We are continuing our evening service series entitled Reformed Presbyterianism today and we will be looking later in our service at our commitment to the Lord's Day. And I want to read now from the book of the prophet Isaiah chapter 58. We shall read the whole chapter. Isaiah 58. Let us hear the word of God. shout it aloud, do not hold back, raise your voice like a trumpet, declare to my people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins. For day after day they seek me out, they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They asked me for just decisions and seemed eager for God to come near them. Why have we fasted, they say, and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves and you have not noticed? Yet on the day of your fasting you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is this the kind of fast I have chosen? Only a day for a man to humble himself? Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast? A day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen? To loosen the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke? To set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter? When you see the naked, to clothe him and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood. Then your light will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear. Then your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the Lord will be your rearguard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer. You will cry for help, and he will say, Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, Then your light will rise in the darkness and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always. He will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations. You will be called repairer of broken walls, restorer of streets with dwellings. If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, If you call the Sabbath a delight and the Lord's holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride in the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob. the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Amen. May God bless the reading and the preaching of his own holy word. The Reformed Presbyterian Church in Ireland traces its roots back to the land of Scotland and to the coming of the first Presbyterians to this island in the early 1600s, to the establishment of the first reformed Presbytery in the town of Carrickfergus at the beginning of the 1640s. So we have a long historic tradition. By the mercy of God We as a church have not changed in our commitment over those 350 years. We believe what our forefathers did. We have not seen scriptural reason to change those things for which they stood. But we do need to express the truths which we believe in language which is appropriate and contemporary for the era in which we live. And so this study, this series of studies which I have entitled Reformed Presbyterianism Today, what do we believe as a church? What do we stand for? What are those scriptural emphases which we think are important? We come to the twelfth of these studies this evening. And I've entitled it, Enjoying the Lord's Day. Enjoying the Lord's Day. This is something that historically is at the heart of Reformed piety. And this is one of the rare occasions when to some extent we part company with one of our theological fathers the French reformer John Calvin. Great as were Calvin's insights and profound as his understanding was, his teaching on the Lord's Day is to some extent confused, inconsistent and self-contradictory. And for a fuller exposition of the biblical doctrine of the Sabbath, We have to go to the Puritans of England and the Scots Presbyterians who in their writings and in their devotion fully developed the biblical doctrine of the Lord's Day. There was a time when the understanding of the Lord's Day was something shared among all true evangelical Christians. Less and less is that the case. The Lord's Day is being neglected and ignored, even among many of the Lord's own people. Many Christians are becoming careless about the Lord's Day. I take an American Christian news magazine, World Magazine, It's something that contains many good articles and perspectives on different affairs, cultural and political and economic. But I was struck in reading a recent edition to see a full-page advertisement for DirecTV National Football League Sunday night. What's your favorite team on DirecTV's Sunday package every week? So here's a Christian magazine set up on specifically Christian values and they apparently see nothing inconsistent, I know people in magazines take all sorts of advertising, but they see nothing inconsistent in advertising something which is urging people to break one of the Ten Commandments and spend their Saturday evening watching American football. And as I travel I begin to think that more and more the keeping of the Sabbath is almost going to become a distinctive principle of reformed Christians. And we do need to understand our position, to be able to articulate it and to defend it, and to be enthusiastic about our position. And that's why I've called our study Enjoying the Lord's Day. Enjoying it. not enjoying it, but enjoying it. At the heart of our observance of the Lord's Day there must be joy. One of the Puritans said, it cannot be a holy day unless it be a happy day. So our subject this evening, how can we enjoy the Lord's Day? And that's why I've turned to Isaiah 58, to those beautiful sentences from verses 13 and 14. There are many passages in the Bible about the Lord's Day that we could have considered, but let me read again those verses. Isaiah 58, 13 and 