October 11, 2015 A.D., by Pastor Ben Willis

The Prophet Isaiah 58:1-14 [NLTse]

“Shout with the voice of a trumpet blast. Shout aloud! Don’t be timid. Tell My people Israel of their sins! 2 Yet they act so pious! They come to the Temple every day and seem delighted to learn all about Me. They act like a righteous nation that would never abandon the laws of its God. They ask Me to take action on their behalf, pretending they want to be near Me. 3 ‘We have fasted before You!’ they say. ‘Why aren’t You impressed? We have been very hard on ourselves, and you don’t even notice it!’

“I will tell you why!” I respond. “It’s because you are fasting to please yourselves. Even while you fast, you keep oppressing your workers. 4 What good is fasting when you keep on fighting and quarreling? This kind of fasting will never get you anywhere with Me. 5 You humble yourselves by going through the motions of penance, bowing your heads like reeds bending in the wind. You dress in burlap and cover yourselves with ashes. Is this what you call fasting? Do you really think this will please the Lord?

6 “No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. 7 Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help.

8 “Then your salvation will come like the dawn, and your wounds will quickly heal. Your godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind. 9 Then when you call, the Lord will answer. ‘Yes, I am here,’ He will quickly reply.

“Remove the heavy yoke of oppression. Stop pointing your finger and spreading vicious rumors! 10 Feed the hungry, and help those in trouble. Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon. 11 The Lord will guide you continually, giving you water when you are dry and restoring your strength. You will be like a well-watered garden, like an ever-flowing spring. 12 Some of you will rebuild the deserted ruins of your cities. Then you will be known as a rebuilder of walls and a restorer of homes.

13 “Keep the Sabbath day holy. Don’t pursue your own interests on that day, but enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight as the Lord’s holy day. Honor the Sabbath in everything you do on that day, and don’t follow your own desires or talk idly. 14 Then the Lord will be your delight. I will give you great honor and satisfy you with the inheritance I promised to your ancestor Jacob. I, the Lord, have spoken!”

Today we’re continuing our new series called I Love Sundays.

Just for fun, I made a list this week of things I love. I love my wife: Amy. I love my kids: Noah, Eden, and Caleb. I love swimming in the ocean at the beach. I love our family vacations in Maine. I love reading a good book. I love superheroes. (Crazy, I know. But when their characters are portrayed well the whole idea of them just makes me smile.) (By the way, Jesus is my favorite superhero. And, of course, He’s real!) I love reading a good book…

Now, do me a favor, turn to somebody next to you in your pew and, in thirty seconds or less, tell them three things you love. Ready? Go!

If you worked at it awhile, I’ll bet we all could come up with a long, long list of things that we love. Did anyone here think to include Sundays on your list?

Let’s get into the habit. Practice with me now, will you? I’ll say it, then you say it: I Love Sundays! (“I Love Sundays!”) I Love Sundays!! (“I Love Sundays!!”)

Let’s pray before we dive in together…

Father in Heaven: You made us, and we’re grateful. You designed us, and You know how we best work. We came this morning hoping that you would speak to us in life-changing ways. And that’s our prayer right now: Lord, in these next few minutes, please speak to us and change us. We are listening. In Jesus’s name. Amen?

I want to propose to you today that Sunday was meant to be the best day of your week. During Jesus’ day, the Jews had all sorts of laws about what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath. One Sabbath day, Jesus was hanging out with His disciples, and they were debating which things applied to them and which things didn’t. In a show-stopping statement, Jesus clarified God’s purpose for the Sabbath once and for all when He said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

What Jesus was saying was, of all the days of the week, God knew we would need a day to break from everything else we were doing and refuel, re-fresh, and re-focus. So, when God was arranging the rhythm of the world, He set one day apart: The Sabbath.

Study the history of Christianity and I think you’ll see that whenever people have taken the time to set aside a day for rest and re-focus with God, their lives have gone better. They’ve felt better about themselves, enjoyed their families more, and experienced the smile of God.

The problem is, in 2015, we live in a never-stopping culture where 24/7 we never have enough time because we never stop worrying about deadlines and never feel like we’re making enough money to guarantee our happiness. Day in and day out we live with pressure: Pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure…

[Take out a balloon and blow it up.] There are two ways to get rid of the pressure in a balloon. [Take out a pin.] You can pop it. [Pop it pretty close to the microphone.] Or [blow up a second balloon], you can let the air release from it slowly. Let the air escape from the neck of the balloon, again, fairly close to the microphone.] Human beings aren’t all that different. Of course, we all pop in different ways: Some have nervous breakdowns; others leave their families and run away; still others begin having affairs or go out and buy expensive cars or quit their jobs, etc…

But for Christians, popping isn’t the only option.

