Proper Attitudes

Opening Prayer and Series Context

0:00 Good morning. Let's begin our day by going to our Heavenly Father in prayer. Let's pray.

0:16 Our Father, as we pause now at the beginning of this Lord's Day, we would come to you as those who are in great need of your mercy and of your grace. We confess that even at the beginning of such a blessed day, such a sacred day, that we feel our disinclination of soul and our weakness and our infirmities. And when we would do good, evil is present with us. And so we ask, O God, that you would have mercy upon us for Christ's sake.

0:50 And that you would give us grace to stir up our hearts and our minds, to fix our attention upon the things of Christ. And eternity, we ask that you would give us understanding as we study your holy word together. We desire to fear your name and we desire to honor you and to glorify you in every area of our lives, in the way we think and understand your word and in the way we live and seek to obey your word, both in our attitudes and in our actions. And so for your glory's sake and your name's sake, we pray that you would indeed help us.

1:29 And draw. We do not come because of our righteousness. We know that our very best righteousness is filthy rags, but we come through the mediator that you have given to us, even your son, whose righteousness is perfect. And you have promised that when we come in his name that you receive us.

1:49 And so this is our hope. This is our trust and our salvation. Grant that we would be strong in faith as we draw near to you today. Again, in Christ's name.

1:59 In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Okay. Here we are again today.

Review of Sabbath Doctrine and Introduction to Observance

2:26 Back to our study. That's kind of been a little bit lopsided on point number seven, but as far as time that we've spent on it. But we're still in section seven, the church's ethics, commitment to the abiding authority of the moral law. And we should have, I think, today and two more.

2:45 And then we'll finally be ready to get to the last one. But this is an outline of everything. This is something that we've covered with reference to the Sabbath. You remember after addressing the subject of the abiding authority of the moral law, the Ten Commandments in general, we then spent time on the Sabbath.

3:04 The microphone's too loud, isn't it? Could you please turn it down a little bit? Thank you, brother.

3:13 So I'm not going to go over all of this again. It's there. There's the outline. This is what we covered over about a six-week period.

3:21 The biblical basis for the continuance of the Sabbath, the fourth commandment, the change of the Sabbath, the possibility of the new Sabbath. And we dealt with the whole issue of the difference between positive law and natural law or moral law. The coming of the new Sabbath, some of the indications to us that under the new covenant, the day that's recognized by the church as the special day unto the Lord, set aside unto the Lord as the Lord's day, the first day of the week. And then those passages that deal with the passing of the old Sabbath.

3:56 And now today we begin to take up the subject of the proper and balanced observance of the new covenant Sabbath. This is what everybody's been waiting on me to get to, right?

4:11 Now, the question we now face is what does the fourth commandment require of us? How are we to observe the Lord's day to remember the new covenant Sabbath to keep it holy? Well, before we dive into that, I thought we were going to dive into that right now. Now, before we dive into that, I want to set before you some important introductory considerations.

4:31 You say, well, Pastor, you keep giving introductory considerations. When are we going to get to the heart? Well, I think these are important. We have to think through all of the foundations of the subjects we're dealing with, if they're going to be really firmly rooted in our minds and our hearts, and all the cautions that we need to keep in mind as we begin to look at this subject.

Avoiding the Extreme of Legalism

4:53 So, some important facts and cautions that we need to keep in mind. If we're going to properly approach this subject. And the first one is we must be careful to avoid the extremes of legalism on the one hand and laxity on the other. First, we must avoid the extreme of legalism.

5:13 What is legalism? Now, as you know, this is a word that's thrown around a lot. It's kind of a bugaboo word, you know, that everybody likes to use when they don't like something. They call it legalism, but it's often misunderstood and abused.

5:27 For example, it is not legalistic for a Christian to be committed to carefully obeying God's moral law. That is not legalism.

