Senior Pastor Damein Schitter resumes our Exodus series, preaching from Exodus 31:1-18 and the importance of doing the Lord's work in the Lord's way, which includes prioritizing Sabbath rest.
Senior Pastor Damein Schitter resumes our Exodus series, preaching from Exodus 31:1-18 and the importance of doing the Lord's work in the Lord's way, which includes prioritizing Sabbath rest.
Thank you, casey. Well, good morning. It's good to see everyone. My name is Damian and I'm the senior pastor here at New City. I'm glad that you're all here.
Damein:So if you've been with us this fall, you know that we've been preaching through Exodus. We started Exodus a year ago, we preached the Old Testament in the fall, we took a break and then now we're back. We're going to complete the book of Exodus this year. So here we are in chapter 31.
Damein:As I was reading and reflecting on this chapter this week, I also was reading and reflecting on something else, which is the new Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk. So I came out in September and I've been reading it. It's fascinating, and among many things that I knew about Elon, there were many things I didn't, because Elon and I, after 400 pages, were based on a first name basis. So I will refer to him as Elon or Musk Either way. One of the things that I've learned is how he took this principle that many people had recognized and made it central to how he designed his factories, both for SpaceX and for Tesla, and that is, he refused, even as an engineer, to separate the design from the production, and so, in fact, what he would do is he would hire these people from other companies, these engineers and then other production people and designers, and he would make them sit in the same office, work on the same teams, and then sometimes he would actually put their office on the floor of the factory, sometimes separated by a tent, so that when things went wrong, the engineers and the designers were right there to help those on the line figure out what was happening. And in fact this is key to the way in which both Tesla and SpaceX were able to cut costs and all types of things. So what's interesting to me is that Elon was refusing to separate design from production and when we read here in chapter 31, we're actually coming out of a chapter chapter 30, where God the architect is giving his design in specifics of the Tabernacle, and we might imagine that he would give the design and say all right, moses, time for you to figure out who you're going to drum up, to figure out how to build this thing, but in fact he doesn't. We see both the design and the production of the Tabernacle, that is, the tent that God is going to dwell in, are seamless. I find it so interesting that God, the great designer and architect of his house doesn't separate the engineering and design from the production, but he moves seamlessly between the two. Chapter 30, if you read it is really it reads like a work order. Here's the work order and at the end of chapter 30, and now into chapter 31, he moves right into the production realities, among many things.
Damein:I'll speak to you on this point. One thing that I love is there's a coherence, there's a seamlessness to God's understanding and view of the world. But for you and I, so often, whether it's in our work or family lives or the view of our faith as it interacts with everything in our life, you and I easily drift into a compartmentalized life, so easily. We all long for a coherent and seamless life, but there are things in our lives that strike us as obviously spiritual and others not so much. For example, if I said prayer, bible study or even your relationships with others, you would easily identify that as spiritual. But if I said creating excellent spreadsheets, woodworking, city planning, product development or jury duty, you'd have a hard time identifying that as spiritual, I think. But in our passage today we see that this should not be so. We see the coherence between heaven and earth, between spiritual and material, between the work of the mind and the work of the hands. What we see is God the architect designing his house, and God the equipped gifting a group of skilled laborers and artisans to fulfill his work order. What we see is the picture of a coherent life and a coherent world.
Damein:At this point in Exodus, as we've been walking through, god has redeemed his people. He's now brought them to Mount Sinai and he's called Moses up on the mountain with him. There on the mountain, he gave specific instructions for the tabernacle and at the end of our chapter today we'll see that Moses' 40 days on the mountain are complete and he gives Moses the two tablets with the Ten Commandments and he sends him back down the mountain. And next week Ben will pick up on exactly what Moses finds when he returns to the camp. But today we're going to explore the fact that even while God was giving his very detailed work order to Moses, he'd been providentially at work, preparing and gifting workers to accomplish the tasks that he had been giving them the whole time. So I want to do this in two points today. The first is that we are gifted for work and the second is that we are commanded to rest. We're gifted to work and we're commanded to rest. So first let's look at this. Gifted for work.
Damein:If you have your Bibles, keep it open to Exodus 31. We'll read a few of these verses, starting in verse one the Lord said to Moses see, I have called by name Bezalel and I have filled him with the spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver and bronze, in cutting stones for setting and in carving wood, to work in every craft. I just wanna point out a few things. First of all, he didn't just say okay, moses, I've spread some of my pixie Holy Spirit dust on the people. Now go and recruit people to figure this out with you. No, he actually says I've called by name Bezalel.