Do this with me. (It’s going to seem weird, but do it anyway.) Put your teeth together and just go “Sssss.” One, two, three: Sssss.

You know what you were just doing? Letting off pressure. Try it again: Sssss. Doesn’t that feel good? (Silly maybe, but it still feels good, doesn’t it?)

I don’t want you to relax so much this morning that you go to sleep, but I do want you to relax enough to lower your blood pressure, listen well, and leave here in a little while feeling a weight lifted off your shoulders…

Set the clock back in our country a hundred years, two hundred years, or three hundred years and there was a lot less pressure. Nobody worked on Sundays. Businesses were closed for the day. There were no kids’ traveling all-star teams. People used Sunday for a rest day. Which seems very old-fashioned. But doesn’t something about that old-fashioned lifestyle call to you?

In prior generations Americans got a lot less done on Sundays. But as a result, they got a lot more done on Mondays! After a day of rest, they attacked the week eagerly. Work was considered a noble thing.

Athletes have found they perform better by working hard and then resting, working hard and then resting, instead of working hard all the time. Our muscles were designed for stress, and then release. Our souls were, too.

Imagine this for a minute: what if we took a step backward in order to go forward?

Way back in the Old Testament, the nation of Israel was about to enter the Promised Land. For forty years they had lived in the desert, without houses or jobs or responsibilities. As they got ready to enter the Promised Land, where they would occupy homes and lead working lives, God visited their leader, Joshua, and talked to him about his priorities. He said [hold up a Bible], “Study this Book of Instruction continually. Meditate on it day and night so you will be sure to obey everything written in it. Only then will you prosper and succeed in all you do.” (Joshua 1:8)

God was saying, “Joshua, once you and your people settle in, you are going to be very tempted to work, work, work to get ahead. But if you work, work, work, to get ahead, you won’t get ahead. You’ll fall behind.”

“Joshua, the secret to getting ahead is to spend time in this Book. Because if you get into this Book, this Book will get into you. And if this Book gets into you, you will become the kind of person who is prosperous and successful.”

And that’s been proven true. In eighteenth-century England, John and Charles Wesley started a movement that resulted in 100,000 weekly Bible studies by 1798. And for the next one hundred years, England was the most prosperous nation in the world.

In 1857, Jeremiah Lanphier started a noontime prayer meeting in the Dutch Reformed Church in downtown New York City that sparked a movement of Bible reading throughout our country. As a result, the history of America’s westward expansion was marked by households huddled around their kitchen tables at night. Mom would do some sewing while the kids played quietly and dad read the Bible to them all, out loud, for an hour. Once that Bible-reading habit was ingrained in our families, over the next one hundred years, the United States became the most prosperous nation on earth.

People today say they’re too busy to read the Bible because they have to work more hours to get ahead. But the Bible says that if you’ll read it regularly, you’ll become the sort of person who gets ahead.

The same is true with the Sabbath. We think we can get ahead by working more. But sometimes the best way to be productive is to rest and refuel for a while. That’s the concept of the Sabbath, and God invented it. The way to make your Mondays better is to start with Sundays.

In the Bible, God prescribes fifty-two Sabbaths a year as part of our health-maintenance plan. That’s seven and a half weeks of spiritual vacation! God did this because when He wired us up, He constructed us to run best on a rhythm of engagement and withdrawl; exertion, and then release.

Do this once again: Sssss! No pressure today, just release.

Open or turn on your Bible to Isaiah 58. Let’s look together at  verse 13. God says:

“Keep the Sabbath day holy. Don’t pursue your own interests on that day, but enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight as the Lord’s holy day. Honor the Sabbath in everything you do on that day, and don’t follow your own desires or talk idly. Then the Lord will be your delight. I will give you great honor and satisfy you with the inheritance I promised to your ancestor Jacob. I, the Lord, have spoken!”

Repeat line three after me: Enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight. (“Enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight.”) And line eight: I will give you great honor and satisfy you. (“I will give you great honor and satisfy you.”)

God’s secret for our being greatly honored and satisfied is enjoying the Sabbath and calling it a delight! Which means that Sunday ought to be the best day of your week!

