Let's take heed to our hearts as we hear these words. Isaiah 58 verses 13 and 14, these are the words of God. If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of Yahweh honorable, and shall honor him not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in Yahweh, and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father. The mouth of Yahweh is spoken. So in the earlier part of the chapter the Lord was actually rebuking Israel both for their keeping and observing some of the things that he has commanded because they were Keeping it in a way that he had not commanded. It was a heart and desire that they had not commanded and And then he was also rebuking them for not living lives that That show love for him and worship to him And so one of the things that they were doing wrong is they thought that the point of the religious ceremonies that the Lord had commanded, was to make them feel miserable and that if they felt badly enough, if they were willing to endure enough religion for God's sake, then God would give them the stuff that they would want. But they weren't getting the stuff that they wanted and the Lord told them, when you fast like that, when you treat me like a God who wants you to be miserable, and when you treat me like your being miserable earns You, A, make me out to be an ogre who enjoys your pain, and B, show that you don't enjoy me or delight in me. So the big problem by the time we, and people who do that, if they don't enjoy God and delight in God, then they don't value God's image in others and they treat each other poorly, which he also reviews in the middle of the chapter. So by the time we get to verses 13 and 14, which are our portion just now, we're realizing something about the Israelites at East Correcting that is also true of our own hearts, and that is we don't find God as delightful as we ought to. And God's prescription for that disease is the Sabbath. His holy day, and referring to it as His holy day actually prepares us for what the Christian Sabbath comes to be called in the New Testament, which is the Lord's day. You know, when the Apostle John says that in Revelation chapter one, he's not just building upon the fact that for a generation at that point, that had been the day of Jesus, the day of the Lord Jesus. for the church so that they would know, in that sense, what he means when he says, the Lord's Day. It's also building upon Isaiah 58, 13 and 14, in which the Lord gives the Sabbath a different name. He says, My Holy Day, so that we will know that it is the Lord's Day. The Lord's day is to be kept by delighting in the Lord, which is God's method by which he trains us to delight in him more. So he says, if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, there's two things going on here. One is feet that wants to do what they want to do. And then God's comes and says, this one's my holy day. On this day, your feet do what I say to do. You have liberty in the service and enjoyment of God the other six days to turn your foot in whatever direction is not sinful, and you are the decider of that. On the Lord's Day, God has a specific place for you to go. Where do you go on the Lord's Day, Safiyyah? I didn't hear her. You go to church, right? You go to the assembly of God's people. You go to other acts of worship. You go to do those specific things for which God has prescribed the day. But this turning away your foot from the Sabbath is also has a fuller or a second meaning that is part of a full meaning. which is turning away your foot from trampling the Sabbath. So that when he gets into the rest of the verse, the not doing your own ways, or finding your own pleasure, speaking your own words, he's already said at the beginning of the verse that if we do want to decide for ourselves what is enjoyable, I don't know if you've ever heard anyone say, well, this is how I relax and God wants me to be rested and that's what Sabbath is about. Well, God describes that as a trampling of his Sabbath, a stomping on his Sabbath. He says, no, no, no, don't you stomp on, don't you trample my Sabbath. Okay. And he says, so if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, don't stomp on the Sabbath. from doing your pleasure on my holy day. You hear the contrast there between the your and the my. It's a day that is consecrated in a special way by God to himself so that we don't do our pleasure. Why? Well, he goes on to say, and call the Sabbath a delight. So who has decided what should be our pleasure on that day? God has. He says call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of Yahweh honorable. So there's a pleasure competition on the Lord's day. Is it going to be our day or is it going to be His day? So you call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of Yahweh honorable and shall honor Him. Now the word honor means weighty. So the day ought to be a weighty thing. Well, you call the holy day of Yahweh honorable and honor Him, verse 13. So the day is weighty because He is weighty. Think about it. There's a day that's been consecrated by God for you to delight in the day by delighting in Him, by spending the day in worship. If we take that lightly, are we not saying that the pleasure of God is a small thing? means heavy, weighty. The Lord is a great and infinite God and when He gives Himself to be our pleasure that should be a great and weighty and good pleasure. So we call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of