This sermon by Dr. Joseph A. Piper is entitled, God's Gracious Promise, taken from Isaiah chapter 58, verses 13 through 14. At this time, I'd like to ask Dr. Piper to come and read the scripture and deliver God's word to us today. Thank you, Pastor. Open your Bibles, please, to Isaiah chapter 58. Isaiah chapter 58. And as you do so again, I want to thank the elders for the privilege of being with you this weekend, have an opportunity to minister in your midst and to enjoy Christian fellowship with so many of you as well. I pray regularly for the work of the church here and rejoice to see how God is blessing you. Isaiah chapter 58, let us stand now for the reading of God's word. Cry aloud, spare not. Lift up your voice like a trumpet. Tell my people their transgression and the house of Jacob, their sins. Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of me the ordinances of justice. They take delight in approaching God. Why have we fasted, they say, and you have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls and you take no notice? In fact, in the day of your fast, you find pleasure and exploit all your laborers. Indeed, you fast for strife and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high. Is it a fast that I've chosen? A day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush and to spread out the sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast? An acceptable day to the Lord? Is this not the fast that I've chosen, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out? And you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh. Then your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry and he will say, here I am. If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in darkness and your darkness shall be as noonday. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your soul in drought and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. Those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations. You should be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. 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 the Lord, 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 the Lord, 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 the Lord has spoken." The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our Lord endures forever. Let us pray. We bless your name, Almighty God. You have graciously brought us into your presence, and now you've set your herald here in our midst that Christ, the risen and exalted prophet, might speak to us. We ask now that He would do so, that we would hear the word of the Lord, and that the Spirit would move mightily in our midst. And we ask this in Christ's strong name. Amen. Well, I imagine that you boys and girls, have special days that you like. Maybe it's, well, we're getting ready to have Thanksgiving. I think that's probably my favorite time of the year as we gather with family and friends. Perhaps it's your birthday, and maybe it's Christmas, or for adults, maybe it's an anniversary or other special times. But we all have, in our lives, days, times that are very special to us. Now as you think about the list of special days in your life, where do you slot the Lord's Day? Where does it figure in with respect to days or times in which you take great pleasure? I think sometimes because it comes around on a weekly basis that we probably forget about the specialness of the day. And we don't really take delight in the Sabbath. It's something that becomes, you know, a regular pattern of our lives, but we might even approach it somewhat thoughtlessly. And for some of you young people, it might actually not be a delight at all. You wake up on the Lord's Day morning and you have to get up and suddenly, oh my, I can't do this today and I have to do that today. And there's no real delight in this concept of the Lord's Day. But what we see here in Isaiah chapter 58, 13, and 14, that it really ought to be, as one of the hymns says, in our estimation, the best day of all. The best day of all, of every day, of all of our lives. So we look this morning to see what God teaches us here. Now, I'll remind you of the setting of these two verses that are our text. You'll know that the book of Isaiah is broken in half, and the first half deals primarily with God's judgment and the Assyrian attacks and captivity. But even there, sprinkled through the declarations of judgment, we constantly hear declarations of God's grace. And you see that in all the prophets, don't you? You have these severe pronouncements of judgment, and then suddenly just almost disconnected great promises of God's grace and mercy. What's more clear even in the second half of the book that begins Well, it's strange. It begins with an announcement of deliverance from captivity. Now, of course, in the second half of the book, Isaiah is pronouncing the judgment of the Babylonians, who will take the southern kingdom, Judah and Benjamin, into captivity. But it begins in chapter 40, anticipating that deliverance from Babylon. And so there's this complexity throughout the second half of Isaiah. with a judgment, deliverance from judgment, but that deliverance from judgment is designed by God to be a picture or a type of the deliverance of the church by the Lord Jesus Christ. And so that second half is so full of Christ. He's there in the first half as well, but in the second half, and it comes to a climax in these, what we call the servant songs, and the final one, Isaiah 52, 13 to the end of 53, where we