So good morning, everybody. Beautiful drive this morning, was it not? A little bit of snow, a little bit of ice, a little bit of snow. I was a little bit surprised. Here we are putting our clocks forward, like spring is here. I don't know what Punxsutawney Phil did this year, but it's snowing. So that's interesting. So, but the drive over was nice. I mean, just looking out, wasn't it? Just the beautiful vistas you have with the snow. I'm sure Pastor Ben was happy. He always likes snow. That's right. So I had an occasion a couple of weeks back to drive over to my hometown, which is a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. And when I was approaching where I used to live and where my parents still live, I had a knack for a cup of coffee. And as you can see, I always have my coffee with me, right? I'm kind of an avid coffee drinker. So I stopped in by the supermarket where I actually used to work when I was a boy growing up. And I went in because they have a Starbucks now. They didn't have a Starbucks back then. And so they have a Starbucks now. So I went in and got my Starbucks coffee and felt a little bit refreshed after a five-hour drive. And then I could go on. So as I was looking around, I got to thinking about all the things that have changed. I went through the cash register, and I was thinking back to the days when I worked there, and we wore a shirt and a tie and an apron, and we bagged people's groceries, and we carried them out to the car for them. It was a different time. And so when I go there today, There's no shirts with collars, there's no ties, there's no aprons, there's a surly looking guy with unkempt hair. and not really doing a whole lot for you, but overseeing this kind of self-service area where you can go scan your own groceries. And I think, wow, have things changed. And the other thing that occurred to me is I'm turning into one of those older people that just gripes and looks back and thinks about how wonderful everything used to be. But Chris knows what I mean, because it used to be when you went to the grocery store in Hudsonville that they wore shirts and ties and carried out your groceries, but they don't do that anymore. But anyway, it got me to thinking about some other things that have changed, and I'm remembering back specifically, there was a year that I took off between high school and university, and I wanted to save some money for college. And so I was working full-time, and one of the jobs that I did was I was working full-time third shift. and stocking shelves at a supermarket. And so, you know, you wonder how those shelves get folded. After you leave in the day, they're all kind of a disaster. At night, people come in and restock them, and they order things and make sure everything looks nice. And so this happens, of course, at night. And at the time that I was doing this, uh, the supermarket was owned by a Christian man and he was concerned about the Lord's day. So he did not allow people to come in to do that work until after midnight, you know, after midnight and occurred Sunday. So, um, I was one of those guys who came in, so we'd come in at midnight and start working. And, uh, The way that days off work when you're in third shift, of course, it's a little bit awkward, right? So on Sunday, it was a day I had to kind of go back to work just after midnight. And so I'd like to sleep, of course, a bit. So I had a little bit of sleep, right? And that interfered somehow with church. So I would go to the morning church service. And then my sleep, I would want to sleep a little bit more later in the day. But that would interfere with the evening service. So I'm going to start my message today with ratting myself out. So I started to miss some of the evening services as I was staying at home and sleeping and trying to get some sleep so I could go to work and feel energetic. And so after I'd done this a few times, I was called into the minister's office And the minister talked to me about, you're missing the evening church service on the Lord's Day, and that's not good. So we had to talk about it. We're some working third shift and have all these difficulties. I don't remember the specifics of the conversation. I just remember the results. I learned a lot from the evening services, and I learned what it was like to work without very much sleep. And I survived, and here I am today. So what do you think about that? Was that, you know, an appropriate thing? Was that a little bit of a harsh thing? Was that perhaps both? We're going to explore this topic today as we get into views of the Lord's Day, okay? And we're going to start with considering a view that is very different from the one that I've just described to you, okay? So the one that I just described to you is from the Reformed camp, where we look at the Lord's Day and we are Sabbatarians, are we not? We look at the Lord's Day as something that is in effect today. But before we get there, I wanna start with a different view, okay? And this is a view that is not without its adherence And I'm going to call it, for lack of a better term, the Nine Commandment view. Okay? So the Nine Commandments. So where does that come from, the Nine Commandments? Well, we all know the Decalogue, right? The Ten Commandments. And so the Nine Commandment view, as you may guess, is kind