Damein:God has something very specific in mind, not just for the design of his tabernacle, but also for the man Bezalel who will lead and equip others in the building of this. The other thing I wanna point out is that he filled him with his Holy Spirit, the spirit of God. I wanna point out two things here. One, the spirit of God. When were we introduced to that phrase the exact wording spirit of God, verse two in Genesis one, at the very beginning, that it was the spirit of God who was hovering over the waters. Well, what was happening? Creation, building work with hands, and this phrase spirit of God shows up here again in now the construction of the tabernacle, which lots of really theological interesting things we won't get into, is that the tabernacle is to reflect the cosmos. We're not gonna get into that some other day.
Damein:But here's the other thing I really wanna hone in on for a second, and that is this is the first time in the entire Bible that someone has said to have been filled with the Holy Spirit. It's not interesting. And what is the task? To build stuff, to create beauty and art and to fulfill a work order, to build a tent, a tabernacle for the Lord to dwell in. We read that the filling with the spirit of God is accompanied by some other things too. Look with me here in the text. He's filled him with the spirit of God and then with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship to devise artistic designs and so on. So this is the tabernacle.
Damein:You know that later on Solomon builds the temple. Once they're settled in the land, they need a temple, another house for God, and Solomon builds the temple, and there are other men who are said to be filled with the spirit of God and gifted with these particular things then as well. But there's something else that amazes me here is that these same three words are attributed to God in creation and Proverbs, chapter three, verses 19 and 20,. Read this the Lord by wisdom founded the earth. By understanding, he established the heavens. By his knowledge, the deeps broke open and the clouds dropped down the dew. So you see, what we see so far is that human beings, wonderfully, are called to imitate God, how, in the very work of their hands. This is the task at the beginning we were given is to work and to till and to create.
Damein:Chris Wright, speaking of this passage as a commentator, and he says I love the fact that on this first occasion when the spirit of God, which has been so active in all the wonderful craftsmanship of creation itself, is said to fill a human being, it's to enable that person to exercise the same kinds of delegated skills. There's something so wonderfully creative and therefore God-like in what this passage describes Craftsmanship, artistic design, embroidery with rich colors, carving wood and stone. I fondly wish I had some of these skills and greatly admire the work of artists who do. We should take seriously that these things are said to be the marks of the filling of God's spirit. Now, we can't read into this all the Apostle Paul will later include in the Christian experience when Jesus himself comes. But at the same time we can't sharply separate the two either. It's the same spirit and it's the same word.
Damein:The spirit fills people, but when you and I think of the work of the spirit in our lives, we rightly think of the fruit of the spirit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We may think of other things like discernment, teaching, exhortation, mercy. We may even think of how Paul teaches us to put to death sin in our lives. How? By the spirit. All of this is crucial.
Damein:But I wanna point out that in Exodus 31 we observe another and very important dynamic of what happens when the Holy Spirit indwells. A person, and that is the spirit, empowers us to make specific contribution through the work of our hands. You may think, okay, okay, but come on, isn't this unique? Because after all, he's building the tabernacle, right? This has to be different. God doesn't actually fill me with his spirit to make contribution, does he Does the work I do, both paid and unpaid, as long as it makes a contribution, is that really from the Holy Spirit? My question, honestly, is well, where else do you think it comes from? I mean, do you think this just comes from you? You think it's just simply DNA? Do you think it's just simply experiences? Luck, john Calvin, so helpful to me in so many ways, even on this topic, and he actually speaks in his commentary to this passage. He says this Although the call of Bezalel was special because, as I've just said, god entrusted to him an unusual and by no means ordinary work, we must gather that no one excels even in the most despised and humble craft, except insofar as God's spirit works in him.
Damein:And then our call to worship Calvin quotes, for although there are diversities of gifts, still it is the same spirit from whom they all flow. And also, as God has seen fit to distribute and measure them out to every man. He didn't say Christian, he said every man and woman, of course, humanity. Nor is this only the case with respect to the spiritual gifts which follow regeneration, but in all the branches of knowledge which come to us in common life. It is therefore a false division when ungodly men ascribe the means of our support partly to nature and God's blessing and partly to the industry of man. By industry he means hard work, since man's industry, or man's hard work itself, is a blessing from God. The poets, he says, are more correct, who acknowledge that all which is suggested by nature comes from God, that all the arts emanate from him and therefore ought to be accounted divine inventions. End quote.
