Let's open our Bibles to Exodus chapter 20, verses eight through 11. If you're using the blue Bibles, you'll find that on page 61. We're continuing through the 10 Commandments. The first four of the 10 Commandments instruct us how we relate to God. So the first one says, who to worship? God alone. How to worship? Not by images, but by God's word. Thirdly, honoring God's name. And then the fourth commandment speaks of the day of rest and worship. Exodus chapter 19. Verses eight through 11, this is God's word. 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, 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. This is God's word, let's pray. Our Father, we pray that you'd be with us now as we hear your word. Help us to see the reason for this commandment as well as the benefit of it. Bless us, we pray, and speak to us, we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Life often has a hamster wheel feel to it. So what we do, we do again and again and again. If you just weeded the flower bed, good for you. Those weeds will come back. If you just turned in your homework, great. Your teacher will probably think up some more for you. You finish your day at work, and they'll expect you to show up the next day of work. Around and around we go. Our toil never seems to cease. Spiritually, it's similar. We struggle against sin. We do that today, and we'll do it tomorrow. We seek to understand our Lord God and we know Him in part and tomorrow we'll be still seeking to know Him. We try to grasp the gospel of Jesus Christ, what it means to be forgiven and to live as a gracious person. But the process of learning that has to go on and on. Our work is never done. Or is it? God gives Israel the Sabbath to commemorate the fact that God is a God who finishes his work and he invites us also to enter into his rest and to celebrate his rest even now. For us as New Testament people especially, we get to focus on this as a rest that has been provided by our Lord Jesus Christ who is bringing us home. all the way to the heavenly promised land, our eternal rest. And these things are pointed at in the fourth commandment. We're going to study this this morning and first see the practice of resting, and then the pattern of resting laid down by God himself. So first comes the practice of resting. Basically, the fourth commandment starts out by saying, remember to rest, verse eight. Remember the Sabbath day, Sabbath meaning ceasing or stopping, resting. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. To keep something holy means to consecrate it to a special purpose. So what God is saying is you separate this day from the other days of the week and devote this day especially to God. which implies, of course, worshiping God on this, his special day. To say the word remember implies a couple of things. First of all, to start off the command with remember suggests that Israel already knew about this command. In fact, we find out, if you stretch your memory, you'll remember back in chapter 16, in connection with gathering manna, God has already given them a command about the Sabbath day. Israel may still remember something about the Sabbath day from residual memory that's there about the creation week in God's example in the creation week. So remember, he says, calling to mind something they've already known. The word remember also suggests that they're likely to forget it. And we know why. We know why. It's because the work we have to do has a way of elbowing itself to the front of the line and taking over. So for the Israelites, they can see the tent needs batching and the sheep needs shearing. For us today, the lawn needs mowing. Better check your email, so on and so forth. And we get anxious about that to-do list, and over time we can lose the discipline of rest. We can forget to rest. And God says, remember it. And he's also saying, make it a priority. God here is setting up a one in seven pattern a one in seven pattern of rest that he superimposes on our lives, a pattern that cuts across ways in which we might prefer to rest. We prefer to rest when we're tired. Well, God doesn't say to us, rest when you're tired, or when we get our project done. or when the weather is too nasty to go outside anyway. These are times when we might rest naturally, but God gives us actually a one in seven pattern and imposes it on our lives once a week. In a sense, the Sabbath command reminds me of a fire drill. It's something that comes into our schedule and calls us to do something else. Whatever you happen to be doing, if that fire alarm rings, then now you're doing something else. So it cuts into your schedule. And the Sabbath is the same way. This is God's idea for their schedule. In that sense, the Sabbath day comes as what I'll call a high command. It comes as a command in which you cannot always clearly see the reason for keeping this command. It is a command then that calls for our trust. It is sort of like the tree of knowledge of good and evil where God says, don't eat from that tree. but it was a fine looking tree and the fruit looked very nice to eat. They just had to trust him on that. In a similar way with a Sabbath day, they just have to trust him that this is when they need to take rest. In Exodus chapter 31, God is going to call Sabbath observance a sign of covenant keeping. And I think that's because doing it really does embody trusting God. and being loyal to him by simply following his directions. Verses nine and 10 lay out how to rest. Verse nine points out that we have six days for our normal work. Verse 10, the seventh day is a Sabbath, a day of ceasing. A Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work. We understand what God is saying there is you don't do any unnecessary work. You have to do at least a little bit of work every day. You have to fix your meals. There's some things that cannot be, you can't skip a day. Probably a lot of these people had cattle or goats. If they're being milked, you cannot skip a day. You have to milk the animals. The watchman could not take the Sabbath day off. There's some jobs that have to be done, But in terms of our normal workload that can be pushed off and deferred, that's what God is saying needs to be rested from. He's telling his people to push aside their normal work and rest in honor of God. I remember a day long ago when I was working at a company on Christmas Eve. We didn't get Christmas Eve off. But the boss had a change of heart, and in the middle of the day, he just said, everyone go home. Go home, you get the rest of the day off. And we gladly did. We took the rest of the day off, we thought well of our boss. And that's kind