The sermon text provided below is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.

Well, if you would remain standing for our reading of our sermon text this evening,
which is taken from Hebrews chapter 4, Hebrews chapter 4, verses 9 and 10.
We looked at this whole chapter last time, and we’re going to focus in this evening on two verses here,
Hebrews chapter 4, 9 and 10.
So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God,
for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Amen. You may be seated.
Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, we would ask that you would come and give us your presence.
Lord, we are gathered here as your people.
We would ask that you would feed your people from your word.
We need you. We need your word. We need your spirit to give us life.
We ask that you would do that this evening.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
All right. Well, if you want, you can start now by placing a finger in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5.
We’ll look at those in a few minutes.
But in the meantime, titled this message, The Last Sabbath, that could have all kinds of meanings.
But one of the meanings will become clear with this story from when I was growing up.
But to start off, what makes something holy?
What if it’s about what you don’t do as much as what you do?
Now, when I was in high school, my dad took a job delivering bread as an independent distributor for a large baking company.
Some of the perks were that he was an independent contractor and he could hire whoever he wanted.
Since we were homeschooled, I started driving a big bread truck as soon as I got my license at 16.
The advantage to having us kids help him was that we got to see my dad all day if we went to work,
and that he got home three to four hours earlier than without our help.
The disadvantage of the job was that as long as the grocery stores and restaurants that we delivered to were open,
there was a significant possibility they might unexpectedly need more bread than my dad had ordered,
which was two weeks before he delivered it, making it my dad’s responsibility to remedy the situation.
Since most grocery stores and restaurants he serviced stayed open on Sunday,
there were numerous times when he would get a call and have to try to deliver bread before or after church,
or sometimes miss it altogether.
While holidays meant extra work like most retail jobs,
we found Christmas to be especially enjoyable because even Walmart was closed,
so there was no possibility that anyone could call needing extra bread.
Christmas is one of those few remaining Sabbaths that is nearly universally celebrated in our culture.
Not that they honor the birth of Jesus, but that they actually stop for a moment.
Closing everything down for a day takes preparation, it takes planning, but it creates unexpected freedom.
I sometimes refer to Christmas as the last Sabbath in our culture.
For most other holidays we expect retail to remain open, even extend their hours to facilitate our celebration.
But on Christmas, retail too catches its breath
and leaves our ADHD culture to figure out how to cope with its own boredom.
Christmas time feels magical for a whole host of reasons,
but everything closing down even for just a day is part of what makes it feel special.
When everything normal stops, it opens up opportunities to celebrate things that we don’t normally get to celebrate.
We’ve come to call time off holidays, which of course comes from the two words, holy day.
When God instituted the Israelite calendar of holy days and festivals, they all included a stopping of their regular work.
The word Sabbath is simply the common Hebrew word for stopping, ceasing, ending, resting,
and it’s used all over the place, as well as to refer to that special day of resting.
In Hebrews 4, verse 9, the phrase Sabbath rest that we see is actually a single Greek word,
which doesn’t show up anywhere else in the whole New Testament or Old.
And it’s a special word saying kind of like Sabbath-ing.
There remains a Sabbath-ing for the people of God.
And he means it to be a resting and a rejoicing in that.
So tonight we’re going to consider three things.
We’re going to consider, first, God’s promise of rest, second, our need for rest, and third, the fulfillment of God’s rest.
So first, we’ll look at the promise of God’s rest, God’s promise of rest.
As we saw last time, verse 1 of chapter 4 in Hebrews tells us to fear missing out,
since the promise of entering God’s rest still stands.
Registration is still open.
The window of opportunity is not closed.
And then in verses 3 and 4, the writer grounds his argument from the second chapter of the entire Bible.
He takes us all the way back to Genesis chapter 2, verses 1 through 3.
Genesis 2, verses 1 through 3 says, Thus the heavens and the earth were finished,
and all the host of them.
And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done,
and he rested from the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy,
because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
The creation of the Sabbath or the Sabbath of creation.
