All my life I thought keeping the Lord’s Day holy meant to go to church.  As I read this commandment now, I realize that it is about rest also.  Leviticus 23:3 discusses the Sabbath and it states, “There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, a day of sacred assembly.  You are not to do any work; wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord.”  So when we combine these two, we see that the Sabbath is a day of rest as commanded by God and a day to worship (assembly) Him.

 

Hebrews 4:9-10 states, “There remains, then a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.” When we do this we are entering God’s rest.  We are going to a place he created for us, a resting place for us to rest from our labor so that we may rejuvenate ourselves and recover from our week.  God knows life is tough down here and he is helping us out.  He knows we need a day off from life and he is commanding us to take that day off and rest!

 

“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested” we are told in Genesis 2.2.  I do not think that God needed a rest even though in the six days prior to that he had created the universe and everything in it.  I think he took the day of rest because he knew that we humans need a day of rest.  Since we are created in the image of God, he wanted to show us that it was good for him to take a day of rest.  He took a day of rest, and set an example for us to follow, so we should take a day to rest as well.  Then God blessed that day of rest and made it holy, and that is why we should also keep it holy.

 

In Exodus 31 (1b) God was talking with Moses about the Sabbath and told him to tell the Israelites, “You must observe my Sabbaths.”  He goes on to say in Exodus 31:15, “For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord.  Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day must be put to death.”  As you can see this is not an optional day off, this is a mandatory day of rest.

 

Years ago I came to the conclusion the human body needs three things.

 

1.  It needs to be fed properly with healthy food. 

 

2.  It needs exercise.  Your body is full of muscles, bones, tendons, nerves, and all kinds of things and they all want to go to the gym.  Muscles are happy when they are being worked.  Why do you think you feel good after a work out?  Your body is feeling good.

 

3.  It needs rest.  I remember when I was a senior in high school our PE coach stood up and said, “I would like to give you boys one word of advice.  After 30 seconds of, “oh man here it comes,” we quieted down to listen to his words of wisdom.  He surprised me when he told us we should get eight hours of sleep a night.  He told us your body needs to rest because when it rests, it repairs itself and gets ready for the next day.  I think we were all surprised with this simple message.  I know I was, so I never forgot it.  I do get eight hours of sleep a night and I have been healthy almost all of my life. 

 

So rest is important and just like we need our night’s sleep to prepare our body for tomorrow, we need a day of rest to prepare for the next week.  This is a day God has given you to rest and relax and we should take his advice and take the day off.

 

I came home one day about noon and the kitchen was full of dirty dishes from the big dinner my wife had cooked the night before.  I saw the dirty dishes and saw her in the kitchen doing them and told her I meant to do the dishes last night, but got tired, watched TV and went to bed.  With that I put down my stuff and started to rinse the dishes and put them in the washer.  I was sincere in the fact I meant to do them.  Since my wife cooked us a nice dinner, I was more than happy to do the dishes.  I enjoyed her great cooking the night before and was glad to clean up.  Really, there is no talent in doing the dishes, but there is in cooking and my sons and I appreciate that talent and would like to see it continue to grow in my wife.

 

Now imagine if you were in the same situation and your wife’s response to your offer to clean the dishes was, “that’s ok honey, your Dan Marino guy is playing, why don’t you watch the game and I will do them?”  You have to wonder why she let me off the hook from doing the dishes.

 

I just got home from church.  I went to the first service and then stayed afterwards to help teach the second service sixth grade Sunday school class.  She knows that I have made God the focal point of my life and am trying to live my life in a way that is pleasing to the Lord.  I read his word, I try to live by his word (and fail often), and in a very small way I am delivering his word (to the sixth graders).  I am trying to be a better person, the person God told us we should be and since my wife sees that desire in me she respects and encourages me to follow the word of God (which includes the fourth commandment).

