1 - This is Renew
April 25, 2021
Transcript
Hi, this is Wilson Pastor of Renew Church OC. A Church for imperfect people only. Thanks for joining our podcast. Over the pandemic. A lot of our lives have been reoriented whether it's our work, school friendships, or church. We've become comfortable with the new normal because of COVID. Many of us are asking what church is and how important is it really? Can I be a strong Christian without the church or can I go to church and PJs off a screen for the rest of my life? I hope this series helps you move away from cultural norms and beliefs about the church and brings us back into God's word and heart for the local church. Enjoyed the sermon.
Welcome back renewed church. I hope that we had some time to lament about going back to in-person as well as think about, you know, one day being able to hug each other, shake hands and look at people in the eyes instead of at boxes. So I'm really excited to go back in person. But like I said, I think over the course of this last year, there's just been a lot of questions for whether the church is vital to the health of a Christian and whether it's become just a construct, a part of a religious system that we're all abiding by with no real meaning or depth.
But when I look at scripture, I see some really compelling reasons for going to church. Although I do think that the phrase going to church is a little misleading intentionally because the bible in the core of what going to church means is really sabbath-ing. It’s slowing down and dedicating a day to God and going to church or for the jew, going to synagogue is just one part of what it meant to sabbath. But this concept of the sabbath is rich and deep. There's God's command and rhythm of sabbath goes all the way back to creation as he formed the days that we live in, one of those days is the Sabbath day. He spent six days creating and on the seventh he rested and then he commands us to do the same. Moses talks about this as he's inaugurating the nation of Israel in Exodus and Deuteronomy. The fourth commandment is the sabbath and we'll spend a lot of time there. But also we see the sabbath as a part of the early Church and how they organize their life and their week in order to center it around God and community.
So in some of the most fundamental pillars of the Christian faith, from creation to Judaism to the early Christian church going to church and sabbath was a part of our entire history, Christianity, Judaism, and the history of the human race. So it's really hard to throw out a phrase and think that that would hold water under the weight of these three most fundamental pillars of what it means to be Christian and a healthy Christian and to follow God. Right? So the phrases of ‘I don't need to go to church to be a Christian or a good Christian’, ‘I don't need to be a church to be spiritual.’ Okay, those sound great as a society, we've accepted it, but when you really put it next to the weight of scripture, it just kind of folds in under itself.
We're going to spend most of our time in Exodus Chapter 20:1-8. And this is when Moses lays out the 10 commandments that God had given him a Mount Sinai to the people. The first four commandments are wrapped around our relationship with God. You shouldn't have any other God before me. You don't carve images of other gods or bow down to them. You don't take your Lord the Lord's name in vain. And then the 4th one is to remember the sabbath and after these four is our relationship with the, with one another, honoring your father and mother, familiar relationships and then societal relationships, not committing adultery, not stealing, not committing murder and so on.
And so when you look at the first four commandments and it's wrapping around and informing how we do relationship with the Lord. Many theologians have said that the fourth commandment of keeping the sabbath, remembering the sabbath is the ‘how to’ when it comes to applying the first three commandments, Meaning that the 4th commandments of keeping the sabbath are the instruction in the way that we keep worshiping God with our hearts, minds, and souls not having any other God before him, and not taking the Lord's name in vain. When we keep the fourth, We keep the first three when we do it correctly.
So here's the fourth commandment in Exodus. Chapter 20:8-11. Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it Holy. Six days, you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is the sabbath to the Lord, Your God on it. You shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter nor your male or female servant, nor your animal, nor any foreigner residing in your town. For in six days, God made the heavens, and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. But he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath Day and made it holy.