have sketched out in such a graphic manner. the suffering death, the resurrection of our Savior and the fruit that comes from that to us. And so intertwined here is judgment, deliverance, and Christ. Now, after chapter 53, there's a clear focus then on prophecies and commandments that really have to do with the New Testament church. And that's what we see here in chapter 58, where God deals both with the hypocrisy of His people and yet what He promises to us in the Sabbath. He deals with their hypocrisy. They're complaining that God does not respond to them, and they even seek Him by fasting. He says their fasting is just hypocritical. It is formalistic. They, in fact, are using fast days to oppress and to sin, and He's calling them to repent of formalism. to repent of painting by numbers spiritually, and to exercise justice in the midst of the people and not oppression. And he promises that if they will turn away from their hypocrisy and their formalism, he will bring great blessings on them. Their light shall break forth in the morning and healing shall come, he says. The glory of God will be their rear guard, referenced to in the wilderness. They'll call, the Lord will answer. He promises a revival and reformation. In verse 12, those from among you shall build the old waste places, and you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you'll be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in, if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath. And he introduces then this most remarkable promise. So I direct your attention this morning then in that context, why do we have here the Sabbath? Because it is the antidote to our religious formalism. It is God's great medicine for our idolatry and our hypocrisy. It's God's great strength giver. So what I want to show you is, is that God has appointed the careful observance of the Lord's Day, or the Christian Sabbath, as a great means of blessing and grace in our lives. God has appointed the careful observance of the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath, as the great means of God's blessing and grace in our lives. And we'll consider two things. And I'm going to look at verse 14 first. Kind of put the carrot in front of the horse, not that you're horses, but anyway, try to entice you with what God promises. And so we see that God promises great blessings through the Sabbath. And then in verse 13, God points the careful observance of the Sabbath as the means to those blessings. So he points the day as a day of blessing, the careful observance of the day as the means of receiving those blessings. Well, first in verse 14, God appoints the Sabbath to be a means of great blessing. Then you should delight yourself in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the high places or the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Now, as we consider these verses, I want you to realize that there's probably no three greater things promised to us as believers than the three things that God promises us here. Consider them. First place, he says that through the Sabbath, you will take great delight in the Lord your God, in Jehovah, the God of the covenant. Now, surely none of us sits here this morning and thinks that he or she loves God as he ought to. Do you delight in him as your chief pleasure and your joy above all joys? Does your heart go out to him with that love with which you even long to love him and you know that so often you don't? Don't we all wrestle with this lack of love for God, lack of delight in God? But you see what He's promising you here? Increase delight in Him. It's a remarkable word. It's a word that is used in Job chapter 22 when Eliphaz, he's calling Job to repentance that he doesn't need to repent. And yet what he says is glorious in verses 25 and 26 of Job 22, then the Almighty will be your gold, choice silver to you, for then you will delight in the Almighty, lift up your face to God. As one delights in gold and silver and precious things, the believer who is right with God delights in God. The word means to take exquisite pleasure, the pleasure you might have in an heirloom or some gift or in some person. And what God promises here is that through the Sabbath, he increasingly will become our delight. The Sabbath is all about God. Sometimes we forget that. The two great purposes of the Sabbath are all about God. The Sabbath, in the first place, reminds you that God is your Creator. He created the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. But then David confesses, or the psalmist in Psalm 119, 73, you made me, you fashioned me. God has made each one of us, and as you look around at the beauty of fall, you recognize God made all of this, God made me, and thus this God who made me is also the God who rules in all things. And so the Sabbath is all about God Almighty. the Creator, the Sustainer, the Ruler of heaven and earth. And as the earth around us is full of that declaration, it's the Sabbath then that points to the fact that reminds us every week, in the midst of all that we're doing, that God is the Creator, God is the Ruler, God is your Creator, God is your Ruler. And then, of course, the Sabbath is about our redemption and salvation. As the commandment is reiterated in the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy, it reminds the church that we keep the Sabbath because God has delivered us from bondage and captivity. And the Sabbath today reminds us of an empty tomb. that He's risen, He's not here, which means that He was justified and in His justification is our justification. As Paul says, He was delivered up for our transgressions and raised for our justification. The Sabbath trumpets the fact that our exalted Savior is on high and thus we have salvation in Him. So your Sabbath meditations, above everything else, should focus on the triune God and the completed work of this triune God as creator and redeemer. And as you do so, then your love for Him grows. You delight yourself in the Lord. Now, the second promise here is you're going to ride on the high places or the hills of the earth. This is language that's actually taken from Deuteronomy chapter 33, chapter 32 and 33, and 32 in the Song of Moses, he refers to this writing in terms of prosperity and victory in 32. 