but we're considering the public means of grace. And we began that study by considering the centrality of the local church. If the local church isn't central to you, then the public means of grace are not gonna be central to you. And yet, the Christian life, the normal Christian life, is that the local church is to be a priority for the New Testament believer. In fact, Pastor Don Lindblad, who I'm sorry you didn't get to hear preach, But he was saying to me recently, one of the Puritans apparently used to say something to the effect that if the church is not your mother, then God may not be your father. The point being that we're so connected to the church as God's people that it speaks something about which family, which spiritual family you're a part of. Well, following on that, if you remember how we ended that time, Kelly helped me out because he let me borrow a bicycle tire. You remember at the end, I held up a bicycle tire, and we talked about the spokes on that tire. And if we think about the church, each of the individual ministries of the church are like each of those spokes. So you can think about midweek service, and you can talk about agape feasts, or women's book studies, men's book studies, all those things. But what happens if you destroy the central hub of that wheel? What's going to happen to the spokes? They're all going to be destroyed. You're not going to have a tire left. that central hub of church life is the Lord's Day. If you take away the Lord's Day, if you don't make a priority of the Lord's Day, the local church isn't gonna be a priority either. And so what we're gonna be doing, God willing, is considering for three Wednesday nights the subject of the Lord's Day beginning tonight with the perpetuity of the Sabbath. That is, are we still obligated as New Testament Christians to obey the fourth commandment? That's the question that's before us. And of course, you know what my answer is gonna be. Yes, we are. I wanna prove it to you from the scriptures. I don't want you to just take my word for it. But I also want to, with that, talk about the centrality of the Lord's day, that it's supposed to be the central part of our week, as we're thinking through our weeks. So with that in view, you're in Exodus chapter 20, look at verses eight through 11. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work, you nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Let's ask for God's blessing upon our time. Father, through the merits of Christ, we ask that you pour out the Holy Spirit upon us, that the Spirit would be our illuminator, our teacher, and the one who applies to our hearts the things the scriptures say. So we pray that you'll help us to learn things that perhaps we've not learned before, and to renew our obedience to you for your glory and for the good of our souls. We ask in Jesus' name, amen. During the war between the states, on Wednesday evening, February the 17th, 1864, a 40 foot long submarine from the Confederate Army smashed into the side of a Union blockade vessel called the Housatonic, just outside of Charleston Harbor. There was a blockade that was set up there and Confederate intelligence had put together this submarine with a 17 foot long spar on the end of it and with gunpowder attached to the end. and they rammed it into the side of it, hoping to systematically remove all the blockade vessels that were there so they could then have access to England and get trade goods from them. On that night, this Confederate submarine, which is known as the Hunley, became the first submarine in history to ever sink another vessel during battle. But the only problem was not only did it sink the Housatonic, a few hours passed and the Hunley never returned to port. And it was understood that the eight-man crew that had to hand crank and propel it had perished at sea, but no one knew what had happened to it. As a matter of fact, it would be 131 years before the Hunley would ever be seen again. But among the many mysteries of the Hunley that it took to its watery grave was a question about her captain, a man whose name was George E. Dixon. Dixon, when the war had broke out between the states, he had enlisted with the 21st Alabama Infantry Regiment. On April the 6th, 1862, he fought at the famous Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. While he was in that battle, a Union mini-ball hit him in his hip. but it didn't kill him and it did severely injure him to the point that he would walk with a limp the rest of his life. But the rumor was, the legend was, that he had a $20 gold piece in his pocket and that the bullet had hit that gold piece and it saved his life. Well, the question was, George Dixon became the captain of the Hunley and he was there with it when it sank the Housatonic. So the question was, was his gold coin real? And did he have it on his person when the Hunley sank? If they ever found the Hunley, would they find his famous gold coin? Well, 131 years passed. On Wednesday, May the 3rd of the year 1995, divers who were funded by the novelist Clive Kustler found the Hunley. She was buried in 27 feet of water, about 1,000 feet away from where the wreck of the Housatonic had sat. It took five and a half years to raise the funding, get the permissions to raise it from its watery grave. And on Tuesday, August the 8th, Year 2000, it emerged from its watery grave, was taken over to a lab not far away, where it still is to this very day. Archaeologists began excavating the inside of the vessel which was completely filled with black silt, trying to recover the remains of the crew and any artifacts that went down with them. Lead archaeologist was a woman named Dr. Maria Jacobson. Her companions had nicknamed her Goldfinger. because on almost every single archaeological dig that she had been on before, she was always the first one to find gold. And so her companions were wondering, will she find Dixon's gold coin if it's indeed to be found? Well, sure