Damein:So obviously I agree with Calvin All gifts given to humanity for meaningful contribution in the world are from the Holy Spirit. Again, where else would they come from? So then I would say, how much more should this govern our thinking in the light of our calling this church as priests in the world? In all of life, god said he's actually making us into a dwelling that his spirit, both individually and corporately, embodies. And because God has made all of life holy, all of creation, all work, when you and I move into every area, both paid and unpaid, to bring contribution, we do it in the power of the spirit or we do it sinfully.
Damein:Another commentator says this is an invitation to eradicate the paralyzing, sacred secular dichotomy that deceives so many Christians into an exaggerated view of what God's work is, because, of course, god's work is paid, christian church work right, I inserted that part. And it also gives us a negatively diminished view of secular work, so-called as of little value to God and God's kingdom. But what we learn from this passage is that work is a gift from God and we are gifted by God for our work. Now I wanna expand this beyond. When I use work, I wanna now, in this next section, use the word contribution, because when I say work, you probably think of occupation, you probably think of the thing you do that you get a paycheck for, and it's not less than that, but it is more than that. So I wanna expand in our mind beyond simply compensation.
Damein:We're gifted to make specific contributions to our neighbors and God's purposes in every area of life. For example, let's say you or a friend might not have a wedding planning business, but let's say she's gifted in administration and design and she wonderfully coordinates your wedding. What is that but a gifted contribution? I have a friend who's a pastor, who's a fine preacher, pastor, good leader, leads a growing church and he is clearly gifted by God in woodworking. He makes wonderful contributions to the world by creating beautiful pieces of woodwork and I want you to know that this is every bit as from the spirit, as his gifts to preach and teach the Bible Every bit.
Damein:Now, if that's hard for us to conceive, it's because our minds have been colonized by a Western notion of a division between secular and sacred, private and public, spiritual and material. Now, I don't deny that those are real categories, but I'm pushing back on how we compartmentalize our lives into these categories, as though we can fit things that tightly. So when I send an email, is that secular or spiritual? I mean Damian and what I'm doing right now. Is this secular or spiritual? What if I sent an email about this sermon to Josh? Right, we're invited into a seamless life. These compartments are really for us to control. That's what we want. We want control of things, so we want to be able to divvy things out. This matters more than this. I just want to ask you the question that God asked Adam in the garden. Who told you that? Who told you that they were separate? The Bible does not think in these categories. I'd rather it does not think in these compartments.
Damein:I'm so helped by the fact here that there is no indication, for example, in the text, that Bezalel was suddenly zapped with an instant ability to be able to do these things. It's not like you woke up one morning a master craftsman, right. It's like the matrix, you know. You remember in the matrix, when people have the thing that goes in the back of their head and in seconds, all of a sudden someone attacks them and they're just, like, you know, kung fu champs. That's not what happened here. Bezalel isn't Neo in the matrix. No, his skillful hands and his understanding and wisdom were honed through years of diligent learning and practical experience. He had to learn why. Because he's human, he had to have learned these things. And while this is more than mere human competence, it's not less than that.
Damein:God gives gifts. He gives gifts to you and to me. He stokes your inner strength. He gives gifts to you and to me. He stokes your interest. Then you get experience, and then in your experience, your desire deepens. And then, as your desire deepens and your skills grow, you're both affirmed and confirmed that hey, you have something here to contribute. So then you seek further experience, and then you practice even more, then you gain more experience, then you're back to developing those gifts, and on and on and on. And all of a sudden you discover, oh, god has gifted me to contribute in this way.
Damein:John Frame has four helpful categories to think in when we think about how we might discern or discover these contributions. Now I like to think a lot about calling, and I know some of you are like, oh tell me, what's the magic bullet? Spoiler alert there is no magic bullet. It takes years and years of this discernment, and this is not a sermon on calling, but I do want to give you four things. First, god gives gifts to humanity in general and to his people specifically. So just know that you have gifts from God. The second thing is that the spirit enables people to discern their gifts. It's fallibly, but he does give you the ability to discern your gifts through self-examination and the confirmation of mentors, friends and collaborators or coworkers. Third, god provides opportunities to develop and exercise those gifts. And four, god grants wisdom to use gifts to glorify him and love our neighbor.