Yahweh honorable and we honor Him by what? not doing our own ways or finding our own pleasure or speaking our own words. Well, what does that mean? Who's going to come up with the things to do and what to enjoy and what kind of conversations to have? If we don't come up with them, who comes up with them? God does. Now, there's a sense in which you kind of wish you just had that the other six days. It would sure help with decision making if the Lord told you what that whole day was for. But there are many things that each of us have to do, and we have different roles in life, and scripture instructed wisdom has to help us on those days. But on the Lord's days, He's given us what to do, what to enjoy, and the kind of words to speak. Then it gets very exciting in verse 14 because he says, if you enjoy having a day like that, then he's going to use it to do something in you. Verse 14, then you shall delight yourself. So a lot of people, when they first come, they first hear about keeping the Lord's Day, they say, oh, that sounds so miserable. You say, yeah, that sounds miserable because you haven't started keeping the Lord's Day yet. It sounds miserable because you don't enjoy Him. But the Lord's Day is an instrument by which He trains you to enjoy it. And if you keep it, He makes you this promise. Through the keeping of it, through His blessing to you, the keeping of it, you will start to enjoy him more. However much you think you enjoy him now, you will more truly and more intensely enjoy him the more you keep his day as consecrated unto him, a day of delighting in him. And when you first start out, yes, to your worldly heart that enjoys the things He gives more than Him Himself, it will not be as enjoyable. But the more He blesses the day to you, to delight in Him Himself, the more you'll delight to come and enjoy His day. And as you delight in His day more, what will you use that to do? Increase your delight in Him. And the more you delight in Him, what will you find more delightful? His day. Do you see the good and generous and kind design of God for the keeping of this Sabbath. So if we find ourselves, we hear this doctrine and we're resistant to it and we've got all of these arguments for the things that we would enjoy more than God Himself for the keeping of the day. Well, we're just at the beginning of it and we ought to obey because He's God and it's His prerogative to command us. but we ought also to be incentivized all the more to obey because he's a good and generous God who he himself is the most pleasurable, most delightful, more than all other things taken together. And his design for the day is out of kindness to make us to enjoy him more than the created things, more than all those things that all the anti our God is good and merciful. He says, Then you shall delight yourself in Galway, and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father. You see, the Israelites thought if we do all this miserable religious stuff and we endure the pain of spending time consecrated unto God in other days and observances from the ceremony along. Then God will give us to rule the rest of the nations and possess the gates of our enemies, just like He said He would give to the Israelites to rule all the nations and possess the gates of our enemies. That's what we want. But what is the Lord saying? He's saying, actually, Riding on the high hills of the earth isn't to dominate the other nations. It's to have me and be kings and queens and princes and princesses who have fellowship with the living God who is the king of kings. And the heritage of Jacob, your father, isn't to inherit a strip of land in the ancient Near East. The heritage of Jacob, your father, is the Lord himself. He is our inheritance. He is our portion. He is our heritage. And if you really want these promises fulfilled, then the path is the enjoyment of the Lord himself and the mechanism by which he gives to come into that enjoyment is the good keeping of his day. Which means, some of you little ones, that when there's something else that you want to do on a Lord's day, And we say, this isn't a day for that. Or we ask you, what day is this? And what is this day for? That we're not trying to be mean in order to stop you from doing those things that you think are fun. We are trying to love you like God loves you and help you find Him to be more joy than any other activity or any other thing. And you, it may encourage you to know that this is when we find ourselves thinking I wish I could just do this chore or hurry up and finish that or maybe even enjoy this other thing and we find that reflex in our hearts and we say oh Lord help me because I still delight in your gifts more than in you yourself in a lot of ways. Bless to me this Lord's Day. Bless to me the keeping of your Sabbath now by making my heart to grow in its So wonderful design for a wonderful command and gift of God. That is the fourth commandment. Let's ask him to bless it to us. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for your word, for the way you correct. our spiritual foolishness. We thank you for the gift of the Sabbath. We thank you for the gift of the Lord's day, which Christ our God and Savior has consecrated unto himself. We pray that you would help us in the keeping of it week by week, that you would train our hearts to delight in you, that indeed we would ride on the high hills and inherit, have, possess the heritage