11 and 12 or 12 and 13, the Lord alone guided him, his church. There was no foreign God with him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth. That where the King James says hills, Hebrew says the high places of the earth, reflecting this language. And then in chapter 33. At the end of the blessing of Moses, in verse 29, So there is God promising them in deliverance they enter into the promised land. Here is God through Isaiah promising deliverance from captivity, but more importantly, deliverance from spiritual captivity and bondage. And so the Sabbath is to us a reminder of the spiritual victory that belongs to us in Christ Jesus. And so as Paul says in Romans 8, 37, in him, we are more than conquerors. And so the Sabbath God has appointed, or God has appointed the Sabbath then to be a, what we're going to call a means of grace. The means by which God communicates to us all of the virtues of the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's designed under that end, you see. And so that's why our standards tell us that we're to spend the whole day, apart from deeds of necessity and mercy, in those acts of public and private worship. Turn away our thoughts and our intentions that we'll see more fully in a few moments from everything else. You see, the Sabbath then becomes the dagger in the heart of idolatry. Just stop and think about it. If you really, by God's grace, begin to discipline yourself, to turn away from the normal occupations and pleasures of the world, even in your speaking and thinking, that kills idolatry. You, by God's grace, discipline yourself. My mind's not going there. My affections aren't running there. No, they're channeled now to run unto the Lord God. And the day then is to be full of God. It's about God. It's to be full of God and God's work. And so God has appointed both the morning and evening worship as these great means by which He meets with us and teaches us from His Word, and then to give you time to be in the Word and prayer and Christian fellowship and service, and you see how through these things you grow and you're strengthened in your Christian walk. I think one of the... One of the reasons that many of us are kind of spiritually malnourished today and weak is because of our neglect of the Sabbath. And it's surely a reason why the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is in such a pitiable condition today. If you look, when the prophets denounced the old covenant church, two things always, idolatry and Sabbath breaking. And the church today is full of idolatry and Sabbath breaking. And because of that, we are in an awful state. The Sabbath is a means of great spiritual strength and victory. And then the third promise that's given us here is an enjoyment of our inheritance. He will feed you on the heritage of Jacob, your father. Now again, this is a reference to Israel's initial possession of the land, which was their inheritance from God. And so again, God's promising them the renewed inheritance, but it's not going to be a bare existence, you see. They're going to flourish in their inheritance. And the promise now to the Sabbath is that we're going to flourish in our inheritance. What is our inheritance? It's eternal life. As Paul says in Romans 8, with our adoption, we are heirs, heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ Jesus. And we are princes and princesses in the kingdom of God with this rich inheritance, and we so often live under the reality of who and what we are. Oh, yes, we can say, yes, I know I'm justified, adopted, and whatever, but what delight is there in that? You see, what God promises through the Sabbath is what I would refer to as a personal, experiential, experimental joy of who and what we are in Christ Jesus. I think it's best captured in Shorter Catechism 36. What are those benefits that accompany or flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification? Those benefits which accompany or flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification are assurance of God's love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Spirit, increase in grace, and perseverance there into the end. The reality of what it means to be in Christ is this assurance and love and joy and confidence. And God has designed the Sabbath, the Christian Sabbath, His day to work these things into our lives as we devote ourselves to seeking Him in the ways that He has appointed. Everything becomes more glorious and precious to us. Three great promises, aren't they? But look at the signature. Sometimes we'll look at the signature of a letter or perhaps a check or whatever, and we recognize the authority of it. But here, the mouth of the Lord has spoken. And I believe that in the Hebrew, it actually is translated