Lord of the Sabbath

Good morning. Rule in business is the customer is always right. The customer is always right. In the age of church growth, we could go to George Barna. Back in 1991, he's been writing on this for almost four decades. He says, the fundamental principle of Christian communication is The audience, not the message, is sovereign. He's basically taking that principle from business, the customer's always right, and applying it to the church. In that instance, the audience is sovereign, that's you all. Might make you feel good. The concern here is, Yeah, we live in a consumer-based society. Praise God, Ben prayed for one other healthy church, and there's many others throughout our city. There's good churches. The concern is that we can approach Christ like a consumer, though. There's a concern that we could approach Christ as if we are a consumer, not looking to the sovereign message. It gets even more concerning when we look at the way the Bible describes us as foolish, self-deceived, Wrestling with this these texts this morning the big question is who is really sovereign? It's important because Jesus has come to his own people and they've rejected him This is very clearly from what John's gospel says Here the religious rulers the religious leaders the Pharisees Jesus has come and he disappoints them He actually confronts them for how wrong they have gotten God's Word. They've turned their focus away from God's Word to their own rules. They've created their own idea of what a Messiah is, and then Jesus condemns them. Now this is all many people's favorite passages, right? This is when Jesus puts the Pharisees in their place. A religious rumble. We like these passages. Jesus sticks it to them, because the Pharisees, they represent an unhelpful authority. They represent hypocrisy. Well, we actually need to recognize that we probably have a lot more in common with the Pharisees than we'd like. The Pharisees were the conservative religious leaders. They upheld God's word highly. They would agree with our statement of faith. God's word is a perfect treasure of a divine instruction. All scripture is totally true and trustworthy. It's the supreme standard. They would have held up God's word like we do. And so we need to be careful about how we might be corrected alongside these Pharisees. We were introduced to the Pharisees last week. Jesus had already had two interactions with them. Jesus healed a paralytic. But before that, he said to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven. And the Pharisees and the scribes rightfully said, who can forgive sins but God? Jesus, knowing what they're saying, because he's God, says, so that you know that I have the authority to forgive sins, stand up and walk. And everyone was amazed, but it doesn't say they believed. Then he's eating with sinners and tax collectors, people that were outcasts in society. And the Pharisees asked the disciples, why would he eat with such people? And Jesus corrects them. I have not come for the righteous, but to call the sinner to repentance. Well, this week we see three more interactions. Two of them, the Pharisees' approach, and the last one that Jesus initiated. Be very clear, liberal Christians, conservative Christians, all Christians, we all have the danger of wanting our favorite passages that we hang on to, and ignore the rest. We need to be very careful about not wanting to believe I really like this kind of Jesus and not that Jesus. He comes and he is Lord. As we think of the Pharisees more, I want to make clear there's two basic problems in the Pharisees throughout Scripture. One is that they like to add rules in order to show how to practically live up the law. That they held up the law so much that they would add rules to make sure people knew how to obey it. There were 39 additional rules to explain how to keep the Sabbath. The problem is their rules eventually became more important than God's law. The second problem with the Pharisees is they would find loopholes to get around obeying the law in a way that they felt uncomfortable. This is the whole thing with who's my neighbor. They wanted to figure out who was the person not worth my love because I don't want to love all these different kinds of people. In our story, when you go back to Matthew 15, this is where Jesus declares, you deny God's law with your traditions. Jesus is pro-law. He wrote it. He is the author of the law. When he's critiquing and going against the Pharisees, it's because they've added to the law. They've ignored the law. They've insisted on their own traditions. So that's the context. We get to see this religious rumble, but the main point of all these texts, this is the one three-word sentence summary. Jesus is Lord. He's sovereign. And we're gonna see he's Lord in three different ways. He's the Lord of godliness, Order and goodness. Godliness, order, and goodness. Let's turn to Luke 5. Beginning here in verse 33. And they, that is the Pharisees, had already been talking with Jesus, said to him, the disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees. But yours eat and drink. Here we see that the Pharisees are coming and they're comparing their piety, their godliness, with Jesus'. And they've even lumped in with John the Baptist. And notice here, we fast. You guys don't. The Pharisees and their tradition required two fasts a week. The Old Testament law only requires a fast one day a week. It's Yom Kippur. That was the Old Testament. There's only one required fast. Now, there's numerous descriptions of fast. But in terms of a regular prescribed