14. If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath, and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight, and the Lord's holy day honorable, And if you honour it by not going your own way, and not doing as you please, or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the Lord. And I will cause you to ride in the heights of the land, and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob. The mouth of the Lord has spoken. And I want to set before you five simple principles from this text. We look at the prohibition, the paradox, the perception, the practice and the promise. First of all, observe the prohibition. Observe the prohibition, look at the opening words of the text, if you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath. That's interesting language that God uses through the prophet, if you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath. The picture there is of something special, something sacred, something set apart. Perhaps it would have had the resonance for the Jewish people of that incident centuries earlier when in the wilderness Moses had approached God in the burning bush. And from the burning bush the voice of God spoke, Exodus 3, 5, Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals. For the place where you are standing is holy ground. Moses couldn't walk casually over this piece of ground. He couldn't trample over it. It was God's place. It was holy. It was set apart. It was His in a special sense. He had made it His. And Moses had to keep his feet He had to keep his feet. He had to observe the restriction, the prohibition which God placed on him. And I think that's the sort of idea we have here. It's something holy. Don't trample over it wantonly or carelessly. Keep your feet away from breaking the Sabbath. It's as if God places a fence around the Lord's day, as if he marks it off as sacred. It's something precious, it's fragile, it's unique, it's not to be profaned, it's not to be broken. In other words, this day is not ours to do with as we wish. It is not at our disposal. Its very name says everything. The Lord's day. It belongs to him in a special sense. He has set it apart. And we need to understand that, to have it clear in our minds. We need a wholesome fear of trampling sinfully over God's holy place or God's holy day. Here is the prohibition to be observed. Keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath. God begins with this warning. But then secondly, we are to accept the paradox What is the paradox? The paradox is an apparent contradiction. Well our subject is enjoying the Lord's Day. Enjoying the Lord's Day. Now how does God tell us to enjoy the Lord's Day? He says, keep from doing as you please. Keep from doing as you please. And that might strike us initially as a contradiction. Surely we would say enjoyment is precisely the opposite. Enjoyment is doing what we please. And when we do what we please we enjoy ourselves. and surely if we want to enjoy the Lord's day the way to do so would be to please ourselves and consult ourselves but God says no keep from doing as you please it seems a paradox but it's not really when we think about it to do as we please is rarely the way to true, lasting enjoyment. The chronically obese person is pleased with eating. If they did as they pleased, they would eat and eat and eat, but that's not the way to enjoyment. The alcoholic, if he or she did what they pleased, they would destroy themselves. Sometimes what we want, what pleases us is harmful. Or sometimes, often in fact, self-denial is the way to ultimate enjoyment. The champion athlete wins through to the joy of a gold medal by years of painful effort and training by limiting themselves, by restricting themselves, by not doing what they please but what they should. And so it is here. We've got to come to God in faith. We've got to admit that in ourselves we don't know what we need. We don't know what is best for us. It simply isn't safe to follow our own desires. We've got to try to escape from the tyranny of self, and self is a tyrant, and ultimately a very cruel and self-destructive tyrant. We've got to reject the basic principle of the sinner. I do what I want. For there is a way that seems right to a man, but it ends in death. We've got to believe what the Lord Jesus told us, that losing ourselves to God is the best way to find ourselves. And that self-denial is the way to self-fulfillment. And that obedience is the way to joy. so that our attitude towards the Lord's day should be, what does God want me to do? And if you will accept that paradox, you will find that what God wants you to do is what is best for you, and what will bring you true enjoyment. Accept the paradox. Keep from doing as you please. Thirdly, we are to develop the perception, and I mean by that the perception of the Lord's day as a joyful thing, a privilege, a blessing. Our text puts it this way, if you call the Sabbath a delight, and the Lord's holy day honourable. And there's a beautiful balance here with our previous point in the previous statement. Keep from doing as you please. It sounds a bit grim, a bit austere, a bit hair-shirty and monastic. Keep from doing as you please. Oh dear, well if that's our duty we'll have to do it, but it's going to be pretty rough. But no, the prophet says, if you call the Sabbath a delight, the Lord's day is not to be a day of gloom or of boredom. It is not to be a burden, but it is to be a blessing. And we have to acknowledge that in the past some very earnest Christians in their desire to keep the Sabbath have become legalists and have become too negative in their approach and have made the day a burden rather than a blessing. The story is