How can you make that happen? What would it look like to make Sunday the best day of your week?

There are two steps we need to take to make Sundays great. The first is to make a conscious decision to honor God’s rhythm for your life.

A few years ago, a pastor was at the Western Wall in Jerusalem as the Jews there brought in the Sabbath together. He wrote, “It was a raucous celebration. Jewish men, dressed in their finest, were bobbing back and forth. Israeli soldiers, Uzis in hand, were singing Sabbath songs together. One little boy ran up to me with a huge smile on his face and shouted ‘Shabbat Shalom’ (‘Sabbath peace’) to me like I was a long lost relative. It was one of the most festive celebrations I’ve ever seen.”

Sabbath celebration is so sacred to the Jewish people that the entire nation of Israel puts their elevators on automatic during the Sabbath. To avoid even the slightest amount of work, like pushing an elevator button, Israeli elevators are programmed to stop and open on every floor from the beginning of the Sabbath to its end. This might seem extreme to us because we live in a country where everyone can do whatever they want to. But imagine if you lived in a high-rise and every Sunday your elevator stopped on every floor whether you wanted it to or not?

Board an elevator in Israel on the Sabbath, and every stop will remind you that there is a God who created the world and He wants you to release and enjoy Him. That would be a great reminder, wouldn’t it, a great reminder of God’s rhythm for our lives?

If step one in making Sunday the best day of your week is to honor God’s rhythm for your life, step two takes it a little further. Step two is…

2. Prepare for Sunday as if it’s the highlight of your week.

Think of it this way. Guys, when you ask a girl out on a date, don’t you usually take a shower ahead of time, comb your hair, and put on some clean clothes? (Let’s hope so.)

How about when you ask a girl to the prom? It’s a lot more special, right? You would buy her flowers. You probably rent a tuxedo. Maybe you wash your car. You make special plans or reservations for dinner. Now, the regular date and your prom date might even be with the same girl, but what makes one good and the other extra-good is in the planning ahead and the extra-preparations, right?

So, think about this: On a normal weekend, the Smith family goes out and does something fun on Saturday night, sleeps until the last minute Sunday morning, rushes to get ready for church, and bickers all the way to the parking lot. (I know that never happens to your family. J)

How hard is it to have a great experience at church if you’ve had a miserable experience getting to church, hmm? Pretty hard!

So let’s rewind the Smith family’s weekend for a minute. What if, instead of whooping it up on Saturday night, they changed their “whoop night” to Friday? What if Mr. and Mrs. Smith developed a plan for preparing for Sunday like Sunday morning was the prom?

If the Smiths have small children, imagine this: It’s Saturday morning and Mrs. Smith is asking each member of the family what they want to wear to church tomorrow. Armed with this information, she does laundry or irons clothes to make sure the chosen clothes are ready by morning. On Saturday evening, Mr. Smith helps the kids to an early or normal bedtime. What kind of difference would it make in your church experience if every member of your family woke up rested on Sunday morning and everything they wanted to wear was already set out for them?

If you’re the Smiths and you have teens, you might not want to kill your kids’ social life every weekend by insisting on an early Saturday night curfew. But what if you worked together to come up with a mutually acceptable plan for Sunday mornings? What if you held a family huddle to talk about how long each member of the family will need to shower, dress, and eat breakfast so that you’re not all yelling at each other for the bathroom, falling over each other in the kitchen, and then running for the car at the last minute?

If you’re a single parent, you’re huddling with your kids and developing your own family game plan. The U.S. Marines have a saying, “Proper prior planning prevents poor performance.” Plan for church like you’d plan for the prom!

Now, replay Sunday morning. This might never happen, but imagine if it did: If it takes your family fifteen minutes to get to church, what if you all got in the car twenty-five minutes before church started and drove over here at or under the speed limit? No honking. No bickering. You could even sing a verse of “Kum-ba-ya” together on the way! When you get out of the car, you could actually walk across the parking lot leisurely. You could stop and have a conversation in the Narthex and still arrive in Sunday School or Worship with a few minutes to spare!

Now, this might seem like a fantasy, but does it have to be?

Like prom versus date, the difference in a good Sunday and a great Sunday just might be in planning ahead and the extra-preparations!

Let’s pray…

Father: Thank You for creating us for rhythm and for rest. It’s great to be Your church together! Help us to live the kind of lives you intended for us and to make the Sabbath a delight. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen?