Remember the Sabbath

Q #103: What is God’s will for you in the fourth commandment?:  A: First, that the gospel ministry and education for it be maintained, and that, especially on the festive day of rest, I diligently attend the assembly of God’s people to learn what God’s Word teaches, to participate in the sacraments, to pray to God publicly, and to bring Christian offerings to the poor.  Second, that every day of my life I rest from my evil ways, let the Lord work in me through his Spirit, and so begin in this life the eternal Sabbath.

As I was contemplating this devotion, several ways to illustrate “God’s will for [us] in the fourth commandment” came to mind. Some were funny, some were poignant, and most of them ended with the likely result of making the reader feel guilty about being a poor keeper of the fourth commandment.  But out of all of these Ten Commandments, isn’t this one in particular—especially for Christians encountering it on the other side of the cross of Jesus Christ—a microcosm of the gospel? There is nothing we can do to save ourselves, and Jesus went to the cross to save us. All we can do is receive. Swiss theologian Karl Barth explains that the God who commands our abstaining and resting from our own works—the God who created us and commissions us to do his work—is the God who is gracious to us in Jesus Christ. Barth continues by arguing that the Sabbath then points us away from everything that we ourselvescan will and achieve and back to what God is for us and will do for us.  If that is true, then how would making you feel guilty convey that? I think that illustrating the gospel by inducing guilt undercuts the message entirely. Maybe that is why the catechism focuses almost entirely on ”the gospel ministry and education for it” for what we are to do on the Lord’s Day. QA103 first commends the assembling of God’s people in order that we might experience this gospel in Word, sacrament, prayer, and offering. Each of these, in their own way, convey this good news of Christ to us. We encounter Christ himself in the Word, read and proclaimed. God’s promise to forgive us in Christ is sealed in our participation in the sacraments. Public prayer by the congregation allows us each to join in offering praise and petition, adoration and confession, again reminding us of our daily dependence on the Lord. Offering our treasure to support the ministry of the church and benevolence work reminds us that everything that we have is a gift from God, and gives us a way to acknowledge him as giver.  Maybe you need rest right now to clear a way to experience the good news of Christ anew. What is getting in the way of your receiving God’s grace? Maybe that prevents your beginning already in this life the eternal Sabbath. Our practice of Sabbath on the Lord’s Day is a kind of firstfruit of our eternal rest. As Christians, our Lord’s Day rest and worship are a focused way in which the Lord works through us in his Spirit, and gives us a foretaste already of the life promised to us. Why not experience that now? ~Pastor Matt