 

Jesus taught on the Sabbath so it only follows that we should go to church on the Sabbath as well to learn the word of God.  Luke 4:14 states, “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside.  He taught in their synagogues and everyone praised him.  He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.  And he stood up to read.  The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.  Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:” We can see from this that Jesus taught on the Sabbath and we should go to church on the Sabbath and hear the word of God and rest our bodies by not doing any work. 

 

God knows we need to keep our eyes on him.  The first commandment is to recognize God as the only god.  The second is to not make false idols to replace him.  The third is to respect his name, and fourth we need a day to worship him and renew our bond with him.  This way everything falls into place, so that we keep our eyes on God.  This is all part of his plan so that we put him first in our lives so that we will not stray from him. 

 

A lot of us own Bibles, but how many of us read them?  I did not start to read the Bible until I was 44 years old.  If you do not read the Bible, how will you learn the word of God?  The easiest way is to go to church and learn about God there.  If you are a parent and you are not teaching your children about God (which I did not do for a while) the best way for them to learn is for you to go to church and have your children go to Sunday school at the same time.

 

I go to my home church, Voyagers (5), on Sundays, but I also go to a different church on Saturday nights, Mariners (6).  It is great!  I get to double dip and hear the word of God twice in one week and I don’t have to do a thing; just sit there and listen.  So if you are new to seeking out the Lord, then just try going to church.  As the old Greyhound Bus commercial used to say, “take the bus and leave the driving to us.”  So go to church and let the pastor do all the work.  Even if you are seeking God in your normal course of the day, by reading the Bible or studying God’s word you still need to go to church, you need to be part of that assembly.  I am always amazed how the pastors can take three or four paragraphs from the Bible and turn it into a 45 minute message.  Those pastors up there are amazing how they pull so much out of the Bible and bring the word to us. 

 

When I first started going to church they had an interim pastor by the name of Wayne Anderson (7).  Within the first few weeks I started going to church he said something that really stuck; he said, “Come as you are.  Don’t feel you have to get your act together or clean up your life, before you can come to church.  Come as you are and let God take care of all that for you.”  He was just saying come to church and hear the word of God and let God move in your life.

 

That offer sounded good to me, so I took him up on it.  He was telling us you didn’t have to do anything but show up and God will take care of the rest.  If you are contemplating coming to church don’t worry about it, just show up, God is waiting for you with open arms, waiting to give you a hug and welcome you into his life.  If you are still a bit uncomfortable you can sit in the back like I do.  I have been going to Voyagers for over 17 years now and I still sit in the seat in the back closest to the exit.  Hey, it works for me.

Don’t worry you will not be the only person in church who sins.  If you want to sit in the sinner’s section, just sit anywhere.  We are all sinners and God knows that and he wants us to come to worship him.  He wants to be part of our lives and he wants us to make him part of our life, so come to church and learn his word.  Wayne Anderson did not put any qualifiers on coming to church and I don’t think God does either.  I think he just wants us to show up.

 

Last week our pastor, Gary Stubblefield (5) was talking about the importance of coming to church every week.  He told us we need to come to church to refocus our lives on God.  We need to recharge ourselves with the word of God and start out the new week refreshed with God’s spirit.  He is right -- going to church is a rest for our soul and we need it.  If our mission in life is to spend eternity with God, then we need to keep in touch with him.  We need to stay focused on him and refreshed in his word.

 

Going to church has been a double blessing for me.  First I get to hear the word from professionals, men who have devoted their lives to bringing the word of God to the people.  Second, I get to help teach Sunday school with Bruce.  Teaching Sunday school has turned out to be one of the greatest blessings I have received.  I think I get more out of it than the sixth graders I help teach on Sundays.

 

When Joshua took over from Moses God came to him in a dream.  In Joshua 1:8 (1a) God told him, “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.  Then you will be prosperous and successful.”  When I read this I thought -- wow, if Joshua, a prophet of God needs to read his word morning and night, then how much more do I need to read the word of God morning and night.  Helping teach Sunday school helps me do this.

