Our sermon tonight is on the Sabbath. We've been reading a good deal about Jesus and the Sabbath in John's Gospel, particularly in John 5 and in John 9. And so I thought it would be helpful. I talked to Pastor Gordon about this, and we agreed it would be helpful to have a sermon on the Sabbath. I said that to my son, who immediately responded, what's the point of preaching on the Sabbath Sunday night? If you don't get that, ask somebody at home. But we all need to be encouraged in the positive dimension of the Sabbath day, which is what we want to focus on this evening. I want to read first just one verse from Exodus 31. Exodus 31 is one of the great parts of the Bible on the Sabbath. And sometimes people say, well, you know, the New Testament doesn't say all that much about the Sabbath. And part of my answer would be, well, the Old Testament doesn't say that much about the Sabbath either. You can read vast sections of the Old Testament and not see anything about the Sabbath. It doesn't mean it's not taken seriously in the Old Testament and in the New, as I hope we'll see as we go along. But listen to this powerful verse from Exodus 31, verse 13, where God said to Moses, you are to speak to the people of Israel and say, above all, that should catch our attention, shouldn't it? Above all, above all, you shall keep my Sabbaths. For this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. And then we turn to Psalm 92, which is the only psalm in the Psalter that mentions the Sabbath and mentions it in the title. Psalm 92. A psalm. A song for the Sabbath. It is good to give thanks to the Lord. To sing praises to your name, O Most High. To declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night. To the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work. At the works of your hands, I sing for joy. How great are your works, O Lord! Your thoughts are very deep. The stupid man cannot know. The fool cannot understand this. That though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to destruction forever. But you, O Lord, are on high forever. For behold, your enemies, O Lord, for behold, your enemies shall perish. All evildoers shall be scattered. But you have exalted my horn like that of the wild ox. You have poured over me fresh oil. My eyes have seen the downfall of my enemies. My ears have heard the doom of my evil assailants. The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord. They flourish in the courts of our God. They still bear fruit in old age. They are ever full of sap and green to declare that the Lord is upright. He is my rock and there is no unrighteousness in him. So far the reading of God's Word. The psalms at the beginning of the fourth book of the Psalter, that is Psalm 90 and following, are psalms in which there is a fair measure of turmoil. Psalm 94 speaks of days of trouble. Psalm 90 talks about, for all our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years to an end like a sigh. Psalm 91 says, you will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day. Trouble, sighing, terror. These are some of the complaints and experiences of the people of God as we find them in those early psalms in the 90s, in the Psalter. These are people living days of turmoil, days of struggle, days of confusion and upset and difficulty. And we can feel in the poetry of these psalms the drama and the struggle. If you're a historian writing about these days centuries later, you would say these are interesting days. And I've been told, I'm not sure this is a fact, that it's a Chinese curse to say, may your children live in interesting days. We don't want interesting days. We want nice, ordinary days. calm days. And part of what I found fascinating in returning to Psalm 92, for those of you who keep records of these things, I have preached this psalm before here, but this is a new sermon. Because as I returned to this psalm, it suddenly struck me in the midst of these psalms of the struggling of God's people, Psalm 92 is a psalm of remarkable calmness, of remarkable serenity, of remarkable confidence in the Lord. In the midst of trouble, this psalm brings a word of peace, a word of certainty, a great word of encouragement. And I think that should leap out to us because that's what the Sabbath is meant to be for us. It's meant to be a different day in the midst of our days. In the midst of days that may have hard work, that may have struggles, that may have difficulties, God weekly gives us a day that's meant to be different. A day in which we do not have to think about our working and our responsibilities in this life and our difficulties. But it's meant to be a day when we stop our ordinary life and give our minds and our hearts and our thoughts to God. And that's why Exodus 31 speaks so strikingly. This day, God says, is to be a sign for you. And the sign is that I, the Lord your God, work to make you holy. Now, we know that word holy in the Bible can have two different purposes and two different meanings. And that's probably true here. One of the meanings of holy is to be more conformed to the law of God. A better person. In that sense, a holier person. An improved person. A better person. And certainly God is the one who works to make that happen in us. It is by the work of God that we become holier. But holiness also means that we are a people set apart. We are a people made different. We are a people distinguished by God from others. And I think that's a significant part of what's going on in Exodus 31. Take time to remember that God is at work to set you apart as his people. And the sign of being set apart, the sign of having a day that you spend differently from the way in which the world lives on that day, is a sign to you and a sign to the world that you are a people holy to the Lord. And that's why this is so important for us to think about, to reflect on. particularly as we increasingly live in a secular culture that has little acquaintance with the Bible or with biblical ways of living. Boys and girls, when I was growing up, very far away and long ago, it was still true that even in California, many, many businesses were closed on Sunday. Even