Good
Morning Friends,
“Remember
the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your
work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall
not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or
maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days
the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but
he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and
made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11)
God
knows the weaknesses of men. This commandment addresses a couple of those weaknesses.
One
is our tendency to forget, even important things. We get so caught up in the
busyness of life that we are capable of going through life without ever
thinking about some really important things, including God! To guard against
that tendency, God established the principle of the Sabbath. He asked man to
set aside one day when we would take a break from the normal routine of life in
order to focus on Him. The Law is no longer binding on us, but the principle
remains true. We still have the same tendency that was present when God gave
the commandments to Moses. We still have the same need to set aside time on a
regular basis (at least weekly) to focus on God and re-orient our lives around
the things that are truly important.
The
second is our tendency to keep working until we drop. It’s not necessarily a
tendency that is seen in every person, but it is common enough that God wanted
to protect us from it. He established the Sabbath so that His people would be
forced to take one day off from work each week. The Sabbath would guard against
becoming workaholics.
God
established the Sabbath for our benefit, not for His. Jesus said, “The Sabbath
was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) The Sabbath was
established to protect mankind from our own weaknesses.
His,
by Grace, Steve
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