 

I try to pray and read my Bible every morning.  I also need to prepare for Sunday school, so at night I prepare for next Sunday.  There are two parts to preparing for Sunday school.  First we have to follow the book, which the church gives us and second, there are Bible verses used in the book, which I feel I need to know as well, in order to do a good job.  So as you can see, I am trying to read God’s word both morning and night.  I will admit, there are times I do not do this twice a day, but I try to.

 

Bruce and I alternate each week to see who teaches the lesson and who the helper is.  On the days I teach I prepare during the week by reading the material over and over each night and on Saturday morning I sit down at my dining room table and put the pen to the paper and prepare my lesson.  Before I start I say a pray to God.  I ask him to come down and bless me.  I ask him to fill me with his Holy Spirit, and bestow his grace upon me because these are his children and not mine and this is his word and not mine and I have come to teach his word to his children.

 

So what do you think happens in heaven when God hears this prayer?  Do you think he looks over at Jesus and says, “I’m to busy for him right now get someone else to go.”  Or do you think God comes down and fills me with his Holy Spirit, pours his blessings on me and sits with me until I am done?

 

You know how you feel after you take the sacraments (the body and blood of Christ) at church?  You get this great feeling of comfort and peace and excitement all at once.  That is how I feel right after saying this prayer.  I am double dipping once again and feeling great! I am happy, I am creative and I am writing like a mad man preparing for tomorrow’s lesson.  Yes, going to church has been a true blessing for me.

 

I took a soccer clinic once and the teacher told us the best way to learn something is to teach it.  Because you have to learn it, before you can teach it.  So for the next week he taught us how to play soccer so we could go out and teach it to our eight and nine year olds.  I have learned so much by helping teach Sunday school and I am so grateful for the opportunity Voyagers Bible Church has given me to do so.   

 

We should go to church on Sunday and worship God, but what if we can’t?  I remember when I was 18 years old one of the saddest things I ever heard came from my Grandmother.  She was a Polish immigrant, who came over to America in the early 1900s, right before Germany invaded Poland in WW I.  She spoke very little English so she lived in a Polish community, Lyndhurst, NJ.  Since her town was mostly Polish people they had a Polish speaking Catholic Church, so she always went to this one church so she could understand what they were saying. 

 

Well, she had a stroke and could no longer get out and go to church.  She had to stay home on Sundays.  I was living with friends in a town about 20 miles away and since I did not go to church then, I would drive up to see her every three weeks and visit with her and the rest of my mother’s family.  I would always go to see my Grandmother first, and visit with her since she was alone (everyone else was at church).  She started to cry one time and told me she was afraid God was mad at her.  I asked her why she thought God would be mad with her, and she told me that since she was not going to church (not keeping the Sabbath) that she would go to hell. 

 

I told her that God was not angry with her.  That the only reason she was not in church was because she could not be there, and God knew that.  She said her rosary beads (a Catholic practice) on Sundays instead, but did not think that was enough.  She was keeping the Sabbath holy as well as anyone could, because the only thing on her mind that day was to worship God.  Even at 18 I knew that what is most important to God is what is in your heart.  It is not the outward actions that impress God, but what you are feeling inside towards him that he sees.

 

Keeping the Sabbath has been a great thing for me.  I get my day of rest, and my wife makes sure of that.  There are no honey-dos on Sunday and she always tells me to just rest, just do nothing.  I get to go to church and listen to the pastor and rest my soul.  I get to recharge myself spiritually and refocus on the prize, eternity with God in heaven.  I get to help teach Sunday school and feel God’s Holy Spirit as he helps me teach his word to his children.  I get all this on Sundays as a gift from God who commanded me to take it and enjoy it.

 

You know the old saying, “you have to take the good with the bad.”  Well, when it comes to the Sabbath we get to take the good with the good.  God commands you to keep his day holy and take a day of rest.  Take the day off, rest and let the Lord bestow his grace upon you, bring his peace into your life and let him put his arms around you and protect and comfort you from the worries of this world.  The Sabbath day is his and he wants to share it with you, so let him.