enough, on Wednesday, May the 23rd, 2001, Dr. Jacobson was about to do what's called a block lift at the very front of the Hunley. There was this big, massive silt in front of her and they knew that George Dixon's remains were inside of that area. They'd cleared out a section below the area to slide in basically a piece of metal the size of a cookie sheet to do what was known as a block lift. Well, before you insert the sheet to make sure you don't disturb anything that's there as far as the artifacts or whatever, you take your gloved hands and you run your hands through the area below it to make sure nothing is harmed or destroyed. Well, Jacobson had her hands underneath this area when suddenly her countenance changed. And she said, I think I've got it. I bet you $100, this is it. And she pulled out her hand, And she had this big mound of silt on her hand. And she had asked for water to be run over that silt to gradually run away the layers so it would expose what was in her hand. And when all the silt was finally washed away, this is what was in her hand. The head side of George Dixon's coin. No, this is not the real one, children. If it was, I would have sold it on eBay a long time ago and paid off my house and everything else. But this is an authentic replica of that particular coin. You'll notice it's warped. It's warped from where the mini ball struck it. And then when she turned it on the backside, there was an inscription engraved upon it. Dixon had taken it to a jeweler to have them write something on the backside of the coin. And it said Shiloh. Do you remember he was struck by the bullet at the Battle of Shiloh, April 6th, 1862. And then he put my life preserver. And then he had his initials GED. For the first time ever, this coin had been recovered. You can actually go to Charleston, South Carolina and see it under lights and under guard, but you can see the real coin that was recovered, and it's worth, in terms of millions of dollars, I can't even begin to estimate. Now, maybe you're sitting there saying, I thought we were gonna talk about the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, and you've been talking about a coin in this obscure submarine. What in the world does this have to do with anything? Here was the point. Dr. Jacobson, when she found Dixon's lost coin, a wonderful treasure of great historical significance had been lost, buried under the sands of time. But now it had been recovered for future generations to be able to enjoy it and to look upon it. And I would submit that the Sabbath day is that same kind of thing. It is a treasure that God gave to man. He gave it to man on the seventh day of creation. After he created everything in the space of six days, he rested on the seventh day, and he didn't create anything else, but the irony is, by his very act of cessation, God created something. He created the Sabbath day and declared that it should be holy. But the problem is, why did he give this to us? Did he create us for the Sabbath day? Is that what the Bible tells us? He created the Sabbath for us. God knows we need rest. He knows we need refreshment. We need rest in our bodies. We need refreshment in our souls. We need time to set aside to worship God and to commune with Him. And therefore, He's given us one day out of every seven to do just that, to set aside every distraction, to give ourselves completely to His worship and to rest. So it's a gift, a love gift He's given to men that was meant for our good, not for our harm. The Puritans, who loved the Sabbath day, called the Lord's Day the market day of the soul. the day when you can feast on things of heaven while you're here on earth. As a matter of fact, have you ever noticed that the writer of Hebrews describes heaven as an eternal Sabbath? That is, that we're headed towards a time of rest, a perfect and eternal rest, and it's described as a Sabbath, so the Sabbath is meant to be a foretaste of that rest. So if you hate the Sabbath, you're gonna be miserable in heaven, is what it really comes down to. So the problem is, though, This treasure, just like Dixon's coin, is in danger of getting lost in every generation. In Jesus' own day, 2,000 years ago, the Sabbath day had been lost. It was buried under the rubbish, the muck, of man-made Jewish traditions. As we'll see here in a little bit, the Pharisees had literally come up with 1,000, I'm not exaggerating when I say that, literally 1,000 man-made rules. If you really wanna keep the Sabbath day holy, then do all this. And you know what it did? It made the Sabbath day the most burdensome, dreaded day of the entire week, because whenever you add to the Word of God, you subtract from the Word of God. And so it made it miserable. So Jesus, in his ministry, very deliberately cleared away the muck of Jewish tradition to recover the pristine nature of the Sabbath and return it to its original intention. Today, 2,000 years later, What do you think the Sabbath is buried under today? Is it buried under Jewish legalism? What's it buried under? Anybody have a guess? Well, good, good. It is a kind of dirt, yes. NFL, yes, it's buried under the NFL. But no, what I would actually say is it's buried under American lawlessness. and it needs to be recovered from that. Even evangelical, what we call antinomianism, because the idea that you have to obey the Ten Commandments as a Christian is viewed as legalism. In fact, if you say anything about the Sabbath, just say the word in front of some Christians, and you will suddenly get dirty looks. I've literally been preaching in the pulpit before, and had a visitor come in, and I just said the word Sabbath. I didn't expound anything about it, just said the word Sabbath from the pulpit, and immediately the countenance of the man changed, and he gave this angry look at his wife. I'm like, well, dude, I hadn't even begun to say anything yet. What if I really expounded upon the Sabbath day? But that's where we are in