There is a strange phenomenon going on in business offices all over this country: People are working longer hours. In a recent study of US work patterns, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that most Americans do not even want a shorter work week. Nearly 2/3 of those questioned wanted no change except for possibly longer hours. Another study showed that MBA graduates are working at least 80 hours per week. The Dean of External Affairs at the University of Chicago Graduate School has said, "This profound devotion to work is a phenomenon of the last 4 or 5 years! It's not just among MBA graduates either, but all the way throughout the work force. The work week is now lengthening for all employees." Ten years ago, 77% of middle executives spent over 50 hours each week on their jobs and 26% spent over 60 hours. (Roper Organization for U.S. News & World Report, 1/16/89) Many today are becoming utterly consumed by their work. The hours are terrible. There is really never a day off. The phone rings continually. The typical routine is scary. The word that describes many of us today is the word "hurried." I read of a salesman who recently got a second cellular phone for his car because the first cellular phone was connected to a fax machine that was regularly in use producing information. He needed a second one in order to have conversations with people. Do you see the terror? What if an opportunity is missed? What if something goes by that cannot be grabbed? We hear phrases such as "Seize the day," "You only go around once in life," "Make it happen." The emphasis is that the outcome depends on our actions, and all will fail unless you hustle. People in Japan, the most workaholic nation on earth (they produce 10% of the world's exports with only 2% of its population), have added a new word to their vocabulary: karoshi. It is a medical term meaning "death from overwork," and refers to what happens when out-of-balance work habits disrupt a person's normal life rhythms. The resulting buildup of fatigue exacerbates pre-existing hypertension and arteriosclerosis and can lead to a fatal breakdown. One karoshi victim who made the headlines was a 39- year-old police sergeant who worked double shifts for an entire month. His case is by no means an isolated one, since some experts estimate that tens of thousands of Japanese every year become seriously ill or die from overwork. It's ironic when you think about it. God designs this wonderful thing called human labor. He offers it as a gift that is meant to help us feel a sense of purpose on this earth, to feel useful, a gift that is meant to challenge us to identify, develop and stretch our God-given potential. But as with most of God's gifts, we human beings find ways to turn God's good gifts into bad gifts. Throughout the course of human history countless men and women have done just that with the good gift of human labor. The result is that multitudes of people have reduced the broad horizons of human reality to one narrow dimension: Work! People start ordering their very lives around their work. They order their relationships. They wound their spouses and children because of their work. They ruin their bodies because of their work. What is most frightening is that often they lose their souls because of work. It is to the problem of the worship of work, the sanctification of success that we turn this morning. The 4th Commandment continues the pattern of teaching us how to so order our lives so that worship of the Covenant-making, Covenant-keeping God becomes the ordering priority in our life.
The First Commandment tells us who to worship, the Second how to worship, the Third the manner of worship... now the Fourth the time of worship. In order to protect us from idolatry, to keep us from attaching ultimate value and worship to that which is not God, God directs us away from a 24/7 mentality which permeates human life. We can so easily be dominated by work, defining our lives by the adage, "You are what you do," thereby usurping the God in whose image we are made. This idolatrous potential is particularly evident in our "workaholic" and "economaniac" society. The command to rest from work on the Sabbath day forces a pause in this compulsive process and reminds us that time, like the earth itself, belongs to God, as does everything by which we are able to create wealth. The Sabbath is a day of rest The word sabbath means rest; it is a transliteration from the Hebrew. We need rest because work is good. Some folks regard work as drudgery. The old bumper stick which says: "I owe, I owe, its off to work I go" betrays the wrong view of work. When we drag themselves to work, hating every minute of it, so disgruntled that TGIF becomes our motto, we’ve forget that work is not an evil foisted upon us, but a divine mandate, because creation itself, although tainted by sin, is still good. Notice the command here: "Six days you SHALL labor..." This begins with a command that we will work. In this we participate in God’s creation; we celebrate that what God