5:41 Obedience to the moral law out of a heart of love and devotion to God is biblical holiness. If that's legalism, then Jesus was a legalist. Furthermore, it's not legalistic for a church to be committed to ordering its life and its practice carefully by the Scriptures. That's not legalistic.

6:00 That's simply acknowledging and obeying the headship of Christ over His church. Neither of those things is legalistic, yet you'll often hear people calling them legalistic. Let a person be serious about obeying the law of God carefully, and before too long, someone's going to call you a legalist. Let a church be serious about ordering its life by the Scriptures, and before too long, someone's going to call that church legalistic.

6:28 But don't be stumbled by that. Jesus said, If you love me, you'll keep my commandments. And therefore, the more you love Christ, the more determined and committed you'll be to keeping His commandments. And that's true of an individual Christian, and that's true of a church.

6:45 So then what is legalism? Well, first of all, legalism is when we seek to obey God in the hope of earning or meriting salvation, either in whole or in part, by our efforts. That's one form of legalism. It's the doctrinal or practical.

7:01 It's the doctrinal denial of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, not of works, lest any man should boast. And we certainly must never observe the Lord's Day thinking that by doing so, we are somehow earning favor, earning our salvation, or contributing to the basis upon which God accepts sinners, which is in Christ and His work alone. But then there's another legitimate way the word legalism is used, and this is especially what I have in mind here. Legalism is, it's also a term used to describe an attitude or practice that expects God's people to obey man-made rules that are not found in Scripture or cannot be proven from Scripture, and that treats those man-made rules as though they are equal to the commands of God. The practice itself may be fine if someone chooses to follow it, but the problem is when it is elevated to the same level as a command of God, and everyone else is expected to follow it. Well, this is something that we need to be careful, very careful, to avoid when it comes to the Lord's Day. You'll remember from an earlier lesson that this is one of the problems with the Pharisees.

8:13 The problem was not that they believed in keeping the Sabbath. That was good. The problem was that they added their own list of detailed rules and regulations over and above the revealed will of God as to how the Sabbath was to be observed. And they enforced these rules and regulations on others, and that's what they viewed as true holiness.

8:35 Do you remember some of the silly rules that we looked at a few weeks ago? I mentioned some of them. The Jewish Talmud, which was like a commentary on the Old Testament, devoted 24 chapters, 24 chapters to the Sabbath. You say, well, Pastor, you just spent seven weeks on the Sabbath.

8:56 Okay, you're right. In those chapters, 39 occupations, are identified as unlawful, and then a multitude of inferences were drawn in order to prohibit hundreds of other activities. One man has estimated that the Talmud contains over 1,500 rules and restrictions for the Sabbath day. I gave you several examples of this in an earlier lesson.

9:24 Here's a few more that I didn't mention. I mentioned a bunch of them, but I'll just give you a few others. False teeth were not to be worn on the Sabbath,

9:34 because if they, if they fell out to pick them up, would be violating the Sabbath. A bath could not be taken on the Sabbath, because if any water spilt on the floor, it would be like cleaning the floor, and that would make a person guilty of house cleaning on the Sabbath.

9:53 I hope all of you took a bath before you came to church today, by the way. You could kill a flea any other day of the week, but not on the Sabbath. To kill a flea on the Sabbath would be the equivalent of hunting. I wonder if you had to buy, a hunting license to be a flea hunter.

10:11 And that was forbidden. There were many silly rules and regulations like that. And you remember that this even led to the Pharisees condemning Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath. So this is one of the things Jesus addressed in his confrontations with the Pharisees.

10:29 As a result of these rules, they had missed the whole point of the Sabbath and had caused it to be a terrible burden for God's people. Well, the same thing can happen in the Christian world. The same thing can happen in the Christian world. The same thing can happen in the Christian world.

10:39 The same thing can happen in the Christian church. Apparently, even some of the Puritans were guilty of this. Not all of them, but some of them were. Not most of them, I don't think, but a few of them were.