First. We're going to look at verse 11-a if you will, as Moses refers back to creation, to set a foundation for the sabbath Day and when you make arguments that tie back into creation before the fall, Genesis 1 & 2, whether that's about marriage, about our relationship with the Lord, about gender or about the sabbath, you're making one of the most powerful arguments for theology because the first two chapters of the bible is the way the world was supposed to be, the way God had intended and designed the world prior to sin entering it. It's the perfect version of the world, the world at its apex. And so when things exist prior to the fall, it means they were designed to exist. It wasn't tainted by sin. And so when we see God create the world, we see this rhythm of rest and work. And it just, it says that rest and work are supposed to be a part of our human experience. It's part of the perfect design and it reflects who God is, that God is a god of work, and that God is a god of rest. And when we work well, we are imitating God, but we can also imitate God in our rest.
So us working all the way through the week actually takes away from us emulating the image of God. He has created a day for us to rest. In our rest, we remember our purpose in our rest. We remember why we work and who we are working for and who is really the lord of our work, but also in our rest we remember who we are, that we are not our work, right? That we are sons and daughters of God. And our value is not what we produce. This was especially potent as God is giving this command to the Israelites because they were enslaved by the Egyptians for 400 years. Deuteronomy 5:15 reminds the Israelites of this. The beginning of Deuteronomy is a rehashing of the 10 Commandments, but there's an added phrase here for the sabbath, it says, And remember that you are a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and the arm outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.
So God ties in Israel's history of slavery with the sabbath. Think about what slavery does to you and to your children and your family, how it defines you. When someone is a slave and a part of the history of slavery, you are defined by your work. A slave is a cog in the machine. A slave's value is about what they can produce and will produce. They are what they do. And so as God is delivering Israel from slavery by gifting them the sabbath. he's saying on this day, you're going to remember that you are not what you produce. Your value is not in your work, that your value is that you are my people and I am your God. Your value is that you are my son and daughter. I'm taking you from slavery to become sons, to become daughters. You know when we break the sabbath and just work from one part of the week, all the way through the next, we lose our son-ship in our daughter-ship and we're kind of back into a slavery mentality.
I've met so many people and Christian and non-Christian who are defined by what they do, who are really slaves to their work, all of who they are, all of their value, all of their purpose comes out of their work. The sabbath day is when we rest in order to commune with the Lord and to remember who we are and our purpose in him. That is really why God rests as well when he creates the heavens and earth, all living things in the six days. He rests not because he's talking too much and his mouth is dry, not because he lost his voice and he's tired. No, he rests in order to step away from work in order to enjoy it and commune with it instead of laboring. That's what we are to do on our seventh day. We're supposed to step away from our work, to enjoy it with the Lord, and to enjoy him, to remind ourselves of who we are.
So God puts up some qualifications of what it means to remember the sabbath day. He says, in six days you will labor. But on the seventh you will um, you will not labor, you will not work. None of the people you have Dominion over or that you're stewarding will work either. So Exodus Chapter 20:11 says, therefore, God blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. Okay. And so on the next slide, we see what the word holy means. It means to set it apart, it means to dedicate a day for the Lord. God has dedicated the sabbath day for himself and we're basically acknowledging and surrendering to that dedication. Were saying that this whole day is for God and how we separate out something is by creating boundaries around it, right? We're creating the sacred space, the sacred time so that it’s uninvaded and dedicated and focused on God.
So a part of that is putting down work as he calls um the jews to put down their work, I believe he's calling us as well to keep the sabbath day and to put down work in school. Have you thought about your Sunday as not just a block of time for Sunday service? Right, Because I think we've just kind of watered down the sabbath day to an hour and a half, 10:30 to 12:00, going to Renew parking doing service and leaving. So really the sabbath has really become a church service instead of creating a whole day, in which we're gifting to the Lord and in which we're separating out for him and Sunday service is just a part of how we're making the sabbath Holy, how we're separating out the 24 hours. So again, I think some of the practical ways we can keep the sabbath is by putting down work, by not checking our stocks, by putting down our schoolwork, and saying God, we're going to gift and give this day to you.
Secondly, consider fasting or capping screen time, right? Consider taking away not only the things that qualify as work but things that can distract us from putting our mind and our eyes on him, like binging Netflix or continuing to scroll through Instagram. Consider fasting or capping screen time on your sabbath.