of like the Sabbath day, where God says, in essence, take a day off, rest and be refreshed. So we take a day resting, and we think well of him. We say thank you, Lord, for this day of ceasing, for my normal toil. God also says here to let the people under you rest. God seems to especially aim this command at heads of household because he talks about it's not just you who need to rest, as in you, father, but also your kids, your servants, and even your animals. God says make it a holiday for everybody. So even the donkey gets a break. And this generosity to all under them actually fits with a major theme of the book of Exodus. The book of Exodus is about how God sees heavily burdened people and lifts their burdens off. Remember how Pharaoh had made Israel's life bitter with bondage? Exodus chapter three, verses seven and eight, God says to Moses, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry. I've come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up to a land flowing with milk and honey. The fourth commandment as stated in the book of Deuteronomy also dwells on this aspect, how we, God says, keep the Sabbath mindful of how I've brought you out of slavery. So they observe a day of rest in the honor of the God who saw his people so heavily burdened and brought them out into freedom going to a promised land, which is a picture of rest. And God calls Israel to be like him. In other words, be those who delight to lift burdens from other people too. Give rest to everyone you can, God is saying. Now, that's all great. In the context, though, as you back up and look at Mount Sinai, there's a twist in the story, because remember that at this time, as God gives the law, speaking it from the mountain, as chapter 19, verse 18 says, the entire mountain is shaking. And meanwhile, God is speaking so loudly and so fearsomely, that we'll see in chapter 20, verse 19, that the people beg that God might stop talking to them. So as God commands rest, he does so in a most unrestful fashion. Nobody's relaxing as God calls them to rest on a Sabbath day. They're shaking in their boots. And that whole scene of Mount Sinai certainly brings to mind God's holiness, how people who have many sins gathering into the presence of God cannot help but be shaken, mindful of how we deserve his judgment, mindful of how we have failed so often both in our work and in our rest and in many other ways. And so here's a great tension of the Old Testament where God is inviting us into rest and yet at the same time, In so many ways, God seems to be threatening and punishing his people for their shortcomings. And they have animal sacrifices to atone for their sins, but those are just animal sacrifices. So, there's a tension here between a call to rest for the people being deeply unsettled, And that is a tension that drives us to the New Testament and teaches us to long for Jesus, because the one who comes to deliver, rest, rest, is Christ, who said, come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And it is Jesus who comes to save us from the tyranny of the evil king, the devil. It is Christ who comes to lift away the burden of our guilt. In Exodus terms, Christ is the Passover lamb who sheds his blood for our sins. Christ is the one who, as Moses led his people through the sea, Christ leads us through the hazards of death and out the other side eventually into resurrection and promised land. So the rest that's being referred to here is We need Jesus to feel truly restful in God's presence. Now as we think about this as New Testament Christians, we ask the question of whether we still ought to celebrate a day of rest today or whether this belonged to the time of Moses and has expired. so that we no longer have a Sabbath that we keep per se. And we find the answer to this question in the fact that the Sabbath command is based in the creation week. It doesn't start with the Law of Moses, so we take it to be a creation ordinance. Excuse me. And now, today, the New Testament, we do rest and worship on Sunday, which is called the Lord's Day. Revelation chapter one, verse 10, speaks of John being in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, which is Sunday, the day that Christ rose. So we do still celebrate a day of rest, only we do it now in explicit memory of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior. We do it not in a sort of Mount Sinai fashion, shaking and trembling under stringent laws and penalties, But as it is forgiven and welcomed in Jesus Christ, we keep the Lord's day, but with much joy and freedom. So the tone of it shifts in the New Testament. Next we're gonna talk about the pattern for resting, and that's in verse 11. The pattern for resting, in keeping this one day in seven holy, we imitate God. Look there at verse 11. It says, 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. What God is saying there is your work week should track with my creation week. And God is saying imitate me by resting, by resting for a day. And even if we didn't have the New Testament, just reading that, we would wonder what God is seeking to teach us. Because He's calling us to imitate Him, but I think we would suspect that this is not just mere mimicry. It's not just like playing Simon Says, so that whatever God does, we do. It is that. But we would suspect that this is a sort of imitation that's supposed to teach. It would be more like a tiny child following their parent in learning to pronounce a word. It's a kind of imitation that's instructive. Surely God is teaching us something about himself by his resting. But exactly what God is teaching us is not necessarily answered in the Old Testament. When we get to the New Testament, there is a passage that sheds a lot of light on what this rest means. The author of Hebrews, in Hebrews chapters three and four, compares the Christian life to the Exodus. And so those chapters compare us to those who have been saved by Christ. Now, in this life, we travel, as it were, through this wilderness of this life, heading for the promised land, which is our rest. This promised land that Israel went to then is a picture of the eternal rest we'll enjoy with Jesus forever. But Hebrews goes on to point to the fact that the essence of our rest is to share in God's rest. The author of Hebrews says that, points out that God, so after talking about the Exodus, that he then brings in the creation week and he says that God rested from his works on the seventh day. And then the author of Hebrews says that that seventh day, that rest that God engaged in, is like a kind of rest that follows on into the rest of forever. He says God's works were finished from the