told whether it's true or not I don't know but it's true as a myth even if it's not true as a fact of the Scots minister who woke one Sabbath morning and there was deep snow, and the road was completely blocked with snow. How would he get to church to preach? He noticed that the river running past the manse down to the church was frozen. So he put on his skates, his ice skates, and skated down the river to the church. This caused great perplexity and confusion among his elders. And they had a meeting about this. Was the minister sinning? One group of the elders believed that he was. Ice skating is a sport. He had engaged in a sport on the Lord's day. He was sinning. The other group said no, he was simply trying to get to church in the most convenient way. How could they settle the issue? So they called the minister in, and they said, here's the crucial question, minister. You skated down the river to church. Did you enjoy it? Because if you enjoyed it, it was a sin. But if you didn't enjoy it, it was perfectly all right. Well, that's a caricature, I hope. I'm sure of this. But there has been a little bit of that sometimes among Christian people. And we have to recognize how sane and how wise this counsel is. If you call the Sabbath a delight, and the Hebrew word means an exquisite delight. In other words, train yourselves to think of the Lord's day in this way. Train yourselves to think of the Sabbath as a pleasure, as a privilege, as a blessing. Not as a fast day, but as a feast day. The joy of worship. The joy of Christian fellowship. of spending time with family and friends, of resting and being refreshed, of feeding our own souls. One of the Puritans called the Sabbath the market day of the soul, for he said that is when our souls do great business with God. Wasn't that the attitude of the psalmist? when to the house of God go up, they said to me. You who are parents, especially parents of young children, must give attention to teaching your children to call the Sabbath a delight. Why should you not have special foods for your young children? Some of their favourite foods and have them only on the Sabbath day. That's what we used to do. The children knew that there would be a special treat on the Lord's Day. With very young children, special toys. And you're only allowed to play with this on Sabbath. And at the end of the day, the child saying, no, can I play with it tomorrow? No. You have to wait till the next Lord's Day. When they get a little bit older, special books that they're reading. And they'll come to the end of a chapter. And then what's going to happen next? Oh, you'll have to wait. You'll have to wait till next Sabbath to find out. To encourage them to look forward to the day. And you've got to spend a lot of quality time with your children. You've got to take a real interest in them. Play with them, talk to them, sing psalms together, tell them Bible stories, be open to them as their dad and mom, so that it's a happy day, a very, very bright, joyful, special day. You mothers and fathers will have to think out ways of doing that for yourselves. But that's the perception that we need to develop, that we wake up with a sense of joy. It's the Sabbath. But of course, I'll not take time to expand on this, but it's absolutely fundamental. We only really delight in the Lord's day when we know and love the Lord of the day himself. So, develop the perception of the Sabbath as a delight. Fourthly, we are to persevere in the practice We're to persevere in the practice. So far we've been thinking rather negatively to some extent of what we don't do on the Sabbath. And some Christians tend to stop there. Their view of the Sabbath is a negative. We don't do this, we don't go here, we don't engage in this activity, we don't say that. It's all negatives. And that's a great mistake. And it's a mistake that our forefathers didn't make. This wasn't characteristic of the Puritan Sabbath or of the Sabbath in 17th century Scotland. Our Catechism says the fourth commandment forbiddeth profaning the day by idleness. By idleness. J. I. Packer says we do not keep the Sabbath holy by lounging around doing nothing. And perhaps some of us congratulate ourselves on our keeping the Sabbath when for too many of us it's a lazy, indolent, do-nothing day. Sleeping for three and a half hours after a heavy lunch in front of a hot fire on a Sabbath afternoon is not really what the Lord has in mind. for keeping the day holy now what are we to do? well perhaps we could take the negatives of the text and turn them around God says not going your own way well that means going God's way God says not doing as you please well that means doing as God pleases God says not speaking idle words. That means speaking helpful words. It's a day for worship. Public and private worship. It's a day when we can study God's word for ourselves. When you can read something that you haven't time to read during the week. When you can give an hour or two of consecutive thought. and learn from God. It's a day for resting in body and mind. And as our society becomes ever more pressured and stressful, the rest of the Sabbath comes to mean more and more. Many of you are conscientious people. some of you are over conscientious that's my guess and God is very kind to put his hand on the workaholics among you and one day a week say my child not only do I not want you to work today I want you not to work that you can rest and you can lay aside all your work with a good conscience, with a clear conscience. One of our members recently was telling me how during a business trip, a very pressured business trip, it was a tremendous relief to be able to say to colleagues, on