Thirdly considers embracing slowness because God is in the slowness, Consider resting by slowing down and doing things that help you slow down. I've been really into uh investing and trading stocks over 2020. I mean we're all locked up and like millions of people alongside me have realized that stocks only go up. I'm just kidding. It's a bad quote. What I realized is man, when I opened my phone and go on um Ameritrade or trade zero or Robin Hood, one of those platforms that I'm investing in, immediately, it's like a shot of adrenaline and endorphins and dopamine is basically getting released in my brain every time I open up the app, right, every time I see the red or the green or one of my day trades. I just get a shot of adrenaline and we get those shots when we're on social media, we get those shots when we see how many people like our Instagram or um seeing someone else's Instagram. We get those shots when we're um, pulling up a video off of Youtube or Facebook or there's a Netflix drop of the next, you know, Winter Soldier, right. I think Sunday is about embracing slowness, take an inventory of our life of what speeds us up. Like those things and other things that slow us down where we can find rest where we can listen, where we can quiet our souls for me, yoga Quiets my soul, you know, volleyball to an extent, actually quiet my soul sitting down with Levi and just playing with him and being immersed into his world or Liam's world quiets my soul. Doing laundry and not having anything on screens and just kind of allowing my thoughts to go where they may quiet my soul. I think Sunday the sabbath is a day where we embrace the slowness in order to hear from God in order to commune with him and to be with his people. So he calls us to make it holy by putting up boundaries to create space and slowing down for him.
But secondly, he says, it's a blessed day, right? So Holy means being set apart and blessing means that God wants to give gifts to his people. He wants to gift us things on his sabbath. He wants to release blessings into our life. I think the first blessing he wants to release is communion with him. God's everywhere, we are, right, He's in our work, He's in our play, but the sabbath day is a special day in which we give complete attention to him individually. We are attentive to Him in our families and were attentive to Him in our larger spiritual community, our church home. And as we do that, He gives us His presence. He allows us to see His face. He speaks to us through worship, through the sermon, through our slowness.
The second gift is that he gives us with his provision as we let go of work or let go of school on and give a full day where that's not a part of our lives. We remember to let go of the death grip of our career, of our money, of us having to provide and strive in life in order to make it. On this day where we let go of school and work, we're saying that we trust God with it and he's ultimately our provider. We don't have to work our fingers to the bone in order to provide for us, but that we can trust the Lord for provisions. So the 7th day in letting go of work is a very practical and concrete application of what it means to trust God and to know that He is the one who is providing for us. He wants to bless us by giving us rest by allowing us to not be tired, to rejuvenate our soul, and then he wants to bless us by giving us mini sabbath's in our work, that this one big day of the sabbath of 24 hours is to help teach us how to have mini sabbath throughout the week so that we're not working in order to rest, but we work out of our rest. Kristin Whitmore quoted someone else in giving me that phrase right? We're working out of our rest, that out of our rests comes work that's in communion with God, out of our rest comes work, in which we're trusting him to provide for us. And we're working with that type of peace. Out of our rest comes working from a place of rest and relaxation instead of anxiety and stress. And we learn how to do that by keeping the sabbath.
