The Lord’s Day: A Gift Older Than the Law
FROM THE STUDY
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27)
Dear friends,
Hear that verse the way the Lord said it. Not as a chain laid across your neck, but a gift set into your hand. We are a tired people, aren’t we? In America, we have more ways to rest than any who came before us, and less rest than most who’ve gone before us, and underneath it all runs an inkling of guilt that we have not done enough. Into a life like that, God speaks a word that sounds almost too good to hear.
Go back to the garden. Before there was a tablet of stone, before there was a single commandment to break, before sin had even entered the world, there was a special day. God finished His work and rested, and blessed the seventh day and made it holy (Genesis 2:2–3), not because God was weary, but, I believe, to lay down a pattern, the way my father shortened his stride so I could walk beside him when I was a child. When the commandment came at Mt. Sinai, it came to guard the day, not to announce its creation, and folded inside it was a mercy a hurried world like ours just cannot see: a whole day on which the servant rested as the master rested and the very animals were let off the yoke. It is one of the kindest laws ever written. The world ignores it, and many in the church treat it as just another day.
We keep it now on the first day, and gladly. Our confession says the day was the seventh from the beginning of the world until the resurrection of Christ, and from the resurrection was changed to the first day, the Lord’s Day, to continue as the Christian Sabbath. The reason is the empty tomb. The old rest looked back on a finished creation; the new looks back on a finished redemption. We don’t crawl toward a rest at the worn-out end of the week. We begin with the resurrection and carry the gift into the six days that are coming.. At least that’s the plan. And here is the word that turns duty into joy: if you call the Sabbath a delight … then you shall take delight in the Lord (Isaiah 58:13–14). A delight. Is Sunday an actual delight to you? Not a day to be endured with one eye on the clock, counting down to the hour when the normal, ordinary life resumes. God is not asking you to suffer through six-sevenths of your days and then white-knuckle the seventh. He is handing you a day to lift your eyes off of self, your goals, jobs, of your own striving after whatever and rest everything on Him.
Listen, brethren, the day was always pointing past itself. There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9). Every quiet first day rehearses a rest that does not end, the rest of those who have stopped trying to save themselves and leaned their whole weight on the One who finished the work in their place. One day in seven, the Sabbath preaches the gospel to you: cease from your labors. It is finished. Come and rest.
FROM THE SHELF
If the day has become a ‘duty’ thing in your house, more rule than gift, let Walter Chantry give you a refreshing perspective. His little book, Call the Sabbath a Delight (Banner of Truth) runs under a hundred pages, and he wrote it as a Reformed Baptist pastor who had watched the Lord’s Day slip out of his own people’s hands. He is plain, warm, and unembarrassed about the fourth commandment, yet his whole burden is the one word Isaiah gave us. You can read it in a single afternoon, and on a Sunday at that.
A WORD FROM JOEL
So this first day, do not meet it as one more obligation in an already crowded life. Cease: let the unanswered message wait, lay down the striving that drives the other six days, and trust that the world will keep turning without your hand on it, because it will. Gather together: the Lord’s Day is not chiefly a day off but a day with the people of God, under the Word, at the Table, singing the same songs together. And delight: lift your eyes off the to-do list of your own striving and rest everything on Him. Lay the week down. Call it a delight. And let the God who rested teach your restless heart, once again, how to rest.
Yours in Christ,
Joel