this day I won't be available for any business. It's a blessing from God. we can devote the Sabbath day to helping other people. The words of our Lord are appropriate. He said it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath day. Our Catechism calls it works of necessity and mercy. Serving, helping, ministering to people in many ways. New Lord's Day spent like this will ever be boring or empty. So we are to persevere in the practice of doing good on the Lord's Day. And then lastly, we experience the promise, and there is a wonderful promise towards the close of this text. The enjoyment of the Lord's day extends further than the day itself. There is a rich blessing promised to those who keep it in verse 14. Then you will find your joy in the Lord. And again, this word means exquisite delight. You will find your joy in the Lord. You will have a deeper relationship with God. That's one of the blessings of keeping the day. You'll know God better. You'll love Him more deeply. You'll trust Him more completely. He will be more real to you. You will enjoy God more satisfyingly than ever before. You will find your joy in the Lord. Are you delighting in His day? If you're not, perhaps that's one reason why your joy in the Lord is not what it should be. And the Lord goes on and says, and I will cause you to rise, I'm sorry, to ride on the heights of the land. To ride on the heights of the land. Alec Mateer, in his commentary on Isaiah, says this is a metaphorical expression. And I love this phrase. For a glorious elevation of life. A glorious elevation of life. I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land. He's thinking there of the promised land, the inheritance, God's blessing. That you'll experience it on its highest level. We sang from Psalm 18, He enables me to stand on the heights. I don't want to sound pretentious or pompous or snobby about this, but it's a simple truth that the service and worship of God ennobles human beings. It elevates us. It gives us a dignity, a breadth and a depth in our thinking. Many of our fellow men spend this day as other days thinking about money and pleasure and television and self-indulgence. And we think of the soul, and of eternity, and of the unseen God, and of the great truths of his word. And we have to realize what this is doing to us. This summer when we were in America, my wife and I had taken a copy of the video which the BBC made about the psalm singing in one of our churches. We showed it in different places. to people. And one of the comments that was made over and over again to us several times, people said how articulate these people are. They weren't ministers, they weren't elders, you remember the video. Farmers, young girls, housewives, and they were interviewed and they spoke about theology and church history and doctrine and devotion naturally. And people were struck by that. And the Sabbath day has a way of bringing a grandeur and a nobility and a true humanity into our lives. You will find your joy in the Lord and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the Lamb. It lifts our gaze from what is parochial and limited and narrow and small. And we're thinking great thoughts. And we're concerned about great matters. And it can't but be that to some extent our faces will shine on a Monday morning. For we've been up the mountain, and we've been in the presence of God, and we've meditated on his word. There's been a tragic, in my lifetime, a tragic devaluation, degradation of the character of the British people. There's a silliness and a triviality and an inconstancy about them that didn't used to be the case. And part of that, of course, the major part of it is our country's abandonment of the gospel. And our people have been degraded and they've declined. You only need to look at some of the material on television. we have got back to the days of the Romans they used to kill people in the arena for sport and people would sit and laugh at the suffering of human beings and in these quiz shows now these reality shows poor pathetic people are humiliated and made fun of And all the shame and sorrow of their lives are laid out and the audience laugh and sneer and roar. And it's cruel and it's debasing. God is calling for men and women. I'm not talking here about IQ or intelligence or education. And talking about a nobility, a Christ-likeness of character, real men, real women, who are serious men and women. And this is part of what is promised here. You will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob. And then at the end comes this great climactic statement, the mouth of the Lord has spoken. And that settles it. We are fortunate. In our church, we have not lost the inheritance of the Lord's day. It has been handed down to us by our forefathers. Are we starting to slip away? Are we doing things that our parents wouldn't have done? Let us give ourselves with gladness to enjoying it more and more, and to anticipating these wonderful blessings. Amen. Let us bow our heads in prayer. Lord God, we thank you for this oasis, for this place of rest and refreshment given to us each week when we stop our own works, when we are reminded that the great issues of our lives are in your hands, when we think of the resurrection of our Savior and the Sabbath rest which remains for the people of God, when we worship when we love one another, when we learn from your word, when we rest in body and mind. Thank you for the Lord's Day. Thank you for your kindness in giving it. Truly, Lord, the Sabbath was made for man's benefit. And we pray that we may avail ourselves of it and enjoy it more and more. In the name of Christ, to whom it points, Amen.