of espousing the notion that we still have the Decalogue, but it's kind of without the commandment about the Sabbath. Why would one come to this understanding? Well, let's look into that a little bit. Okay, the view here is that the keeping of the Sabbath, and by the way, I need to step back a second. We don't call what we're doing here today necessarily the Sabbath. We call it the Lord's Day, right? It's the day that the Lord rose, and so it is There are differences between this and what we do and what the Old Testament folks did back before the coming of Christ. And so I need to acknowledge up front there is something of a difference between the Sabbath day as it was practiced in Old Testament times and what we have now with the Lord's Day, where we get together on Sundays. For the sake of this discussion, I'm often going to be intermingling the terms between Sabbath and Lord's Day. My kids, I think, just got here. My live 360 is telling me, I'm sorry. So I'm going to be intermingling those terms, but please remember that there is something of a distinction, but for the sake of our discussion, when you hear Sabbath in today's lesson, it's going to be, the meeting will be Lord's Day and vice versa, okay? All right, the nine commandment view, the keeping of the Sabbath was an Old Testament law that no longer applies to the church. It was fulfilled in the work of Christ in whom we now have rest. So the view here is that Sabbath rest was a type and a foreshadowing of the rest that we have in Christ. Christ came, we have that rest now, And so, the need for this day has gone by the wayside. So, we have that. With fullness in Christ, his presence with us today, we have that rest with us all the time. And so, the Sabbath, as it was prescribed in the Mosaic Law, no longer applies. So, that is the view. Where would one come up with such notions? Well, let's take a look. I am going to read from you a brief couple of verses here from Colossians, okay? Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival, or a new moon, or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Okay, so get back to this idea, substance belongs to Christ, Christ is with us now, and so therefore, we no longer have the Sabbath as it was. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism, worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, huffed up without reason by sensuous mind, and not wholly fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations? Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. referring to these things that all perish as they are used. According to human precepts and teachings, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh." So I've gone a bit beyond the portion of the text that talks about the Sabbaths, but I did that with a view to providing a bit of context here. So some people look at this and say, that equate the Old Testament Sabbath with the Sabbaths that are spoken of here in Colossians 2, I think it's verse 17, or 16 and 17. And among these teachers was none other than Augustine, St. Augustine himself. And so when St. Augustine speaks, we tend to listen, right, because he was probably the greatest theologian of the first millennium, and he continues to be one of the most profoundly read, cited, and influential theologians of all time. So Augustine read verses like this and came to the idea that he embraced what we call the Ninth Amendment view. So I am going to read from you a brief excerpt from Augustine in one of his works, in which he says, all of the Ten Commandments, that which was related to the Sabbath, which was the only one in which the thing commanded was typical. So I don't think this means typical in the sense that we sometimes think of typical as something that we often see, or that is maybe typical of somebody's behavior, but referring rather to a type. It is referring to a type and a foreshadowing. The bodily rest enjoined being a type, which we have received as a means of our instruction, but not as a duty binding also upon us. But we are not commanded to observe the day of the Sabbath literally and resting from bodily labor as it was observed by the Jews. From this, we may reasonably conclude that all those things which are figuratively set forth in the Scripture are powerful and stimulating that love by which we tend towards rest, since the only figurative or typical precept in the Decalogue is the one in which the rest is commanded to us, which is desired everywhere And again, I know this is a mouthful, I know this is dense stuff, but let's pay attention here. Which is desired everywhere, but is found sure and sacred in God alone. So in God we have this rest, Christ is here, we have this rest. So this Sabbath in his view was a type foreshadowing of that, and so the Sabbath no longer applies in his view. Okay. I'm going to make one other reference here, which you probably would have heard of. In fact, it was referred to by Jason last week, and that is the Council of Jerusalem, in which you may recall the apostles met, and they talked about the issue of the Gentiles coming into the church, and what to do about the Gentiles, because they were uncircumcised, many of them, and so do the Gentiles have to be circumcised, and that is kind of a specific topic, but in a broader sense, do we apply the Mosaic laws and rituals