in the New American Standard, for or because the mouth of the Lord has spoken. This is God's guarantee. It's the old Columbo with that one eye. He says, you can take it to the bank. What's God saying here? You can take it to the bank, you can bank on it because Jehovah Himself stands behind it, the triune God. He uses this statement in this book of Isaiah, in the very first chapter, when He promises pardon, He says, for the mouth of the Lord is spoken. You can have no greater guarantee than that. What we read in Hebrews chapter 6, the God who cannot lie, promised with an oath, Our salvation in Christ, God who cannot lie, promises you this morning as you sit here, these three great blessings in the Sabbath. Do you believe Him? Do you want them? Surely you do if you're in Christ. And that leads us to the second thing, verse 13, that God's appointed the careful observance. So He's appointed the blessings. But the means to those blessings is the careful observance of the Sabbath. Verse 13, if then, because, if then you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your own pleasure, you call the Sabbath a delight, the honorable day of the Lord, honorable, and shall honor him, not doing your own ways, or finding your own pleasure, or speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord." Now, you notice what we have here is a conditional promise. Now, the Bible has many unconditional promises. I will never leave you or forsake you. I am your rock. I am your comforter. You can think of many of those things. But God also gives many conditional promises. That's this if-then promise, you see. young people understand conditional promises. Let's say that your dad says that, you know, if you clean up your room Saturday morning just the way your mom likes it, then we'll go out Saturday afternoon for pizza. And man, that's great. So you get in there Saturday morning and you start earnestly cleaning your room and then you get distracted. You ever get distracted when you're doing your room? And you'll start reading a book or playing with a toy or doing something else. But you don't forget the time. And so you go get dad about two or three o'clock and said, no, it's about time now to go out. And he says, well, let's go check your room. Uh-oh. So it's not done, not done well at all. And he says, we're not going. Now, what do you say? But you promised. No, I promised if you do something, then I will do something. And that's very clear, isn't it? Verse 13 begins with an if. Verse 14 begins with a then. Do you really want these promises that God makes in verse 14. Well, here's the way to those promises. First, he calls us to a careful observance of the day, both negatively and positively. It begins negatively. And so he says in the first part, if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, doing your pleasure on my holy day. Now, as he refers to the Sabbath as a holy day, he's taken us back to Genesis chapter 2, verses 1 through 3. People forget this, that the Sabbath, in fact, is not simply the fourth commandment of the ten. and it's not the stepchild of the ten, it is part of the ten, because it's actually premised as the creation ordinance here at the seventh day of creation. So in Genesis 2, Thus the heavens and earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed 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, sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made." So we come now to the seventh day, and this word rested in Genesis chapter 2 is the very Hebrew word from which we get the word Sabbath. And so you could substitute for God rested and God kept Sabbath on the seventh day. And God's Sabbath rest was for three purposes. It declared that the work was completed exactly, exactly as he had ordained it. Secondly, he took great pleasure in it. We see this, we won't go there, but in Exodus 31.17. Or his declaration in Genesis 1.31, it's all very good. He said, It's just, this is beautiful. It's perfect. It's kind of the way you do something. You step back and, oh man, this is great. And then the third purpose of God's Sabbath was to declare to us that we could enter into his Sabbath rest. Now, because of that, we said that God, God did two things to the seventh day. He blessed the day, which means he assigned to it special purposes. With then by his work, the means to fulfill those purposes. That's the if then that we have. here, that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. It was a day of great blessing that God is going to bestow blessing on his people through this day. Under that end, then we read, he sanctified the day. And that means he set it apart from everyday, normal, common use to the special uses of worship. Anytime in these first five books of the Bible, by Moses through the Holy Spirit, that God sanctified something, it was always dedicated to God's purposes. Thus, it is a holy day, as God says through the prophet Isaiah. a holy day set aside by God that we then might follow Him in delighting in the perfect work of creation and redemption and enjoying our inheritance of who and what we are in Christ Jesus and anticipating eternal life. Now, just a little thing, you might have a question, if God made the seventh day holy, why are we here on the first day? Because God appointed the seventh day to commemorate creation, changed, and we don't have time now to go and you can ask me a question about this at Sunday school, to the first day, and that's declared in Hebrews chapter four. The translation doesn't get