10:49 For example, one early Puritan, Nicholas Bound, wrote a book on the Sabbath that was later criticized by the great John Owen. Here's what Owen said about that book. He said, A man can scarcely in six days read over all the duties that are proposed to be observed, on the Sabbath. In other words, here's what you should do on the Sabbath.

11:15 I'll talk later about Richard Baxter and his Christian directory. He gives us details of what you should do when you get up in the morning, first thing in the morning, what you should do when you go to breakfast, what you should do every part of the day, regimented out. Here's what you should do each part of the day, all the way until the point that you go to bed at night. Well, this book was something similar to that, probably even more than that.

11:36 And Owen said, you can scarcely read in six days everything he says you're to do on the Sabbath. Uh, uh, much, uh, much less do them. So this is something that we must be careful to avoid. This legalism can also show itself in a tendency to see everything is either black or white, to have a dogmatic answer for every possible circumstance or case of conscience that may arise.

Avoiding the Extreme of Laxity

12:02 An unwillingness to allow for the fact that some things are simply not that clear cut in scripture, to allow for the fact that there is room for legitimate differences in what some brethren do and don't do that day when a clear case cannot be made one way or another from the Bible. So that's one extreme that we must avoid, but we must also avoid the opposite extreme, the extreme of laxity in reaction to legalism. We must not swing, which is always our, our, our tendency as human beings. And even as Christians, when we see something that's wrong, evil, our tendency then is to get as far away from that as we can possibly go.

12:46 And so we can go past the medium and go all the way over to the opposite extreme. So in a reaction to legalism, we must not swing like a pendulum to the other extreme of an overly loose approach to the Sabbath. And that tends to happen in at least a couple of ways. One is the idea that it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do on that day.

13:10 Doesn't matter. All that really matters is your motive. As long as a person has good, motives, no one has the right to question what they do or don't do on the Lord's day. Now, it's true that motive is important and is really in a sense most important.

13:26 But keeping the Sabbath, as we'll see, is not only a matter of having good motives, it involves what we do or don't do on that day as well. This lacks tendency is also seen in an unwillingness to make any statement at all about the proper manner in which the Sabbath is to be done.

13:45 So it's important to be observant just as long as we all agree that the fourth commandment still applies. That's all that matters. We don't want to get into the question at all of what is required on that day or what is forbidden. Let's each man do what he feels.

13:59 Fest. You must never judge my observance of the Sabbath. We should just throw out the general principle that every man do what is right in his own eyes. Well, as one has put it, a duty of which others can never exhort you is a very strange duty to avoid legalism.

14:16 Doesn't mean. That we're to pretend that the Sabbath command doesn't mean anything, that it doesn't actually forbid anything or that it doesn't actually require something that can be defined and spelled out. No, the fourth commandment can be broken and the fourth commandment can be kept. And there is a difference between breaking it and keeping it that can be scripturally defined and explained.

Guidelines from Both Old and New Testaments

14:43 As I trust, we will see. So this is the first introductory consideration when it comes to the observance. Of the Sabbath, we must avoid the extremes of legalism on the one hand and laxity on the other. The second introductory consideration is this.

14:59 We must find our guidelines for keeping the Sabbath from both the old and the New Testaments. And here I'm giving a caution. There are some who speak as though there is this huge, gigantic contrast between Sabbath keeping in the Old Testament and Sabbath keeping in the New Testament. They speak as though obeying the fourth commandment means something compete completely different than it did back then.

15:31 Now there is an element of truth in that, but there are problems with that as well. We need to think a little more carefully than that. Okay. You remember we saw that the Mosaic Sabbath functioned as both moral law and covenant sign.

15:51 And this is I don't have time to go over this in detail, but again, but it was moral law. And it was a sign. It was both moral law and a sign of God's covenant with Israel. And we saw that it continues to be so now with this difference, it's now moral law and a sign of God's new covenant with the new Israel, the church.