to the Gentiles in the same way that we apply them to the Jews. And so, within that council of Jerusalem, we can read about it in Acts 15. I'll just read a brief excerpt here. Therefore, my judgment is that we should not trouble those Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from blood. So some people point to that and say, well, you know, in the Council of Jerusalem, the apostles did not, the apostles seemed to go in the direction of saying, you know, we're not gonna put all of these Mosaic laws upon the Gentiles, and so some people read into that the notion that Sabbath day that the Jews practice is no longer an effect or that it does not at any rate apply to the Gentiles. So I'm trying to set this up just so you understand and we all understand kind of where these people come from, especially because there are people like St. Augustine that believe this, and people whose voices we should definitely hear. So I want to pause in a second and say, okay, how relevant is this today? How relevant is this notion today? What do people believe? Because I think if you look around you, you talk to your friends and your family, probably a lot of people that you know in the Christian world, especially evangelicals, I don't know that they hold quite all the same views that we do, but they do seem to understand and believe that the Lord's Day is important, and many of them go to church. So I have a little graph here. If you have a handout, and if you are at home listening to this, there is a handout that you can download. But the graph just kind of shows how many, they indicate, at least in practice, how many Christians subscribe to this belief. The graph is actually showing the number of people who attend services. So the graph goes from at least once a week to once a month or twice a month, to seldom, to never, and to basically don't know. And so it shows different faiths here, and among these displayed is the Evangelical Protestant. And so the Evangelical Protestants come in at 58%. That is to say 58% of them are claiming that they attend services at least once a week. And so that gives us some insight as to how many Evangelical Protestants take seriously this commandment concerning the Sabbath and the Lord's Day. Now I realize that this may not be, strictly speaking, telling us what these people theoretically think. More of them may buy into the fact that the Lord's Day is a command, and they may simply not be following that command. or that they may not be following it very rigorously. But I guess at the end of the day, if you regard somebody's behavior, regardless of what they may think, theoretically, I think sometimes action speaks louder than words, right? So you want to know what somebody actually believes, then you can kind of tell by the way that they behave. And that seems to give us some indication anyway. Evangelical Protestants, you know, we're about 20 points above Catholics in terms of participation, weekly participation. And we are behind Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, who are something like 77 and, I can't quite read it, it looks like around 85, 90%. And of course, it goes on to describe other faiths like Hindus and so on. Alright, I thought it was just interesting to stop and stand back a little bit and see, you know, in today's world, where people are with us. But let's move on. Alright, so that was the 9th Amendment view. We're going to move on now to the 10th Amendment view. And as I do this, We need to bear in mind, I don't want to be simplistic about this, there is more than just one Ten Commandment view here. There is more than one just view on what the Sabbath means in terms of Sabbath, observing the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, and keeping the Lord's Day holy. But we're going to have to be a little bit simple as we introduce things here. and we'll get into a little bit of the details a little bit later. All right, first things first, let's go back to scripture, and you'll notice here that I have a few texts written there, so if you have your handout, you can read along with me, and if not, I'm gonna start out at Genesis 2, one through three, where it says, thus the heavens and the earth were finished. and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. So I want to ask you a question at this point, and I want you to, we're not going to go into detail about it now or answer it, but I want you to bear the answer in mind as we keep reading. So, as we read Genesis 2, 1 through 3, it's this, before the fall or after the fall? This is an easy one, come on, shout it out. Before the fall or after the fall? Before the fall, right? This is before the fall, okay. So I want you to remember that, okay? Bear that in mind. We're gonna come back to that before the fall. Next text. Exodus 20, eight through 11. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. One of the things that I think we want to take away from this, of course, that this is one thing that this is part of the Mosaic law, but also that it heralds back and harks back to the creation mandate that we read about earlier, the idea of God resting. So that is the second. There are more verses that we could read, of course, but I'm going to give you just one more, and this is coming from Isaiah, and this is a text in which the prophet is speaking to the people and he is admonishing them about their lack of zeal, right? So he says, if you turn your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call it the Sabbath, call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable. If you honor it not going your own way, seeking your own pleasure or talking idly, Then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." Now I don't want to get too much in the weeds here, but I do want to point out a couple of things. When we think about the Mosaic Law and the Sabbath, We think about Moses as he approached Pharaoh, and what did he say? Let my people go. Why? What were they gonna go do? They were gonna go worship, right? Let my people go so that they can worship. As we're reading through Isaiah here, it's interesting to note that he speaks of If you turn your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure, he doesn't specifically mention commerce, or work, or labor, right? He says from doing your pleasure on my holy day. Not going your own ways, seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly. It's interesting here, I think, that we don't hear talk about people working. We hear about people doing other things. This also is sometimes read though differently from that. There are those who look at this text and they read into this and they say, well, what was the pleasure of those people? And they surmise that the pleasure of those people was that they would engage in commerce on the Lord's day or on the Sabbath day and that that is how this text is to be understood. Well, I'm gonna leave that there for now, but I thought it worthwhile to bring up for your notice that Isaiah speaks about the Lord's day in ways that extend beyond labor, okay? At least it would seem to, yeah? Okay, let's keep going. All right, so the context in which we're giving this lesson today is the one in which we are studying the Reformers, right? And specifically, the last weeks, we've been talking about John Calvin. Last week, you'll remember, we talked about the Lord's Supper and how the Lord's Supper is, I think, more than we sometimes think about it in terms of its significance. And so I think perhaps we will leave with that understanding, too, about the Lord's Day observance today. We'll see. But for now, I want to review what Calvin's view was on the Sabbath. You may be surprised to find out that Calvin's view on the Sabbath doesn't necessarily correspond to the teachings of this church, though we are in fact Reformed. Calvin was kind of the preeminent Reformed theologian. Therefore, we should hear what he has to say, right? So I'm going to go through this, and I'm going to kind of focus in on a few points here. Calvin says the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, is a transcript of God's immutable moral law and is binding on humanity in all ages. What that means is, according to Calvin, doesn't change. One of those things that doesn't change, okay? Immutable means it doesn't change. The fourth commandment being one element of the Decalogue is one of God's immutable laws. So he's saying, that doesn't change. You still have the fourth commandment. And binding on humanity in all ages, in that sense, the Sabbath institution, though not necessarily weekly Sabbath observance, is a creation ordinance. So Calvin is observing here a creation ordinance, which I think is important. The Sabbath day required under the old dispensation by the fourth commandment was a type or figure of spiritual rest. Sounds a little bit like Augustine, doesn't it? Calvin often echoes some of the sentiments of Augustine. We see a little bit of that here, I think. Now, this is a key point. Number four, spiritual rest is ceasing from our own sinful works, mortifying our old nature, so that God may perform his sanctifying work in us. It may also be defined as conforming to God's will or imitating him. Do you remember a little while ago when I mentioned let's remember something? Was the first text that we read, pre-fall or after fall, Pre-fall. Calvin is talking about spiritual rest with relation to the Lord's Day and the Sabbath in terms of redemption, in terms of God working in us to work his nature and to sanctify us. But I think it relevant here to recall that the first instance where we hear about the Lord's Day occurred in the pre-fall situation in which people were not fallen. So there was no fallen nature for this to happen to. That is not to say that we don't grow in the presence of God, even if we're not fallen. But he seems to be really focusing in here on redemption and sanctification. So let's go on. Observing the weekly Sabbath in the Old Testament did not simply involve ceasing from the labor of the other six days. That rest was to be used for public worship and private meditation. On the promised reality, such rest typified Number six, since God was pleased to provide his people with a foretaste of the reality still only prefigured, Christ hadn't come. Okay, so this is a type. The weekly Sabbath was a sign of invisible grace. It was, therefore, a sacrament of regeneration. At the coming of Christ, the light in whose presence all shadows disappear, spiritual rest became a full reality. Consequently, the weekly Sabbath as a type and a sacrament was abrogated. So I think we need to make a distinction here. Calvin