this day and age. Well, I want to show you the perpetuity of the Sabbath and prove it to you from the Scriptures themselves. And so, because the reality is, if you know anything about Galatians chapter 4, Colossians chapter 2, there's certain passages that you may question, don't these things seem to say that the Sabbath is no longer for the new covenant? As a matter of fact, there are some Christians who would believe that if you believe in the perpetuity of the Sabbath today, that's like saying that you have to be circumcised if you're a Gentile, or have to eat kosher diets and things like that. But over the years, as I've meditated on the subject, I've actually come to conclude that those who would say, deny the perpetuity of the Sabbath, the burden of proof is on them, rather upon those who would say, we believe in the perpetuity of the Sabbath. And you realize that the majority of Christians who've lived for the last 2,000 years would say amen to that? because the majority of them held to the view that Sunday was the Christian Sabbath, the New Covenant Sabbath. And that's true whether you're an Anglican, or a Methodist, or a Congregationalist, or a Presbyterian, or a Baptist. Our Baptist forefathers in 1677 wrote two whole paragraphs in their Confession of Faith about the Sabbath day. They believed in it, and all the officers of our association of churches believe in the perpetuity of the Sabbath day, and all the officers of our church believe in the perpetuity. So, I hope you'll be convinced as well. So, if I'm going to make the argument for its perpetuity, how do I do so? I want to do so under three simple headings. First of all, we're going to see that the Sabbath is a creation ordinance. Secondly, the Sabbath is a part of the Indivisible Decalogue. What's the Decalogue? Someone tell me. Ten commandments, the ten words. And third, the Sabbath was recovered by the Lord Jesus. So let's consider those three things. First of all, The Sabbath is a creation ordinance. Look at verse 11 of our text. God himself, when he's given the Ten Commandments, supplies the reason why Israel was to keep the Sabbath holy. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. So when is he saying that this all happened? When was the Sabbath first invented? At creation, first full week of creation, God established that one day out of every seven, you were to rest. So he's harkening back to Genesis 2, verses one through three. You can turn there if you wish. It says this. Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished, and on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He had rested from all His work which God had created and made." So the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit created all things in the space of six days. On the seventh day, he rested, and when he rested, he created something by not creating anything, and that was the Sabbath day. When it says God rested, it doesn't mean, man, I'm tired. Man, I really have spent a lot and I need a nap. Now, because God is all powerful, God can expend energy without losing energy. When it says he rested, it means simply he ceased from creative activity. He didn't create anything, but by his very act of cessation, as we've already said, he created the Sabbath day. Now, here's why this matters. Here's why this is important. Almost everyone who denies the perpetuity of the Sabbath insists that it did not exist until Moses, that the Sabbath came into being on the top of Mount Sinai when God gave his 10 commandments. So follow the logic here. The idea is that from Adam until Moses, there was no Sabbath day. Then from Moses until Jesus, there was a Sabbath day. But when Jesus died on the cross, he abolished the Sabbath. So now from Jesus' ascension to his second coming, there's no Sabbath day. That's the teaching. So there only existed a Sabbath in the time between Moses on Mount Sinai and Jesus died on the cross. That's the logic. The problem is, if the Sabbath can be proven to be a creation ordinance, then we have the problem that there was a Sabbath from Adam until Moses. So let me show you that indeed that's the case. We have Jesus' own words to prove it. You can turn with me to Mark chapter two, verses 27 to 28. Mark two beginning in verse 27. And he, that is Jesus, said to them, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore, the Sabbath, or the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath. Now, do you notice Jesus just claimed a title for himself? He said he's the Lord of the Sabbath. You realize, who is the Lord of the Sabbath? Who is the God of the Sabbath? the Hebrew God, he's claiming his deity here. He's saying, I have authority over the Sabbath day. But what's not obvious in our English Bible translations is there's a word that's omitted that appears twice in our text, it's the little word the, okay? The Sabbath was made for the man, not the man for the Sabbath. What man do you think he's talking about? Adam, he doesn't say the Sabbath was made for the Jews. He says the Sabbath was made for the man, that language made. What is that language? Creation. When was man made? On the sixth day. When was the Sabbath made? On the seventh day, Jesus seems to be arguing from the order of creation that if the Sabbath was created before man, then maybe we could say man was created for the Sabbath. But no, man was created on the sixth day, then the Sabbath is created on the seventh day, so it was created for his good. But whose good? For Adam's. So the point is this, the Sabbath did not come into existence on the top of Mount Sinai several thousand years after the world was created. It came into existence in the Garden of Eden. Even man before he had fallen into sin, God knew he needed rest, because man had work to do six days a week, even in the garden, and he would grow weary and tired. So God mercifully gave him a day of rest. When you say you don't want a Sabbath, what you're saying is, I want to work seven