Damein:And one of the things that I love about these four categories that John Frame gives is that what's important about it is that it's not necessarily tied to the work you do for compensation. If the answer to these questions and the work you get paid for align, that's amazing and it's a privilege. And insofar as you and I have agency to shape and plan our life, we ought to, in community, do that. But just know that it is not ordinary in history or in the world today that your contribution given by God and your paid work 100% overlap, and for you to expect that it would be is going to lead you to a life of disillusionment. Okay, there's more I could say there, but I felt responsibly. I had to say that. Now what we see is again God is moving seamlessly between the building of his house and the construction of his house, or what happens mentally in design and production through the work of our hands. And what we see is that God gifts us for work and gives us the gift of work. But what I love about this is immediately what we learn is that we're actually made for more than work still.
Damein:So this passage was well known to me, the Bezalel passage, that is, one through 11. But this week, verse 12 shocked me. I had never seen that the Sabbath follows right after this command to work. So let's look at our second and final point, which is not only are we gifted to work, but we're also commanded to rest Verse 12,. And the Lord said to Moses, you are to speak to the people of Israel and say, 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. As I mentioned in preparation this week, I was struck by the fact that, right after this wonderful passage on gifted for work were commanded to rest. As I kept thinking about it, I thought that if this was written by an American or by someone after the Industrial Revolution, we would expect the Lord probably to say something like this okay, now that you have your objective, you have your constraints, you have your personnel, get to work. This is the most important task that you have. Do not stop until it is finished. Now I've worked in a factory, for example, and it ran 24 hours a day and I promise you, it wasn't producing rockets, like SpaceX, it wasn't producing cars, like Tesla. It was producing plastic things, things that didn't seem important, and yet this factory had to work 24 hours a day. This is just the way things are right.
Damein:As I mentioned earlier, I'm nearly finished with the Elon Musk biography, and he is infamous for his maniacal demands and expectations on his employees. He's an incredibly driven man. He's also an incredibly wounded man and he thrives on chaos. In fact, he's very uncomfortable when things are not unstable. He regularly goes into what those closest to him call quote demon mode, and everyone who survives knows that when Elon Musk goes into demon mode, you have to learn how to manage him. They say. The creepiest thing is he doesn't get angry and yelling, he gets calm and threatening. And so demon mode. What happens then? He demands work at all hours. He would sleep in the factory and expect others to do so. He would create artificial deadlines. He knew they were artificial. He would create artificial deadlines in order to create a chaotic sense of urgency, and then he would justify these modes by talking about the scale and importance of what SpaceX and Tesla were accomplishing. He said if we don't work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we will never become a multi-planetary species, is what he said. So he's connecting all that he does to this moral reality that's larger than him. He's trying to say this is the future of humanity and I'm the man who's going to usher it in. This is very common language, but I couldn't help but think that nothing, of course, is more important than constructing God's house, is it Nothing? And yet God says, right after he gives the clear instructions and they're ready to go, he says oh, by the way, I want you to rest for 24 hours one time a week.
Damein:One commentator, alec Mortier, says this emphasis on the Sabbath was surely meant to alert the workers on the tabernacle to the fact that the uniqueness and holiness of their task did not allow them to sit loose to the law of God. The commandment was not addressed specifically to them, but to all Israel, for no one knew at this point who was to be included in that workforce. No one was permitted to say either that the abnormal circumstances of their wilderness life or the exceptional nature of the work in hand allowed adjustments to be made. As ever, god's work must be done in God's way. And this just smacked me between the eyes this week. I mean I was thinking okay, this sentence right here. No one was permitted to say either that the abnormal circumstances of their wilderness life let's just stop there.
Damein:Listen, this week was just crazy. I mean Thanksgiving's coming up, sunday's still coming. I mean we're going to be traveling next week. We just ran out of time, like we just have to go ahead and work the weekend. We got to do the yard work, we got to get everything, we got to run errands. We don't have time to take 24 hours to rest from what we know to be work. We don't have time to set one day apart. That's holy. But I mean it just happens to be this week, right? I doubt that.
