Tag Archives: Lord’s Day

Responding to God’s Love

Heart Tree

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” – 1 John 4:10

Well, after a length hiatus from the blog, we pick up just where we left off. Last year we were in the middle of looking at what love is in light of who God is. God is love, therefore our understanding of love must be derived from him. The love of God for his people is most clearly expressed in sending his Son to suffer and die in our place. In his work, Christ was completely pure, without sin or thought of himself. He came exclusively to do the will of the Father for his glory. When this act of pure love is applied to one of God’s creatures and his or her heart is renewed, love for God is a necessary result. From this newly awakened love toward God flows our love for our fellow man as well.

In the last post love was defined as follows: an expression of feelings of affection according to God’s law with the other’s best interest at heart. The goal of this definition is to keep love from being a nebulous fuzzy feeling. Love is an expression, and as such can be expressed well or poorly. To properly consider love, we first have to think about how man might properly express his love for his Savior. Since love is expressed according to God’s law, we can easily define proper love from man to his Savior by considering the first table of the law, or the first four commandments:

Having no other gods before him. The first commandment is not dealing with ranking, but geography. There are to be no other gods in the Lord’s presence. Since God is omnipresent, or present everywhere, there are to be no other gods, period. That means that to love God is to hold him as pre-eminent in every part of our lives. Anything that pushes God to the background is an act of hatred toward him.

Not making an idol. The second commandment deals with how we serve God. To love God is to serve him as he has commanded. If God says no drunkenness, that is how we will serve him. If God says keep the marriage bed pure, that is what we will do. We do it because God has loved us first, and our gratitude is expressed in our total obedience.

Not taking his name in vain. To love God is to acknowledge him as high and exalted by honoring his name. To make God’s name common, or even a curse word, is to insult him. But we can insult God with our actions as well. When we cause others to speak ill of God because of our actions, we cheapen his work as Redeemer.

Honoring the Sabbath. To love God is to recognize him as your Creator, and the One who led you out of your enslavement to sin. These are the things the Sabbath points to, as well as the future rest that will be ours in heaven. To treat the Lord’s Day as another day for recreation is to slight the picture of the eternal rest we will enjoy in heaven.

So love, originating from God is expressed properly by his people in following his commandments. And all the people who are saved will inevitably love their Savior.

What Can I Do on the Sabbath?

Ten Commandments

In this post, I’m going to assume you are on board with the idea that Sabbath observance continues to be binding in the New Testament church. If not, you can review my posts here, here and here. The question for today is how to set apart the Sabbath as holy as New Testament believers. Whenever you start talking about setting apart the Sabbath, the main question many people want to solve is whether or not their particular activity of choice would be permissible on the Lord’s Day. “Is it okay for me to do activity X on the Sabbath?” Other people have made artificial lines in the sand in an effort to maintain the sanctity of this day. I think we can do better. I think Scripture gives us a very clear picture of what the Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, should look like. The directives of the Bible on this commandment can be broken down into three main areas.

First, the fourth commandment clearly states that our daily labors are to cease. The Lord commands that on his Sabbath we “shall not do any work.” It is directed at individuals. Of course, works of necessity and mercy are not included in this command to rest, but by and large, we are to cease from our labors.

Second, the fourth commandment also states that the daily labors of those under our care should cease. From children to servants to cattle to foreigners, none are to do any work. The best picture of the implementation of this commandment comes from Neh. 13:15-22. There Nehemiah forcefully implements Sabbath rest, not only for the people of Israel, but also for the Tyrian merchants who tried to set up shop outside the gates. He understood: the Sabbath was a day of rest.

Third, as is so often the case in Scripture, mere external action is not a sufficient expression of our love for God. It must be accompanied by the appropriate motivation. Is. 58:13-14 tell us that on the Sabbath day our hearts are to be turned aside from our own pleasures and instead directed toward delighting in the Lord.

With these broad-stroke principles laid out in Scripture, we can determine the appropriateness of many, if not most, activities on the Sabbath. We simply translate the principles into questions and subject any activity to them: 1. Am I working? 2. Am I making anyone else work? 3. Am I turning from my own pleasure and delighting in the Lord? So long as we answer honestly I think these questions will take care of 95% of the activities in question. I will give only one example:

Can I eat in a restaurant on the Sabbath after morning church? Well, assuming there is no emergency crisis at your house you can ask the three questions. Are you working? No. Are you making others work? Yes. Are you delighting in the Lord? Maybe. For the Christian asking the three questions helps us see there is something in behavior that goes against God’s instruction. We are causing others to work and the 4th commandment says we should not. If our actions violate God’s commandment the Christian is not free to act in that way.

