10 For Ten 3 (Exodus 20.8-11)

In this week’s message, we reflect on God’s Word regarding keeping the Sabbath.  This commandment feels a bit different from the rest in that the Lord isn’t addressing a singular moral, spiritual, or relational issue.  He is making a claim over time itself, and how we mark it, think about it, and use it.  Time is to be understood not in relation to ourselves but in relation to Him.

Six days are for labor/work while the seventh is for Him; it is a “holy” day.  For Christians, Sunday has largely replaced Saturday as our Sabbath day since it is ‘resurrection day’ and the first day of the week.  We are to understand Sabbath not as a legalistic formality but as an expression of God’s grace to us.

Sabbath offers us the grace of rest, the grace of ordered lives, an outward mark of being God’s grace-filled people, and pictures our salvation by grace as we rest in the Lord’s saving work and not our works.  In order to observe the Sabbath well, we need rest, reverence (worship/prayer/meditation on the Word), remembrance (of all God’s blessings, particularly our salvation in Christ), and renewal (our own and that of others).