Damein:But here's the thing is that what we're saying here is that, listen, I mean we're in a wilderness life. I mean it's not like we have houses to construct, we have tents, so we always have to be fixing them. We always have to see what we're going to have for food, on and on and on. Excuse, right. And then the other thing is but this work is so important, right, this work is so important and God, right away, says yeah. If you think that all of this really exciting work on the Tabernacle is going to get you out of Sabbath, then let me reiterate and you know, honestly, we shouldn't be surprised by this At the prominence of Sabbath at this point, both in Exodus and in the whole Bible, you see, we learn that Israel belongs to God.
Damein:He saved them, he is their God, they are his people, so, so that means that everything that is Israel's is God's, not Israel's. You and I say that all the time. We'll say acknowledge I mean, all that I have is God's Any concept of tithing or generosity or giving. What do we say? It's just stewardship, right, it's just stewardship of the resources God has given me. And so I give, because then I give first to him. I don't pay all my bills and do all of that and fund all my things and then whatever I have left over, give to God. Right, this is common Christian stuff here. No, we give to God first.
Damein:But you realize that you and I don't do the same with our time. You realize that you basically look, you and I look at our week and we say, well, we got 168 hours, we got to get to it. Yeah, there's something about money that we're willing to say we got to give first to God, because I would feel wrong and bad and greedy if I didn't give money, if I didn't steward in that way. You do know that your time is not yours either, right, I do know that my time is not mine either. Israel's time is not their own. Israel must order and allot their time according to the command of God. You and I might say but we're doing the Lord's work, yes, and we always have to do the Lord's work in the Lord's way. We don't just get to decide that we should do this seven days a week and never rest. We don't get to decide that God clearly says you do not have seven days to work, you have six days to work. You have weeks to work. You have six days to work, you have one day to rest. He didn't just say until. Whatever. He said literally forever. It's in the passage. And then he says, just in case we miss it to all of your generations.
Damein:Now here's the thing is, I overwork all the time because I like to work, right, don't you? Don't you like to work? One of the hardest things for me on my day of rest is I just want to sit and read. But then I find myself, well, this is kind of like work, this is what I do, right. And so Abraham Heschel has this great quote. He says if you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands. If you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. And increasingly I've leaned into that, but I feel the pain. I want to read. You guys listen, I would literally read all day. Every day, I would sit down with a book and knock it up, except to go to the bathroom and when I was done, and so, of course, when I rest. That draws me, but I really have to think and check. It's like, is this me sort of sneaking work in, because I bet the book that I want to read someday is going to be helpful for the work that I do? What about you? Why are you tempted to overwork? Well, one reason is because I like to work, and I bet most of you do too, and I'm sure a lot of you also overwork, like me because there's a true reality that I find my worth and value in being productive. Truly, the thought of others working I've gotten better at this, truly but the thought of others working while I'm not makes me feel incredibly insecure and uncomfortable. If I'm on vacation and everyone else is not, it takes me a little bit of time to be okay that everyone else is working in the office. Now again, I've gotten better, but. But it's there, it's real. And so God has given you the gift of work, but if you can't stop us, no longer a gift, it's a master.
Damein:In his book 4,000 weeks, which is a fantastic book, I'd recommend it British author Oliver Berkman names a modern phenomenon that he calls pathological productivity. He points out, quote Aristotle argued that true leisure, by which he meant self reflection and contemplation, was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake. In other words, you weren't self reflecting and going into contemplation, that leisure for some other ends, you did it because of it, wasn't end in itself. That's what Aristotle said. He says, but now we have a new hierarchy that's been established. Work is seen as the real point of existence.
Damein:Leisure is merely an opportunity for recovery and recovery. Leisure is merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment. For the purpose what of more work? Yeah, I got to rest. I'll be more creative when I come back, All of better ideas when I come back. I got to sleep because my brain's going to be working on Saturday night, so when I get up the sermon might come together. But that's the only reason I want to sleep.
Damein:Berkman points out that this has fundamentally not only changed our relationship with work, it's changed our understanding and relationship to time itself. This isn't philosophical, really. Think about this. He says, quote in this view of time, that is where work is really the purpose of everything. He says anything that doesn't create some form of value for the future is, by definition, idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purpose of recuperation, for work or perhaps for some other form of self improvement. I just want to thank you all for listening to me talk about me when this, I'm sure, has nothing to do with you.