I think in comparison again to how we've learned to go to church and sabbath, which is oftentimes like a little slot in the morning schedule of Sundays, and then the rest of Sunday is really Saturday, right? The Jewish people really engrossed themselves in the sabbath and I wanted to look at their schedule so that it gives us a contrast of often what ours can look like. So the Jewish sabbath is from Friday night to Saturday night, and they really saw a day's the day starting from the night before. So they started the day from sundown and how they conceived it. So their sabbath is Friday night to Saturday night and then Sunday and then the Christians are the Protestants moved their gathering to Sunday's because that's when Jesus resurrected, but all of the Jewish community had done gatherings on Saturdays. Okay so Friday night they would intro their sabbath, they will begin their sabbath by a call to worship. Then they would read close to 20 blessings of prayer and worship. And after that, there would be a reading of scripture in the Tora, which is the first five books of the bible and they would divide it into a little over 50 weeks so that you're reading through the Tora every year. Then they would have a formal dinner and this dinner was to invite God into as if he was a guest in their home, right into their sabbath. So everyone would dress up, The women would wear perfume, they were prepared the best food, they would clean the house in the day hours of Friday so that they would welcome God into their home that's clean, that smells good with the best food. And then after dinner, there was this ritual of candles where a woman would be honored by lighting candles and saying a blessing while covering, covering their eyes, and waving their hand in the air to bless the family and again this invitation of sabbath into their home. After that, the family would hang out and enjoy each other's company and fellowship. So it was this family coming together the night before to put their eyes on God during the sabbath and to be with one another and then Saturday morning to night they would be in community, There was a three-hour morning service where they would do much of Friday's liturgy, alongside teaching, reading of psalms, they would have lunch together, then they would do an afternoon service dinner together and then they would have a night service at the night service when the third star in the sky appeared, they would close off their sabbath. They would have a beginning and an end to the sabbath to build boundaries around it. And so on Saturday night, they would close off the sabbath by doing a service, acknowledging the end of the sabbath and the sabbath was the day that the Jews look forward to the most. It was, they entered it with joy, they loved it. It was, it was the day that they anticipated throughout the week, and again it was a full day.
The early church also observed the sabbath and they had many rhythms of community in how they lived out their Christian faith. It said they devoted themselves to Apostle teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. So the same pillars of the Jewish community are adopted by the Christian community, there is the reading of scripture and teaching. There's a prayer and worship in verse 27 the breaking of bread and eating together and then Jesus adds upon that communion. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts, especially in the early church, they would meet more than once a week. The sabbath was their biggest day of being together.
So how can we observe the sabbath when it comes to the application? You know, is the sabbath day a day that God has made holy in your life and you said God this day is yours, it is yours. It's not for work, it is to enjoy to rest and to be with you, to be with family, with you, to be in community with you. Do you see a full day in your week that you've given to the Lord so that he could bless you? How can you decide what boundaries can you put up to slow down to move away from work so that you could be with God and community? I want to challenge you if you're a family, what do 24 hours look like in communing with the Lord personally and in your family life? How can you be a part of our church community where it’s like, in and out, let's do service and peace out, but be a part of the life of the community, whether that's serving on the host team, worship AV, Children or whether that's just participating in the life of the church, in the community where you care about people and they care about you, you know people and they know you. We're hoping that our Sunday service wouldn't just be, you know about one person teaching but about a community coming together and becoming family. That's why I love our times together in the opening question and we did that when we were in person, we're going to continue to do that in person. I love our times of communion of worship, of prayer for each other after the sermon, of eating lunch together, of stacking chairs, of playing basketball, or going to each other's homes and enjoying fellowship. I loved the way we did community because, for most of us, the church wasn't a time slot on Sundays, it was being with each other and being with the Lord and allowing time to expand into the rest of the day. I hope that as we move back into Sunday service, that we would have that same experience of loving of just loving to be together, to be with God, that we would separate out a whole day, to put our eyes on Jesus.
Lastly, I want to talk about mini sabbaths, we sabbath in one day in order for that sabbath to be brought into the rest of our week. For me, I have kind of these daily habits in which I carve out these sacred spaces to be with the Lord and to put my eyes on him. So Sunday allows me to do that for the rest of the week and it starts with Levi, he wakes up in the morning with Liam and they basically asked for milk. They're crying, they're they long for it, you know, there's tears in their eyes because they love milk so much and it takes me a while to roll out of bad to pour them out to heat it, but the whole time like they're just shaking because they want milk so much and as I'm preparing milk for them and as they're drinking milk, I sing this gregorian Latin monastic chant that I wrote and it goes, “may I love the Lord as Levi loves his milk, may I need the Lord as Levi needs his milk. would I love the Lord as Levi loves his milk” and I just sing that for straight seven minutes of making milk and watching Levi drink it. Then I get Liam ready for school. I drive them to daycare about 8:-00 am. And then around 8:30 I do yoga and as I do yoga I create another mini sabbath and it's so good for my health. I'm tight everywhere, especially my knees. But as I'm in child's pose, I imagined bounded before the Lord as I'm in mountain pose, I imagine, I think about what I'm grateful for God reaching out towards him. You know, as I do my warrior poses, I think about what it means to serve God right? I'm just in prayer and meditation through my yoga practice at 9 a.m. Oftentimes I'm with our church community doing devotionals, being quiet before the Lord, but communing with my brothers and sisters as we, as we talk about God, as we reflect on our lives, as we think through scripture as we sit quietly before God. That's that takes us about 30 minutes. It's just this rich mini sabbath in my life. Sometimes I don't make devotionals so I do it on my own. Then from about 9:30 to 7:30, I don't have any rhythms except that I threw my devotional and time just kind of sitting silently before the Lord. I am reminded to invite God to the rest of my day. And so my mini sabbaths becomes right before I send an email or meet up with someone. I just invite the Lord to give me wisdom to do admin with me because I usually bored out of my mind to speak to the person who is in front of me and to be attentive to their soul. Just inviting God into my work, into the mundane.