the people who didn't go to church knew that Sunday was a different day. They had no choice but to live somewhat differently. But today we live in a world where that memory of Sunday as a special day is rapidly disappearing. And that puts renewed pressure on us. Will we live like the world or will we continue to think about God's ways as revealed in his word that we're to be set apart, marked as a different people, in part by the way we live out our week? The growing ignorance in our society of the Bible and what we would tend to think as very basic truths of the Bible should alarm us. I couldn't help but notice in this past week that someone was all infuriated that the most recent nominee for the Supreme Court believed that wives ought to submit to their husbands. What a crazy notion. What an outrageous notion. And then, of course, the reporter went on to say, this is just one of those strange teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Well, you all know, don't you, this is not a distinctively Roman Catholic teaching. Part of what I found discouraging was, I at least did not hear a single defender of this nominee say, well, if you attack that statement, you're attacking the Bible. Nobody seemed to know it was in the Bible. And so we have to ask, what's in the Bible about making us holy? Setting us apart? Being a mock mark and a sign to us? Even some of our really fine Christian friends will say, well, Jesus didn't uphold the Sabbath. He violated all sorts of Sabbath rules. Haven't we just seen that in John chapter 5 and chapter 9? And the answer must be definitively, sharply, strikingly. No, that's not what Jesus did. Jesus did not reject the Sabbath. Jesus did not criticize the Sabbath. Jesus did not abolish the Sabbath. Jesus said, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. He's not the Lord of the abolished. what Jesus attacked was the corruption of the Sabbath, the misunderstanding of the Sabbath, the betrayal of the Sabbath by Pharisees who precisely turned the Sabbath into all about what they did do or didn't do instead of recognizing that the Sabbath was all about what God does. We are to set aside the Sabbath to be marked by the Sabbath so that we can recognize that it is the Lord who works to make us holy. And that positive sense of the Sabbath is what I think is taught to us so beautifully here in Psalm 92. The psalm really helps us to see how we are to keep the Sabbath holy. and what it means for us to keep the Sabbath holy. And the first point of how we keep the Sabbath holy is, I think, pointed to us in the very title of this psalm, a psalm for the Sabbath, because the word Sabbath is a Hebrew word. Did you know that? Some of you know it. The word Sabbath is one of those Hebrew words we've simply taken over into English. There aren't a lot of them. Amen is a Hebrew word taken over into English. Hallelujah is a Hebrew word taken over into English. And Sabbath is a Hebrew word. And Sabbath can be translated. And it can be translated as stop or cease. or rest. The idea of Sabbath is, in the first place, an idea of doing something differently on that day. Stop what you ordinarily do. Stop what you ordinarily do. Cease from your ordinary activities. Now, that doesn't mean to be totally inactive. I talked once to a minister of the Free Church of Scotland who ministered in the island of Lewis, way up in the northwest of Scotland. And about 60% of the population of the Isle of Lewis were members of the Free Church of Scotland, a very conservative, orthodox, traditional reformed church. maybe one of the most pious places on earth, next to Friesland. Seeing who's laughing and who didn't. Very pious place. And so I said to this minister, do they still keep the Sabbath carefully on the Isle of Lewis? And he smiled and he said, oh, yes, the ferry still does not land on the Sabbath day. And I said, well, it sounds almost like heaven and earth. And then he smiled awry, Calvinist smile, and he said, yes, some folk keep the Sabbath so carefully they never get out of bed at all on Sunday. Well, that's not a keeping of the Sabbath, is it? That's not what God instituted the Sabbath for. That's not the kind of rest we're called to. That's exactly the kind of misunderstanding that the Pharisees had introduced. And that's why the Pharisees could not stand it that Jesus was doing good on the Sabbath. They'd lost a sense of the Sabbath as a day for doing good, a day for loving, a day for caring, a day for reaching out and embracing. And this psalm, as you can see, is a psalm that calls for activity. It calls for giving thanks, it calls for praises, it calls for playing praises to the Lord. The Sabbath was never intended to be a day for doing nothing, but a day for turning our minds to do something different. To turn our minds and our hearts away from our work to God's work. And that's what Psalm 92 helps us see so gloriously, so helpfully. It's a day for turning to God. And this was true of the nation of Israel as a whole in the Old Testament. But it was also true for every Israelite family and every individual. And that's the way this understanding of the Sabbath was embraced by Reformed people, particularly in the 17th century. Part of what got me thinking about this was I put on my historian's hat, and I thought, isn't it interesting how the Sabbath day was embraced not only as a theological principle but as a pious practice by serious-minded Reformed people throughout Europe and North America. The Sabbath became one of our distinguishing marks for over 400 years. It was not so much emphasized at the first part of the Reformation, although certainly people didn't work on Sunday and they went to church. And I thought, why does the Sabbath become so powerful amongst Reformed people in the 17th century and beyond? And I thought, you know, one of the great struggles of the 17th century in the churches was this. We now have doctrine that's been Reformed and purified by the Word of God. We now have worship that's been reformed and purified by the Word of God. But have our hearts been reformed and purified by the Word of God? Or are we just going through the motions when we