In it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within the 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. Wherefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath and hallowed it. Very familiar words, second time you've heard them today, all right? Question 58, we're gonna take these three in order. And then we'll talk about how we kind of unpack them with three major points for this message anyway. Question 58, what is required in the fourth commandment? Answer, the fourth commandment requireth the keeping holy to God such set times as he hath appointed in his word expressly one whole day in seven to be a holy Sabbath to himself. In question 59, which day of the seven hath God appointed to be the weekly Sabbath? The answer, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God appointed the seventh day of the week to be the weekly Sabbath, and the first day of the week ever since to continue to the end of the world, which is the Christian Sabbath. When we look at the 10 commandments, God has given us the moral law, and this is the 10 commandments. And of those 10 commandments, why of all of those is the fourth commandment the one that is the most likely to be thought of as not applicable in our lives? Why is that? And it is true, isn't it? that the Sabbath day, honoring the Sabbath day, keeping it holy. Why does that occur? Any ideas? My style is you may actually say something when I ask a question. If it's rhetorical, I say, hey, that's a rhetorical question. But does anybody have any ideas as to why that might be the case? Doug. Saturday to Sunday, the seventh to the first day of the week. So are you saying we get confused in our hearts as to what that is and so we just kind of go, well, whatever? External, okay. Right, right, no, that's fine, yeah. Right. Okay. And we will look at some of those passages in the New Testament later on. So, Sophia, did you have a point? Covered it? Okay. All right. All right. It's so true. Just, you know, there are some who deny that this commandment, this fourth commandment, is perpetually binding upon all men of all ages. And We're going to take a little bit of a look into the spiritual realm and see how sly and how deceptive of a deceiver the devil is, where he uses God's own words. What was the devil's first recorded words in Scripture? Did God really say? And he does that so often. So he's gonna take the what, the words of this commandment, and he's gonna twist them to make them sort of the why and the what we do. He's gonna take this duty, he's gonna make it into a duty and leave it there and not allow us to progress to the fact that this should be a desire of our hearts to do. And so that's one of the things that we're gonna look at. But these are the very words of God. The catechism study that we use here gives three good reasons why we should take these words seriously. And a couple of them, I'm just gonna add a few, okay? And the first ones I wanna add are, these are the very words of God. If he says this, we should take that to heart. And not only that, but we should take to heart why he says this. And he says it because he loves us, because he understands who we are as people and what we need. And he also says that because he is worthy. He's worthy of our worship. So let's not receive these lightly, okay? One of the reasons, so I'm gonna get my teaching mask on here and go here. But the reasons why, why take seriously And there are three reasons there, but I'm not going to write them down. Number one is that God has included this in his moral law. There's 10 laws that he gives us. They are, he hand delivered them. That makes them special. Do you not believe God wrote these on a tablet of stone and hand delivered them to Moses and says, these are not civil laws. These are not the ceremonial laws. They're coming up. You know, we'll get into that. Okay. These are the 10 moral laws that I have given you. Okay. They are more They have more weight. They just have more weight. And yet we in our society today want to take that one out of the 10 and go, eh, you know, let's not take that very seriously. Nobody alive goes, well, you know, that whole murder thing, eh, that's not that important, you know, because that was Old Testament stuff and it's New Testament now. But they take the fourth commandment about the Sabbath and they try to deny it. You know, why is this a critical part of the moral law? Number two, second reason, is that it's a creation mandate. It's a creation ordinance. God gave this command. He made this before sin. It's one of the only ones that he did. The few things he said, he said, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it. He also said, Seven days, I've given you, six days are for work, one day is for rest and for worship and for personal reflection and for a fellowship as well. And that's because God loves us, all right? Sabbath is a creation ordinance, it's established before sin and we read about that in Genesis two, verse three, where he says, sorry, I should have had this marked. Hebrews 3, then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made. This is before anything that really else happened. That gives it some weight as well, I would say. Comment on that, Irene? He did. And did he need to rest? I don't know that he needed rest, but he did. So it's awfully important. The Sabbath also is, the third reason, I should say, so it's part of the Ten Commandments, the moral law. The second thing is it's a creation ordinance. The third thing is that as such, because of those two things, you've gotta have a very, very good reason to take that command and dismiss it. The book uses the word abrogates, just say, oh, it's fulfilled, it's done, we can kind of dismiss it. And that's nowhere found in scripture. There's nowhere in scripture does it say, take that fourth thing, just forget about that. Thank you. But to fulfill it, but to fulfill it. We're still in my thunder, it's coming up, but very good, okay? In fact, it says here, think not, Christ said in Matthew 5 or 7, think not that I have come to destroy the law, I am not, he says. And then Paul says, do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid. Yea, we establish the law, Romans 3.31. This is the constant teaching of the New Testament. The 10 commandments of God do remain in effect. So those are three very good reasons why we should take this law very seriously. The second thing is we take a look at the heart of the law, not so much the letter of the law, but the heart of the law. The letter of the law says I've worked seven days, or six days, on the seventh day, I'm gonna rest and you should too. Now, does that mean that the seventh day, is the ordinance important, the order of the days important, or is it the proportion of the days, one in seven? So as my example will show here, I have seven chocolate chip cookies lovingly made by my wife this past, I don't know when it was, Friday, whatever, okay? They're all pretty much the same, aren't they? Take a look. You can see some, they're not exactly the same. And I have six volunteers here. One of these, by the way, one of these is special. You don't know which one it is. To be honest with you, I don't know which one