days a week. I don't want any days off. I want to work all the time and have no breaks, which is exactly what Pharaoh did to the slaves in Egypt. You think he gave him a day off on Saturday? He didn't. And God said to the Israelites later, He said, this is a badge of your freedom. This is a badge that show you're not a slave anymore. Because you don't have to work seven days a week. So it's not a bondage to have to observe the Sabbath day. It's a great liberty to enjoy the Sabbath day. But Jesus says the Sabbath was created for the man. The man was not created for the Sabbath. So here's the question. Was the Sabbath created at Mount Sinai? No. As a matter of fact, did God say when He gave the fourth commandment, know that there's such a thing as a Sabbath? What did He say? Remember the Sabbath, something you're already conscious of. Remember this thing, don't forget it, right? So why this is important then as a creation ordinance is that if something's a creation ordinance, that means it's binding upon all peoples of all times under all covenantal administrations. Let me illustrate what I'm talking about. You can turn there if you wish, or you can just listen, but in Matthew 19, The Pharisees tried to trap Jesus once again by asking him a very controversial question. It's a controversial question to ask today as well. The question was this, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? And they were trying to trap him. But do you remember how Jesus answered them? He ultimately would say, if someone commits adultery, that does give you the warrant to divorce and remarry. Paul would also tell us, by the inspiration of the Spirit, someone abandons their spouse, then there's grounds for divorce and remarriage. But do you remember Jesus' initial answer? What was his first place he went to when they said, is it lawful for a man to divorce? You remember? He went to creation. He said, because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And if you remember, he takes them to Genesis chapter two and talks about the first wedding between Adam and Eve and says, what God has joined together, let not man separate. Here in us, that's his answer. What's his point? His point is this. Holy God created marriage, and he created it to be permanent. But sinful man corrupted that original purpose. Sinful man created divorce. Because of the hardness of your hearts, there's divorce. In other words, even if you have biblical grounds for divorce, someone has sinned. and that sin has introduced the impermanence of marriage. But if sin had never entered the world, what would marriage have done? It would have been permanent. So Jesus is saying the normal order, the created order, the intention of God from the beginning was that one man with one woman for life, the permanence of marriage is a creation ordinance. He looks back to creation to say, here's your answer about divorce. There's a second example, it's found in 1 Timothy 2. I'm sure you have heard before that Paul, the Apostle Paul, is considered a Melchovnist pig in the modern era. And why is that? Someone tell me why. Doesn't permit women to teach, men in the church. He also requires wives to submit to their husband's authority, like the husband's the head of the home or something. So that makes him a male chauvinist pig, right? And you've heard the argument, I'm sure. The idea is that Paul was responding to his culture. His culture had a low view of women. He imbibed that low view of women and put it into the Bible. Well, the reality is, when you search Paul's writings, Paul had an extraordinarily high view of women, actually. He had an extremely high view of their value to God's kingdom, of their help in the spread of the gospel. It was contrary to the culture of the time for him to be as praising of women as he was. The people who say Paul had a low view of women do not prove that he had a low view of women. What they prove is they have a low view of the Holy Scriptures, because it's the Spirit of God who moved Paul to write the things he wrote. But in 1 Timothy 2, he tells us why women are not to teach men or to have authority in the church over men, and why they're not to therefore serve as elders or deacons or deaconesses. 1 Timothy 2, verse 13, he says, for Adam was formed first, then Eve. So Melhadship in the home is a creation ordinance. Do you see why this matters? So if something's a creation ordinance, marriage, Melhadship, there's something else, work. Work is a creation ordinance. Do you know that the fourth commandment doesn't just command you to rest, it commands you to work. six days a week. So all these things are creation ordinances. Therefore, how far over does the permanence of marriage carry? Are we still obligated to recognize marriage as permanence today? Yes. Must we recognize work today as part of a creation ordinance? Must we recognize male headship in the home as a creation ordinance? Yes, we must. Well, what about the Sabbath day then? If the Sabbath is a creation ordinance, then it's binding upon us today. And as we look through the scriptures from Adam until Moses, you see this played out. For example, when Noah was on the ark, have you ever noticed that Noah and his family recognized a seven-day cycle for the week? It repeats in there over and over again. They recognized that a week consisted of seven days. How did they know that? I mean, is seven just stamped into creation somehow? How do you know that there's seven days? Because they knew how long it took God to create the world and they rested on the seventh. So presumably, Noah and his family observed the Sabbath while they were on the ark. Exodus 16 comes four chapters before Exodus 20, which is where the Ten Commandments are given. And do you remember what happens in Exodus 16? I'll give you a hint, it's bread from heaven. Remember that? The manna from heaven that God provided in the wilderness wanderings? You remember what He did? He said six days this