Damein:You know, an extreme example of this is the case of the novelist Danielle Steele. You guys, have you ever read Danielle Steele? Me neither, but I've seen her books everywhere. Right, she's written a lot of books. You go to CVS, you go to Walgreens, you go whatever Danielle Steele's been writing for a long time. She's an OG of these really fat books that you can buy anywhere, and you find them in the ones, the things where people give away for free in the neighborhoods. It's just chock full of Danielle Steele.
Damein:So she gave an interview in 2019 with Glamour magazine and this she revealed the secret. They say how do you manage to write 179 books at this point in her life? She was 72. So, unless she started writing books before she could speak, that's pretty impressive. She released them at the rate of almost seven books per year. How they said? How she said by working literally all the time in 20 hour days, with a handful of 24 hour writing periods every month, a single week's holiday each year and practically no sleep. End quote. She said I don't go to bed until I'm so tired I could sleep on the floor. That's how she knows when she's done. So can I sleep on the floor? That doesn't really sound appealing. Okay, I'm going to keep working. Could I sleep on the floor? Yeah, okay, then I'm ready to stop. She was quoted by saying if I have four hours a night, that's really really good for me. I don't know how to explain how good that is.
Damein:Psychologists call this inability to rest, because, you know, psychologists have to name this kind of pathology Idleness aversion. Isn't that good? Write that down. Idleness aversion, which makes it sound like just another minor behavior foible we have and can brag in. You know, I have idleness aversion. I mean, it just means that I can't stop working. It's crazy, you know, but in fact it's not a mere foible. It's actually now become the core ingredient of the modern soul. I have idleness aversion.
Damein:In fact, those of us who are parents, I'm sure this is the best and worst discipleship of our children that you and I are doing. It's the best in the sense that they are learning from us how to work all of the time and to build in no true rest, no true recuperating rest. They're learning that from us and they're going to be good at it because it's just normal life to them. It's normal to them that they wake up, that they go to school, that they go to sports practice, that they come back and do homework, then they go to bed at 9 o'clock and then they get up and do it again until Friday. They go somewhere and travel for their sports or their academics or whatever, and then they come back and they do it again for 18 years. This is normal. This is the best discipleship we have. I'm telling you we're crushing this. It's the best and it's the worst because, except for attending worship on Sunday morning for a couple of hours, there's nothing different about this day or any other for them. You recognize that right. It's the best discipleship and the worst discipleship. It is key to the modern soul of the current day. Human being is that work is everything, activity is everything. But in Scripture, in God's economy, we get a completely different reality.
Damein:A refrain from the book of Exodus is that people may know that God is their God. You remember this refrain and then they will know. There are three things that show the world in Exodus that God is their God. First one he delivers them from slavery in Egypt. Second, he dwells with his people. Third, he gave them the Sabbath. Those are the three ways in the Bible that God, the world should know that God is their God. He delivers them from slavery, he dwells in their midst and he gave them the Sabbath. Those are the three. How will the nations know that they're gods and he dwells among them? They will imitate God in working six days and resting one, keeping one day holy to him. That's how they'll know.
Damein:Now listen, this is when people feel like I'm trying to make them feel bad, badly, Bad, badly, both Bad and badly. And so what happens is we start to feel shame and then we either have contempt for ourselves, our circumstances or me right now. If you knew, if you only knew, yeah, that's probably right. Like, if I was you, I probably wouldn't take a Sabbath either. I wouldn't take a Sabbath if I was me either. Maybe a little bit of time, maybe an afternoon, but all day excessive. It's 24 hours, it's excessive. So let me speak quickly to that. It is true that the New Testament never quotes the fourth commandment, which is the one on Sabbath. The New Testament never quotes the fourth commandment. That's true. It's true that Colossians 2.16, paul rules out any legalistic approach to the question of Sabbath observance. Go read it, colossians 2. Okay, that's all true.
Damein:Nevertheless, we must be careful to take account of what's actually happening here, this wonderful, deeply theological understanding of the Lord's day given here to us in Exodus. The Sabbath is to be assigned to the world of our holy separation as God's people. We're slaves to God, not to our work. That's like the whole point. The Sabbath is to be assigned to the world of our holy separation, and that separation is to be a sign of our determination to imitate God. That's the whole point. We're to imitate God.