it is, but we're going to make that very clear. So I've got six volunteers. I'm going to ask you to do your duty now and pick one of these. one of these cookies. Come on up and take that right now, if you would, please. Six volunteers. Did you guys already have cookies after? So it turns out, here's the special one. This is it, because That's what God says. Satan has taken God's very words and he said, six days you shall do all your work and the seventh is a Sabbath day. That's the reason why God says take a day and use it. to worship, to have fellowship, to rest. He's done that. It doesn't matter what day it is. Now it does because we use scripture as our guide and very clearly in the New Testament, there's multiple passages where the believers gathered on the Lord's day, the first day of the week. And so that has now become the special day. That's that change from the Sabbath being last day of the week in the Jewish tradition to the Lord's day becoming the first day of the week because it celebrates Christ's resurrection as well on the first day of the week. So you may eat those cookies by the way, they are special, you don't have to. I'm gonna eat that one a little bit later because I didn't have a cookie afterwards as I was setting up. So it's not that the order of the days is so very important, it's that the proportion of the days is so very important. Why does God do this? I like to say he does it for two reasons. Reason number one is because he loves us, because he understands we need that day. We need that day to rest from our labors, to focus our energies and our minds away from our work, and we need to worship. We're created for worship. Just a historical example of that. We're written here somewhere, there it is. Historical example of that, following World War II, the Japanese, very religious people, not Christian, not godly, not biblically, but very religious people. The Japanese people thought to themselves, wow, America's God is greater than our God. So therefore, we should probably start worshiping America's God. And so they looked at what America's God was. Unfortunately, at the time, the church in America had been so marginalized that that didn't even come on the Japanese radar. They looked at America and they said, your God is industrialism. That's your God. You were able to defeat us because of your commitment to industrialism, to working hard, to making things happen. And the proof is there. I mean, the Japanese culture has become a huge, compared to the size of its country, a huge player in the world from an industrial sense. And the Japanese people, and they did it hard, and they did it well, and they worshiped. But then what started to happen is that they had these young, especially these young men, they were dying for no reason whatsoever. Well, when they investigated this, they found that these young men were dying from overwork. They were religiously working. And I think you've probably seen the documentaries and the videos that, you know, how these companies get together and these people get together and they do calisthenics together and they sing songs together. And it's almost a religious exercise for them. The Japanese culture has even come up with a word for this. It's called karoshi. Karoshi translated into English is working yourself to death. This is what happens to us as human beings when we put our emphasis on the wrong things. One of the instances that I looked at was a young man, and it's still going on, by the way. I think it was in 2008. They found this young man, died of overwork, And they found out that he had put in 80 hours of overtime that week. Now you think about it, that's at least 120 hours of working. I didn't do the math on how many hours a day that is, but that's the case. One of the reasons why God gives us the Sabbath day for rest is so that we may rest. So that we may rest from our labors and that we may refresh ourselves, our bodies, and that's because God loves us. The providence of God gives us the fourth commandment. The second thing, and I might be oversimplifying here, but the second thing is that God is worthy of our worship. You know, I keep thinking of R.C. Sproul's famous five words. They weren't his last words, but famous five words. And his famous five words are, what's wrong with you people? And in response to a question, you know, why is God's punishment so severe? And his answer is, what's wrong with you people? You don't understand, God is God, and he's the creator of the universe, and he's worthy of our worship. Out of mercy, he's created us to worship him, to love him, and we're concerned about some severe punishment that we don't think is fair. So those two things, just to emphasize, God gives us the fourth commandment so that we don't kill ourselves, we'll work ourselves to death, and because he is worthy of our worship. So. When we look at scripture, I think Romans 1 applies here as well. Romans 1 is this chapter where Paul is talking to the Romans about what man has done. When we take God and we marginalize him in our lives, when we don't honor him as we should, when we don't acknowledge him as God, we create our own idols. And so the whole idea of worship is so very important for us to reflect once a week, and obviously we should be doing it every day, but once a week to set aside a day in which we can do this and do this to his honor and glory. When we look at this whole idea of what Satan has done to To take God's own very words and twist them in our minds, we have to understand that He's tricky, okay? And the disposition of our fallen nature is to create worship alternatives or substitutes. What is most important, we think, is to be sincere and zealous. Now, when we look at Scripture and we look at the description of the most sincere and zealous worship, we find a passage where the Israelites were dancing, they were shouting, and they were They were being very, very sincere, worshiping God through a golden calf. So sincere and zealousness isn't really what we should be trying for. We should be trying for worshiping God in spirit and in truth. Isn't that true? John Calvin saw the chief need for the reformation of the church to be in the area of worship. He believed the church's worship had denigrated to superstition and idolatry because the church's doctrine had been neglected. And he believed that unless sound doctrine informs our worship, our worship will go astray. God wants people who will worship him in spirit and truth and will give him glory in a way that reflects his true nature and his true character. I don't know that this piggybacks on what Pastor Wallachort said about our culture today, but I think it relates. We've seen in our culture this desire to change worship. So we get away from a pulpit and we have a stage. We get away from choirs and we have worship teams. And it's not designed to honor God. It's designed to please man. And so when we do that, our worship is going to go astray. This is defined evangelical worship in the United States for some time. When we begin to pander to the audience rather than to God, we are in serious trouble. And I think we should be ever mindful of that, especially when we consider the fourth commandment.