Be seated. Let's open our Bibles now in the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verses 8 through 11. We will cover the Fourth Commandment tonight. We will also speak about the Heidelberg Catechesis, Lord's Day 38. But we will look first into the Scripture in Exodus, chapter 20, verses 8 through 11. As usual, we will begin in verse 1 because the first commandments, they are all related and we need to remember all of them. So, let's start. This is the word of the living God and He speaks with His church saying, And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You should not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or the 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 rest on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Amen. Let's pray. Close your eyes. Our Heavenly Father. We read your scripture and once again we are moving your eyes through the commandments of the Lord. We ask you Lord that may you change your hearts and minds helping us to understand your commandments and helping us to follow you while we are obeying you. Please, God, change us and help us through the works of the Holy Spirit, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. We also will read the Heidelberg Catechism, the Lord's Day 38. You can find it in your Forms and Prayer book, page 246. There are two questions related to this Lord's Day. I will read the question, and I invite you to read the answers. Lord's Day 38, page 246. Question 103 asks, what is God's will for you in the four commandments? First, that the gospel ministry and schools for it be maintained, and that, especially on the festive day of rest, I diligently attend the assembly of God's people to learn what God's Word teaches, to participate in the sacraments, to pray to the Lord publicly, and to bring Christian offerings for the poor. Second, that every day of my life I rest from my evil ways and let the Lord work in them through His Spirit. And so be this life the eternal Sabbath. Question 104, what is God's will for you in the fifth commandment? Oh, sorry, this is Lord's Day 39. I'm a little bit lost here, I'm sorry. So, we are now moving your eyes to the fourth commandment, and it's very important to remember that we are here in the first part of the Ten Commandments of God. We already spoke about this, but we need to remember because today we are coming to the last important subject related to the first four commandments. The first one will remember us and call us to worship only one God, because there is only one God. And since there is only one God, we are called to worship only Him, and we are called to have only Him as the Lord of our souls. And since we have one God, since there are no other gods in this world, we are called to remember about three important things to relate to this one God. The first thing is speak in the second commandment, you shall not have other gods before you. Now, this is the first commandment, sorry. You shall not make for yourself a carved image. Do not make any image for yourself. The first thing that we need to understand when we are relating to this God, it's that we need to protect the image of God. The image of this God, it's unique. There is no other gods, so we need to protect this image because He is the only God and He says you should not make anything to adore, to worship, because I am God. I am a spiritual God, and you will never make or produce anything that can satisfy the greatness and the unicity of this wonderful God. The second thing is about His name. We're supposed to protect the name of our God. We should not use the name of our God in vain. We must understand and remember ourselves that His name, it's the name of the only one God. And being the one God, we need to respect Him and honor Him because He is the only God, and He is our Lord and our Savior. So, don't use His name in vain. We must hold His name to the Word and show His greatness to this world by using His name properly. is what we will cover tonight, which is we must protect His worship. We are called to worship this one God. Since there is only one God, we must understand that in our relationship with Him, we are not only called to receive the benefits that we are receiving every day from Him, but we are also called to respond to His greatness to His love, to His mercy, to His care with worship. And this worship, it's not like we want to do or as we can invent being normal men. We must see what He wants for His worship. And this is what He's telling us first about His worship. There is one day in your week and this day since the beginning was called to be the day of the Lord." So in this day, God is telling us we must worship Him and we must dedicate everything we have to relate with Him in this worship, praising His name and exalting His name. And this is then the third response that we have for the greatness of having this God. And then we will go through Exodus 20, chapter 20, verse 8, and we will start to understand how God wants us to worship Him. And the first thing, and I don't know if you already realized that, this is one of the commandments that doesn't start with a negative phrase. Here, instead of, you shall not, as we will find in almost all the other commandments, we will find, remember, remember the Sabbath day. Because the first thing that we must understand when we relate with the day of the Lord, it's that we must remember