go to church and we recite the creed and we hear the Heidelberg Catechism? You know, almost anybody can give two hours a week to God without giving their hearts to God. And so one of the great struggles of the church in the 17th century was, how do we ensure that people are really committed to the Lord? Not just the ministers, but the people in their hearts. And I think one of the great signs that the people had embraced the word of God was that they embraced the Sabbath. They carried it home with them. If we read the history of the 17th century, we know that certain pressures were put on people to keep the Sabbath day holy. They didn't come to church twice on Sunday. They might be prayed for by name from the pulpit. Or they might be fined. Or even worse, the elders might come to call. There were pressures. But in a profound sense, the people embraced the Sabbath because in their hearts they treasured God. Because in their hearts they knew it was right to have a different day. In their hearts they knew they wanted to cease what they ordinarily did to turn their activity towards God and knowing him. And I think it remade not only the churches, but in a profound sense, it remade the cultures around them. But our concern tonight is not about culture, it's about the church and about the hearts of God's people and whether we really want to be set apart as a people who know that the Lord works to sanctify us. And that's really the second part of what's at the heart of keeping the Sabbath day holy. Not only do we cease from our ordinary activities, but we seek to know the Lord. Psalm 92, verse 6 says, The stupid man cannot know. The fool cannot understand this. Now, boys and girls, your parents may be working to keep you from calling others stupid and fools. And that's a good thing in the name of politeness. But in the Bible, being a fool and being stupid is almost a technical term of those who reject the teaching of the Lord, adamantly reject it. So when Psalm 92 says the stupid cannot know this, they cannot know it because they will not know it. And we are called to be a people who do know the truth. who know the truth as it is in the revelation of God. Who know the truth about what God is doing in this world. And this psalm highlights for us some of the truths that we particularly need to know. At the very center of this psalm is the statement, The Lord is high. Do you know that the Lord is high? What does that mean, the Lord is high? It means he's lifted up, he's exalted, he's glorified. You have to be careful with almost every word in the English language now, don't you? They've all been perverted by the world. But to say that the Lord is high is that he is exalted, particularly in might and in power. Who runs this world? Pastor Gordon talked about that powerfully this morning. It is not princes who run this world. It is God who runs this world. It is God who is supreme. And what makes the fools stupid is that they do not acknowledge the Creator. They do not acknowledge the Preserver. They do not acknowledge the Redeemer who is on high. And that's why the doctrine of the ascension of our Lord is so important it's not just that he finished his earthly ministry and so had to leave it's that he finished his earthly ministry and so was revealed in the glory of his ascension as being taken on high to be king of kings and lord of lords over his people that's what we need to know that's what we need to study on the sabbath day that's what we need to sing about on the sabbath day we have a god who is in charge of all things and that doesn't always mean of course that we know why he's doing what he's doing it doesn't mean that in our heart of hearts we might not have suggestions of how he can do things better but when those thoughts creep into our minds we are pious enough to know No, actually, we cannot make things better with our suggestion. Because he knows what he's doing. He's high and exalted in might, but he's also, the one verse 15 says, in whom there is no unrighteousness. What a wonderful thing to think about. There is no unrighteousness in God. He never does a wicked thing. He never does an evil thing. He never does a wrong thing. We can have confidence that all things work together for good because He's good. It's not always easy to see, which is why we need time to learn it, to think about it, to reflect on it. We see this psalm beginning with the word good. Good it is to give thanks to God. And it ends with the statement of his goodness. You know, one of the great tragedies of our time, I think, is that increasingly in our secular world, we are told that we live in a world of chance. Well, we live in a world where things just happen. They don't have any meaning. they just happen you have to live with it and go on and part of the comfort that we come to know is that nothing happens by chance god is in it all accomplishing his purpose and so this psalm says on this day this day of rest this day of learning and knowing we should always focus on the great truth that our God is steadfast in his love and faithful in what he does. Verse 2. To declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night. It's very tempting for a minister to say that proves we ought to have two worship services on Sunday. One in the morning to focus on steadfast love and one in the evening to focus on faithfulness. But I think what it really means is that the whole day is given over to contemplating the character of God. His steadfast love at the beginning of the day and then through the day knowing our God and ending up with His faithfulness. Which means, of course, we really ought to have more than two services on the Lord's day. I've said that before. I always get a little chuckle. But it's sort of true. I've never heard anyone say to me as a minister, why do we only get two services? Why can't we have three? But the real point here is, this is a day in which we're to contemplate the character of God. A God who loves us with an everlasting love. A love that will not let us go. A love that was so costly to Him that He had to give His own Son on the cross to maintain His righteousness and justice in