manna is going to descend in the morning with the dew. And you've got to go out and gather it up and there'll be enough for today. And you can't save it for the next day, because if you do, it's going to spoil and be eaten by worms. And remember what happened? Israelites being Israelites, some of them saved it anyway, and what happened the next day was spoiled. Literally, God was providing their daily bread every single morning, which they had to gather. But then He said on the sixth day, which in this case was Friday, On the sixth day, gather twice as much so that you don't gather it on Saturday. And this time it won't spoil, but you'll have twice as much so you can feed your family on Friday and on Saturday, but you don't have to go out and work for it on the Sabbath day. And so you remember what happened? People went out and tried to gather it on the Saturday anyway, and the Lord rebuked them, and he said, how long will you not obey my commandments? How long will you test me and try me? When will you not, why will you not obey? And he talks to them about the Sabbath day, keeping the Sabbath rest. God had not even given the 10 commandments yet. And yet the Jews understood that there was a Sabbath day. So the point being, was there a Sabbath from Adam until Moses? The answer is yes. Was there one from Moses until Christ? And the answer is yes. And that leads us then, because it's a creation ordinance, to our second heading, our second proof. The Sabbath is part of the indivisible Decalogue. Turn with me to James chapter two. The question we're getting at is this. Do we as New Testament Christians have to obey the Ten Commandments? Yes or no? We do. And when you think about it, you know this. It's not legalism. Is it legalism if you have only one God and worship Him only? Is it legalism if you don't make statues of God and pictures of God and bow down to Him? Is it legalism if you are very careful about not taking God's name in vain? Is it legalism if you honor your father and mother? You see what I'm saying? I mean, how absurd does it get if you start saying that it's legalistic to obey the Ten Commandments? Now, if you're obeying the Ten Commandments in hopes that God will save you because of it, that is legalism. But if you're obeying them because you love the Lord and you love your fellow man and you want to show that by obedience to His commands, then that is called holiness. It's not legalism. So if the fourth commandment is a part of that, then the question is, do you only have to obey nine of the 10 commandments? So here we are in James 2, verses 8 to 12. Humor me for just a moment. Is James in the New Testament or the Old? It's in the New, thank you very much. Just wanted to clarify that. James 2, verse 8, if you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, okay, law, royal law. What makes a law a royal law? It came from royalty. It came from a king. Who's the king of the church? So, royal law then, spoken of in the New Testament, has to be the royal law of King Jesus, correct? So, if you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet stumble in one point, he's guilty of all." So the question is, what law does James have in his mind? What does he have in view? Verse 11, for he who said, do not commit adultery, also said, do not murder. What's he talking about here? Where did this come from? The Ten Commandments. Do not commit adultery is the Seventh Commandment. Do not murder is the Sixth Commandment. Now if you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you've become a transgressor of the law. Now notice what he says, verse 12, so speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty. He just called the Ten Commandments two things, the royal law, therefore it's the law of the head of the church, King Jesus, and he's called it the law of liberty. If something is your liberty, is it legalism? No, our liberty is the latitude we have about things indifferent that are within the boundaries of God's moral law, his 10 commandments. I'm not free to transgress his law, that's not my liberty. But liberty is the liberty I have within the boundaries that God has established in his moral law. So that's why our confession can talk about chapter 19 of the law of God. And then a couple chapters later it talks of Christian liberty. And then it comes back, chapter 22, and talks about religious worship and the Sabbath day. Here he's talking about Christian liberty right in the midst of talking about God's moral law because the two are in perfect harmony with one another. It's the law of liberty. Now I'm going to give you an illustration. Many of you have heard me use this before, but I've never found a better one, and I'm indebted to Ian Murray for it. But let's suppose that you had a window pane that had 10 different panes individually in it with a wooden grate in between it. And you wanted to paint the 10 commandments on those 10 panes. So you went through and first one, you shall have no other gods before me. Second one, you'll have no graven image, et cetera, et cetera. And you put all 10 of the commandments on those individual panes. Theoretically speaking, could you take a rock and throw it to the fourth pane, remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, could you throw a rock through that one and leave the other nine intact? You could, if you had good aim, right? You'd break one, the others would remain intact. James is telling us that's not how the Ten Commandments work. Instead, take one solid sheet of glass, paint every single one of the 10 commandments on it, and now take a rock and throw it just at the fourth commandment, what's gonna happen to the other nine? They're all gonna shatter. Now I ask you, is that not what James is telling us here? You break one, you break them all. And this plays out in the scriptures themselves. For example, Ezekiel 20, verse 16. God rebukes the Israelites and he says, they despised my judgments and did not walk in