men and women needed this kind of rest even when work was nothing but a blessing.

10 · Exposition of Sabbath rest as a 24-hour pause from all forms of work and productivity, a confession that God is in control and lavishing us with grace while we rest

Sabbath is an invitation to rest from all of our usual work and duties, from our schedules and our emails and our deadlines, our labors, our leading, are handling emergencies. The list goes on, all the things that get associated with work, all the things that kind of pile the commitments up on your shoulders. God calls us to pause from those things, from earning and providing and laboring and producing. He calls us to 24 hours of rest and even play, a specific time where we recognize God is in control. And that as He's in control, He lavishes our lives with grace. He lavishes our lives with grace while we rest in His work. That we glorify God by actually setting down our tools and resting in His provision. It's a strange thing, but we glorify God by 24 hours of unproductivity. Because we recognize He is being productive for us.

11 · Personal anecdote of a pastor who pridefully claimed never to take a day off, illustrating the delusion that ceaseless work honors God

I talked to the pastor once, it was actually while I was in seminary, and this guy told me with not a small amount of pride that he never takes a day off. And I go, "What do you mean you never take a day off?" He said, "I never take a day off. I believe that if I'm sufficiently prepared for Sunday morning, that I should be getting as much rest on a Sunday morning as the rest of the congregation. Now, never mind that most of the people in his congregation are taking a rest from their normal work, probably do work around their homes and whatnot on Saturdays, but he viewed it as he never had to have a single day where he wasn't working. And as I listened to him, I was feeling exhausted. And I was actually in seminary, so I didn't really have a full grasp of what it meant to go into a Sunday morning as a pastor and the time in preparation before preaching, and then just the day of worship and the preaching itself and the pastoring and the pastoral care, what it means to come out of that. You talk to pastors and they talk about Sunday afternoons and Sunday evenings, and I'm now looking back at this guy and thinking, were you insane? Like, how did you ever think that you were going to do this? He was living in this prideful delusion that somehow He was honoring God by never resting.

12 · Propositional statement that Sabbath rest is a theological confession—'I am not God'—and that God is honored by rest, not ceaseless work

But God isn't honored by the person who never stops working. He's honored by the person who works hard for 6 days and then sets all his labors down and contentedly rests in Him. Sabbath rest is a confession. I am not God. That's what happens when we rest and cease from work.

13 · Personal testimony of the pastor's two farmer grandfathers who, despite unending work, rested every Sunday as an act of trust in God's provision

I saw this from my grandpas when I was growing up. They were both farmers. Farming, man, you want to talk about a dawn-to-dusk activity. Dairy farmers getting up at 5 in the morning and working just to the bone all the way into the evening and then after supper. 6 days a week, but both of them every Sunday would set aside their work and they would rest. It's a profession where the to-do list is never done. It's not like they didn't have stuff they could do on Sunday. It's not like they couldn't have gone to bed or not worked a 14-hour day the other 6 days of the week if they weren't working on Sunday. It was the recognition, we're going to rest and we're going to trust. That God is in control and that He is faithfully caring and providing for us.

14 · Doctrinal assertion that inability to rest reveals an identity rooted in work and performance rather than God's grace, constituting an idolatry problem and failure to trust God's sovereignty

Now here's the thing, when people of any profession are unable to take 24 hours off a week to rest, when they're unable to find in their week places where they can just put aside work, when people live that way, they prove that their identity is rooted in their work, that their identity is rooted in performance. And when your identity is rooted in work and especially rooted in performance, your identity is not rooted in the grace of God. Because the grace of God is a fundamental recognition that he has worked and that he has achieved and he's covered us with grace and mercy that we haven't earned. And so if you can't rest, it means you can't trust God. If you must always work and always produce, it means you don't grasp grace. And living like that will eat you up because you are not God. As the weeks and months and years go by, you will lose enthusiasm for your job. Your productivity will diminish. Your creativity will suffer. Your energy will wane. Your crankiness will grow. Just watch. Your stress will increase and your joy will vanish. People who can't rest have an idolatry problem. And many of us, especially in our culture, are afraid to rest. And the fear is rooted in our lack of trust in God's sovereignty. And so we rely on ourselves to hold the world together by the work of our power. Instead of resting in Christ to hold it together by the word of His power. When we rest, we say, "God, I trust that while I lay these things aside, You are at work for my benefit."