there, but because of the resurrection, The work of redemption was completed, and Christ, through the apostles, moved the day from the seventh day to the first. And so the first day is God's holy day, as we read of a holy day here in Isaiah. So he says, don't profane the day. Think of the day as a beautiful garden full of flowers and you're traipsing through it. You're knocking down and you're bending and breaking the flowers. That's the language. Turn your foot from the Sabbath. And how do we profane it? By doing your own pleasure on my holy day. This word pleasure is a word that Solomon uses in Ecclesiastes chapter 1 and chapter 3 and chapter 8. In chapter 3 there's appointed a time for everything, a time for every event, and the word is pleasure under heaven. Or in chapter 8 verse 6, there is a proper time and procedure for every delight. That's this word. So we profane God's garden, we desecrate God's holy day, trampling it underfoot by doing our thing and not His thing, seeking our pleasures and not His will. And that's how we profane the day. That's how we are not giving it the honor that God calls for. But then he sets it positively. You know, God is never negative for the sense of being negative. He's negative because of our propensity to sin. But instead of profaning the day, he then says that we are to honor it, to call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable. This word delight is the same word that he's used in chapter 14, to delight in God. He says, if you want to delight in God, delight in his day. If you don't delight in his day, you're not going to delight in God. But if you will, turn your foot from doing your own pleasure and call the Sabbath a delight, a holy day of the Lord, honorable, honorable. to take great pleasure in this day. Well, how then do we go about honoring God through honoring his day? That's the second half of verse 13. So we honor him, we serve him and reverence him and thus the day in three ways. Not doing, the word is desisting from your own ways, your own pleasure, finding your own pleasures or speaking your own words. We have here now the amplification and application of the fourth commandment. Desisting from your own ways means you're not pursuing your callings and vocations, whatever they might be, outside those deeds of necessity and mercy. And turn aside then from all those regular occupations and pre-occupations. And this also, in the fourth commandment, we're told that we don't involve others outside of deeds of necessity and mercy. in their occupations. This is why, in the careful observance of the day, we don't go out for recreational eating on the Lord's Day, causing others to have to work. So many times I'm in a restaurant trying to witness to a waiter or a waitress, and I'm waiting in the church, and then, well, I'd love to come, but I have to work. And you know, in the South, I don't know what it's like here, but you take your bulletin to the restaurant and you get a discount. It's the Christians. One of the reasons we, I believe, lost our blue laws of Sabbath closing laws was Christians going out to eat on the Lord's Day. And there was this crumbling of the whole foundation of Sabbath keeping. And then second, we are to desist from our own recreations, as our catechism interprets this, finding your own pleasure. That's that same word. Obviously, it must be more now than vocations if that's covered in your own ways. It's not a day for recreation, it's a day for recreation. And we must commit ourselves to this, you know, not that I go to church, not I can watch television on Sunday afternoon or a ball game or I can go out and play some tennis or get a quick round of golf or whatever, no. And it's very important that we train our children this way. When my children were young, the things that are wholesome were never done on the Sabbath. In fact, Little League had a rule you couldn't practice on Wednesdays because of prayer meeting, and you couldn't practice or play a game on the Lord's Day. But now it's all done on the Lord's Day, isn't it? Rabbi, huge soccer complex, going home to church, and there's hundreds of kids out there. And that becomes difficulty for us as Christian parents because these are good activities. And well, we better let our kids do this. No, no, no, no, no. You're not helping them. We must let them learn to delight in this day as well, and in self-denial. We're called to deny ourselves for Christ's sake, and Sabbath is one of the few places in our culture we have to do that now, and it's very important our children can learn. Yes, you can't play soccer on Sunday afternoon, but you'll have a brother or sister in China or Russia, and they can't go to the university. They don't get to see their daddy because he's a Christian. And suddenly, our self-denial is pretty weak, isn't it? On the other hand, you must create a day of pleasure for your children. It's not, you can't do this, you can't do that. You must create for them Sabbath activities, particularly when they're young, so that they can learn to delight in the day. And then kind of the clincher is that we also do stress from speaking. our own words, or the Catechism says our thoughts and words about our vocations and our recreations. God wants us to train our minds, thus we can train our hearts. That's not saying you only talk about the the Bible or theology or Christian experience, that should be the primary topic of conversation. But of course, in Christian fellowship, we want to know about each other's lives. So