my statutes, but profaned my Sabbaths. They broke the fourth commandment. Why did they break the fourth commandment? Listen to what he says next. For their hearts went after idols. Did you hear what he just said? Why did they break the fourth commandment? Because they broke the first and the second. That's why. And then a few chapters later, Ezekiel 22, verse 26, they have hidden their eyes from my Sabbaths. They've broken my Sabbath. They haven't remembered it. They've forgotten it. So that I am profaned among them. Hear what he just said? They broke the fourth commandment, and by doing so, they broke the third. They took my name in vain. I would go further. The eighth commandment is you shall not steal. God rebuked the Israelites through Malachi and said, you are robbing God. You're withholding from me your tithes and your offerings, and you're robbing these commodities from me. You're keeping it from there. Well, there are other commodities you can rob besides money. What about time? What if you steal the time? God has said, this is my time. In fact, the phrase the Lord's day, where does that phrase come from in this Bible? Does anyone know? Revelation one, verse 10. I was in the spirit on the Lord's day. What is the name Lord's? What does that possessive mean? Jesus. That's right, that's right. It belongs to Jesus. It's the same exact grammatical construction that Paul uses when he speaks of the Lord's table or the Lord's supper, the supper that uniquely belongs to the Lord Jesus. The Lord's day is the day, the whole day, not just the morning, but the whole day that is the possession of the Lord Jesus. Interestingly enough, there's a movie that came out years ago about the NFL, and the claim was made, the NFL literally owns a day. They own Sunday. Well, sorry, they don't own Sunday. Who owns Sunday? Jesus, who was raised from the dead on the first day of the week. It is the Lord's day. It is the possession of the Lord Jesus. Should we steal His possession from Him? Or must we give him his day? We must give him his day. So you won't do to say I'm gonna keep all nine of the Ten Commandments. Is the Sabbath day perpetual in terms of obedience? The answer is yes. J.C. Rouse said it this way. Sabbath pleasure seekers are their own witnesses. They are every week practically declaring we do not like God, we do not want him to reign over us. In other words, how dare he think he has the right to tell me what to do with my time? That's why our flesh chased against it, because the idea that God is sovereign over my use of time, my flesh does not like that. And as a convinced Sabbatarian, I'm gonna tell you something, my flesh still doesn't like that. I still have to say, I feel sin rising up within me and wanting to do my own thing rather than saying, let me give the day to the Lord. But let's recognize what it is. We don't like that someone has the right to tell me what to do with my time. And yet that's exactly what Jesus, or what the Bible commands us to do. So we've seen the week of Sabbath as a creation ordinance. We've seen it's part of the indivisible decalogue. A third powerful argument for the perpetuity of the Sabbath is this, the Lord Jesus, recovered the Sabbath day during his earthly ministry. Have you ever noticed when you're reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that Jesus is constantly getting into controversy about one commandment specifically? And which commandment is it? I know it took a great guess to figure out. This is the fourth, right? Do you know how many times he had conflict over the Sabbath? Anyone know the number? It's seven, it actually is. Which is funny how that number sticks to the Sabbath, right? But the Bible records some incidents in Jesus' life more than once, right? So like Matthew and Luke will cover the same territory and maybe the same controversy. So if you compare Scripture with Scripture, it's actually recorded 11 specific times in the ministry of Jesus. Now, does the Holy Spirit waste words? Does he have a reason that he's trying to tell us something when he tells us this controversy keeps on coming up over and over again? He has a reason for this, but in every single case, is Jesus violating the Sabbath? Or is he restoring the Sabbath? He's restoring it. He's doing things like healing people who are sick. on the Sabbath day. And you remember the time where he healed somebody, the woman was literally bent over so that she couldn't even stand up straight, been like that for years, and Jesus heals her. And the Pharisees and the chief priests, they're counting on it. They know he can heal them. They have no question that Jesus has the power to heal them. They're just waiting to accuse him because he healed them on the wrong day. And so he loosens this woman. He says, woman, thou art loosed and she stands up and she's healed. And literally, you remember what happens? The synagogue man gets up in front of everybody and publicly rebukes Jesus. There are six other days to get healed. Come on those days. And Jesus says, which one of you doesn't loose your animal to take it and get water, even if it's a Saturday, even if it's Sabbath? He says, this woman who is created in God's image has been loosed. How much more should we be concerned about her than we are our donkeys? Right? So in other words, he's doing what is lawful, what was always lawful to do on the Sabbath day. But it's the Jewish traditions that had buried this and hid it out of the way. I told you earlier, there literally were a thousand man-made rules. They were like a book of a thousand rules. Let me tell you what some of the rules were. If you're walking down the road on the Sabbath day and you find a man buried in a rock slide, you need to interview him first before you get him out from under the rock slide. to make sure, and if you think he's healthy and he'll survive the night sleeping under the rock slide until the next day, don't violate the Sabbath, come back the next day