15 · Extended pastoral teaching against cookie-cutter Sabbath rules, using personal anecdotes (Bert's household projects, the pastor's legalistic upbringing) to illustrate that rest is conscience-driven and individually defined, not regulated

Now, the idea here isn't of cookie-cutter Sabbaths. I'm actually not promoting necessarily that we become Sabbatarian, not actually at all. It's of a vision, a theology, an idea of Sabbath and rest. The Pharisees' whole problem is they're trying to regulate how everybody rested, but not everybody rests in the same way. Rest for one person looks very different than rest for another person. Hannah and I lived for a period with another family and we lived in their basement and this guy, his name was Bert. His name actually wasn't Bert, that became his nickname, but he goes through all of life as Bert now, which is an interesting thing. His real name is Daniel, but he prefers Bert. So, Bert. Burt's idea of rest is he would— and he was a hardworking man. He would work hard at work and then he would come home and then he would get home and it was like he would literally like almost time it. Like he would sit down for like 20 minutes and read a magazine and then he would get up to do a project. And part of it was for Burt, I asked him about this one time, I said, "Man, you ever just wanna relax?" He said, "It is so relaxing for me just to get to do a little thing around the house." But he understood his own heart. He understood how he worked and functioned. He understood that for him, this was rest. I grew up in a community where they tried to regulate these things. You did not mow your lawn on Sunday. Didn't do it. Like, you would get visited by the elders for doing that. Not joking. My dad was told he could ride the bike on Sunday, but only behind the barn so nobody could see it from the road. It was like scandalous rebellion when we went with my mom one time to Hardee's, the only place in town that was open on a Sunday because it was a national chain, and went to get an ice cream cone on a Sunday evening after church. We'd gone to church twice that day. We'd done all the proper Sabbath stuff, but we went to get an ice cream cone with some other folks in the church, and this was scandalous. We were breaking Sabbath. So my thought here isn't I'm trying to establish rules for us. That's not it at all. There aren't any cookie-cutter Sabbaths. One person mows the lawn on Sunday because there wasn't time on a packed Saturday and there won't be time on Monday. That's not rest. But another person goes to mow the lawn because there is nothing more relaxing than smelling the fresh-cut grass and going to the garden and sinking their fingers in the dirt. Each person in their own conscience has to figure out what does rest look like for you. Jesus' point is that the Sabbath is meant to be a gift, not a burden. It's about standing ourselves down and denying ourselves the impulse to master and to make and to build and to accomplish, and instead to rest. And to be. So the Sabbath invites us to rest.

16 · Exposition of the third Sabbath invitation—worship

It also invites us to worship. Calvin and the Reformers would actually say these were the two twin goals of the Sabbath, this rest from work and this call to worship. You notice what Jesus is doing on the Sabbath in the text. He's teaching in the synagogue. Part of the ebb and flow, the natural schedule of Jesus' life is when it comes to the Sabbath, He's not going to be bound by stupid, silly rules, but He's also not going to completely rebel against the goodness of what God has gifted with His people. He's teaching in a synagogue. He's gathered with God's people in worship. It's not just that we're oriented in a Godward direction on the Lord's Day, it's that we're God-oriented together. And His people are gathered. There are plenty of areas of flexibility in the points of what we're looking at this morning. But I think here, we have to actually recognize that God has ordained specifics. Even as the early church moved the day of rest and worship from Saturday, the Old Testament Sabbath, to Sunday, from the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week, in recognition of the resurrection. This is the Lord's Day. This is the day He rose from the grave. They moved their time of rest and worship to this new place. Even as they did that, they still maintained the priority of worship. And that worship has been prescribed by God to involve specific things. That when His people gather, there would be prayers, there would be singing, there would be the public reading of Scripture, there would be the preaching of the Word, and the practice of the sacraments. That in all of these things God's people would worship and find a different kind of rest.

17 · Theological claim (supported by Keller quote) that corporate worship provides gospel rest—a deep reservoir restoring perspective and renewing passion through Scripture, preaching, fellowship, singing, prayer, and sacrament

Tim Keller writes this: All of us are haunted by the work under the work, that need to prove and save ourselves, to gain a sense of worth and identity. But if we can experience gospel rest in our hearts, we will have a deep reservoir of refreshment that continually rejuvenates us, restores our perspective, and renews our passion. That is precisely why God's people gather in worship, to drink from a deep reservoir of refreshment that continually rejuvenates us, that restores our perspective, that renews our passions. To be rejuvenated by brothers and sisters caring for each other and fellowshipping, bearing burdens, right? Restoring perspective in the midst of a week where you're buffeted by waves and trials and just busyness and craziness that is the week in a fallen world. And then you come and you gather as God's people and perspective is restored because the scriptures are read. The promises of God are proclaimed and the word is preached. You gather to have your passions renewed, to sing from the bottom of your heart even as you're lamenting, to pray and cry out to God together, to come to the table and partake with the body of Christ in remembrance of the body of Christ.

