You Must Rest in Him: What is the Sabbath, and are Christians required to observe it? Should we stay at home and not do any work around the house, or are we free to do what we please seven days a week? What if you're scheduled to work a shift on Sunday? Throughout the Gospels, Jesus refutes the legalistic interpretation of the Pharisees and their far-reaching rules for the Sabbath. Through this, we can see that the Sabbath is not a list of rules we're required to follow. Rather, it's an invitation to rest in and enjoy the Lord. Recorded on Feb 19, 2023, on Exodus 20:7 by Pastor David Parks.

Ten Commandments: Learning the Law of Love is a sermon series on the most influential legal code in human history. Why should we learn about the Ten Commandments today? Because they reveal God’s will for how human beings ought to live: to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. Ultimately, the law of love points us directly to Jesus.

Sermon Transcript

All year, we’re focusing on Learning the way of Jesus. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments. [Ten Commandments slide] Now, all of our sermon series this year are really trying to answer the question: if the gospel is true, how then should we live? The Ten Commandments, as part of God’s moral law, reveal to us how God wants individual people to live and, by extension, what he wants for our families and societies as well. Ultimately, this new way of life can be summed up as learning to love the Lord our God, heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbor as ourself. The Ten Commandments are really a law of love. So far, we’ve worked through the first three commands, which focus on our vertical relationship with God, including 1. You shall have no other God’s before or besides the one true God. 2. You shall not make any image or idol of any created thing for use in worshipping the one true God. 3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, or bear the name of God in a vain or empty way. Today, we have the final command relating directly to our vertical relationship with God before we move next week to our more horizontal relationships with others. So today, we’ll consider the fourth command, to keep the Sabbath day holy. What does that mean? Well, all of these commands teach us profound wisdom for how God intends our lives to work. But for several reasons, this command is especially hard for us to understand/obey in our modern American/Western culture. However, if we learn this countercultural Sabbath way of life, it will not only guard us from a life of over-work, but also a life of over-worry. Why? Because, a Sabbath way of life is a life of love/joy/true and lasting peace. If you have a Bible/app, please open to Exodus 20:8. We’ll read through this and then unpack it together.

Exodus 20:8-11 (NIV), “8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” 

As we’ve said, the book of Exodus, written about 4,300 years ago, by Moses, the prophet and leader of ancient Israel, describes a key turning point of history when God rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and entered into a covenant relationship with them, which included giving them the Law. Thinking about the context of this command, I can’t help but wonder how the ancient people of Israel would have ...