and get him out. That was literally a rule in the rule book. Here's another one. If you're a farmer, and you're walking down the road on the Sabbath day, and you see a mud pit next to you, don't spit into the mud pit. Because if you spit into the mud pit, your spit might make a furrow in it, and that's kind of like making a furrow like you would for planting. Yes, this was on the law books, no kidding. Another one was, if you're a seamstress, you couldn't carry a needle in your shirt pocket, because then you're carrying an implement of your trade on the Sabbath day. And here's another one. You were to count the number of steps you walked on the Sabbath. You had a strict number of steps you could walk, and after that number, you had to stop. So I guess you just stop in the middle of the road wherever you are if you've reached 692 or whatever it is you're supposed to do. Could you imagine trying to relax and get some rest when you're having to count how many steps you've done in a day? This is the kind of garbage that had been piled upon the Sabbath day. Here's the question, did God command any of those things? No, but man did. And so when you obey man's tradition, you wind up breaking God's law. Addition is always subtraction. Whenever you forbid what God permits, you will soon permit what God forbids. That's how it always works. And so we never find Jesus abolishing the Sabbath. What we find him doing is recovering it. As a matter of fact, it's interesting, after his death, Luke 23, verses 55 to 56, if his disciples thought he was abolishing the Sabbath, they certainly didn't get the memo. Listen to what it says. And the women who had come with him from Galilee followed after and they observed the tomb and how his body was laid. So it's Friday, right? What's gonna happen the next day? Next day's Saturday, which was the Jewish Sabbath, right? Then they returned and prepared spices and fragrant oils, and they rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment." These are women who've been following Jesus for months and years, and yet they saw nothing in his life that said, I should start disobeying the fourth commandment. Instead, they were careful to faithfully obey that commandment after he had been put in the grave. Let me again quote J.C. Rowe. I find Jesus speaking on the subject of the Sabbath, but it's always to correct the superstitious additions which the Pharisees had made to the Law of Moses about observing it, and never to deny the holiness of the day. He no more abolishes the Sabbath than a man destroys a house when he cleans off the moss or weeds from its roof. Very wise words. So, brothers and sisters, I began by talking about Dixon's coin and how the Sabbath is like that coin in that it was buried under the muck of Jewish legalism. Did Jesus believe the Sabbath was worth recovering? He clearly did. As followers of Jesus, today in the 21st century, is the Sabbath worth recovering from American lawlessness? It is. But I will tell you, and I think some of you have already discovered this, it's a lonely road. It's a lonely road among other Christians. And yet, if it's God's command, and I love the Lord, and I love His people, then I'm gonna endure even some loneliness and some insults in order to obey what God has spoken. Now, We're going to be looking at the question of, God willing, how do we know that the Sabbath is no longer observed on Saturday and is on Sunday? And I think you'll be surprised that there's actually quite a wealth of material in the scriptures themselves to prove that. And then the final thing I want to teach you is about the lighting in the day. I'll give you just a little bit of hint at this. Isaiah 58, the last two verses of that verse, I like to read those verses before I come to church on Sunday morning. because it says, if you will turn your foot away from the Sabbath and honor the Lord and honor His day, then you will delight yourself in the Lord. Is it your duty to keep the Sabbath day holy? Yes, it is. Duty is helpful because there's only two times to do your duty, when you feel like it and when you don't, right? That's a help to me because how many of you always feel like obeying the Lord? Show of hands. Well, when should you obey the Lord? Even when you don't feel like it. And when you do feel like it. So duty helps me. But what's the difference between duty and delight? Duty is I have to. Delight is I get to. And learning to delight in the Lord's day is learning to delight in the Lord Himself, because it's not about the day per se. It's about the one who is the Lord of the Sabbath. It's delighting in Him. Well, with that, I'm gonna make two applications, and we'll be done for tonight. First, have you ever thought about this? The fourth commandment forms a part of the active and passive obedience of Jesus Christ by which you have been justified before God." Have you ever thought about that? You see, from one vantage point, Jesus' entire earthly life was one unbroken act of obedience to God. That is, He came to earth and He had to obey God's law in our place because Adam failed. Adam broke God's law. You have broken God's law. Jesus had to keep what we had broken. And He perfectly kept the Ten Commandments in our place. And you need to understand something. Jesus didn't cheat while He was on earth. It wasn't that in His humanity He fell back upon His deity to enable Him to not sin. he had to represent us truly, which means that as a man, he made himself entirely dependent upon the Father for fresh supplies of the Holy Spirit to enable him to resist temptation and to enable him to perfectly keep God's law. That's why you read about Jesus spending whole nights in prayer and repeatedly of being filled with the Spirit over and over again. because he, as a man, had to truly obey in our place. He couldn't fall back on his deity and say, because I'm God, I'm gonna do this. No, as a man, he had to represent us. And so he kept God's law, that's called