18 · Theological claim that worship confesses rest is good but not ultimate

When we worship on the Lord's Day, on the day of the Sabbath, we confess that rest is good, but rest is not ultimate. I think as American Christians, we're particularly vulnerable here, this temptation to make rest ultimate. There is a great temptation, I think even a trend, to turn Sunday into a second Saturday. To turn Sunday into a second day where there's nothing on the calendar, nothing on the schedule that I don't specifically want or place there. And so we look to our neighbors who do chores on Saturday, right? So that they can sleep in and go to brunch and watch football, take kids to activities and go to the lake. On Sunday. And we see all that, and there's a temptation for the believers of Christ to start to think that that's something we deserve. We start to suspect, "I think we're getting a raw deal. I don't want to rake leaves on Saturday. I don't want to do house chores on Saturday and then have to get up early again on Sunday. I want to sleep in." We start to suspect that somehow we're getting the short end of the stick. Leisure is Sabbath bereft of sacred. That's a helpful understanding.

19 · Historical example (from the pastor's father's generation) of a gifted baseball player drafted by the Yankees who declined, prioritizing consistent corporate worship over career and wealth

My dad actually knew a guy growing up. He was older than him, a generation before him. He was an incredibly gifted baseball player. He was so gifted he actually got drafted by the Yankees. To play. And he was a high enough draft pick, it wasn't like a pipe dream, like he was, you know, 26th round and never gonna see it out of single-A. He was a high round pick. He was a really gifted athlete. And without a sense of legalism in his body, he declined to go play for the Yankees. And people asked him why. And he just said, I can't imagine how if I saw this through and I was playing in the major leagues How could that consistently be gone from worshiping God in my community and specifically with my family on a Sunday morning and it wouldn't be detrimental to my faith? He loved baseball. This guy was as competitive as anyone you've ever seen, but at the end of the day, he deemed it more important to recognize the invitation to worship consistently with God's people. Than to play a child's game for tons and tons of money and fame. A remarkable statement.

20 · Application warning against treating Sunday as a burden or a catch-up day, calling the congregation to center the week around corporate worship rather than fitting God in

If we aren't careful, suddenly gathering with God's people isn't a blessing, it becomes a burden. Sunday isn't a day to catch up on what we didn't get done on Saturday. The rest God invites us to isn't the same thing as recreation. It can involve recreation, but the two aren't synonymous. Real rest is Godward, and this involves worship according to the manner that God has wisely prescribed for his people. This is the difference between fitting God in on Sunday and centering our entire week around the opportunity to gather with God's people in worship. Sabbath, the Lord's Day, invites us to worship.

21 · Exposition of the fourth Sabbath invitation—feasting

It also invites us to feast. This isn't something you necessarily see right off the bat when you read these texts, but it's here. In Luke 14, Jesus is eating with the Pharisees on Sabbath. So even though they've got all these rules of stuff you can't do, they're still going to feast on the Sabbath. They're still going to eat and have a meal and break bread together. They're eager to gather. And so here's Jesus in Luke 14 sitting at the table with them, breaking bread with them. Just even go back and think of the text in Exodus we read earlier. Did you hear how other-centered Sabbath keeping is? I think sometimes we have this view of like the Sabbath is just all the stuff that I have to do, all these rules I have to keep, or even you're trying to think about it correctly and you're thinking, no, the Sabbath is the way I'm orienting myself. But that's not the way the text reads. It's rest for you and your household and your servants and the sojourner in your midst and even your livestock. The sense is you're gathering together in rest and blessing. From early on, people recognized one of the ways we rest is in community at the table together. It's enjoyable. It's refreshing to share a meal. Jesus is showing us in Luke 13 and 14 that kingdom work doesn't need to end on the Sabbath. People can be healed on the Sabbath. God is glorified in the works of the kingdom on the Sabbath. And people, as a work of the kingdom, can gather together in meals on the Sabbath. They should do this. When we think of our mission together, right? Treasuring God in the gospel. That's something that's definitely oriented towards worship. But maturing in the gospel, there's a part of that that's oriented towards the way we can feast together and eat together. God invites us to break bread together on the Lord's Day. The early church called them love feasts, these great meals they would have where they would come together and eat and fellowship and enjoy community.

