(This is part four of a four part series. The rest of the parts will be collected on our Lord of the Sabbath page after they are posted.)

Matthew 11:28

Watch on YouTube

Today, I want to wrap up our discussion of the Sabbath, and Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath, by answering one question I often get. If God commanded Old Testament Israel to observe the Sabbath day on Saturday (Exodus 16:26) and Saturday was the day in the first creation, God set apart as holy and consecrated as the day of rest, why on earth do Christians worship on Sunday? Have we moved the Sabbath day?

Well, to answer that, I’d say no, we didn’t. Because no one has the authority to move or change the Sabbath. Only God has that authority. But in answering this question, there’s something really interesting I want to look at with you today. And that’s generally how God works between the first creation and the second creation. So, for instance, everything he makes in the first creation, he always replaces with something better in the second creation. So, for instance, God gave Adam and Eve holy matrimony in the first creation. (Genesis 2:18-24) With Jesus’ death and resurrection, he gives his church the wedding feast of the Lamb that we look forward to in the new creation. God gave Abraham the covenant of marking God’s people as his own through circumcision. (Genesis 17:10–14) But Christ, after he rose from the dead, commanded that all nations be baptized, thus making them the children of God through water and the word. (Matthew 28:19-20) You have Moses, who is given the covenant of the Passover, (Exodus 12:1-28) which on the Last Supper, Jesus replaced with the better, more glorious meal of God’s feast, deliverance and freedom through the Lord’s Supper. (Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-27, Luke 22:14-23)

Everything in the first creation is replaced with something new, with something better, with a full, more rich expression of God’s grace to you, in the New Covenant in the New Testament. And you see, the same is true for rest. When we look at the Old Testament Sabbath day that happened one day a week. And as we looked at over the past few weeks, the rest that they were given in the Old Testament, whether it was work being done or holding still or being safe from your enemies, it was never fully completed. But Jesus’ death and resurrection changed all that. With Jesus’ death and resurrection, he gave us rest.

Come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)

Notice this promise isn’t connected to a day of the week, but when we come to Jesus in faith and seek in him our rest. The author of Hebrews explains this he, points to the Psalms that say, today, if you hear his voice, believe in him, and you will find your rest. (Hebrews 4:7-11)

What day is our New Testament Sabbath day? Is it Saturday? Is it Sunday? Both, is the correct answer. Any day we hear his voice and trust in Jesus as our Savior, we have sacred rest. All the work is completed. We have stillness in Christ and we have deliverance from our enemies. But the early church chose Sunday, they called it the Lord’s Day as the day they would worship and gather together to praise God and receive his sacraments because there was something special about Sunday.

Sunday was the day that God began his work of creation. Sunday was the day Jesus rose from the dead and ushered in the new creation. (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:2, Luke 24:1, John 20:1) And Pentecost Sunday was the day when the Holy Spirit was poured out on God’s church, (Acts 2) sealing you as the future participants of the new creation and new Kingdom through Christ. So every time we gather on Sundays, or if we gather a different time of the week to worship, we’re always celebrating the wonderful works God has done for us on that very first day of the week. That reminds us of the first day of the new creation we look forward to in Jesus. Amen.

(This is part three of a four part series. The rest of the parts will be collected on our Lord of the Sabbath page after they are posted.)

Joshua 21:44, Ephesians 6:12

Watch on YouTube

We’ve been talking about how Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. Today I want to look at the third major Sabbath theme in the Old Testament. We find this theme in the Book of Joshua. In fact, the book of Joshua, which is full of all these battles and conflicts, it ends with this beautiful statement. That God gave Israel rest from all her enemies. (Joshua 21:44)

The sense of this rest is the sense of being able to sleep at peace, because you know you are perfectly safe. Now, a few weeks ago, I was on a trip out of town and my wife called me at 12:30 in the morning, and right away I knew something was up. You see, she was just getting settled down for bed and someone rang the doorbell. And instantly she was alert and awake and wondering what is going on, who’s at the door, who is messing with me? And maybe it’s a result of watching too much true crime on Netflix, but from that point on, neither her nor me could get any sleep. And my wife spent the rest of the night with her aluminum bat close at hand, just in case someone were to try to storm the fortress.

What is robbing you of your peace? We think of our lives and how easily anxieties and fears, concerns about safety, concerns about the future can rob us of our peace. God wants you and I to have peace, but so often we lose our peace and not only because of financial stressors and physical stressors in our life, but we have to always be alert to what’s really happening.

Your battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12)

We’re fighting against the devil who will rest at nothing to rob you of your peace in Jesus. He’ll attack you any way he can. He attacks us through busy schedules. He attacks us through fear, through dangers. And in this world where oftentimes we live in fear, Jesus is your Lord of the Sabbath. He’s the Lord of crushing your enemies under his feet.

In fact, that’s what the book of Joshua shows us all throughout that battle after battle, all the Israelites had to do was show up. But the battle belonged to the Lord. The Lord was the one who fought the battle. The Lord was the one who won the victory and he gave it to his people. Just like he gave his people that feeling of peace and security.