has made is good and it is enjoyable to create. The warning comes if that is all we see and do. There is a cycle to productivity which demands rest. Work is not all we do; it does not so define us that to cease work is to cease to live. A study was done a few years ago by the U.S. Army in which they observed several soldiers in various conditions to determine at what stage these individuals achieved the maximum level of output. The Army discovered that after 7 consecutive days of hard work, each soldier's performance dropped. But the most interesting discovery the army made was that, even though the soldiers' performance level dropped, the soldiers themselves were unaware of it. They thought they were still operating at maximum level. Maybe this is why so many of us think we don't need to rest... that it is somehow LAZY to take a break every once in a while. But God’s command to rest is not for rest's sake. We need rest because worship is crucial The command here to observe is active You are probably more familiar with the Decalogue as it is found in Exodus 20 where the command is to remember. These words are synonymous. To remember is more than a mental act; it is more than just not forgetting. It means to meditate upon, consider the implications of something. The word "observe" here, like "remember," is active. To "observe" is to guard like a soldier, to exercise great care. This term is often used in the context of the Covenantal worship: to observe the Law is to do it. The command to observe means to keep the day holy. "Holy" conveys something sacred, that is, it is something set apart, made special, or different. How is this done? It is done certainly by the peculiar action of corporate worship. It is seen in gathering together not for our immediate benefit and advancement, but as a body turning our focus away from ourselves to the God who created us, who has redeemed us. It is sad how views of Sunday have changed. Our great-grandfathers called Sunday the "Holy Sabbath." Our grandfathers called it the "Sabbath." Our fathers called it "Sunday." And we call it the "weekend." Things have really changed when it comes to the way we think of this day. To many people Sunday is just another day. Thomas Watson said that our need for a Sabbath is like the failing dust of the world has clogged the wheels of our affections, that they can scarce move toward God; the Sabbath comes, and oils the wheels of our affections, and they work swiftly on. To put that in a contemporary idiom, our hard drives are filled with bits of data throughout the week. For that reason we must constantly back up the hard drive, delete useless files, protect against virus and when necessary, defrag. William Wilberforce was a 19th century member of the English Parliament. He is widely remembered for his legislative labors that eventually led to the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire. What most people don't know about Wilberforce is that, by his own admission, he had a terrible time controlling his own ambition. In one particular time in his life, when his runaway ambition was not only threatening his life but also his soul, he wrote in his journal, " Blessed be to God for the day of rest and religious occupation wherein earthly things assume their true size and ambition is stunted." When two of Wilberforces colleagues committed suicide, he wrote, "With peaceful Sundays those strings would never have snapped" ...as they did in the case of his friends with over-tension. Wilberforce understood the wisdom of the 4th Commandment. He knew that the Sabbath day was meant by God to be a kind of built-in "checks and balances" that enabled him to keep his career in proper perspective, so he would learn that everything in life was really not related to his winning of political arguments and races. The Sabbath is a day to reflect on God’s creation We need to reflect on God's work in the past. Where does this one in seven principle come from? It is rooted in the order of creation itself, so that we order our lives, just as God worked for six and rested on the seventh day. Again there is a slight difference between Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. In Exodus 20 the reason is given by going back to creation itself. We need to reflect on God's work in the present. In the Bible, the Sabbath is a summary of God's relationship with His people. In Exodus 31 it is a sign of the Covenant. In Isaiah 58 how the Sabbath is treated indicates how God is treated. There are more regulations, more discussion in the Old Testament regarding the Sabbath than any other law. But we must not forget that God created the Sabbath rest because He had finished His work. It was not simply because He was tired. The primary purpose behind the Sabbath is not its usefulness to us. The most commonly held purpose behind the Sabbath is its practical utility for those who follow it. After all, it only makes sense that people should take one day off from work. God is only looking out for our best interests. But once more, as so often