sparing us. And a God who is faithful in all that He does. That's what we need to know. That's what we need to spend time learning. I wasn't sure how far Pastor Gordon would get in chapter 10 of John, but next week he'll say to you, the works of Jesus that He's defending as having been done on the Sabbath day, they reveal who He is so that we might know Him. So we might know not just that He is good and does good on the Sabbath day, which is appropriate, but also that He's divine because like His Father, He's been working from the beginning to save His people. When we pause from our works to think about His work, We're thinking not just about the work of the Father, but the work of the Son and the work of the Holy Spirit. Who are always at work to bless, to help, to correct, to lead, to guide, to sanctify His people. So it's a day for knowing. And that knowing is a responsibility of the church, We heard Pastor Donovan give us detailed directions today how we're going to try to do Sunday school and catechism next week out of doors. That's because churches are dedicated to be places of learning. It means not just that the ministers have to diligently prepare in their study of the Word of God, but it means that every one of us has a responsibility to go on learning in life. None of us ever in this life arrive at all we need to know. And I kind of think we'll go on learning in heaven. And I think that's part of the excitement of heaven. Some people say, well, heaven must be dull, isn't it? And I think the answer to that has to be, no, not at all, Because in heaven, we will see the infinitely interesting God whose interests will never, never be fully understood by us. Every moment in heaven, there'll be more to learn and more to be fascinated by and more to be delighted by in knowing more about our God. And that's a responsibility to begin now among us. The careful observance of the Sabbath day amongst Reformed people created the most excellently educated laity in the history of the church. And one of the tragedies of our time is the number of churches who, in giving up on the Sabbath, find themselves with an increasingly biblically illiterate laity. And that's a tragedy. That's a tragedy that each one of us has to evaluate because every one of us is responsible to be growing in a knowledge of the Lord. It's interesting when you read the letters of the New Testament. The letters by and large are not addressed to ministers and elders and deacons. and say, you need responsibility in the work you do. They do need responsibility in the work they do. They're directed to Christians and say to every Christian in that community, you're responsible to know the truth, to evaluate the truth. Pastor Gordon said this morning that we need discernment as the people of God. How very true that is. It's not just ministers who have to see the wolves. The people of God have to see the wolves and recognize the wolves. Because if you don't have enough knowledge to recognize the wolves, you won't know which minister to listen to. Because there are ministers who are wolves. And you need to know enough to resist them. So, treasure the Sabbath day as a day of rest, as a day of learning, and as a day of praising. This psalm is very much about praising. Praising God for who He is. Praising God for what He's done. Praising God for the gladness that comes into our souls as we think about him. That may be one of the great tests of the Christian life. That may be one of the great tests of the Christian heart. Do the works of God, do the thoughts of God make you glad? Can you enter into the psalm that says, I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord. So as a minister, I say, gladden up. But that doesn't do any good, does it? Nobody can make you be glad. You either are glad or you aren't glad. I remember years ago, as a family, we were able to go with a church group to visit parts of Europe, and we were able to go to Heidelberg. Of course, I was excited to go to Heidelberg to be able to see where the Heidelberg Catechism was written. And we were standing on a beautiful sunny day up at Heidelberg Castle. We were looking down on this beautiful medieval city, spared the ravages of World War II. There was the Holy Spirit Church where Olivianus had preached and helped write the Heidelberg Catechism. There was the beautiful Necker River flowing by. Across was the Philosopher's Way and orchards. It could hardly have been a more beautiful scene. And I was standing next to my daughter, who was 13. And most of you won't know this, but 13-year-old daughters occasionally are difficult. Not anyone here, of course, but I mean just in general. And I said to her, isn't this just beautiful? Well, we'd been on the road about three weeks and she said, I am tired of scummy castles and scummy food and scummy people and I want to go home. Now, I could have said, be glad, but she wasn't. And I could sort of see she was tired. It doesn't really help just to be told to be glad. How do you get glad? You get glad by really focusing on the works of the Lord and saying how much he's done for me. How much he will do for me. You know, this is a psalm that talks a lot about the judgment on the wicked and the blessing on the righteous. And you should be glad as God's people to know that the righteous are like trees, not like the grass. That the righteous flourish in the house of the Lord. They are not scattered to the four winds. The righteous bear fruit. They are not doomed to destruction. And we come to that glad conclusion in part by keeping the Sabbath day holy by resting by learning by praising may God bless us as a people set apart and marked by the Sabbath Amen let us pray O Lord our God all of your works are good and one of your good works for which we thank and praise you is giving to us the gift of the sabbath day not as a burden not as a negative weight but as a day of rejoicing a day of learning a day of drawing closer to you so help us oh lord to sanctify the sabbath in our church, in our homes, in our hearts that you might be glorified and we might be sanctified. Hear us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.