16:14 Therefore, those aspects of the Sabbath under Moses that were strictly connected to the old covenant economy and theocracy, in other words, the ceremonial enlargements of the Sabbath that we find in Moses, they have indeed passed away. And that involves certain special ceremonial Sabbath days and feasts like the Passover and the feast of first fruits and so on. The same is true of the Sabbath years. Like the year of Jubilee.

16:39 They were temporary attachments to the Sabbath as a sign of the old covenant. And several considerations we saw make that clear. One, they did not originate in creation. Two, they're not part of the Ten Commandments.

16:51 And three, they're connected with aspects of the old covenant that were typical and typical. And so, they were temporary. They were either tied to the ceremonial worship, to the land inheritance or to Israel's position as a theocratic state, all of which ended in the transition from the old covenant to the new. And this also includes the civil sanction of the Sabbath or civil punishment, which no longer applies, at least not in the same way.

17:19 In the Old Testament theocracy, the punishment of death was required for public and flagrant violation of the Sabbath. Well, the people of God are no longer under a theocracy. And the civil sanction of the judicial laws no longer applies to the Christian church. We don't have authority given to us to exercise that kind of corporal punishment.

17:42 We've also seen that there's a change in the day on which the fourth commandment is observed in the new covenant. The new covenant Sabbath or Lord's Day does not look ahead to the coming of Christ as a shadow. It's not a shadow. We still observe the fourth commandment, but not as a shadow, not as a mystery or a shadow of him who was to come.

18:05 We observe it on the first day as a sign and a commemoration of the fact that he has come and that his work was finished on the first day. And we observe it as a sign and a pointer to that eternal rest that is yet to come in the new heavens and the new earth when our Lord returns. So there are these differences. Okay, there's those.

18:26 There are differences. And I think the fact that we're looking back at an accomplished work that also though joy was intended to be a part of Sabbath observance in the Old Testament, it should be even more so in the New Testament because we're no longer looking through a glass darkly through shadows. We see the reality in that Christ has come and he has accomplished our redemption by his death and his resurrection. But apart from these ceremonial attachments and civil sanctions, and the change of the day to commemorate the fact that Christ has now come, there is no basis for drawing some kind of hard fast distinction between Old Testament Sabbath keeping and New Testament Sabbath keeping. When it comes to the natural law and the moral law, and as it is worked out in the New Testament, applied in the New Testament, remembering the Sabbath day to keep it holy still means the same thing now that it meant then. What it meant for Israel to keep the Sabbath still means the same thing for us to keep the Sabbath, just like you shall not steal still means the same thing, and you shall not commit adultery still means the same thing, and honor your father and mother still means the same thing.

19:44 And all of the other Ten Commandments still mean the same thing. Remember we saw that Jesus, when we look carefully at what Jesus taught about the Sabbath and the Gospels, we saw that he nowhere violated, annulled, or depreciated the Sabbath in those Gospel records that were written well after Jesus' resurrection and were written by New Testament theologian evangelists for the Christian church. He nowhere changed Sabbath observance. What he did was attack and correct the Pharisaic perversions of the Sabbath.

20:19 And he clarified from the Old Testament Scriptures themselves what proper Sabbath observance is. So when it comes to the moral law of the Sabbath, as with the rest of the Ten Commandments, our understanding of what it requires is to be informed by the whole Bible, by both Testaments, the Old and the New. Well, so much for introductory considerations. We're ready now to at least begin to consider the proper manner, balanced manner in which we are to observe the Lord's Day.

Proper Attitudes: Delight in the Sabbath as a Blessing

20:51 And I want to begin first with proper attitudes we ought to have toward the Lord's Day. And that's as far as we're going to get today. We're going to begin with attitudes. And then next time I hope to underscore the proper use of this day and give some practical directives.

21:12 But we begin first of all with attitudes. I said earlier that keeping the Lord's Day is not just about having good motives, it's also about our behavior, what we do and don't do on that day. However, it's not only about our behavior either. God is concerned with our heart as well.