this day and this This reality is something that covers much more than one day specifically, but it needs to be something that stays in our minds for the whole week, helping us to wait for that day and be prepared for that day. So, tomorrow it's Monday, and we are already here today because in the New Testament the Sabbath changed for Sunday because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But tomorrow is the second day of the week, and we probably forget about the Sabbath day. will forget about the Lord's Day because there are still six days to cover until the next Lord's Day. And usually, on Mondays, we don't think about the Lord's Day, or we are not preparing ourselves for the Lord's Day. But what this commandment is saying is, remember the Sabbath Day. So in all the days of your week, you must remember that in one day, and now is the first day, we need to be ready to worship and to praise His name. And how can we do that? First of all, we must understand that the Lord's Day, it's only truly lived when we give the whole week, our whole week, to God. If you don't worship His name, if you don't remember about Him, if you don't bow down to Him or read His scripture or pray to Him in all the other six days, you will probably not be ready for the Sabbath day. Because the Sabbath day, it's when we bring everything that we brought from our week. We learn a lot from the scripture during the week. We are living our lives. And when we are living our lives, God is working on us. He's speaking with us. He's helping us in many different ways. He's blessing us in many different directions. And then we come Sunday here to worship Him for everything that He has been doing in our lives. It's a response. But if we not remember, if we forget about His worship, and if we forget about the importance of this day, we will not be ready to celebrate His day. So remember, it's the first order that we find here. And the second, it's remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. So the commandment here, it's very related with making this day a holy day. And how can we make our Sabbath or Sunday, the Lord's Day, holy? Well, to make this day holy, we need to understand that we should dedicate ourselves to the Lord. There is no other way besides this. The Lord's Day, it's a day in which we should focus our mind and our hearts on God. He's the center of this day, and we are here to worship Him. We are here to look to Him and to remember about everything He has been doing for His people. So, at this day, I will try to have His name in my mind. I will respond to Him with worship, with praise, and I will all the time during this day try to remember all the grace and the mercy that He is giving to His church. I know sometimes it seems very difficult because there are so many things happening in our lives, right? And that's why we have in the commandment a reality, an answer for a question like, how can we obey this statement to keep it holy, to remember and keep it holy? Then verse 9 will bring us a solution. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God. So, here God is telling us that since he made and he created the world in six days, and he worked for these six days, and he rests in the seventh day, we are called to do the same. So in six days, we must do everything we need to do. It's interesting that here he's telling us, for example, that we should work. Do your labor for six days. This is an order, too. So it's not... good for us to spend a lot of days in our week not doing anything. We are called to work. That's how we grow. That's how we produce fruits to the kingdom of God. That's how we learn from the gospel, and that's how we serve God in a good way. We must work. We must do our labor. But this labor has six days in a week to be done. So when I make plans and when we make plans, we should not make plans for the seventh day, for the Sabbath, for the Lord's day. Because we know that everything that we can include in this day will take our focus to God, from God, to another thing. So, if I want to invite you, for example, to a party, I will not plan this party to the Sabbath because I know I will not only take all my day preparing everything But I will also take your attention from your God and I know I will take everything that you should be offering for God to yourself. So, we will be together not keeping this day and not making this day holy. I'm not saying that we should not have fellowship during Sundays, of course we have, we should. This is part of our communion also. But we must remember ourselves that even when we have fellowship together, God needs to be the center of our lives. So the Sabbath day, and this is what God is saying here, it's a day that we should remember Him. We should remember His love, His greatness, His kindness, and we must worship Him for the whole day long. And he will say here something that will be interpreted in many different ways because in verse 10 he will speak about we not being called to work or son or daughter or male servant or female servant. everyone, even the Sojourner who is within your gates. This idea is very not familiar to people nowadays because we usually don't receive visits for a long time in our house like it was the costume of this time. But the idea here It's that we are called to put everyone and to call everyone around us to glorify His name with us. So the Lord's Day is not