Here God creates by stopping.
Earlier, God had distinguished light from darkness, day from night, sky from sea, dry land from water.
Now his final act, he distinguishes work from rest.
Our weekly structure.
Have you ever thought about why we have seven day increments called weeks?
Why not eight or nine or ten?
Why not more? Why not fewer?
It’s rooted in God’s creation of the world.
Did you know that during the French Revolution,
when the secular atheists wanted to remove all traces of Christianity from their culture and society,
they implemented a ten day week.
In 1793, the revolutionary leaders declared it to be year one,
and imposed a logical week according to their prized metric system.
Unsurprisingly, it only lasted twelve years,
and in 1805 people couldn’t take it anymore.
It kind of reminds me of the current efforts in scholarship
to move from dating things as B.C. before Christ,
or A.D. Anno Domini, which stands for year of our Lord,
and they changed it to B.C.E. before Common Era, or Common Era,
in order to avoid referencing Christ.
But guess where they still divide the line at the birth of Christ?
They still can’t get away from God’s imprint on history.
Remember that next time that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t believe in God.
Ask them if they’ve ever thought about where we get a seven day week.
If they try to say it’s arbitrary, ask them why no one has successfully changed it,
and why there is such universal agreement.
It’s not based on astronomy, as the year, month, and days are,
yet it’s ingrained in nature.
God created in six days and rested on the seventh day.
Atheistic evolution argues for a never-ending process of creation,
but the seven day week of the world that we live in comes from a God
who ended his creation because he had finished, he had completed it.
The very structure of our week is a proclamation of God to the world,
of his authority as creator,
and ultimately that the promise of entering his rest still stands.
But second, we see the Sabbath as God’s covenant sign.
When we look at Exodus chapter 31, verses 12 through 17,
we see God laying out something about the Sabbath.
The Sabbath is a creation ordinance rooted in God’s design for the world.
Its purpose is deepened by God’s redemptive work.
We see in Exodus 31, 12, and 13, it says this,
and the Lord said to Moses,
You are to speak to the people of Israel and say,
Above all, you shall keep my Sabbath,
for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations,
that you may know that I the Lord sanctify you.
We jump down to verse 16,
Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath,
observing the Sabbath throughout their generations as a covenant forever.
God says that this weekly resting is meant to be a sign of God’s covenant with Israel.
It’s one of the things that will set them apart from the world as God’s people.
The Old Testament festivals included stopping.
It wasn’t just the regular weekly Sabbath,
If you read through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy,
you will find numerous references to the special celebrations
that they were called to celebrate,
and they always say, It shall be to you a Sabbath.
God commanded Israel to regularly stop and celebrate.
Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat,
which can simply mean stop,
but it’s also used to refer to the weekly day of stopping,
as well as the annual Israelite festivals, even the Sabbath years.
Each festival had the requirement that work simply not go on as usual.
Negatively, God uses the Sabbath as a synecdoche for his covenant.
Now, of course, a synecdoche,
that just means using a part of something to refer to the whole.
So he refers to the Sabbath as his covenant,
when the Sabbath is only part of that covenant.
Negatively, God says that Israel broke his covenant.
It says he profaned my Sabbaths over and over again in the prophets.
We see this.
Positively, he promises blessing and salvation to foreigners who keep my Sabbaths.
Isaiah 56, for instance.
God says in verses six through seven of Isaiah 56,
And the foreigners shall join themselves to the Lord,
to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath,
and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant.
These I will bring to my holy mountain.
I will make them joyful in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar,
for my house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
The Sabbath is spoken of positively keep my Sabbaths,
and negatively profaned my Sabbaths.
Keep makes sense, because mundane work has to be kept out.
The day has to be defended from mundaneness, from commonness.
We have to fence off the Sabbath from intrusions.
And profane shows us that God’s rest is related to his holiness.
To profane is to regard something holy as common.
When the day set apart for rest is treated as any other day,
something holy is treated as common.