21:31 And even more so. He's concerned about our attitudes as well as our actions. And this is always where true obedience to God begins. It begins with the attitudes of the heart.

21:42 Deuteronomy 6, 4. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And Jesus tells us that this is the greatest commandment.

21:55 This is the summary of all the commandments. It's about our relationship to God. That's where it begins. True obedience is that obedience that comes from a believer, from a person who is trusting in God's mercy, freely given to us in Christ, and it is an obedience that flows from the heart.

22:16 From a heart that delights in Him and is supremely devoted to Him. Any kind of outward obedience that's completely divorced from that is just an abomination before God. It's not pleasing to God. Proverbs 4, 23.

22:33 Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. So this is where we begin. We begin with the heart. What are the proper attitudes we are to have?

22:43 Well, I've summarized this under two headings. Someone else has summarized it actually under two headings, and I'm borrowing from him here the headings at least. First, we must delight in the Sabbath as a God-given blessing. And secondly, we must be devoted to the Sabbath as a God-given obligation.

23:00 Alright? So first of all, we must delight in the Sabbath as a God-given blessing. When God first instituted the Sabbath at creation, we are told that He blessed the day. And we saw that that means that He made that day to be a source of blessing.

23:19 Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man. Referring back to creation. By the way, He didn't say it was made for Israel. But for man.

23:28 And not man for man. For the Sabbath. It's not made against man or to harm man. But for man.

23:36 God made it to be a channel of blessing to mankind. And therefore, it's not to be viewed as something dark and painful that God forces us to endure so we can show how devoted to Him we are. He gives us this day to be a blessing. And it's to be viewed that way and treated that way by us.

23:57 Our attitude is to be one of delighting in the Lord's day as we read in Isaiah 58, 32. We are to call the Sabbath a delight. Now, it will help us to do that if we remember the ways that this day is intended to benefit us. How is the Sabbath a blessing?

24:14 Well, first of all, it provides needed rest for our bodies and minds from our ordinary labors. We're going to be opening up this whole matter of rest in some detail later. Not just spiritual rest, but physical rest. In the fourth commandment, they were to let their cattle rest.

24:33 And their animals rest. And that wasn't spiritual rest, it's physical rest. So, it does provide rest. It's intended to provide rest for our bodies and minds from our ordinary labors.

24:43 And in doing that, it provides us with an opportunity to commemorate and to celebrate God's work of creation and redemption. And it provides us with an opportunity to think about and to have a foretaste of that eternal rest that awaits us in the world to come. One man has described the Lord's day as a tall mountain peak that rises above all the other mountain peaks of the world. And that's the quote that I have here.

25:06 During the other six days of the week, we're down in the valley of the world and we can often lose our perspective on life. The wicked seem to prosper. To proper, it should be prosper. The kingdom seems to be making little progress.

25:20 Spiritual realities can seem distant and far away. But on the Sabbath, we climb to the highest mountain peak where we find a true vantage point on life. On the Sabbath, we are able to see the ultimate end. The end of the wicked.

25:35 On the Sabbath, we are able to see the ultimate success of Christ's church. On the Sabbath, we are able to regain our spiritual blessings or bearings and refocus our spiritual goals. The Sabbath reminds us that the day is coming when we shall rest from our labors and enjoy eternal fellowship with our blessed Savior. Now, there's a sense in which we can experience some of these realities every day of the week.

26:00 But God's given us this day in which we can rest, we can legitimately, with good conscience, lay aside all of our ordinary labors to focus upon these things and it serves us and blesses us in that way. Hasn't that often been true in your own experience? You've had a difficult week. Your soul is dry and weary, but God draws near on the Lord's day, especially in the public worship.

26:25 Christ draws near. Your heart is refreshed. Your soul is revived and you're enabled to press on with joy to the new week that follows. The Sabbath also provides us with the opportunity to give ourselves to the means of grace in ways that we often find more difficult during the week.