22 · Concrete application to prioritize Sunday meals: host care group families, invite unfamiliar members, restore Providence's quarterly church potluck tradition

Part of the call for us, if we're serious about experiencing the rest, the Sabbath that God has for us, is to prioritize gathering to eat. So here's a challenge: on Sundays, be proactive. Not just to get home in time to see the kickoff of the Chiefs game, but be as proactive to set up a meal with someone, to have a couple families from your care group over, or to think, who is someone we've never had over since we've been a member of this church? Who are the people in this church that we look at the member directory and we kind of only know them by name? Invite those people over and break bread with them and get to know them. Someone outside of your demographic. Here's something I'd love to see us do. We used to have potlucks 2 or 3 times a year. Now aside from the fact that I like food and there's lots of good food that gets cooked at potlucks and I will just confess the first time I came to Providence there was a potluck and at the very end of it there was beef brisket. And there's a large part of my soul that just felt like, I've come home. Like, they serve really good barbecue. It's amazing the kind of stuff they have in these potlucks. But that's fallen out of practice at Providence. I would love to see us restore the tradition of quarterly, 4 times a year, the entire church gathering for a potluck, the Providence version of a love feast. But here's the thing, the reason we're not doing it is there's just too much stuff for Dave to do and administer on a Sunday morning. We need some people in the congregation who want to say, "Yeah, we want to Sabbath feast together as well." So if that strikes a chord with you, talk with us. We would love to deploy you as people who help us get back in the habit of potlucking on brisket together. 4 times a year.

23 · Extended exposition of the fifth Sabbath invitation—stillness

The Sabbath invites us to feast, and it is such a compelling witness when God's people prioritize worshiping and eating together, where they treat Sunday as the Lord's Day and not a second Saturday. When unbelieving coworkers or family members wonder, like, why can't you come to the event that we have scheduled at 11 o'clock on Sunday? Oh, I'm gathering with God's people. I can't come to that at 1 o'clock, I'm gathering for a meal. Incredible opportunity to bear witness to the kingdom in those moments. Finally, Sabbath invites stillness. It's not just that we don't work one day out of seven. It's that we slow down. In our context, we unplug. We are still. I think one of the hardest things, one of the hardest commands for modern smartphone-possessing, social media-connected Christians to obey is the one we read for the pastoral prayer this morning. Psalm 46:10, "Be still." and know that I am God. The Sabbath isn't a day for more leisure. And it's also not a day for more clutter. Well, I've stopped working, and so now I've got 1,000 other things that I'm trying to fit in. I've stopped working, but if I stop working and I rush home from church, I can get like 8 episodes of Netflix binging in today. I don't feel— I feel rested. I can't really sleep. But man, I got a lot accomplished on Netflix. That's not the vision of the Sabbath. But that's a temptation if we don't sanctify our time. There is an article I was reading in preparation for this in the New York Times. So as secular as you get, right? The New York Times is a no-Christian newspaper. And the person writing the article wasn't a believer. But this person basically said, I long to be Jewish or an old-fashioned Christian and have Sabbath from the busyness and the chaos and the clutter of my life. It was an entire article in the New York Times, completely secular person, just recognizing, I kind of wish I was one of these religious people who had this prioritized time of rest. It was remarkable to read. And yet so many believers, I think, just are oblivious to the need for it. What if we had 6 days to man our phones and to man our gadgets and to tweet and to post and to update, and then the 7th day to rest and unplug? We have a busyness epidemic in our culture. It's not just solved by, you know, rest from work for one day a week. No, we're busy even outside of work. What if Sundays were also a day we sought to declutter and to simplify? I'm not thinking legalistic rules here. I'm really not thinking you can't use a smartphone. I'm just trying to paint a picture that's compelling. What if the Lord's Day was less about consumption and more about digestion. More about the absence of labor. But not just the absence of labor, that our Sundays were about keeping pace with God. We live in an instant world. You microwave dinner, right? Nobody even— like, kids don't even understand, like, the that sound of dial-up internet. You know, like, it was just like that. You just ingrained like, okay, I'm gonna get on the internet and now I'm gonna do some homework for 10 minutes to redeem the 10 minutes that it's connecting to the internet. No, it's like if you turn your computer on and it's like searching for Wi-Fi, what's wrong with this coffee shop? You know? I was just telling Dave, I was so upset. Google Fiber has come to Overland Park and they stopped like 2 blocks short of my neighborhood. I want 1,000 megabits a second internet. I need it! Or so I was thinking. How have I survived up to this point in my life without it? We live that way and we think that way. The Bible doesn't operate that way. We live in milliseconds and instants. We live in the world of technology. And the Bible operates in the world of agriculture. Culture. We live in the world of 30-second cook times. The Bible lives in the world of plant, water, care, grow, prune. Scripture's vision of discipleship, of maturing in Christ, is a much slower, much more intangible process than we want to admit. I think keeping pace with God most often requires us to slow down. Because God is gracious, He calls this thing we're doing the walk of faith, not a sprint. So He calls us to keep pace with Him and to slow down, to cease multitasking, and for at least a day, return to Him. Mark Buchanan has a book called The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath. In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is sloth, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God, the rest He invites us to enter more fully so we might know Him more deeply. Be still and know that I am God. Some knowing is never pursued, it's only received. And for that, you need to be still. Sabbath is both a day and an attitude to nurture such stillness. It's both time on a calendar and a disposition of the heart. It's a day we enter, but just as much a way we see. Sabbath imparts the rest of God. Actual physical, mental, spiritual rest, but also the rest of God, the things of God's nature and presence we miss in our busyness.