command for fast, they're going above and beyond. And notice here, the Pharisees are judging Jesus as less pious and godly than him because they see he doesn't fast as often as they do. He's already inferior because he's eating with sinners. Now he's inferior because he doesn't fast as much as they do. Notice there's a pride in their pride. That kind of makes it ungodly. They've replaced here the law of God and the word of God, and they've bound up the conscience with the necessary fast. Notice Jesus' response, and he's always responding in a way that's fairly indirect. He has two responses. Jesus said to them, can you make wedding guests? Notice there the force of the language. Can you require, can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? We're about to have a wedding. We've got a shower underneath after the service. Guess what's gonna be served there? Food is a necessary part of a celebration. When there's a wedding, when a bridegroom and a bride are about to join the holy covenant of marriage, there's a feast because you celebrate it. You fast at a funeral. You fast when you grieve or mourn, but he's saying here is a time of celebration. Now he does declare there's a time, days will come when the bridegroom is taken away and they will fast in those days. But today, Jesus is saying that the bridegroom's here. I believe he's alluding to something very important. This is an incredible picture that God gave us in the Old Testament. Christ clearly says he's fulfilling. He's the bridegroom. He's God himself who's come to be with his people to enter into a covenant of love with them. There's an intimate, beautiful picture of God pursuing his sinful people, loving them even though they're sinners. The bridegroom is this incredible picture of Christ pursuing those who are unworthy of his love, giving them all of his love. I believe here this is what he's alluding to. He's saying, I am the bridegroom. I am fulfilling the promise that I myself will come and I will love my people. Why would you require a fast? This is a day of celebration. And then he tells them a parable, and parables, by definition, are meant to stump them. They're difficult, and this one's a little tricky. Mainly because I don't know how many of us are working a vineyard and put wine in skins. No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new one, and the piece from the new will not match the old. So here's the first half of this parable, the picture of if you put a new patch on an old garment, it's not gonna fit. The second is that no one puts new wine skin to old wine skins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it'll be spilled. The skins will be destroyed. The new wine must be put into fresh wine skins. This has to do with the fermentation process and what requires new wine to go through the fermentation. It cannot do that in the old. But notice what he says at the end. No one after drinking old wine desires new. For he says the old is good. The first thing we need to be clear is he's not referring to Old Testament, New Testament. He's referring to your old ways and traditions and what's new, the bridegrooms here. When Jesus comes, he is the yes and amen of the Old Testament. Everything the Old Testament was saying, he is fulfilling. He is confronting them that if you keep hanging on to your traditions, if you keep practicing and desiring your traditions, you're not going to ever desire The new, the bridegroom. You're committed to your traditions. You're so committed to this idea of piety. You're so committed to your expectations, your pre-understandings, you're gonna miss what Scripture says. Now fasting is a context. Let's just back up. The New Testament never prescribes fast. It describes many fasts. Fasting seems to be something that a church or a Christian would do in the midst of a dilemma or a problem. If you're wrestling through a certain sin, or if you're looking to come alongside and be a mediator, a caregiver for someone in a difficult problem. If the church is going through a difficult season or trial, if your nation is in the midst of a difficulty, you fast. You're replacing the regular eating of food for strength to pursue God and prayer depending upon him for strength. Fasting is a religious practice that we don't prescribe and say, this is the day we're all gonna fast. But I encourage you, if you don't fast, it's a practice where you're setting aside the typical need of food. That's how God designed you. To say, I'm gonna pursue God. I'm gonna set aside this time that I would normally eat. I'm gonna pursue God in prayer. And I'm gonna depend upon him and his strength. It's not something we require, but it's something that is regularly seen as good. The real rub here, the Pharisees are looking at Jesus and saying, you're less godly. You don't fit our presuppositions. You don't fit our expectations. And if we wrestle with this, how much do we come to Christ and expect him to fit within what we already want to do. That is how we can parallel this passage. And the most dangerous way to do this is doing it religiously. To simply say, now here's what I think is the right way to worship God, and now Jesus, I'm gonna believe in him, and therefore Jesus is gonna fit slot A, B, and C, but not D, E, and F. No, he's Lord. He's come as the God of love, grace, and kindness. He's also come as the God of laws, rules, and expectations. If we just turn over, we can wrestle with this. Look at Luke 6, 36. Here's a command to wrestle with that's gonna challenge our assumptions, our expectations. Be merciful even as your