Do not forget. The Christian obeys God’s laws evangelically. What I mean is, we do not obey because we are hoping for God’s approval. Instead, we know and believe what God has done to make us acceptable, so we delight in being able to obey him. In Rom. 7:24 Paul, in agony of spirit cries out about how wretched a man he is. He does not cry this way because he has to obey God’s commandments. He cries out this way because he continually disobeys the commandments. So ask the three questions about your choices of activity on the Sabbath and be prepared to delight yourself in obeying the Lord.

The Purpose of the Sabbath

Bible Open

In our consideration of the Sabbath seen that the fourth commandment is part of the moral law given by God. These laws reflect the very character of God and turning against them is to turn against God. This moral law is summarized in the Ten Commandments (Cf. Deut. 4:13). Since the Sabbath is part of the Decalogue, this commandment is also binding for today. For the sake of time, I am assuming the arguments for the transfer of the Old Testament Sabbath from the seventh day to the Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, on the first day of the week. I do that so we can take time to understand the purpose for God giving the fourth commandment instead.

There are three main reasons why God gives us the Sabbath:

First, Exodus 20:8-11 teaches us that God gives us the Sabbath so we might imitate his rest after he had finished his creative work. Each week again, we remember God’s rest and imitate him. Our rest draws us back to the six days of creation when God made all things. He is the creator of all things and therefore is Lord of all things. Nothing in this world falls outside the realm of God’s sovereign power. Considering this truth helps us to remember our obligation to him.

Second, Deuteronomy 5:12-15 teaches us to remember something else: the Exodus. There Moses says Israel is to obey the Sabbath because God led them out of Egypt. In the New Testament economy we have a similar exodus experience. It does not involve sand, tents and Jericho, yet the exodus is just as significant. By God’s grace, we are led out of our bondage to sin to the blessed hope of eternal redemption. We are led out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light (Cf. Col. 1:13). On the Sabbath we are called to remember our redemption.

Third, because of our propensity to be satisfied with hollow, outward obedience, God also directs our motives for the day. In Isaiah 58:13-14, we are told we ought not delight in our own pleasure but instead delight in the Lord. The function of Sabbath is, in fact, to help us turn from our normal orientation toward the Lord. We know from Romans 12:1-2 that all of life is worship to God, but in a special way, God sets aside the Sabbath for the purpose of worship: a special day for delighting in the Lord.

The Sabbath, then, functions as that weekly reminder of our eternal obligation to the Lord because we are his creatures, his gracious redemption of our souls from Satan’s kingdom and the worship we should give him on this special holy day. So what happens when we neglect the Sabbath? We eliminate the God-given reminder of who we are to live for. Instead of that weekly, central reminder that God is the author of all time, God becomes one of the choices we may make when it comes to using our time. We will work when we want, play when we want, travel when we want, sing when we want, and worship when we want, if at all. Skeptical? Just look around and ask yourself whether the church has flourished or faltered since she turned her back on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath and My Family

bell tower

When I moved to Canada in 1985, all the shopping centers were still closed on Sunday. I don’t think anyone had the faintest idea why, but they were closed nonetheless. Now, in the church, we have the same situation. We commend Chick Fill-A for being closed on Sunday, but at the same time we’re a bit disappointed because now we have to spend more by going to Appleby’s for our Sunday lunch. We have lost our understanding of the significance of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath. You, parents, are the ones who must be about making Sunday the Lord’s Day again.

The point of this post is not to address the issue of the theology of the Sabbath. Other people have done a very good job at it. Iain Campbell, Walter Chantry, Ryan McGraw, Joseph Pipa and others have made a thorough biblical case for the continuing application of the 4th commandment for the Christian. What I want to do is think through the “why” and “how” of teaching our children about the Christian Sabbath.

First, “Why?” If I was to boil down the significance of the Lord’s Day to one idea it is this: God has given us Sunday to continually re-orient us in the use of our time. Christian worship can easily become one of our weekly activities. We work, watch football, do homework, visit friends, and we also manage to fit in church. God knows the weakness of our frame and gives us one day in seven where everything stops. We have to get everything else in our week done in six days because we know that on the seventh, we don’t work, neither do we cause anyone else to work. It is God’s tithe on our time: all the time we have belongs to God and we should use it to glorify him. It is a gift from God reminding us we are blessed when our hope is in him (Ps. 146:5).

Second, “How?” There are two ways we mock the Lord’s Day. First, by not giving it any thought, and second by turning it into a checklist. The way to avoid these extremes is by setting some foundational truths before our children about the Lord’s Day:

  1. God made the Sabbath as part of his creation, before sin even entered the world (Gen. 2:3). That means we are all to obey this commandment
  2. On Sunday, we are not to work, neither should we cause others to work. If we need to make changes in our families to conform to this commandment, make sure we can show our children they are required by God, not you.
  3. Obedience to the Sabbath demonstrates we trust God will take care of us. We are to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all other things will be given to us.
  4. There are exceptions to the Sabbath commandment to rest in the works of necessity and mercy.