Bible Text: Deuteronomy 5:12-15 | Pastor: Eric Danielson | Series: For Our Good | Lots of things in this life make us tired – ongoing trials and suffering, trying to keep up with everyone else running the rat race, trying to measure up to God… Life has a way of beating you down and it’s an unending cycle. How are we suppose to make it through?

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The Gift of Sabbath
Deuteronomy 5:12-15

I’ve shared this story before, but it fits well with what we’re talking about this morning – In 2004, before we had kids, Amy and I went on a vacation to Cancun at a hotel right on the beach. So we enjoyed swimming and laying in the sun and I enjoyed snorkeling and looking for shells and fish. One day there were warnings about a strong undertow, so I decided to go snorkeling close to shore to be safe. I went along the shore and got to an area that was roped off because of the dangerous undertow, but as I went along, I actually found that area to be the calmest waters I had seen.

So I explored – it maybe got to waist deep but then it actually got more shallow the further out I went and it was in that shallow area that I found more shells. But the calm water made me less cautious than I should have been because just past the shallow area it got deep very quickly and the undertow from the shallow to the deep water in that area was very strong and before I knew it, I got pulled out to where it was over my head. At that same time, I hit the break point where the big waves were crashing down on me.

So there I was, in water that was over my head, caught in the under tow, with big ocean waves crashing over my head. For the first time ever, I began to panic. I could swim, but I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to beat the undertow, plus, I had flippers, goggles and a snorkel that I borrowed from a friend that I was trying to hold on to and they were impeding my swimming ability. I was exerting all my energy to just try to stay afloat.

In a way, I think that describes the way a lot of us feel in life sometimes. We get pounded by stressful situations and face difficult trials and ongoing struggles. Or we get weary of running the rat race, always trying to keep up with everyone else or get ahead when it comes to career, home and kids. We can also get tired and overwhelmed by trying to measure up to God – to win and keep his approval.

Like waves of the ocean crashing over your head and the undertow trying to pull you out to sea, life has a way of relentlessly beating down on you. It seems like an unending cycle and it’s clear that though it might lighten up for a time it won’t really ever go away. How are we supposed to make it through without going crazy? Without giving up and throwing in the towel? How do we go beyond just trying to survive and actually live purposeful lives of faith, strength and courage?

Well, God has given us a gift that was intended to help us through all this. But it’s a gift that is often neglected… We are continuing to walk through the Ten Commandments and this morning we find ourselves at the fourth commandment where we’ll see a gift of great value that God wants us to learn to embrace.

Read Deuteronomy 5:12-15
Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. 15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

My hope is that we’ll begin to see the Sabbath as a valuable gift this morning. The Sabbath day and this command to observe the Sabbath is often quite confusing. In 21st century American Christianity, most of us are probably aware of the concept of a Sabbath. Most of us probably think that by not going to work on Sunday but going to church instead we are somehow observing the Sabbath, but that’s about the extent to which most people think about it, and because of that, most people miss the fullness of this gift God has given.

The first time you read about the gift of the Sabbath is in Exodus 20:8-11 when God first gave the Ten Commandments to the people on Mt. Sanai: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep 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, 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. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

So right away you can see some similarities between this passage and Deuteronomy 5 – observing the Sabbath means you do your work – farming, building, cleaning, baking, whatever it is – you do that for six days, but on the seventh day you don’t. You rest from your work. Everyone in the community is to rest – rich, poor, young old, slave, free, human, animal – everyone rests on that day. Everyone keeps it holy by setting it apart from the other days of the week.

In ancient Israel, this didn’t fall on any particular day of the week that we know of, because they didn’t have any names for the days of the week. There wasn’t such thing as Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the Jewish calendar. There was the first day, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day, and Sabbath. So the Sabbath didn’t fall on Saturday or Sunday as we know it, it fell on the seventh day – the only day with a name… the Sabbath. The rest of the days were work days – designated by numbers. So the Jewish week really revolved around the seven day cycle of the Sabbath.

Now, this passage in Exodus is a little bit different than the account in Deuteronomy in that it tells us where this pattern comes from. Here Moses points out that the seven-day cycle of the Sabbath is rooted in God’s works of creation. For six days God created and on the seventh day he rested. And in the covenant he made with his people at Mt. Sinai, that was the same pattern he wanted them to follow. This was a gift to them and we find out why he wanted them to do it back in Deuteronomy chapter 5.

Deuteronomy 5:14 says: “the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” And in verse 15 it says: “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”

So besides just being a day when they were to rest from their work, the Sabbath was to be a day of worship and reflection when they remembered two things: they were to remember how bad things were when they were slaves in Egypt. During that time all they ever did was work, work, work – every day of every week – long, hard, wearisome labor, day after day with no break. There was no day of rest. But they were also to remember that God had rescued them from there with his mighty hand and outstretched arm. They were to remember that God had saved them from their slavery and never-ending work. A friend pointed out to me that God wanted them to know that he was a much different kind of master than Pharaoh. He was a master who would give them the rest that they needed – a master who rescues his people from hopelessness, bondage, and the unrelenting cycle of weariness.

So the Sabbath was both a physical rest and a spiritual rest. A time for spiritual reflection and recalibration – remembering that God has rescued us and in the midst of all our work, it is always God who is working for us, not just we who are doing the work. Yes, we have to work and rightly done, work can be very meaningful and give purpose, fulfillment and joy, but our lives don’t ultimately depend on us and our work, they depend on God – a good God who rescues and gives us rest.