is the case with the other Commandments, this explanation is human-centered rather than a God-centered way of looking at it. There is much more to the Sabbath institution than the service it renders to us. The Protestant Reformers argued that the primary purpose of the Sabbath was to advance the kingdom of Christ. The main point of all of God's laws, including this Sabbath decree, is theological. It teaches us something about God, not something about ourselves. The Sabbath is a sign-bearing gift from God. The Sabbath is a day to refelct on God’s redemption This aspect is what is brought out in Deuteronomy 5. Notice what Moses points to when speaking to this new generation in verse 15: "Remember that you were slaves..." The mighty hand and the outstretched arm of God were not wearied by the work of creation. They are full of strength. God's rest was not for recuperation, but for exultation. Now the same God has shown His power not just to create but also to save. So the focus of the Sabbath is on God, not only as the source of creation, but also as the source of salvation. "Your God brought you up out of the land of Egypt ... THEREFORE he commanded you to keep the sabbath day." One day of rest in every seven, kept holy to the Lord, reminds us and shows the world that GOD is our creator and our deliverer; we did not make ourselves; we cannot sustain or save ourselves without His grace. Christ's death and resurrection is why there is a change from Saturday to Sunday, why we move from a creation ordinance to a redemption sign. In the New Testament and with the early Church there was a radical change that took place almost without comment since it was universally understood why. The day of worship and of rest became Sunday. The reason? The Resurrection! It celebrated the new creation, the new beginning. The Sabbath became the Lord’s Day as it was the day in which God with a mighty hand brought us out of slavery and made us His sons. But in our sinfulness we fight against this everyday. This sense of resting in Christ is at the core of the Sabbath, but we so often respond to the Sabbath with typical Pharisaical tendencies. We want earn our own rest, rather than relying on another to give us what we need. This was at the heart of Jesus’s continual confrontations with the Jewish leaders over the issue of Sabbath observance. In Matthew 12 Jesus confronts the misconceptions the leaders have regarding the Sabbath and in so doing He explains what the Sabbath is all about. Jesus's disciples, walking through a field of grain, take some grain and eat it, clearly breaking the rules regarding the Sabbath. The religious leaders point this out, to which Jesus responds. "The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath." Christ is the interpretative key to understand what the Sabbath is all about. If you seek to understand the Sabbath apart from Christ, it will lose its meaning. But notice the context, what comes before this healing on the Sabbath in Matthew 11. Jesus invites people to share in His rest. As Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, He can then call people to come to Him for rest. The burden imposed on the people through the myriad of Sabbath regulations handed down by the religious leaders was a burden none could keep. The scribes detailed 1,521 things that you couldn't do on the Sabbath. You couldn't prepare a meal on the Sabbath. You couldn't move a lamp on the Sabbath. You couldn't tie a knot on the Sabbath. You couldn't light a fire on the Sabbath. You couldn't walk more than 3000 feet from your home on the Sabbath. A radish could be dipped in salt, but it could not be left there, since that would turn it into a pickle, and that was considered work. A man could lift up his child, but he could not lift up his child if his child had a stone in his hand, because that was considered a burden. If a person got ill, steps could be taken to keep the man from getting worse, but not to cure him, or make him better. You could not rescue a drowning man on a Sabbath. If bit by a flea, you could not slap it, for to do so would be to kill the flea and that was hunting. But rather than being slaves to the unending regulations, Jesus offered rest, as He takes upon Himself the fulfillment of the Law. The Gospel promise of another one in our place, freedom by God’s outstretched arm, is the promise we see in the Fourth Commandment. The Fourth Commandment points to the importance of trust Christ as the Lord of the Sabbath. The critical importance of resting in God establishing a relationship with us is what the author of Hebrews describes in Hebrews 4. Using Israel in the wilderness as the example, he explains why so many of them died in the wilderness, having never reached the Promised Land. The real issue for Israel wandering in the desert was one of faith. The reason they did not enter the rest of the Promised Land was not that they were not sufficiently obedient, nor that they did not offer enough sacrifices or perform enough ceremonies. They were barred eternally from God's rest