January 14, 2012

Today is Audrey’s birthday, and she awakens in Honduras. The team will leave Talanga and travel to the valley of the angels for culture and shopping. Tonight they will stay near Teguc in a bed and breakfast, and fly home tomorrow. Audrey enjoys each part of a mission trip, and this day of touring and shopping in an artisan town should be a fitting way to celebrate this anniversary of her birth. Tonight the team will surprise her.

Today’s theme for me is “weddings.” I have two counseling sessions with couples planning their spring weddings, and then a very large wedding at 5:00 pm at Wesley. The fact that there are 4 ring bearers and 3 wedding coordinators indicates the scope of this event. Today also will involve making phone calls to leaders, writing an email to igniting leaders, encouraging the Upward ministries, and finalizing my sermon for Sunday. It is by necessity further along than usual, given the wedding work I will do today.

For my devotional reading of scripture, I am getting ahead of the gospel portion of the One Year Bible, but reading a chapter a day of Matthew seems to be a good pattern for me.

Matthew 12

This chapter finds Jesus, on the Sabbath walking through the grain fields with his disciples. “They became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, ‘Behold, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.’” (Verses 1b-2) Thus the chapter involves Jesus teaching about the Sabbath, going to their synagogue and healing a man on the Sabbath, and infuriating the Pharisees who began to plan how to destroy him.

Jesus teaches that he is “Lord of the Sabbath”, and that David and his men violated an ordinance when they are the consecrated bread, and that every week the priests in the temple break the Sabbath, but are not guilty. This whole topic of sabbath-keeping continues to be a point of interest to me. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8) is the fourth commandment. Of the Ten Commandments, this seems to be the one that Christians lack clarity in following. I know that as a pastor, my work on Sunday (the first day of the week, the “sabbath” for Christians) requires the most exertion. I recognize that in our culture, the fast pace of life is destructive, and everyone needs a day of rest in the cycle of the 7 day week.

My insight this morning is that Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, and that as He says in Mark 2:27 “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” Given that all followers of Christ are priests, and that the 4th commandment does not spell out exactly what it means to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy”, I think that there is still much to be gained for all of us who follow Christ to reflect upon the Sabbath, and find ways to remember it and keep it holy.

For me, here are some of the components of my remembering the Sabbath: 1. I treat each day as a gift from God, to be kept holy. 2. I understand the technical sense of Saturday (today!) being the seventh day of the week, kept as the Sabbath by Jews and 7th day Adventists. 3. I celebrate Sunday as commemorating the day of Christ’s resurrection, and worship every Sunday as my way of remembering this. 4. I recognize that God made us in His image, and that He rested on the 7th day of creation, thus we need to rest from our labors one day in seven (for me that is typically Monday), 5. This modern culture seems to live for the weekends, which are times of self gratification and self absorption, thus to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy is truly counter cultural today. It used to be that blue laws were in place and forced people to remember that Sunday was set apart in a different way.

Guide me Holy Lord, Lord of the Sabbath, Lord of Heaven and Earth, as I follow you, serve you, represent you, teach about you, and live a life of love.