is not saying that the Sabbath is no longer in effect at all. He's saying that as a type, it is abrogated because we have Christ. So what is he saying? Although the perfection of spiritual rest will not be realized until the eschatological last day, in other words, we won't fully have our rest until Jesus comes again, right? And there's a new heaven and a new earth. That rest is now an actual possession of the believer. Spiritual rest presently enjoyed and eternal rest are the same in substance. So we have Christ and our obligations are not the same. We have the actual possession. We have that spiritual rest. It's enjoyed presently. Christians, strictly speaking, are no longer obliged to keep a weekly day of rest. The relaxation of that demand, however, and here's the key point, however, should not be understood as abrogating the fourth commandment. Remember, we said it was abrogated or done away with, only as a type, a prefiguring of Christ. But as intensifying and elevating its demands. For Christians, keeping the Sabbath means, in the final analysis, experiencing the spiritual rest, freedom from sin, newness of life they have by virtue of being buried and raised with Christ. Such spiritual rest cannot be limited to one day of the week, but must be practiced daily, perpetually. Calvin was not a Sabbatarian in the same sense that we are in this church. Calvin believed in the Sabbath, and we're gonna get Read some more of his comments in just a moment, but I want to point out the context in which he is saying this, because that last point is very telling. Calvin is not saying we need to, or we are allowed to, or we should back off from what we do on the Lord's Day. Remember, this is somebody who preached 250 sermons a year. So in Calvin's time, for Calvin, the people that lived there would have gone to church twice on Sunday, and they would have also gone to a midweek service, and there were also sermons preached on every other day. So bear in mind the context that Calvin's observance kind of extended to a daily experience in which Sunday still held a special relevance, but that every other day was included in this type of rest. It almost seems a little bit funny talking about rest in the same breath as talking about preaching 250 sermons a year. The experience of spiritual rest necessarily expresses itself in deeds of piety and Christian service, meditation upon God's works, the acts of worship, since spiritual rest is perpetually daily public worship is the ideal for Christians. This is his ideal. This every day is Sunday, more or less, right? Since Christians are subject to the same sinful weakness as those under the old covenant, a practical necessity exists for certain stated times to be set aside so that believers, being released from worldly cares and distractions, might be free to meditate privately in a symbol publicly for worship. If I can add my own two cents here to Calvin, I am not a great theologian or anything like that. I'm just a simple businessman. But my daily routine is regimented according to my Microsoft Outlook. And if I want to get something done, it's going to be in my Microsoft Outlook. If it's in there, it'll probably get done. If it won't, it probably won't. So Calvin is saying, for practical purposes, you have to have stated times and days where you're going to do this, right? Or it's probably not going to happen. If I say in my work, I'm not going to put down that I'm going to get together with my commercial team regularly. I'm just going to develop a culture in which I make that a general practice. It's never going to happen. Maybe it's just me. I don't know. But if I don't set a time aside to do something and write it down and say, at that time, I'm not going to do other things. I'm not going to be somewhere else. I'm going to be here and doing this, the likelihood of that happening is very slim. And I think that's kind of what Calvin is saying. People haven't changed. The Jewish Sabbath was perfectly suited to meet that need, but because so much superstition became associated with it by the failure to see that the typical mystery had passed away with Christ, the ancient church substituted the Lord's Day for it. That substitute was particularly appropriate because it memorialized Christ's resurrection, the day on which the Old Testament figure ceased to exist. So Calvin is saying, it's appropriate that we do this. So the church changed the day from Saturday to Sunday. It's good that they did this because that's a day that we memorialize Christ's resurrection. Today, the Lord's Day still serves the need it was designed to meet. So the Lord's Day met a need, and it continues to meet a need. In principle, however, those Christians cannot be condemned who may wish to set apart some other day or event to pattern their lives by some other arrangement than the weekly day of rest, so long as they keep it and view the need for steeded times of public worship and meditation. All right. We could go on. There are a few points here. You can read them as you wish. But I think we've kind of gotten the point. Calvin is saying that this rest that we have should characterize our daily life. And we shouldn't regard this as something that we just do on Sunday. And Sunday is an appropriate day to do this, but it was not a command in his view that we have necessarily to do our worship on Sunday. He thought it was an appropriate thing to do, but not a command. But again, I wanna point us back to the context. 