Your Jesus is the Lord of Sabbath who crushes his enemies under his feet. And of all the victories God has won for you. The greatest victory was the victory of Jesus hanging on the cross, or Jesus rising Easter morning to descend into hell and crush the devil’s head once and for all. He [the devil] is beaten. And for you, he [Jesus] wants you to rest, knowing all of your enemies have already been defeated by Jesus. Your sins are forgiven. Death is destroyed. The devil’s crushed under Jesus’ feet. You are safe. Amen.

(This is part two of a four part series. The rest of the parts will be collected on our Lord of the Sabbath page after they are posted.)

Exodus 20:9-11, Psalm 16:9b-10

Watch on YouTube

Last week we started talking about Jesus as the Lord of the Sabbath. Today I want to unpack the second major rest theme in the Bible with you. We find this theme thousands of years after the creation, when in the book of Exodus, after God has freed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, he’s leading them through the wilderness where he commands that for six days they are to labor. But on the seventh day, that is to be a day of sacred rest. (Exodus 20:9-11) A day where they are to do no work at all, there to be perfectly still so that they can have a time of sacred assembly to hear God’s Holy Word.

Now, how good are you at holding still? It’s kind of a fun experiment to have with toddlers, actually. Tell them to hold still. And the more they think about holding still, the more and more they fidget. Or maybe if you’ve been carted into an MRI before and had to sit in that tunnel, and the last thing the operator always tells you is hold still. And it’s the moment that they say that, that all of a sudden you’re so consciously aware of that itch and it just drives you nuts. We’re not very good at holding still, are we?

Spiritually speaking, we can’t hold still. God says, be still. Let me do all the work. Let me do all the labor and heavy lifting. But our human reason, our human logic says, no, no, no, no, God, I’ve got to do something. I got to contribute. It’s got to be my faith or my faithfulness, or my good works that somehow contribute to me being saved. Or God says be still. Just trust in me. And you know what? The more I think about holding still, the more I think about I gotta trust in God. I gotta trust in God. The more I worry. I’ll even start to worry about my own faith. Whether or not my faith is trusting enough in God. We can’t hold still. That’s why Jesus is your Lord of the Sabbath. He’s the Lord of holding perfectly still. In fact, we see Jesus perfect trust in God, quoted in Psalm 16 When Jesus says,

My body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay. (Psalm 16:9b-10)

Jesus went into death. He died in perfect trust, trusting himself into his father’s hands. And the most beautiful moment after Jesus death is when Jesus fulfilled all of those commandments from Exodus by holding perfectly still as his body laid in the tomb on the day we call Holy Saturday. Jesus did no work. He didn’t even lift a finger. You see, for you and me, we can never have perfect trust in God. But what we can do is we can run to Jesus, who is our perfect trust, our perfect stillness, our perfect rest. And for all the times I’m lying awake at night and all the times I’m troubled, I run to Jesus and rest in his perfect stillness Amen.

Matthew 12:8, John 19:30

Watch on YouTube

(This is part one of a four part series. The rest of the parts will be collected on our Lord of the Sabbath page after they are posted.)

One of my favorite titles for Jesus is when he calls himself the Lord of the Sabbath. (Matthew 12:8) And over the next few weeks, I want to unpack with you what that title means. Sabbath means sacred rest, and the very first time we see it in Scripture is in the creation account. God creates the heavens, the earth, and all things in six normal natural days, and after he creates everything, he sees it. All of his work is done and completed. It’s finished and there’s nothing left to do. And so he rests on the seventh day, and he makes that day holy.

Whenever I think of the creation account, boy, I think about all of my home projects that I’m doing. I’ve got this thing where I’ll do a project but it’s never quite completely done. It’s never completely finished. I’m a tweaker. I’ll always keep continuing to tweak and mess and edit for eternity. Or sometimes even when I think I have a project finished, I might look back over that and always see those 1 or 2 flaws, those 1 or 2 things I wish I had done just a little bit differently. And I have OCD, so it really, really bothers me.

But you see, those unfinished, uncompleted projects are kind of a picture of our creation after the fall into sin. It means nothing is ever going to be finished perfectly. Nothing is ever going to just stay done or stay fixed. And most importantly, the thing that isn’t going to be done or especially done right is keeping God’s law perfect. That’s the project, that’s the work that I always fall short of completing. I always leave something undone, something unsaid.

Or maybe after the fact it’s when I’m laying awake in my bed at night, not able to sleep because I’m wishing and wishing I hadn’t have said that dumb thing. And I’m wishing that I could go back and do things differently. Well, Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. He’s the Lord of getting a job done once and doing it right. And when he does it, it stays done forever. He came back into this creation as the second Adam, the second Adam, to complete our perfect righteousness when we could never do that job right. He came as the creator in order to begin a new creation, a second creation.

You see, he labored for six days, and that six days of labor culminated with his death on the cross. And as he hung on the cross, what did Jesus say? He says “it is finished.” (John 19:30) It is done. It is completed. There is nothing left to do. Nothing left for you or me to do. And in that perfect job, that job done well, Jesus rested on the Sabbath day.

God the father showed that he approved of Jesus work by raising Jesus up from the dead. And with Jesus resurrection, we have the promise of a new creation, you and me. We get to be partakers in that new creation. In Holy Baptism, God is connected you to Jesus completed work on the cross and his resurrection. That means we’re looking forward to a new world, a better world, a second creation where we don’t have to worry about jobs that don’t get done anymore. We get to look forward to perfect rest. Amen.