Father is merciful. Let that sink in and be weighty today. Jesus is not saying there's no law. No, that's a weighty law. That's a weighty expectation. It means we don't get to choose how we're gonna show mercy or who we're gonna show mercy to. We follow the Father's pattern. We receive mercy. We receive grace. We receive forgiveness. We receive patience. And then it says, be merciful even as your Father is merciful. Jesus comes to show mercy, and to expect mercy. Jesus comes to show mercy, and he expects mercy. Are we showing the kind of mercy in our lives that God expects? We see there that the Pharisees, they had this idea of what piety looked like. Jesus didn't fit it. They never believed in him. Jesus is showing what true piety looks like, and we'll look at those passages a little bit later. Not today, a couple weeks. The second command, the second passage, he's Lord of order. If we're so hung up on what we think is supposed to happen according to our traditions, we're not gonna miss the, we're gonna miss the bridegroom, that's point one. Point two, the Lord of order. On a Sabbath, alright, whenever you see that in the gospels, just play in your mind, dun dun dun. Always the setting, the arena for a battle. While he was going through the grain fields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. Okay, we can go to Deuteronomy 23 and we can see that whenever anyone was traveling, they could do this. There's no fast food chains. There's no place to hop in and get a burger, a Chick-fil-A sandwich. I had to represent there. The way they actually accommodated folks traveling was to just grab grain and eat. Remember the Pharisees, they've got 39 rules that help explain, and I say the word help, what it means to keep the Sabbath. Sabbath laws were very unique to Israel. Other nations circumcised. The Sabbath was the one unique command of God that was special for Israel. It is the command that set them apart. All the other nations would go and say, how is it you don't work a whole day? How is it you would eat and not work? How is it that you would trust a God with such order in their whole weakest pattern now? This brings order and goodness and faith and trust to their whole society. The Sabbath was essential to be Israel. The Sabbath laws were good for Israel. First, they taught them they needed rest. We're created beings with limitations. It shows you we can't do everything, every day, all day. There's a good reason for rest. The Sabbath points back to redemption, Deuteronomy 6, when we get the Ten Commandments a second time. The rationale for the Sabbath is to remember God saved you from Egypt. It taught them faith, God will provide. Most of all, it taught them God was holy, worthy of worship, worthy of trust. Notice the Pharisees say, why are you doing what is not lawful? Verse two. So they're going through, they're plucking, they're rubbing their hands, and the Pharisees interpret this, why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? Two things that they made clear were out of bounds of the Sabbath were harvesting or threshing, grabbing the grain. And then we can see that they were threshing because they were rubbing their hands together. They were taking away the husk. And in the Pharisees' mind, this breaks the law as we have written it out. Now, the 39 rules. All right, the Pharisees, they're religious people. They see the importance of Sabbath. They see that it is rightfully important and a holy day to the Lord. And they say, God says, keep it. There's warnings about it. And so what would they naturally do? Well, let's actually try to explain what that means. And so they came up with 39 rules. I want to say, I want to trust the instinct there. The instinct should not be, how close can I get to flirting with doing something on the Sabbath? But the desire would be, let's keep it. But the problem, any time we start adding rules to Scripture, those rules are going to end up being like Scripture. We kind of get confused. This is better than the lukewarm Christian who wants to go, how do I get close enough to flirt with it? The problem here is the rules have become absolute. The man-made rules are now as if the law. So they accuse, this is unlawful. Jesus answered them, have you not read? That's provocative. These are the authoritative teachers, interpreters, readers of the law. This would be like asking a librarian, ever heard of the Dewey Decimal System? It'd be like asking a chemistry professor, you ever heard of the table of elements? Periodic table? It'd be like asking Baham of Syracuse, you ever heard of the zone defense? Right? He's being provocative. Have you not read, of course they've read this. Have you not read what David did when he was hungry? He and those were with him. He entered the house of God, the temple, he took and ate the bread of the presence, which is only lawful for the priest to eat. And he gave it to those with him. Now he's using another example, just as he said on the bridegroom, he's now using another example, but it's something written more specifically in history. David, when on a mission, was hungry, goes by, sees that he could take this bread, and he does so. Was it lawful for David to take the bread? David wasn't a priest, he was not of the Levite tribe. David is of the tribe of Judah. Now in Matthew, we see a helpful harmoneutical tool where Jesus even says, mercy is better than sacrifice. And so it seems as if the rule of mercy is what applies so that David is able to take what he otherwise normally would not take. That's helpful, but we're in Luke. I believe what Luke