often the day we see ourselves, we pray for one another and we want to know how something's going at work or at school or whatever. We meet new people. But it's simply saying that we don't have unnecessary conversations that create unnecessary thinking about these things. And so this is how we honor the day. Summarized for us then in our larger catechism, one of the sins forbidden, 119, the sins forbidden in the fourth commandment are all omissions of the duties required, all careless, negligent, and unprofitable performing of them and being weary of them, all profaning the day by idleness and doing that which is in itself sinful, and by all needless works, words, and thoughts, about our worldly employments and recreations. That's the summary of what we're told here that we are to desist from in order to have these glorious blessings that God promises. But the desisting is only that we may do. The Puritans call the Sabbath the market day of the soul. It's the day you put everything else aside so you can devote yourself better things. It's the weekly vacation. When you go on vacation you like to leave it all behind, don't you? Sometimes I'd stay up until two o'clock in the morning just so when I left the house I would have to think about these things. And what God does, he says, look I'm giving you a weekly holy vacation. Forget about it! and enjoy me." And so positively, we then have in Larger Catechism 117, the Sabbath or the Lord's Day is to be sanctified by a holy resting all the day, not only from such works as at all times sinful, but even such worldly employments and recreations are on other days lawful, making it our delight to spend the whole time You don't want to come to Sunday evening worship to spend the whole time, except so much as taken up in works of necessity and mercy in public and private exercises of God's worship. And to that end, we are to prepare our hearts and with such foresight, diligence, and moderation to dispose and seasonably dispatch our worldly business that we may be more free and fit for the duties of that day. These are the pleasures of the Sabbath. It's to these things that God calls us that we may enjoy these great pleasures. Now, I hear from people sometimes, I can't do that. Why? It's too difficult. And obviously, nobody can keep the Sabbath in the way that you're teaching or the way the catechism explains it. So my response to that is, that's interesting. Tell me which one of the commandments you can keep according to scripture or the confession. That's part of the purpose of the law, you see. The law drives us back into the arms of Christ. Our failure with every commandment is God's way of saying, rest in Christ. In fact, Heidelberg, on its second purpose of the Sabbath, talks about resting, turning away from our works, resting in Christ every day. The Sabbath drives us to Christ, the only Sabbath keeper. Yes, we sin. Yes, we break it. And that simply brings us back to him for pardon, but also for power and delight and ability to grow in keeping the Sabbath. And so God's appointed the careful observance of the Sabbath as a means of great spiritual blessing. Those wonderful things to delight in God, to have spiritual strength and victory, to enjoy what it means to be in Christ. Perhaps some of you sit here this morning, have been convicted by the Holy Spirit and you see, I trust you're convinced from scripture that your practices are not in alignment with God's will. And what you need to do is repent of that and ask God's forgiveness and confession. And as heads of household, that means you also need to sit down with your family, wife, children, whatever, and say, you know, I've been wrong. I've led the family wrong. And, and, um, I've asked God to forgive me and I want you to forgive me. And we're going to devote ourselves to trying to seek God in this manner. Um, but understand that God's a God of forgiveness and he does forgive us and he will give us grace. But on the other hand, there's a problem. This is a problem that I wrestle with. And that is the very thing the Sabbath appointed to deliver me from. And that's formalism. I can, I can go through and check off all the boxes and fail to see God. And I repent of that, you see, and you need to as well. The Sabbath is not an end in itself. No law is, no doctrine is. It's always to bring us to God, to rest in Christ, to delight in God and repent of your formalism and begin each day seeking from God these things that he promises us here. And know that through this, you, but also your congregation shall enjoy personal revival and the presence of God in ever new and refreshing ways. Let's pray. Our holy God, we thank you for your law. We can say with the psalmist, oh, how love I your law. It is our pleasure. It is to us sweeter than the sweetest honey, more precious than the finest gold, more joyful than spoil at the end of battle. Oh, cause us to love your law because we love you. And through your law, you revealed yourself to us in all of your beauty and glory. And forgive us, Lord, of our Sabbath breaking and our disregard and our silly excuses and our violating, Lord, your will. and restore to us a joy in your day. And then grant to us, Lord, these things that you promised, that we'll delight ourselves in you and that we'll have spiritual victory and a real enjoyment of our inheritance that's in Christ Jesus. Oh, Lord, work these things in our hearts and revive and bless and reform your people here and under the ends of the earth. And we ask this in Christ's name. Amen.