his active obedience, that's his keeping of the precepts of God's law, but then he suffered under the wrath of God because our sins were imputed to him, that is, the penalties of the law were imputed to him, and that's called his Passive obedience, passive because he was on the receiving end of God's wrath. But the point is, in order to justify you and to reconcile you to God, Jesus had to obey the law perfectly, and then he had to suffer all the penalties you deserve in your place, and then rise again from the dead. So when you believe on Jesus, think about this. You know, sometimes we say, the day I was converted, I was redeemed. That's technically not accurate language. You know when you were redeemed? No, not quite. We were elected before the foundation. That's right, that's right. But when were we redeemed? When was the purchase price for our redemption paid is what I'm getting at. Jesus' death and resurrection. So we were redeemed 2000 years ago. That was already accomplished, but it was applied to us in time when the Spirit effectually called us. But 2,000 years ago, if you're in Christ, your sin was imputed to him. The moment you put your faith in Christ, what was imputed to you? His righteousness. And what does his righteousness consist of? What was imputed to you? His obedience to the commandments, including his obedience to the fourth commandment. His perfect Sabbath keeping is part of the righteousness you're dressed in. And your Sabbath breakings, He was punished for. Think about that. I don't think it's even a category in the minds of most American Christians. But Jesus had to die for my profaning of the Sabbath. And part of the righteousness I'm dressed in is His perfect Sabbath keeping. That should make us think differently about it, shouldn't it? To think this is the sin for which Jesus had to die. And yet this is His perfect obedience applied to me. Now, anyone in here ever kept a Sabbath perfectly holy? Me neither, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven, because I'm a sinner. There's none of the commandments I keep perfectly holy, and I still need the blood of Christ to cleanse me from my sins and to wash away my Sabbath breakings. But thinking about that category is huge. 2 Corinthians 5, Paul says, he made him, that is, the father made the son, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Second thing, and this is my final application tonight, the fourth commandment, just like the first three commandments, is all about worship. You ever notice that? The first four commandments are all about worship. The first commandment is about the object of your worship. There's only one object of worship, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the one true and living God. Second is you can't worship God with pictures of Him or statues of Him. Why is that? not make a graven image. And if you make a graven image of God, you've misrepresented Him. Right? And it also means you can't come up with man-made ways of worshiping God. We're to worship God the way he's commanded us to in the scriptures. The third commandment then is you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. That's speaking about the attitude of worship, that I'm to be reverent, to remember this is a holy God that I'm worshiping and therefore I should honor his name. And therefore what is the Sabbath day about? How does that contribute to worship? You must set one day and every seven apart for worship. You must give time to worship. Let's put it this way. How many of you have ever heard of or have been to Central Park in New York City? Anybody here been there? You have? I haven't. But you know what it is? It's right there in the middle of the city, right? There's always skyscrapers everywhere, all around Central Park. That's why New York City is sometimes called the concrete jungle. But there are 842 acres of real estate that make up the center of New York City, Central Park. What do you think the zoning laws for Central Park are? You think you can build anything there? No, why? It's a park. If they let people build there, what would happen? they would disappear. There would be no place for you to go and enjoy God's creation, to rest and all that. So you have to be very careful to make sure nothing encroaches upon Central Park. When God says to you and me, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, he's telling us the same thing. Don't let anything unnecessary encroach upon that day. Which means you've gotta obey the commandment, remember the Sabbath day, Monday through Saturday. You ever thought about that? you've got a plan for it. So somebody calls you up and says, Hey, can we go to a baseball game on Sunday afternoon? And they called you on, on Tuesday. What do you do? You remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. And you say, thank you so much for your kind invitation, but I've got a previous engagement on that day. Matter of fact, I got a previous engagement for every Sunday, the rest of my life. Can we go on a different day? Right? It's remembering those things and planning your day, trying to do as much as you can to make sure I don't interfere with the day. So on Saturday evenings, if the car needs to be filled with gas, I'm gonna run it out and get some gas in it so I don't have to stop on the way to church. If I forget, okay, I'm gonna stop and go to church. I'm not gonna just walk to church and run out of gas somewhere. But you get what I'm saying. I'm thinking proactively, how do I guard and fence the day so that nothing encroaches upon it? and to plan that way Monday through Saturday. That's what it means to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. So I encourage you, there's a book by Terry Johnson called The Christian Sabbath, free copies out there. Get a hold of it, it's excellent, short treatment on the subject. But come back and let's learn some more in the coming Wednesdays about what the Lord's day is all about.