is pointing out is David took what would normally be unlawful for him. He was the king, he was a foreshadow of the Messiah. He went into that temple and God gave him the authority to take which would normally not be right for him to take. And then Jesus says, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus is simply declaring, I, the Lord, I, the creator of this earth, I, the promise giver to Israel, I, the law giver to Moses, Jesus says, am Lord over this most holy day. Who do you think you are? The Pharisees are trying to tell the author of the Sabbath what's right and what's wrong on the Sabbath. This is like whenever one of my kids might be misbehaving and my wife are right there and one of their children needs to correct them. No, we got this. We're parents, we're right here. This is silly for the Pharisees because they have not seen who he is. He's shown them he has the authority of God to forgive sins by raising a paralytic. And yet, they're still trying to make sure he obeys their rules. Jesus declares, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. This is significant for us to wrestle with. The Sabbath was at the center of their worship. It's how they order their week. It's how they demonstrated their faith in God. It's how they were not like the nations, and it wasn't they just decided what they would do or not do on the Sabbath. They recognized it was a gift and a privilege from God to trust Him. If you think about this important element of worship, who is sovereign over our worship? Just to be clear, we're trying to be as submissive to God in worship as we possibly can be. Our worship service starts with a call to worship. We read scripture. Our songs, we hope, our paraphrase, or words of scripture, we're singing to one another. We wanna read God's word. We're trying to proclaim God's word. We're praying God's word. We're gonna end with a benediction. All those things are very important. We're seeking to submit and order our corporate life together according to God's word. What are we gonna do? We leave. pray you're challenged and encouraged to keep ordering your lives around God's Word. Trusting Him who actually is sovereign of worship. Now, is today the Sabbath? We can talk about that later. Let's talk about it. Sabbath, that's the seventh day. That was yesterday. according to the Jewish pattern, according to God's creation, today's the first day of the week. Yesterday was the Sabbath. When Jesus is taking the grain, it's happening on yesterday, not today. That was the holy day of Israel. And what Jesus is showing here is I'm the Lord of the Sabbath, I have the authority over this day, and we'll also see he is himself the Sabbath. The whole goal of God's plan is for us to find and end up and live with His rest. Jesus is our only rest. We do not work our way into His salvation. We trust His work so that He becomes our rest. He alone provides us rest. So what is today? If you look to the front of your bulletin, It's the Lord's Day. If you're not a Christian, one of the most challenging things you have to wrestle with is what caused an entire people to change their holy day. all of Israel, Saturday was the holy day. And then all of a sudden, mostly Jews early on started not worshiping on Saturday, but the next day. And their reasoning is that's the day Jesus rose from the dead. The most clear historical evidence that Jesus is risen is that we're here worshiping right now on Sunday. You are testifying right now, if you're a Christian, that he has risen because we're here today to praise him, to exalt him, to remind one another of him. Today's the holy day of the church. If you wanna acknowledge and continue on the Sabbath, that just means yesterday you shouldn't have worked. But if you wanna acknowledge and recognize the holy day of the church, the Lord's day, It's not what we don't do on our holy day, it's what we do. We come together. We encourage one another. We lift up Christ to one another. We forgive one another. We confess to one another. We love one another. We serve one another. We exhort one another. The Christian holy day is the Lord's day because that is the day Christ is risen to begin a new creation because he's made us his new creation and we're waiting for that day to come. An encouragement. As Israel ordered their lives on the Sabbath, what would it look like for us to order our days around the Lord's day? What patterns will we be showing by faith in a demonstrable way by ordering our lives around what Christ commands us on his resurrection day? The third point. beginning in chapter six, verse six. He is the Lord of goodness. Notice the previous two, the Pharisees, they're the ones who initiated. Now Jesus is gonna initiate. On another Sabbath, new day, new scene, maybe new Pharisees, he entered the synagogue and was teaching. The early church, they designed actually what we do around the synagogue. Again, we're very like the Pharisees. They would read God's word, they would pray God's word, they would sing God's word. Here in the synagogue, that's the place for teaching, and he was teaching. And then notice the emphasis on the character. A man was there whose right hand was withered. He was lame in his hand. And the scribes and Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath. Now this already shows you Jesus has a pattern. When somebody is in need, Jesus heals them. He rightly is caring for whoever comes. There's a pattern. They're expected. They're there to see Jesus. They see the man with the withered hand. They're just thinking, all right, we're gonna wait because this is gonna be a moment he cannot resist. He's gonna break the Sabbath. Notice, so they might find a reason to accuse him. Now, that's never a helpful posture. They're looking to find Jesus wrong. But he knew their thoughts, again, he's God, and he said to the man with the withered hand, come and stand here. And so Jesus, knowing this is their intention, Jesus knowing that they're trying to set a trap, they're trying to find a way to accuse him, he initiates and says, hey, come here, puts him in the middle, and then notice what Jesus says. I ask you. He's challenging their tradition, their posture, their position in the law. Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to harm? To save life or destroy it? He's getting at their motivation. He's getting at who they are. He's getting at their very posture towards the people. Oh, and then this next moment. After looking around at them, Can you imagine what this stare from God would feel like? The men who have been set apart to teach God's word, who have been not using God's word to teach what is good and saves life but is destroyed, can you imagine the whole just being stared into their heads and hearts? The stare here of judgment we should all be terrified of. After looking around at them, He said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he did so. And the hand was restored. This is what Jesus does, he restores. The Sabbath is meant to be a day of remembering God's promises. And here Jesus is keeping the promises. He has come to restore. He's the Lord of the Sabbath. He can do what is good on the Sabbath, and he's confronting them. He's now exposing them. You just wanna keep people down with your Sabbath laws. You're not teaching what's good, you're teaching in pride. The Sabbath laws were to restore all. The Sabbath laws were to restore the goodness and order. The Sabbath laws were to point to arrest. Notice the previous miracles brought awe and wonder and people were amazed. Look at the Pharisees and their response, verse 11. They were filled with fury and disgust with one another what they might do to Jesus. Because he's done good on the Sabbath. Because he's restored on the Sabbath, they now want to attack him. Now, I remember that rule that I think for Matthew was helpful as we look at all of these, mercy over sacrifice. But what Jesus has intentionally done is exposed to them their own hearts. He's exposed to the people their own hearts. They're not for the good of God. They're not for the good of people. If you're not a Christian, I hope you see something today. God has come. Jesus Christ is God who has come for the purpose of doing good. for the purpose of saving life, for the purpose of restoring what's broken. And what keeps these Pharisees from delighting in that, rejoicing in it, and pursuing it, is their refusal to see that there's anything broken, wrong, or sinful about themselves. The challenge today, are you merciful as God is merciful? Are you perfect as God is perfect? Are we sinners who truly seek to obey God and worship Him as Jesus reveals, or are we like these Pharisees? We just always try to figure out there's somebody else worse than me that I can make myself feel better by comparing myself to. If you're not a Christian, the most dangerous form of pride is religious. Here, this religious pride is keeping them from believing in Him. who alone can forgive. Christian, we cannot question the will of our God. God has given us his will in so many different passages, but here we see the good will of Christ. It's to do good. It's to bless. It's to restore. It's to save. There's a way in which we see the kingdom of God coming at hand because Jesus is doing what seems to be impossible. Over and over again, Jesus is doing what seems to be impossible. We recognize His grace is efficient. We believe in Him. And then we seek to obey. We've seen three rounds. And Jesus' main focus, our main focus, is to be, He's Lord. He's the Lord of godliness. He is the Lord who is truly perfect in every way. He alone, God declared, with him I'm well pleased. Is Jesus truly defining the way we want to be godly, pious, holy, obedient? Do we find loopholes? Where do we find loopholes? That's what we do. Let's just be honest. We like to find loopholes around God's clear commandments. And then we like to add to the laws we really like to make sure we feel spiritual. It's dangerous. God's son invites us. He's the bridegroom who loves us and demonstrate that love because he died on the cross for us. He's the Lord of the Sabbath that gives us rest and then he orders our lives around his goodness and kindness. And He's the one who restores us to good. He alone is worthy of all our worship as He calls us. Will you pray with me? Father, we thank you that you have not left us alone to confuse your word with our own rules and traditions. How much worse is it when we just come up with our own ideas that reject who you are because we want to make you like ourselves. We thank you, Jesus, for coming, for dying, to give us rest from the weary labor of trying to wash ourselves and cleanse ourselves and make ourselves right before you. Thank you that we can trust you because your work is sufficient to restore us to our relationship with God and to once again be restored Good. Lord, we thank you for your laws. Lord, I pray we would know how to continually practice and make them habits for your glory. Help us, Lord, to order our lives around the good things you've declared. Help us, Lord, to trust you as our Lord, who is good, who is loving, who brings order. In Jesus' name we pray.