Damein:You say how, by working six and resting one. Listen, the Sabbath is not meant to be an exercise in restriction, but devotion. What are you devoted to? Not what is God keeping you from? Because he's mean. No, he's saying I want to make sure you keep your devotion proper. You give me the first day. All my time, all of your time is mine. But I'm going to give you six of the days and I get one. But that's meant to be a gift. Imitation of God is what we're called to. Did God rest, yes. Did Jesus rest, yes. Should we rest, yes.
Damein:The writer Judith Shulovitz not a Christian woman didn't write from a faith-based perspective. She wrote a book on the Sabbath, and in that book she says quote most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work, but the inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the cat in the hat says, it's fun to have fun, but you have to know how. This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, she says, requiring extensive advanced preparation, at the very least a scrubbed house, a full ardor and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful, she says. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.
Damein:You want to know why it's so hard for you and I to Sabbath? Because no one else does. That's why you guys, when we were in Jerusalem at the beginning of August. We were in Israel, we were in Jerusalem. We had a Shabbat meal with a Jewish family. Now, these two were Jewish people raised in New York City, so they're also American and Israeli citizens. They moved back. They were probably in their late twenties, early thirties. They had all 20 of us over and as we're walking through Jerusalem, we go by the wailing wall, we go up and we pray. It really was this remarkable experience.
Damein:And then we're walking and all of a sudden you hear through open windows people singing at the Sabbath meal. Before there's this bustle of people getting everything ready literally children and are sprinting back and forth going to get different things for the parents. The parents are. You look in the window. They're trying to get everything ready and we tend to think of Sabbath as an antiquated thing. But this is a very modern society. You go in and you watch them do this. It's quite striking.
Damein:And then they start to do things and you're like, well, that's funny, that seems legalistic. For example, one time the woman accidentally bumped her electric toothbrush and it turned on because there's a Sabbath. They couldn't turn it off, so they just let it run out. When we were there when we were there, all the foods on hot plates, they had prepared a meal before it and as the husband was feeding it, he accidentally bumped a light switch. All their lights are on timers, so he accidentally bumped a light switch that came on and we were like so what are you going to do? And he kind of chuckled. And so Jason, who was with us, just walked over and was just like click and just shut it off, right, because they couldn't shut it off.
Damein:And we look at that and we think, oh, this is just legalistic, this is whatever. No, it's not. This is the type of severe reality it takes to actually cease. This is what it takes. It takes that kind of craziness literally. It takes more a certain type of craziness to overcome the regular craziness that we live in.
Damein:You see, in Scripture, rest is a gift, not a reward. In Scripture, rest is a gift, not a reward. You and I are like, if I work hard enough, maybe I can take a day off. No, that is completely the Bible is upside down from that. You rest first, no matter what. This is why we start our week with rest. This is why we start our day with sleep.
Damein:You do know that, biblically, the day doesn't start in the morning, it starts at night. And what's the first thing you do? You sleep. It's very theological. Have you ever thought about that?
Damein:You rest first, then you work, and this perfectly reflects the message of the gospel that sets us free, doesn't it Perfectly? You see, the invitation and promise of the gospel is the invitation to rest, not work. That is the invitation of the gospel Come and rest, and it's the rest that we participate in. It's God's finished work on our behalf. Jesus does the work. We rest in that work. Rest and peace in Jesus is not a reward to working hard or believing hard. It's the gift of receiving salvation. Jesus' work is what we receive and rest in, and it's from this rest and standing that we work. So this passage invites us to at least two things. In conclusion, it invites us to a seamless life where we don't separate spiritual from material, we don't get to compartmentalize our lives and the other things that it invites us to is to receive the gift not only of work but of rest, and the order really matters. We rest, then we work. This is exactly what the gospel invites us in. We rest in the work of Jesus. We don't earn the work of Jesus.
Damein:Let's pray, father. We come to you and we ask that you would give us mercy, help us see where we might need to turn and to repent, and to recognize your invitation to us that we refuse to take. Lord, I do pray by your spirit, that you would bring conviction, maybe, but not despair. Would you bring conviction, but not shame. Would you bring curiosity to all of us? We all fail in this area. Some of us have never even thought about these things. I ask that you would bring this rest that we have just learned of that even now, in this moment, rather than striving to figure out all of the things in our calendar that we can change in order to rest, that we would just receive rest in this moment. Let us rest in you, and it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.