foundation of the world in Hebrews chapter four verse three. In other words, God's rest at creation shows that he is a God who finishes his works and it signals that in the big picture his works are gonna be finished for all time at last, including the work of redemption. When you trust in Jesus and you enter and you gain rest, What you are entering into is Christ's finished work, into God's finished work, and so you, in a sense, rest in his rest. The eternal rest that we look forward to, we could say, is our resting in a restful God, a God who is both at peace with himself and at peace with us through Jesus Christ. He is restful in himself, and then he welcomes us into relationship with him, and because of that, eternal rest opens up to us. So God rests from his works in that sense, but there's another sense in which God always continues to work. We can think about the seventh day of creation and how on that day, although God ceased from his creating work, he continued to uphold and govern everything. He was still at work in that sense. And in that sense, God has worked from that day to this. Our Lord Jesus Christ, when he was accused of breaking the Sabbath, said in John 5, verse 17, my father is working until now, and I am working. Which shows us that God is always on task. even on the day of rest. And here we get to a paradox that stretches our thinking, but which we need to step into this morning. As theologians both ancient and modern have said, God is always at rest and he's always working. He's always at rest because he never changes. He's the high and holy one who dwells in eternity. He's not subject to time and space and all this changes like we are. Though he's present with us, he's not bound by those things. God is always at peace with himself and he is always at one with his own purposes and plans which never vary and never swerve. God is therefore always at one with his own plans to rescue us in Jesus Christ and his plans are fixed and finished and immovable. He's at rest. and yet God is dynamic. He is dynamic in his relationships between God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is dynamic in how he works out his purposes in the created order, bringing his plan to completion in time. He is in that sense always at work, always at rest, being the unchanging God at peace with himself, always at work in governing all things. And I think this sheds light on the creation week In the first six days, God is showing himself to us in his work. He's showing us that he is dynamic and that he works out his purposes. But I think day seven opens the curtain a bit. on the unchanging God, the God who's the alpha and the omega, the God who knows the beginning from the end, the God who always works out his own fixed purposes, the God who, in our experience, brings to completion the good work that he has begun in Jesus Christ, and he brings that to completion because, fundamentally, he doesn't change. He is who he is, he keeps his promises, and he never varies from his word. So, Our unchanging God is someone we rest in, just as God brings Israel out of Egypt to the promised land, which he said he would do, and he makes it happen infallibly because he said so. He never changes. So we can say that God will bring us through this current life into his rest, and it's not in question, and that is not subject to doubt, because God always brings to pass his holy will. including his will to save us in Jesus and bring us into his rest. So the creation week shows us that God finishes what he starts. God finishes what he starts. And when God calls us to rest one day a week in commemoration of his rest, He's really calling us to join us in a celebration of a God who finishes His works. And ultimately, He's going to complete them in the day of Christ Jesus. That coming day is the Sabbath, capital S. The book of Hebrews says a Sabbath rest remains for the people of God. And we look forward to that coming day of completion. And God gives us a one in seven pattern for us to take a break every seventh day, be refreshed in his promises and his grace, and look forward to that great coming rest. So here we are, and we're on the hamster wheel, and we have this busy life of ours. There's much toil. There are many demands on us. Spiritually, in many ways, we feel hard-pressed. We're in the middle of a battle with sin. We do feel the ongoing struggle there, and we feel the burden of guilt. And it seems like that treadmill just keeps going around and around and around. We do, in the context of this toilsome life, experience stress, worry, guilt, And in that context, we can sometimes push ourselves very hard. And we can push those under us very hard as well. And it is possible that we are not resting in God, as he says, in a seven in one pattern, either physically or spiritually. And this is a great blessing of the Lord's Day. Because when the Lord's Day comes, God says, stop, stop, stop your work. Take a break, take a break. Rejoice in the fact that I am a God who finishes my work and I bring all promises to completion in the day of Jesus Christ. I finish what I start. For though I am always at work in you, I'm always at rest in myself. And my purposes are unchanging, my plan is set. And therefore that day of rest we're heading to is certain and firm. In the picture of Jesus' parable, it is like the banquet is already laid. The table is already set for us. That rest is being prepared by Jesus Christ for us to come and join Him and sit down and to enjoy. And when the Lord's Day hits every week, God is calling us to breathe deep, relax, rejoice in His rest and in the coming promised land. So observing the Lord's Day is a command. It's also an invitation. It's also a celebration. It's an invitation to gather into the Lord Jesus Christ amid our perpetually unfinished lives, to rejoice in a God who always completes what he starts. In principle already, as Ephesians says, we are seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ, for his purposes toward us are set. And on the Lord's day, we get this in our view, and we rest, and we rejoice. Let me pray for us. Dear Father in heaven, we thank you that you are a God who always finishes your works. And we see this in the creation week. And in the bigger picture, we see how you bring us all into the rest of your favor through the grace of Jesus Christ. Help us then, Father, we pray, to take a break from our toil on the Lord's Day, and help us as we turn to you and rejoice in you, to also on that special and holy day, to gain a renewed sense of your pardon granted us in Jesus Christ and your acceptance of us through him. We ask it in his name, amen.