Remembering The Jesus Of Christmas (Audio)

This week's audio message:

Remembering The Jesus of Christmas

Grace For Life audio archives are here.

Remembering The Jesus Of Christmas

It's almost Christmas as I write.

And we all know the Christian warnings about remembering Jesus. Jesus is the reason for the season. Keep Christ in Christmas. And these cliches have become cliches because they are valid.

Still, the baby in a manger was just the beginning.

It's good to celebrate the birth of Christ. But the Son of God didn't come to earth for the purpose of being a baby. As He grew in years, He grew in wisdom and stature, as a man. He was and is God, but now God with us, Emmanuel.

And He came to us, dwelt with us, tabernacled with us, in a human body, on Earth, that He might die to pay for our sins, so that we might be saved, forgiven. And then He rose again from the dead, and lives today, in a body at the right hand of the Father, but by His Spirit in us, who believe in Him.

Have you ever done Bible memorization? I have.

If you have, one verse you probably haven't memorized is 2 Tim. 2:8.

It's something important that Paul the Apostle told his spiritual son and protege, Timothy. He tells Timothy to remember something. It's something that you wouldn't think Timothy would need to be reminded of. But he did need to be reminded of it, and so do you, and I.

2 Tim. 2:8:

“Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descendant of David, according to my gospel.“

Why would Paul remind Timothy to remember Jesus?

1. To be strong in grace.

“You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.”

Strong in the Grace? Sounds like a contradiction.

But life is tough, isn’t it? Timothy had things to do. And so do you.

These things require the grace of God. Remember Paul’s thorn in the flesh?

We can’t be strong in grace if we don’t remember Jesus, that He is alive (risen from the dead). He's not just a dead Savior, He is a living Savior, and may I say it like Jesus did?...He calls us his friends.

Can you imagine? We are FOJ's. Friends of Jesus. The Creator of the Universe, the Lord of all Creation, the almighty God, calls us His friends.

And the Lord wants us to be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

Do you ever hear preachers, or other Christian folks, all they talk about is sin? Now if you're preaching through the Bible and you come to something about sin, preach it. But do you notice how some think the most important subject in the world is sin? I'm talking about Christian brothers and sisters. They think the most important subject in the world is sin.

Now sin is important. As Christians we're against it, aren't we? But we don't need a huge amount of teaching about it, because we are very familiar with it, aren't we? It's not something we need to be constantly reminded of, or to be constantly dwelling on.

What we do need to be constantly reminded of, and to be dwelling on is Jesus Christ, and His astounding grace. That's what honors Christ, and that's what gives us the light to walk by, the light to walk in the Spirit. And the Bible says that when we walk by the Spirit we won't fulfill the lust of the flesh.

See how that works? If we dwell on sin, we end up trying to defeat it in the flesh, which just compounds the mess. It's like trying to clean honey off of your hand with your other hand, and both hands end up sticky with nowhere to go.

But if we dwell on Jesus, who gives us the water of life, He by grace fills us with His Spirit, and we walk with clean hands. It's grace we need to obsess over, not the Law and sin. And the grace will minimize the sin, as we realize freshly that we are not under Law but under grace, and we are dead to sin and alive to God through Jesus Christ, Rom. 6:11.

"The Law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." –John 1:17

2. Because of His past faithfulness.

Don’t you just love the Book of Psalms?

An entire Christian life could be spent meditating on the Psalms. Maybe no other book so exalts God as the powerful creator of the universe, and maybe no other book exalts God as the faithful provider of mercy for His children.

He is faithful.

And the Psalm-writers, mostly David, write over and over about remembering the Lord.

I want to mention some things the Psalmist says about the Lord, and just let them wash over you.

Take a few moments. Be still, and know He is God.

Remember Him for these things. His:

Loving-kindness
Mercy
Word
Salvation
Faithfulness
Deliverance
Justice
Compassion
Righteousness
Strength
Watchful eye
Blessing
Protection

We are so prone to forget these things, and partly because we are so prone to forget Him.

We live in a “now” world.

We have things to do, people to see, presents to buy, things to arrange, go go go!

And we've got problems, and we have them NOW.

And we know we will have more problems in the future.

And so we’re prone to worry.

But then we remember Jesus.
That He is born in Bethlehem.
That He died for us, for the forgiveness of our sins.
That He is risen.
That He is here.
And not just here, but in us (Christ in you, the hope of glory).

And we remember His faithfulness in the past.

How He rescued us from that storm of life (even a literal storm, maybe).
How He comforted us in that loss we had.
How we had this thorn in our flesh, but His grace was sufficient.
How we lost hope in a certain person and then God turned them around.
How we had that financial setback or lost that job, and He provided.
How we thought we just couldn’t get through that one thing, and He brought us through it.

And so we remember His past faithfulness to us.

We remember Him as we walk through the day, and we remember Him as we lie on our beds at night, like David did.

We remember Him as our Rock and our Fortress, and our Deliverer, and our Friend, and we long for Him like the deer who pants after the waterbrook.

And we love Him. We love Him.

And we remember that He loved us first. Even when we were unloveable. And maybe we don’t feel all that loveable even today. But He loves us anyway. And so we love Him.

I became a Christian in 1976.

Contemporary Christian Music was a brand new phenomenon.

Four years before I became a Christian, there was a man named John Fischer who wrote a song. And it’s a song I have never forgotten in 30 years. It’s simple, almost simplistic, but it sticks in your mind, and it blesses you, and then you realize how profound the simple little song is.