250 sermons a year, twice on Sunday, every day of the week, on alternate weeks, and so you had, on a daily basis, this life of worship, okay? Which was intensified on the Lord's Day. Okay, I think that's something people sometimes forget when they talk about Calvin and the Lord's Day, and when they bring up his views, that he wasn't quite the Sabbatarian that we are. But the other side of that coin is that he did worship on the Lord's Day, and he worshipped on every other day, too. Okay, let's keep moving. We are now getting to the Westminster. So I need to breeze through this a little bit, because I'm taking a lot of time here. All right, I'm probably not gonna read every text here, okay? So bear with me, but I do wanna read some of them enough where you kind of get the gist. We're gonna start out with what is the Fourth Commandment? And the Fourth Commandment reads Exodus 20 as we just read, so I'm not gonna reread that. Now let's get into 116 here, if you have your handout. Question 116 from the Westminster Catechism, the larger catechism. what is required in the fourth commandment, the fourth commandment requireth of all men the sanctifying or keeping holy to God such set times as he has appointed in his word. So this is saying something different. This is not quite saying the same thing Calvin did. This is saying there are set times that are set forth in God's word that we need to follow. expressing one whole day in seven, which was the seventh from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, the first day of the week ever since, and so to continue to the end of the world, which is the Christian Sabbath and the New Testament called the Lord's Day. All right, how is the Sabbath or the Lord's Day to be sanctified? The Sabbath or Lord's Day is to be sanctified by an holy resting all the day. And here I think is a relevant point too, that this Lord's day or this Sabbath is a day, not an hour, not a two hours. And I think if we visited our friends that were on the graph that we looked at in page one, those faithful folks, you know, who are attending services regularly, we were to ask them, what about Sunday afternoon or evening as well as the morning? What response would we get? You probably get a lot of different responses. What do you do in the afternoon? What do you do in the evening? Do you keep the Lord's Day holy? Or is this worship something that you do just on the morning? I talked a couple of weeks ago about how it is that my children go to a Lutheran high school and that their friends think it's so amazing that they have church twice on Sunday. They think, wow, you're going to church twice on Sunday. But this is why, right? This is one of the reasons why. Our delight to spend the whole time, except so much of it is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy. Remember Jesus healing the sick and the lame and things like this in the verse about who is not going to step into a ditch to help their ox or whatever it was. We don't probably spend a whole lot of time helping oxen in ditches, but you understand the point. And the public and private exercises of God's worship. And to that end, we are to prepare our hearts with such foresight, diligence, and moderation to dispose and seasonally to dispatch our worldly business, that we may be the more free and fit for the other duties of that day. So if I can echo something that Pastor Ben stated in a sermon a while back about this topic. He said something to the effect of, you're probably gonna be really busy the other six days of the week. Right? You're probably going to be really busy the other six days of the week so that you can be free on the seventh. And I remember growing up, and when Saturday came, we did, you know, watch our Saturday morning cartoons and things like that. But part of the day was spent and doing the housework and preparing and studying our catechism and our Sunday school lessons. So we were ready for that. It was a preparation. And it's a blessing we have, I think, in this country that we've had for the last century. I think it was a law that went into effect in 1938 or 1940 that applied to most Americans or many Americans that we had this five-day work week, right? I want to say it was FDR who passed that into law. And so we have this typical five-day work week, and of course, that's pretty typical throughout the world today. We have a 40-hour work week, and some countries have even less than that. But that gives us that time to prepare, doesn't it? Why is the charge of keeping the Sabbath more specially directed to governors and families? I'm not gonna go through that. I'm gonna go through the next one. 119, what are the sins forbidden in the fourth commandment? 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. Okay, so our catechism is telling us The sin is not simply not engaging in the means of grace like we are now. It's also a sin not only to omit this, to omit availing of yourself of the means of grace, but also the careless performance of these duties and these rights, the negligence in doing them, the lack of preparation, right? And the unprofitable performing of them and being weary of them. Do we come here with an attitude that we kind of drag ourselves, especially today, because we lost an hour, right? My goodness. Do we drag ourselves here, sit there and looking at the watch, thinking about the meeting I have tomorrow morning and how I have to prepare for that? Are we sometimes guilty of that? Yeah? Myself? Am I the only one? I don't know. All right, unprofitable performing of them and being weary of them, all profaning the day by idleness. Wow, idleness. We kind of associate Sunday with going to church, eating a nice meal, and then kind of sleeping. I think that's fine. Probably nothing wrong with that, right? It's good to rest. But I think what is in view here of you have holy obligations in this day and the not performing of those, right? All profaning the day by idleness and doing that which is itself sinful. That's the obvious one, right? And by all needless works, words, and thoughts about our worldly employments and recreations. And there I think we get back to the text we read earlier where the prophet Isaiah was talking to the people of Israel not only about the labor that interfered with the celebration of the Sabbath, but it was the other things that they were doing, by all appearances, engaging in various types of recreation, which interfered. And my goodness, in today's world, we're so busy, aren't we? We all have smartphones and laptops and all of these things, and we're so engaged, super engaged all the time. Right? Our kids are no different, and so we all walk around kind of almost in another place all the time, don't we? But when these things intrude on us, not only the work that we do, but the thoughts that we have, the things that we do, whether it's engaging in our recreational activities, or whether it's our work, if it interferes with the day of rest and worship, and availing ourselves of the means of grace that we have in this day. Those things are also sin. I don't want to descend now into the discussion that would lead us down to the path of legalism. But I think we all understand the point here. This day here, we have for a specific reason the entire day, which is set aside. And so there are things that compete for our time all the time, right? And if we are constantly being distracted by those things, whatever those things are, it falls into the same category according to the catechism. Okay. I'm gonna skip over the next one. And I'm gonna read just the last one here. Why is the word remember set in the beginning of the fourth commandment? The word remember is set in the beginning of the fourth commandment, partly because of the great benefit of remembering, we being thereby helped in our preparation to keep it, and in keeping it, better to keep all the rest of the commandments, and to continue thankful remembrance of the two great benefits of creation and redemption, which contain a short abridgment of religion, and partly, and I think this is a good one, Partly because we are very ready to forget it. That there is less light of nature in it. And yet it restrains our natural liberty in things at other times lawful that it cometh but once in seven days. And many worldly business come between the two. Too often taking our minds from thinking of it either to prepare for it or to sanctify it. So there's the preparation for this day and then there's the actual sanctifying the day. And that Satan without his instrument, Satan, excuse me, with his instruments, much labor to blot out the glory and even the memory of it to bring in all irreligion and impiety. I had the occasion some years ago to visit a cathedral in the Netherlands in which William, that prince, that great prince William of Orange is buried and It's a beautiful cathedral, and I grew up, you know, we would go to school, I went to a Dutch Reformed church and school, and so at the recess, the teacher would sometimes read us stories about the liberation of the Netherlands from the Spanish, you know, and the work that William of Orange did. And so I was really excited to see this cathedral. And so they take you into this church, and they charge admission. It's a tomb, in more ways than one. All right. Moving along quickly because we don't have a lot of time here. We may go slightly over, but I wanted to share with you also my own tradition where I'm from with respect to the Heidelberg Catechism, what the Heidelberg Catechism has to say about this. In Lord's Day 38, the Heidelberg Catechism is broken into 52 Lord's Days. Each one is supposed to apply to a given week of the year. And this is the 38th one. What doth God require in the fourth commandment? First, that the ministry of the gospel and the schools be maintained. So this would be the school, right? And that I, especially on the Sabbath, that is on the day of rest, diligently frequent the church of God to hear his word, to use the sacraments publicly to call upon the Lord, to contribute to the relief of the poor as becomes a Christian. Secondly, that all the days of my life I cease from my evil works and yield myself up to the Lord to work by his Holy Spirit in me and thus begin in this life the eternal Sabbath, which I think is interesting about that as it touches on two things. One is the rest that we have now for the purposes of acts of worship, and the other is this prefiguring of the eternal rest that we have. Remember