God’s promised rest is represented in the weekly Sabbath,
which finds its roots in both God’s example in creation,
and his prescription in his law.
Rest is an important part of God’s law to Israel,
as seen in the numerous festivals which all contain the requirement for resting.
But is that all we can say about rest?
Is rest simply arbitrary?
And what we want to look at next is our need for rest.
So secondly, our need for rest.
When we understand who God is from the rest of the scriptures,
for instance, Isaiah 40, 28, it says,
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary.
When we understand who God is from that,
we see that when God rested on the seventh day of history,
it wasn’t because he was tired.
He rested because he was finished.
He also rested to give us an example.
And we see this in Exodus chapter 20.
Exodus chapter 20, 11.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.
Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
If you’ve grown up in church or you have some familiarity with the Bible,
you know that the all-important Ten Commandments can be found in Exodus chapter 20.
But did you know that those core Ten Commandments show up in Deuteronomy chapter 5 as well?
The list is almost identical,
which is why there are a couple of differences which stick out like sore thumbs,
and they mainly have to do with the fourth commandment.
If you put your finger in Exodus 20 and turn over to Deuteronomy 5,
when you look at verse 12,
first we notice a difference in the first word, observe.
If you flip back to Exodus you see that it says remember the Sabbath.
In Deuteronomy it says observe.
Now these are two different words in Hebrew also.
Now the word remember just means remember.
But the word observe is a generic word for doing or making.
So literalistically you might say do the Sabbath.
But this isn’t the real big difference.
The biggest difference from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 is the reason for the Sabbath command.
In Exodus, as we read in verse 11, it’s based on God’s example in creation.
But in Deuteronomy 5.15 we find something else.
Deuteronomy 5.15 says,
You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt,
and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
Therefore the Lord commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
What’s going on here?
How does slavery in Egypt relate to a seven-day week?
By mentioning Egypt, God is rooting the Sabbath rest in salvation,
his act of redeeming Israel from Egypt.
So this means that the fourth commandment, the Sabbath,
is rooted in creation and redemption.
First, let’s consider creation.
Exodus 20, verse 8,
where God roots the fourth commandment in creation.
Physically, mentally, emotionally,
God created us to need sleep.
Unlike the God who created us and created all things, we do grow weary.
While there are certain muscles and systems and processes in our bodies,
which never stop as long as we live, like our heart or brain activity or breathing,
there are plenty of other aspects which require rest.
You won’t just get physically tired, you’ll get cranky, you’ll make bad decisions.
Sleep is required for your mental and emotional health.
Scientists have been trying for centuries to pinpoint exactly why we need sleep.
But the more they find out about the brain, the more it remains a mystery.
The brain doesn’t turn off during sleep, and many of the functions that happen during sleep
are also able to happen while we’re awake.
Yet it remains an unshakable biological reality
that sleep is not only necessary for sanity, but for life.
You will die without sleep.
They don’t know exactly why, but they know you will.
And they say you’ll spend roughly a third more of your life asleep,
unconscious to the world around you.
God created us to need space between tasks.
We don’t just need sleep to segment up our days,
but we need periods of rest interspersed in our work days,
and especially our work weeks.
Burnout is a real issue that we’ll face
if we don’t step back, spend some time relaxing,
just doing something different.
Now it might be equally taxing physically or mentally,
but the fact that it’s different sometimes makes it refreshing.
Our God created need for rest physically forces us to remember
that we’re dependent on God.
We’re forced to remember that the world will keep spinning without us.
God created the world in six days,
and he can govern it without us just fine.
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
In Mark 2, 27, Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees
who are upset that his disciples are eating grain on the Sabbath.
But Jesus reminds the Pharisees who were upset at his disciples
and tells them that the Sabbath was made for man,
not man for the Sabbath.
God made the Sabbath for mankind who needs regular rest.
Mankind is not meant to work, 24-7.
The Sabbath is God’s gift to mankind who desperately need rest.