26:44 We have time that we don't have during the week to fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ, extra time perhaps to pray and to read the Bible and to read good Christian literature. Of course, we should be doing that all through the week, but the fact is that it's much more difficult then. Our time is more limited. We're so busy and distracted with so many things, often very legitimate things, legitimate God-given duties.

27:10 Well, God knew that. He knew that after six days of labor, we need a break from that. And in His mercy, He has given to us this cycle of one day in seven in which we can legitimately lay aside all of the distractions of our regular work, a day to recharge our spiritual batteries, a heavenly holiday, a time of spiritual refreshment. The Sabbath is a gift of love from our Heavenly Father, and we are to view it that way.

27:42 We are to call the Sabbath a delight, and we are to rejoice in it. And we need to communicate that to our families and to our children. And I'm going to talk later about practical ways we can do that in the way we observe the Lord's Day in our families and in our homes. Now, what does this tell us by way of application?

Application: Examining Our Hearts Regarding Delight

28:00 Well, one thing it does, it calls us to examine our hearts. And I think that's important.

28:07 That's one of the very powerful benefits of this commandment. It's a great call to examine our hearts. If God made the Sabbath to be a blessing, what does this say about you if you dislike the Lord's Day? What does it say about you?

28:25 If instead of being a delight to you, the Lord's Day is a burden to you, it's a drudgery, it's a bore to you, what does it say about you? If coming to church on Sunday and worshiping Christ and hearing His Word and spending the day away from the distractions of your ordinary, normal labor so that you can enjoy a day dedicated to Christ, a whole day of rest and refreshment and Christian fellowship and conversation, what does it say about you if that's a burden for you? And spending a day like that is boring to you. Well, let me just say this.

29:02 It says a lot more about you than it does about the fourth commandment. The problem is not with the fourth commandment. The problem is with your heart. You see, our attitude toward the Lord's Day reveals something about the state of our souls.

29:20 It reveals whether the things of Christ are really precious to you or not. So what does the Lord's Day reveal about you? All of those of us who love the Lord's Day, we need to realize this. We need to realize that the natural man will never find the Sabbath a delight.

29:46 He never will. It shouldn't surprise us. It shouldn't surprise us that this command is so hated. The natural mind is enmity against God and is not subject to the law of God.

29:58 Neither indeed can be, Romans 8, 7. Man by nature is a hater of God. That's why so many people don't get very excited about the Lord's Day. That's why so many skip church.

30:11 That's why so many choose to go to the lake that day or to play golf on that day or to work that day or to just sit at home and watch television all day on Sunday. This is one of the reasons we have a hard time attracting people in the community to the church. It's not necessarily because there's anything wrong with the church. And certainly not that there's something wrong with the Lord's Day, the fourth commandment.

30:36 It's not that we need to compromise on that command and start providing more entertainment on Sunday or lighten things up to make church more fun or start having fewer services and start having fewer sermons and start giving skits and showing Christian movies in their place. And it's not that we need to drop our commitment to the fourth commandment. That won't help anything because that's not the real problem. The problem is that men by nature are not and will never be attracted to the Lord's Day or the things of Christ unless God in His sovereign mercy changes their hearts.

31:16 And we shouldn't beat ourselves up all the time thinking that there must be something wrong with us because everyone in the community is not flocking to our church on Sunday. I mean, we want them to. We're praying that they will. But we shouldn't be shocked.

31:32 Rather, it should cause us to cry to God in prayer for these people because such is the state of the human heart that unless God comes and awakens men and women and gives them a new heart, they will never love the Lord's Day. Unless they come to know Christ, they will never love Christ. And if they never love Christ, they will never find joy in keeping His commandments. So that's the first attitude that we must characterize our observance of the Lord's Day.

Proper Attitudes: Devotion to the Sabbath as an Obligation

32:02 We must delight in the Lord's Day as a God-given blessing. But that's not all. Secondly, we must be devoted to the Sabbath, the Lord's Day Sabbath, as a God-given obligation. Now, I want you to follow with me carefully here.