Now, the Israelites unfortunately went through times where they ignored this gift and didn’t observe the Sabbath – that usually coincided with times when they forgot about God and relied on their own strength or the strength of foreign allies instead, which grieved the heart of God and made them weak and susceptible, just like every other nation. But they also went through times where they elevated the gift of the Sabbath too much and turned it into a burden. They gutted it of its purpose, and turned it into a legalistic requirement to try to measure up and earn God’s approval. Rather than being a blessing, it became a burden to the people and the day of rest essentially became another day of work – just a different kind of work.

This is what they were doing in the time of Christ and Jesus exposed this error on a number of occasions. One of the clearest I think is in Mark 2:27-28 where Jesus allowed his disciples to pick heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath – a practice that was considered to be a violation of the Sabbath laws. The Pharisees were very upset and confronted him about this and Jesus responded by saying: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” In his commentary, R. Alan Cole explains that “In origin the sabbath was God’s merciful provision for His creatures. Humanity was certainly not created simply to exemplify and observe an immutable theological principle of sabbath-keeping, as some rabbinic extremists were quite ready to uphold.” So Jesus pointed out that he allowed his disciples to pick heads of grain on the Sabbath because the Sabbath was given to be a blessing to man, not just an empty religious requirement that man did to try to measure up before God.

Furthermore, in verse 28 he pointed out another important aspect of the Sabbath, saying: “the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” In other words, the Sabbath was created to bless man and to serve Christ, by ultimately pointing people to seek him as their Sabbath rest. Because you can take a day off every week to rest from your work and still never find rest for your soul. The only way you can ultimately find rest on the Sabbath, or any other day of the week for that matter, is if you find rest in Jesus Christ himself Jesus paid the price for our sin and lived a perfect life of righteousness on our behalf, and when we turn to him in faith we are released from the burden of having to try to measure up to God – Christ has already done that for us.

So the Sabbath is an amazing gift from God for the rest and rejuvenation we need, both physically and spiritually to stay afloat and live with purposefulness, courage and strength in this world. And God wants us to embrace it.

I want you to think of me adrift at sea with the waves crashing over my head and the undertow pulling me out deeper and deeper… I was beginning to panic and think I was going to drown when all of a sudden I felt something – it was the rope that had been used to rope off that dangerous area and it was connected to a floating buoy out in the deep water that was connected to another rope that went all the way to shore. That rope was a life saver. It provided me with a way to rest and a way to retreat from the crashing waves. It gave me something to hold onto so I could find rest and get my bearings. And even though I was still in the middle of all those waves, it gave me the peace and strength that I needed because I knew if I kept holding on and following the rope, it would eventually bring me back to shore.

That’s what God wants the Sabbath to be for you – a way for you to find rest and retreat from the weariness of life and strength to keep moving forward with hope. He’s given the gift of a day and a gift of the personal presence of Christ by his Spirit to give you and I the rest that we need. It’s a gift from God that’s for our good.

You may be overwhelmed by stress and the trials and struggles you’re facing in life… Like the Israelites, we can become slaves – only in this case, slaves to fear and anxiety and despair. God’s gift of Sabbath can give you rest and fill you with hope again as you take time to worship, remember that he’s in control, and connect with Christ who will be with you always. As our Sabbath rest, Jesus tells us in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Or maybe you’re super busy and weary of the rat race – always trying to keep up and get ahead, with your kids, your home, your career. We can become slaves to our own work and ambition, and we can forget about God and begin relying on our own strength. God’s gift of Sabbath can give you the rest you need to realign your life and values to his and remember that it’s not you who is responsible for what you achieve in the past, present, or future – it’s God. He’s in control and he wants you to trust in him and quit striving so hard all the time. In Psalm 46:10-11 God says, “Be still (cease striving), and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” 11 The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.”

Or you may be tired of always trying to measure up – to win and keep God’s approval by being a good person and fighting to defeat sin. We can become slaves in trying to be good and fight against sin. God’s gift of Sabbath can remind you that God has already rescued us from slavery to sin and guilt and set us free in Christ. So rather than trying to fight to win his approval, we can rest and learn how to trust in him. Isaiah 30:15 says, “For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, ‘In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.’” God already fights for us and we need to trust in him.

This gift of Sabbath is for our good and we need to learn to embrace it. On one hand we need to literally and physically take time for rest and purposeful worship and reflection – something most of us have a really hard time figuring out how to do. But my hope is that now you see a little more clearly how important it is to make it a priority. For most people this will be on Sundays, because that’s when we already meet for worship and most people already have a built-in day off from work. You might have to work on Sundays, but I encourage you to find another day to rest from your work so that you can take time to Sabbath. I encourage you to come to church where hopefully you will be able to connect with Christ and focus on him. I also encourage you to do something different than the normal daily grind for the rest of the day – take a nap, go for a walk, spend extra time in prayer and reflection, take time for your family. Be intentional about focusing your thoughts on God to rejuvenate your soul.

But like Jesus pointed out, the Sabbath isn’t just a day, it’s Jesus himself, and I believe we have the need to go to him for rest much more often than just one day a week. So I encourage you to cultivate a day by day, moment by moment relationship with him. It amazes me what people can go through on a daily basis when they stay connected with Jesus. He is the vine and we are the branches and we need to be connected to him in order to thrive and endure. Do you have a daily devotional time when you can retreat for prayer, reading and reflection? Are there other ways you can connect with him throughout the day – maybe listening to Christian music or sermons online?

Let us not become a people who are caught up in ceaseless striving, but rather people who embrace God’s gracious gift of rest in giving us the Sabbath.