But second, let’s consider the grounding of redemption,
as it says in Deuteronomy 5.
Spiritually, we need rest.
Augustine, as we saw last week, says,
Our hearts are restless, O God, until they find their rest in you.
We are spiritual beings who need more than sleep, vacation, or a sabbatical.
Our restlessness goes down to the soul level.
Deep down, we know that we’re not on good terms with our Creator.
We’re rebels living for ourselves with the stain of sin on our souls
and the unsettling knowledge that God is not pleased with us.
This problem cannot be solved by positive aphorisms,
by doing good things to make up for it, or by forgiving ourselves,
because the problem is not just in our heads.
The wrath that we sense that is due to us for sinning against God is real.
We need a real solution to this real problem,
a real solution outside ourselves that can give us real rest.
And ultimate rest comes from salvation.
Two thousand years ago, a baby was born.
There was heralded by angels who said,
Glory to God in the highest and on earth,
Peace for those with whom he is pleased.
The baby was named Jesus because the angel said,
He will save his people from their sins.
Christmas isn’t just about good feelings of goodwill.
It’s rooted in a baby who came on a mission.
He was born to die.
Die because all of us have two options to deal with our sin problem.
Either we pay for it ourselves in hell for eternity,
or replace our trust in Jesus to take it in our place.
Peace with God is available to those who are connected to Jesus
by putting their trust in him.
You can have once for all peace with God.
An ongoing daily gospel centered rest comes from two places.
It comes from Jesus’ work and Jesus’ person.
Jesus’ work in his death and resurrection.
Jesus was born because he was on a mission to die and rise again
according to the scriptures.
What he did can apply to you by the Holy Spirit.
You need his death to kill your old heart,
wash your filth and neutralize your destructive life.
You need his resurrection for a new heart,
righteousness and holiness.
And what Jesus did, when what Jesus did gets applied to you,
you can finally have peace with God
and have fine rest for your soul.
Jesus’ final words before dying on the cross were,
it is finished.
Just as God rested only after he had finished in creation,
Jesus also rested when he had finished paying for sins.
You can rest on that.
But also, we find daily rest in Jesus’ person.
Union with Christ.
We all need daily rest.
Christ didn’t do what he did to make you a new person
and send you on your way.
He secured peace with God
in order to establish fellowship with God.
Jesus says in Matthew 11, 28 through 30,
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am gentle and lowly in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls,
for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Daily, hourly rest for your soul comes from a person,
comes from fellowship and intimacy with Jesus.
We’ve looked at God’s promise of the availability of rest
in creation and redemption.
Then we looked at how God’s promise of rest
fulfills our need for rest,
both physically and spiritually.
Then next, we’ll look at the fulfillment of God’s rest.
So third, the fulfillment of God’s rest.
God’s design in the Sabbath
is to make us both holy and happy.
Isaiah 58 that we read before, verses 13 and 14,
If you turn your foot from the Sabbath,
from doing your pleasure on my holy day,
and call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable,
if you honor it, not going your own way
or seeking your own pleasure or talking idly,
then you will take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth.
I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Consider the consecration of the Sabbath.
When we looked at Genesis 2,
we saw that God not only blessed it,
but made it holy, the seventh day.
This is actually the first thing that God makes holy.
God has been blessing things all throughout the creation week
in chapter 1, so it’s not surprising to see
that God is blessing on the seventh day,
but what’s different is that he made it holy.
Things in the temple were consecrated, utensils,
special recipe for incense, the furniture.
They were not to be used for any other purpose,
only for the temple purpose.
Consecration is not just what things are used for,
but also what they’re not used for,
and you can see this in the holy days, the Jewish feasts.
They were times of stopping, ceasing work,
special because it was not normal to stop work,
but normal work was to stop,
because special work was to commence.
You ever come back from a vacation
feeling like you need rest?
Certainly possible you ever did it,
but it’s partly because vacation is a time
not for doing nothing,
but for a time of doing something different.