32:22 I mean by that, in other words, that we should keep the Lord's Day out of a principled commitment to obey God regardless of how we might feel at any given moment or time. The Sabbath is not only a God-given blessing, it is also a God-given duty. In other words, keeping the Lord's Day is not an option. It's an obligation.

32:47 Now, some Christians have a hard time with that, especially in this generation that we're living in. They seem to think that words like duty and obligation are somehow bad words. That's somehow contrary to the nature of Christianity. We don't want people to come to church because it's their duty to come.

33:06 We want them to come because they'd like to come. We don't want people to feel constrained to keep God's law. We want them to delight in keeping God's law, as you said in the first point. That's true.

33:20 So, they say we shouldn't speak about duty and obligation when it comes to the Christian life. We shouldn't have church covenants and so on in which people publicly bind themselves to certain biblical obligations. No, duty is a bad word for the Christian. Well, there are several problems with that.

33:39 First of all, for the Christian, joy and duty are not enemies. They're friends. The Christian finds joy in doing his duty because he knows it's the will of God. And he wants to honor God.

33:55 He finds joy in doing his duty. Listen, I'm married to Kelly and it's my duty to love her as Christ loved the church. But it's also my joy to do that and my delight. The fact that it's my duty doesn't mean that it's not my delight.

34:10 The fact that it's a delight doesn't mean it's not my duty to do it. Ought to and want to come together in the heart of the child of God. Also, now listen carefully, sometimes we must do what we know it is our obligation to do, not because we are presently feeling joyful about it. We live in a generation I believe that's in bondage to their feelings and their emotions.

34:43 Now there's a balance. I think there's also a problem sometimes in the Christian church and Reformed Christian churches especially. There's not enough emphasis given to feeling and emotion and affection. But at the same time, we can be in bondage to our feelings.

34:57 So sometimes we must do what it's our obligation to do, not because we're presently pumping full of great feelings of emotion about it, but because we trust God that doing our duty is the path in which true joy is to be found. In other words, sometimes present delight precedes and motivates us to our duty. We feel delight in God's command and this moves us to obey it. At other times, depending upon what our spiritual state may be at any given moment, it's the hope of future delight that precedes and motivates our duty. We don't feel any delight right now, but we do what it is our duty to do because we trust that this is where true joy is to be found. Think of the Lord Jesus. When Jesus was sweating great drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He prayed, Oh, Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass from Me, did He feel like going to the cross?

36:03 No. But He embraced the cross as His duty. Not My will, but Yours be done. However, because it was His duty and He did not feel like going to the cross, does that mean that there was no joy that He found in doing His duty?

36:26 No. There was the anticipation of future joy that moved Him to embrace the pain of the cross. So He saw joy. He even felt joy as He anticipated the greater joy that awaited Him by doing the Father's will.

36:43 Hebrews 12 says, For the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame. So duty and joy are not enemies for the Christian, they're friends. A sense of being under divine obligation does not negate the experience of joy in doing God's will. And a sense of joy, or even a lack of joy at times, does not negate the obligatory nature of God's will.

Application: Duty in the Face of Remaining Sin

37:08 Secondly, we must also remember that the Christian still has remaining sin. We still have remaining sin. We are not yet glorified angels. And because of remaining sin, sometimes our desire to do God's will can be very weak.

37:29 It's not what it should be. So does that mean, well, we don't do it? No. When desire fails, commitment to our duty lifts us up.

37:47 Now part of our duty is to have desire. But we stir ourselves up to do our duty, regardless of how we feel. Sometimes it's the promises and the realities of the Gospel that stir my heart with joyful desire to do God's will.