24 · Theological claim that Sabbath is a shadow pointing to a greater reality (citing Paul and Hebrews)

Ultimately, Sabbath, though, is a shadow. Paul says that the Sabbath points to a greater reality. This is why we don't need a rigid rule or rulebook to guide our Sabbath keeping. The Sabbath is a shadow that's pointing us to a destination. That's the vision of the book of Hebrews as well. There's constant talk in the book of Hebrews about rest, about entering rest, about pursuing rest. That's a strange thought, right? Pursuing rest. Warnings about failing to enter rest. Rest. But the vision is that we are going towards rest, that it's a destination believers are pursuing, that we enjoy Sabbath rest while striving to enter a greater rest. Well, what does that mean? It means that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Sabbath is an invitation to foretaste. We orient ourselves Godward. We rest from work. We worship. We feast. We are still. So that in all these things we might taste and cherish Christ. Sabbath keeping is so much more than observing a day. That's not what this sermon is about. That's not what Luke 13 and 14 are about. It's a posture that pauses from the clutter of our lives and routinely, consistently turns to Jesus. Sabbath is about putting down the phone and the hammer and the computer and gazing on the beauty of Christ, gazing on the beauty of Christ arm in arm with the people of Christ, drinking together from the fountain of delights and feasting on the bread of life. It's a foretaste in a fallen world of the feast to come.

25 · Doxological conclusion quoting J

I conclude with this quote by J.C. Ryle: The day is coming when there shall be a congregation that shall never break up and a Sabbath that shall never end. A song of praise that shall never cease, and an assembly that shall never be dispersed. Here we often worship God with a deep sense of weakness, corruption, and infirmity. There, at last, we shall be able, with renewed body, to serve Him without weariness, and to attend on Him without distraction. Here at our very best we see through a glass darkly, and know the Lord Jesus Christ Christ most imperfectly. It is our grief that we do not know Him better and love Him more. There, freed from all the dross and defilement of indwelling sin, we shall see Jesus as we have been seen and know as we have been known. Here we have often found it hard to worship God joyfully by reason of the sorrows and cares of this world. Tears over the graves of those we loved have often made it hard to sing praise. Crushed hopes and family sorrows have sometimes made us hang our harps on the willows. There every tear shall be dried, every saint who has fallen asleep in Christ shall meet us once more, and every hard thing in our life journey shall be made clear and plain as the sun at noonday. We are invited to a foretaste of that Sabbath rest.

26 · Closing pastoral prayer asking God to guard against legalism, grant freedom in Sabbath keeping, stir conviction about the need for rest, and awaken desire for the ultimate rest in Christ

Would you bow your heads? Lord, I pray that you would guard us against the impulse to construct rules to pursue rest. Father, I pray that you would help us to experience the freedom that Jesus points us towards in this text. That you have created Sabbath, that you have created rest for us. That it is a great expression that you know our frame, that you know that we are dust. So Lord, I pray that you would stir up conviction, Lord, for those who just fail to recognize our need for rest. Lord, that you would encourage us, that you would fill us with grace, that we would be a people, that we would be a body, that we would be households rich in the grace of Sabbath rest in Jesus Christ. And I pray that in all of these things, you would stir up a desire to enter into the great rest of your Son. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.