Then to my play, I'm still playing volleyball. I know that I'll probably need knee replacements earlier because of this. But you know what? I'm serving the ball, my knees are feeling healthy. Oftentimes I would just be like, God, thank you so much that today I get to play volleyball and as I'm walking home or as I'm going home on my God, please restore the cartilage in my knee and sorry for playing volleyball. Right? So I just bring God into my work into my play, into the mundane as mini moments of the sabbath. Then finally after dinner, um, I washed the dishes, Nina washes the boys, we come together at 7:30. We have family worship where, uh, we played to Youtube videos of Children's songs and we sing to them. We love power shuffle the most right now. They have a great baseline fun body fun motions and I just love watching Liam worship the Lord. I love worshipping next to him in this really child-like way I hated Children's worship songs throughout my whole life. They were so silly and like you know it just made me feel silly but when I watch Liam sing about how God has a plan for his life or how God wants to empower him. It just brings me so much joy in life and I am truly worshipping alongside him. Then we read a bible story At about 8:00 we put our boys down and I put down, Levi. Nina puts down Liam as I'm rocking with Levi. I sing very loudly because he lives that's like and like it just goes right through the wall. So sometimes Liam sings it with me and then I pray over Levi and my family as I put him down.
Then 11 p.m. That's the one discipline I'm trying to start. So it's very new to me as I go to sleep, I basically just surrendered a day to the Lord. Um the things that have gone, well I thank him for the things that I'm stressed about the questions that I have. I just say God I give these to you to carry as I sleep. I don't need to carry them until the next day.
So my Sunday really allows me to, it informs and centers the rest of my week. That's what the sabbath is for. It's not to isolate the rest of your week, but it's to inform and center the rest of your week. I just want to leave you with this passage from Hebrews 10:24. It says, “do not give up meeting together as some of you are in the habitants of doing, but encourage one another all the more as you see the day approaching.”
I love this passage. If I were, to sum up, everything I everything I've said in 2020 and what my hopes are as we re-gather, I would say, don't give up meeting together as some of us are in the habit of doing right. It's so easy to give up Sundays, it's so easy to do lazy church. It's so easy to want to just kind of go online for the rest of our lives and count it as church. But God has built out the sabbath to be the sacred day or we do nothing else except put our eyes on him, with each other, with the church, with our family, and to allow him to bless us in that day. So don't give up on that. Don't give up on that. Make it a priority, surrender your day to the Lord and allow it to be holy and blessed
God, We just thank you so much for today. It is our sabbath and it is a special day. You created it into the rhythm of humanity, you created it and put it into law for the jews and you gave it life in Jesus and for us the church, I pray Lord that we wouldn't be slaves and machines. We wouldn't find our whole purpose and value in our work. But that Sunday's would be a breath of fresh air would be us lifting our eyes up and as we see you, we remember who we are, remember our value and we remember our purpose in light of you. Thank you so much for this beautiful community. I'm so excited to see them. I'm so excited to spend a day with them and with you in Jesus’ name. Amen.