38:03 But at other times, my heart is so cold that it's not very responsive to such motivations. I'm reluctant. Desire is weak. Then I hear the voice of my God screaming in my conscience, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

38:18 Jeff Smith, the Lord Jesus, your Savior, commands you to keep the Lord's day. And I'm shaken out of my spiritual lethargy by a solemn sense of obligation to my Lord and Savior. So there is this sense of solemn obligation, the sense of duty that keeps me in the way until the proper feelings of delight begin to return. Now, if we were all angels or glorified saints, we would never need to be compelled by a sense of duty to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

38:52 Our desire to keep God's command and our delight in coming to church and keeping the day for Christ would always be burning red hot. But on this side of glory, we still have remaining sin and our hearts are sometimes cold. And when we're tempted to neglect God's commands and we don't feel like keeping God's command, whatever command it may be, we don't feel like coming to church, for example, on Sunday, when we're not leaping for joy at the thought of setting aside the entire day for the Lord. Whenever that's the case, which it sometimes is, if we're honest, the fact that we are obligated to obey God, the fact that we have no option as His children but to obey our Heavenly Father, that steps in.

39:34 And lo and behold, what happens? As we do what we are obligated to do, simply because we know that it's our duty to do so, what happens? God meets us. He meets us in the way and a sense of joy and delight begins to return.

39:56 Isn't that true? Haven't you found it that way many times in your Christian experience? You do what you know it's your duty to do, even when you don't feel like it. And as you do so, your feelings begin to come and your soul is revived.

40:11 You see, brother, there are some things that need to be settled convictions in our lives. Settled convictions. They're not questioned anymore. They're settled convictions.

40:23 And regardless of how I may feel from one moment to the next, I am determined by God's grace to keep these commitments that I have made. I remember when I was a little boy, it never even occurred to me to ever ask my mom and dad, if we were going to church on Sunday. The fault would have never even occurred to me to ask them that. Are we going to church Sunday?

40:49 Are we going to evening service? Those were settled convictions in our home. It didn't matter how we felt from one day to the next. From one Sunday to the next.

41:01 And we need to have those kinds of convictions in our lives. Especially when it comes to God's moral law, the Ten Commandments. So, these are the attitudes with which we are to keep the Lord's Day. We are to delight in the Lord's Day as a God-given blessing, intended to be a blessing to us.

Concluding Remarks and Q&A Invitation

41:24 And we are to be devoted to the Lord's Day as a God-given obligation. Well, next time we'll get more into details regarding the practical...

41:34 Someone's laughing at me. The practical outworking of this in our Lord's Day. How do we approach this question of the proper observance in a way that's balanced and in a way that navigates between the two rocks of laxity on the one hand and legalism on the other hand? Well, we have about four minutes left.

42:01 Now, I am going to stop in the context of laying out the practical aspects of this, particularly at the end, to give you time to ask whatever questions that this may raise in your mind. Because especially when we're talking about the practical application of this commandment in our lives, I'm sure it's going to raise a lot of questions and discussion. But we still have about four minutes left if someone has a comment that they would like to make relative to what I've said this morning or a question. Yes.

42:35 So, you, Matt, you are so stringent about the Lord's Day and you're not here in this office working on a proposal. On Sunday, your proposal is due on the Monday that's tomorrow. Does it affect your...

42:49 witness, you know, love and care for other people and the struggle... The answer that I'll raise to that question is, where do we start saying that we're going to disobey our God for the sake of peace and people or if it could be done on other days of the week since we know that if we're in that office on the Lord's Day, we're going to run our bodies into the ground when we have forsaken the blessing of God for killing us on that day?

43:19 Did you guys hear what he was saying? Yes. Didn't we? Yes.

43:25 What's wrong with us? Don't mind me if I don't. What about you, David? David, what's wrong with you?

43:31 I don't think we're going to give you what you want. We just need you to be always with us, and constantly be there for the Lord. They're not your family. We're going to recognize and be a part of you and be a part of Christ through this moment.

43:43 Yeah. So...

43:45 I believe that's the best you can do and that's why we need to love God so that we can be knowing how to love him and to feel