because of unbelief. They refused to locate their rest in God alone. They refused to declare that their salvation was entirely in His hands and refused to believe that they were at God's mercy and that God would graciously provide. They took matters into their own hands and decided to save themselves. When they could not do this, they complained about God. Notice, both the believers in the wilderness and believers today have the same Gospel preached to them (verse 2). We are faced with the same decision, the same crisis event. The unbelievers in the wilderness had known the promise and had participated in the rituals and ceremonies that constantly reminded them of that promise. Yet they did not respond to the Gospel, but simply took it for granted and then, when times grew tough, decided to make it on their own. This process is familiar to many of us who have seen family members and friends - maybe even ourselves - go from a Christian home to a disregard for the things of God and then, finally, to a complete rejection of Christ, in practice if not in theory. Hebrews 4:8-10 is the key to the entire passage. This is what the Sabbath points toward: Anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His. The lost generation failed to enter into the Promised Land, not because they failed to enter into the promise, but because they would not stop trying to enter the land by their own efforts and scheming. The Sabbath is a day to refresh ourselves in worship On this first day of the week, the day of Christ's Resurrection, God's people are to come together for the purpose of worshipping God together in community. It is here we are reminded to rest - not just stop work one day out of seven, but rest from spending our lives trying to declare to ourselves, to our families, to our friends, and to our God that we are really good, really worthy of God’s favor. On this day we stop and hear the comforting words of Christ: "Stop working yourself to Hell, trust in Me. The rest I offer is a gift; it is My death in your place. It is not a rest in rules and regulations; it is a rest of faith in the finished work on the Cross." For over 160 hours a week you and I are subjected to a constant barrage of deceptive and often profane creeds and slogans and jingles that take a toll on our value system. They beat us down and rob us of God's perspective on life. And God says you need to come together. We are all prone to wander from the true course, to forget who God is, to forget why we are here, to forget what life is really all about and what the source is of true meaning and value. When we allow work to interfere, family to interfere, leisure to interfere, we are rejecting the benefit of the Gospel, of a Sabbath rest, of hearing the Gospel and remembering God's act of creation and redemption. If there is but one principle to remember from this, if there is one thing you need to remember, it is that nothing, absolutely nothing, should stand in your way of remembering that your rest has been won. You may get further ahead on that school assignment, you may get that promotion, you may get that good feeling of being with family, but you won't get the assurance that Christ died for you; you won't hear what really matters for your eternal destiny. And I want to remind those of you with children, every single time you demonstrate inconsistency in your worship attendance on Sundays, you are sending a very clear message to your kids. And every time you demonstrate consistency you are modeling before your children an example that will almost always bear spiritual fruit later on in life. But there is more to honoring the Sabbath day than closing up shop, possibly doing deeds of mercy, and drawing near to God in Worship. We don't need more regulations to tells us we fail each and every day. We are all Sabbath breakers at the core, not just because we do things on Sunday that are displeasing to God, but because we'd rather try to work than trust; we'd rather prove ourselves than trust Another to die in our place. It all comes down to the fact that we all need to hear the Gospel proclaimed to us by someone else each and every week. Reapplying the Gospel to your life in your Sabbath observance is what is crucial. Today, if you hear God's voice in Scripture, do not harden your hearts to His offer of a rest, a Sabbath. Your sins are taken up by Christ; you do not have to prove yourself to God. You are accepted by Him because of what Christ has done in your place. One man challenged another to an all-day wood chopping contest. The challenger worked very hard, stopping only for a brief lunch break. The other man had a leisurely lunch and took several breaks during the day. At the end of the day, the challenger was surprised and annoyed to find that the other fellow had chopped substantially more wood than he had. "I don't get it," he said. "Every time I checked, you were taking a rest, yet you chopped more wood than I did." "But you didn't notice," said the winning woodsman, "that I was sharpening my ax when I sat down to rest." |