How do you make an occasion holy?
Well, there’s things that you do.
Maybe you get out the fine china.
You have a fancy menu.
Maybe you dress up in nicer clothes, etc.
But there’s also things you don’t do.
You don’t bring out the regular dishes.
You don’t have the ordinary food.
You don’t wear the ordinary clothes.
We’re called to consecrate the Sabbath.
Or another word is sanctification of the Sabbath.
We are called to sanctify the Sabbath,
which just means to make it holy.
Remember the Sabbath in Exodus 20.
The Sabbath is for remembering what God has done for us,
how much we need him.
We’re told to remember because we’re prone to forget.
Prone to forget the day, prone to forget our need for it,
prone to forget our need for God.
Prone to forget our need for God.
We have to remember to stop from everyday activities,
but also to observe the Sabbath,
to do the Sabbath in Deuteronomy 5.
The Sabbath is not just passive, it’s active.
It takes effort.
It takes intentionality to rest.
It’s not just something we don’t do, but something we do.
We gather for worship.
The Sabbath sanctifies us.
The Sabbath sanctifies us physically.
We need to rest.
John Piper likes to say that sometimes the most sanctifying
thing you can do is take a nap.
Callie and I have found that there are arguments to which
the only solution is sleep.
We’ve become more adept over the years at spotting those
arguments earlier and putting them on hold sooner until
we’ve had some sleep.
It is pretty amazing that parents that will recognize the
lack of sleep in their kids, which makes things hard,
but fail to recognize it in themselves when they’re having
arguments with each other.
But we also need rest spiritually.
We need spiritual rest.
Coming to worship forces us to take our eyes off of ourselves
and put them on God.
This reminds us that our salvation is not accomplished by
our efforts.
We don’t work to bring about our salvation.
We work as a result of our salvation.
It’s an utterly crucial difference, distinction that
must not be missed.
We don’t work to bring about our salvation, but as a result
of our salvation.
The Sabbath is meant to put our eyes on heaven.
There is a final Sabbath coming, a rest from fighting sin,
from guilt, from sorrow, from pain.
Revelation 21, familiar passage, verses one through four.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven
and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.
And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of
heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the
dwelling place of God is with man.
He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God
himself will be their God.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall
be no more.
Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore
for the former things have passed away.
The heart of heavenly rest is fellowship with God.
God himself will be with them as their God, it says.
To have God as your God means resting in his salvation from
your sins and his daily provision of your needs.
So when the writer of Hebrews says there remains a Sabbath
rest, he doesn’t just mean in the future.
He says forever, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also
rested from his works as God did from his.
The promise of entering God’s rest is for right now, especially
on the Lord’s day.
Hebrews 12 portrays it this way when you come to worship.
Hebrews 12, 22 and 24.
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal
gatherings, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are
enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the
spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the
mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that
speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Abel was murdered.
His blood cried out to God, saying, give the killer no
rest.
But Jesus’ blood says, forgive them.
I paid the price.
For we who have believed have entered that rest.
And it says, whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested
from his works as God did from his.
We follow God’s example when we rest in the finished work of
Christ on our behalf for our salvation.
Don’t wait for some day to enter God’s rest.
Enter now.
Stop trying to make it up to God for what you’ve done or for
what he’s done for you.
He doesn’t want to be repaid.
He wants you to rest in what he’s done for you, to enter into
his joy and invite others to do the same.
Amen.
Let’s pray.
Our Father in heaven, we thank you that you have appointed that
rest.
You have opened your rest up to unworthy sinners.
By sending your son as a baby, as a man, destined to die, and
putting him to death for our sakes, that you have opened up
the way to enter your rest.
Lord, we ask that you would cause us to enter that rest now,
that by faith we would stop trusting in our own strength or
our own works, and rest in what you have done for us.
And we pray this in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
Well, in response, let’s turn to Hymn 479.
Jesus, I am resting, resting.
Hymn 479.
If you would please stand.