what Calvin and Augustine were talking about, that rest that we look forward to in Christ? This is an anticipation of that, so I appreciate the succinct way that the Heidelberg Catechism has set that forth, touching on both of those points. Last page here. The Christian Sabbath, okay, what is our response to all this? I'm gonna sum it up, and I might go just a minute or two over, but bear with me. The Christian Sabbath, or the Lord's Day, is still in effect. We are Ten Commandment Christians. So we've got a couple of purposes here. What is the purpose of this? One purpose of that day is to refrain from our daily work and recreation so as to enable us to faithfully engage in acts of worship. the entire day should be devoted to acts of worship. You recall reading in scripture, in the Old Testament, in the worship that they had, that there was a morning sacrifice and that there was an evening sacrifice, right? This typified the day. There was a morning sacrifice and there was an evening sacrifice. That was not just on the Sabbath, that was a daily activity, okay? What we have here is in some way similar. We have a morning sacrifice, and worship service, and we have an evening sacrifice. And these things serve as bookends to help us observe the entire day. But if you look back in biblical history, we can see something of a benchmark for this, I think, in the morning and evening sacrifices of ancient Israel. We part ways here with Augustine, we talked about him. We part ways, in some ways, with Calvin, we talked about him. So among our views, our concerns about how Calvin expressed his view is that the Sabbath was established as a creation ordinance. As Calvin said, but we think about the Sabbath establishment as a creation ordinance prior to the fall, that means The necessity of the Sabbath goes beyond the work that Calvin said that we should do in mortifying ourselves and being redeemed. This is built into creation itself, okay? That is the concern that we have with this, one of them. Within the creation ordinance, we see a rest established within the context of a pre-fallen world. The fall had not taken place, so significance as a spiritual rest that finds its fulfillment in Christ's advent cannot fully explain the meaning and the basis for the ordinance. All right, number two here, we also recognize the Sabbath as an anticipation of the final rest we have in Christ when our work is complete. This is something that I hadn't really thought a whole lot about. I don't know about you. I always thought about the Sabbath as rest, and about the means of grace, and about Christ's resurrection, and this type of thing. But in so doing, I think I had kind of forgotten about that last part of the Heidelberg Catechism and some of the things that Calvin and Augustine said. We recognize the Sabbath as anticipation of the final rest we have in Christ when our work is complete. So when we come here today, we're not just coming here today as if it were a small thing, but we're not coming here only today in recognition of Christ's resurrection, which is, of course, critically important. And we memorialize that, but we are also doing this in anticipation. We're not looking back only. It's a mistake I made. We're not looking back only. We're looking back one way and we're looking forward in another way. Christ came, Christ rose, Christ is coming again. We're going to have that eternal rest with him. What does this mean? Our work is not a meaningless, ceaseless repetition of days. You ever feel that way? You get up and kind of do the same thing every day. You go through your work, you get ready, you go through your work. Come home, you're tired and you kind of do what you need to do and get ready for the next day and maybe have a little time to rest. Our work is not a meaningless, ceaseless repetition of days. It is meaningful and will result in rest. We move forward to the goal of fully participating in that rest when our work is done. For now, we have a weekly reminder to anticipate that rest. It is a day devoted to the remembrance of man's eternal destiny. The remembrance of a thing that is to come. The present creation still anticipates the new creation. The weekly Sabbath still points to future perfection. And there are those who might look at us and say, you're doing away with my Christian liberty and putting a bit of a yoke on me and requiring that I do of all these things. What do we say to that? A weekly observation of the Sabbath does not compromise the freedom brought by Christ, but it is an expression of that freedom to a watching world. And they are, of course, watching. We saw the bar graph in the first page here, or the second page, did we not? People are watching us. It is an expression of that freedom to a watching world. that we are not enslaved to the turmoil of an impersonal, meaningless, historical process, but we remember Christ's victory over the grave, and we look forward to the time when he'll come again, and when we will have our eternal rest in him. And so today, we have the right, we have the privilege to engage in acts of worship when we do these things. Folks, thank you. And I hope that you've learned something from this. I wish you a good Lord's Day this morning and this evening as you go throughout your day. May you be blessed. Let's close in prayer.