only for you who are a member of this church, but it's also a day for your children, for example. They are called to celebrate this day. They are called to attend the congregation of the saints that worship the service together. This is what Heidelberg is telling us also. We are called to go to church. We are called to celebrate the rest. We are called to participate in the sacraments. We are called to pray to the Lord publicly. We are called to bring offerings to the poor. We need to teach this to our children. They are called to do the same thing that we are called to do. And we cannot do this if we ignore the Lord's Day. So, the Lord's Day here, it's very important that we understand this. It's a day that God is calling us to look to Him, to relate with Him, and to worship Him. This is the purpose of this day. And everything that we do that will take our attention out of this will make us steal the worship that we must keep from the Lord who must receive this worship. So let's look in a practical way. How can we and how should we celebrate this day? First of all, the idea here is that we will find joy and grace during this day. When we come to the Lord's Day, we are not only keeping a commandment. But we are here to worship a God who is blessing everyone that is keeping his Lord's day. That is what he says, and the Lord bless the seventh day, the Sabbath day. It's at the end of verse 11. So when he bless this day, he's also blessing everyone who is keeping his day. So, we are here tonight, we are looking to God, we are worshiping, we praise, we celebrate His name with many songs, we pray with Him, and sometimes we don't understand that everything that we made here and we are doing here should bring joy to our hearts. If we really understand the meaning of those things, everything should bring joy and grace to our lives. Because if we sing properly, if you look, for example, to the Psalms that we sing tonight, you will understand that we are here as a congregation of saints celebrating His name and confessing His name among everyone. We are speaking about the benefits of being a Christian. You spoke, for example, the Apostles' Creed tonight, and you confess a lot of gracious works that God gave and made for you. You confess that He saved you, for example. You confess that He came to this world and He died for you. You confess that He was resurrected from the dead, and He's the first one, we will be there with Him. You confess that there is a congregation of the saints, and we are the people of God, and you say that out loud, you are confessing those things. And when we do that, we must find joy, we must find something that It's a blessing to our minds. If you are coming to the Lord's Day and you are singing and you are reading the Scripture and you are confessing your faith and you are not finding anything, probably it's because your heart and your mind is not here. The Lord's Day is not a tradition for the church. The Lord's Day is a privilege for the church. When we come here and we start to sing, that should bring a lot of satisfaction to your heart. And you should sing out loud and with all the gifts that God gave to you, using your voice and everything you have to really praise His name. Because we are in the presence of a holy God, and instead of receiving His wrath, His condemnation, we are receiving His love, and He's looking for us, and He's waiting for us to respond to His call of worship. And when we worship Him, He blessed us. And this is amazing. Every Sunday, we have a day to meet our God in a different way that we find him in our particular ways. It's not the same when we sing in our room during the night, right? If you start to sing at home, it's one thing. But when we come here and we hear all the voices together, And we follow the piano, we find... a wonderful way to worship His name. We are together professing the same truths. We are confessing the same things, and God is looking to us, and He's seeing us worship Him, and that must bring a lot of joy for our hearts. And that's the Lord's day, that's the fully greatness that we can find the Lord's day. So we will recharge our batteries like many people are expressing today, like you are uncharged, but when you come to the Lord's Day, you come back home differently because you met your God, you listened His voice, He spoke with you, and you are stronger at the end. You were encouraged by the Scripture to keep your work. You find His mercy once again, especially if you are dealing with a specific sin that is destroying your life, that is consuming you, and you find grace once again, you find His love once again, and you discover that He's still loving you and He's still looking to you because He's a wonderful God that will continue to bless you if you follow Him, if you repent, and if you change yourself to please Him. It's a wonderful meeting, you know. We're supposed to go back home differently every Sunday because we are finding a gracious Lord. But there is another reason to keep this day, and it's very interesting because we will not find this reason here in Exodus 20. We need to go to Deuteronomy 5, verse 15. We know that there we also have the Lord, the Ten Commandments, but here in Deuteronomy, verse 15. Moses will bring us another reason to keep the Lord's Day. This is different from what we have in Exodus 20. And it says in the middle of the four commandments, you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. And the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commands you to keep the Sabbath day." So here in Deuteronomy, Moses is bringing another reason to make us keep his day. And this reason is very related with the works that Jesus Christ made for us. The slavery that they had in Egypt, it was something that points specifically to what Christ was doing with us at the cross. We were slaves. And He gave us freedom from… reality, we became completely different after meeting Jesus Christ and after knowing Him and receiving His salvation. We were slaves and now we are free. We were condemned and now we are part of the kingdom of God. We were in darkness, and now we are walking in light. And when we think about that, when we remember about this salvation, come to the presence of this God, it's just a simple response to what He has been doing in our lives. One day actually doesn't seem enough. He gave us salvation for eternity. We should worship Him not only during one day, but all the days of our lives. And it's interesting because the question 113 Heidelberg brings our attention for that when it says that every day of my life I rest from my evil ways, let the Lord work in me through His Spirit And so, being in this life the eternal Sabbath. So, the idea is in response to His love, we must want to worship Him. So, we are not obligated to come to the Lord's presence to worship Him. You can avoid that if you want. But if you are not coming to His presence, you are not understanding what Jesus Christ made for you and what God made for you. And that's the idea that Deuteronomy brings to the keeping of the Lord's day. The Sabbath day, it's the day that we should keep holy. It's a day when we wake up, we must be ready to worship Him. In every other day, you have a lot of work to do. You need to clean your house. You need to go to your office. You need to bring your children to school. You need to think in many other things. But at the Lord's Day, you're supposed to wake up and stop and pray and start your day in His presence. And then you start to wake up and you change your clothes, you go to have breakfast with your family. And instead of making many plans, we're supposed to remember that this is His day and we must be ready for this. And if you did right, you will see that you always can be prepared for the Lord's Day. The bulletin, for example, usually is in your app before the Lord's Day. You can read the message. You can read something that is related to the message. You can start to look around the text that we will cover in the Lord's Day, you can prepare your heart for that day, and you can be ready for what God wants to talk with you. You can start to sing before coming to the church, because we must worship Him. And worship Him is not only when we are here. We must worship Him in our prayers. We must tell our kids how God was a wonderful God for us, and we must remember them that it's a great opportunity to come to God's presence and to worship Him with His family, with the family of God. And by the end of this day, we will find relief, relief from all the other works that we have in the week. I don't know if you feel that, but I must confess that the Lord's Day, it's something that brings a lot of joy to my heart. And being a pastor sometimes is difficult because we need to prepare sermons, be worried with many things, and especially me, I need to preach in other language. It's a big challenge, but it's a privilege. Because I'm here with you, I'm here with the saints of God. We are here together to worship the one God. And this day, it's a wonderful day to serve Him, to worship Him, and to glorify Him. And by the end of this day, I will not be tired. I will be happy. It was a difficult day, yeah, but it was a wonderful day. because I met my God. We met our God, and in His presence we find mercy and grace and salvation. So we must change the way we relate to the Sabbath day. We must take this day really as a day of rest, not because we are not doing anything, but because we are resting in the presence of God. You probably, I know a lot of people here who work a lot on Sundays. We have so many things to do, but this is for God, and it's a privilege to serve Him. It's a privilege to prepare everything for Him. And since we are here, we must praise Him, worship Him, and glorify Him. I will not bring you laws, rules. My idea is not to say how you're supposed to keep your Lord's Day. I don't know your life. I don't know what do you do for a living like the Jews did in the past, like you don't supposed to walk. like 50 miles, I don't know, I don't remember exactly the quantity of miles, but like you cannot go here, you cannot go there, you cannot do this, you cannot do this. No, this is not what the Sabbath day is calling us to do. The Sabbath, it's a day for the Lord, so are you worshiping Him? Are you really bowing down in His presence? Are you really offering your time to Him? Are you really singing with joy when you follow everyone else at church to sing to Him? Or we are here just because it's a tradition? Well, we must evaluate ourselves. and we must change our hearts to honor Him in His day. Let's pray. Close your eyes. Let's talk to our God. Our Heavenly Father, thank You once again for the privilege to find Your Scripture. Sometimes it's difficult for us with many different ideas of…