It’s called the “All Day Song”.

"Love Him in the morning when you see the sun arising,
Love Him in the evening ‘cause He took you through the day.
And in the in-between times when you feel the pressure coming,
Remember that He loves you and He promises to stay."

Have a blessed Christmas as we celebrate the birth of our Savior!

Merry Christmas.

Remembering The Jesus Of Christmas

This week's audio message:

Remembering The Jesus of Christmas

Grace For Life audio archives are here.

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 2 (Transcript)

Before we get started, I want to say something briefly about physical rest.

Although the Fourth Commandment to do no work on the Sabbath or seventh day of the week, indeed the Old Covenant itself, was made obsolete by the New Covenant, there is nothing wrong with taking a day off to rest.

One of the beauties of studying the Old Testament is in learning the wisdom of God, who is all-wise, and knows all things. And physical rest is important, just as rotating crops from year to year was important, for example, so as to not deplete the soil.

And just as too much of almost anything can lead to what we have come to call burnout. So I encourage gleaning practical and spiritual wisdom and principles from the Old Testament, as long as we don’t fall into the trap of legalism, or putting ourselves under Law as a means of earning God’s love and favor.

O.K., Jesus our Sabbath, Part 2:

Brief Recap of Part 1

In Part 1 we gave several reasons why the Old Covenant Sabbath-keeping is not for believers under the New Covenant.

Briefly these are as follows:

1.In Colossians 2:16-17, Paul clearly refers to the Sabbath as a shadow of Christ, which is no longer binding since the substance (Christ) has come.

2.The Sabbath was the sign to Israel of the Old Covenant
( Ezekiel 20:12). Since we are now under the New Covenant (Hebrews 8), we are no longer required to observe the sign of the Old Covenant.

3.The New Testament never commands Christians to observe the Sabbath.

4.The church met on the first day of the week in the book of Acts (Acts 20:7), and even that is not a command, but merely a practice that sprang up, possibly in honor of Christ who rose from the dead that day.

5.We touched on this already, but nowhere even in the Old Testament are the Gentile nations commanded to observe the Sabbath or criticized for not observing it. That makes it clear that Sabbath-keeping is not meant to be an eternal moral principle.

6.Nowhere in the Bible does anyone keep the Sabbath before the time of Moses, and there are no commandments in the Bible to keep the Sabbath before the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai.

7.The apostle Paul warned the Gentiles about many different sins in his epistles, but breaking the Sabbath was never one of them.

8.In Galatians 4:10-11, Paul rebukes the Galatians for thinking God expected them to observe special days (including the Sabbath).

9.Nothing in Scripture indicates that Sunday has replaced Saturday as the Sabbath. Believers tend to gather on Sunday, which is the first day of the week, but there is no command of Scripture to do so.

10.Lastly, Hebrews 4:9-11 makes it clear that the Sabbath was all along meant to be a shadow of Christ who came to be our Sabbath rest.

It’s that last point, number 10, that I would like to dwell on for a while…that Jesus Christ Himself is our Sabbath rest, and we need no other.

About the Book of Hebrews

But before we get to this argument in Hebrews, primarily Chapter 4, let me give just a very brief overview of the Book of Hebrews as it relates to the New Covenant.

Hebrews was written specifically to Jewish Christians who had been undergoing some persecution, and would no doubt have more persecution in the future.

The letter was intended to show the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, or maybe to put it better, to show how much better the New Covenant is than the Old Covenant. And not just better, but how the New Covenant made the Old Covenant obsolete, as we read in Hebrews Chapter 8.

Let me just sort of rattle off these great themes of Hebrews. I won’t read the scriptural passages, though I would love for you to read them when you’re through listening to this, so I’ll reference the Chapters where these themes occur.

Here are the themes:

Jesus is a better revelation of truth 1:1-3
Jesus is better than the angels 1:3-14
Jesus is better than Moses 3:1-6
Jesus is better than Aaron, Moses’ brother, the priest 5
Jesus is a better high priest 6,7
The New Covenant has a better law 7:12
The New Covenant is a better covenant 8:6
The New Covenant has better promises 8:6
The New Covenant has a greater temple 9:11
The New Covenant has better sacrifices or sacrifice 9:23
The New Covenant has a better possession 10:34
The New Covenant has a better country 11:16
The New Covenant has a better resurrection 11:35
The New Covenant has better blood 12:24
The New Covenant has better atonement, which of course, goes beyond just covering sins, but taking them away, which the Old Covenant atonement could never do 10:1-5

So we see the overall theme of Hebrews might be called “betterness”, the betterness of Christ over Moses and the betterness of the New Covenant to the Old.

Who Hebrews Was Written To, And A Warning

Now I’ve left out part of Chapter 3 and all of Chapter 4, but now I want to talk about that, because this is where we find that the New Covenant has a better Sabbath.

Now when I said that Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians, I should have said PROFESSING Jewish Christians, because the writer is careful not to assume that all his readers are really born again.

And so he warns them in Chapter 3, verses 7-11, not to harden their hearts as the Israelites did in the Wilderness, causing God to swear, “They shall not enter my rest.” Now the writer is quoting Psalm 95 here, but here’s what’s important to realize. These Israelites already had the Sabbath law. They already had the Fourth Commandment, and yet they did not enter God’s rest.

And the writer of Hebrews is warning those who have not yet really believed in the Messiah, and then encouraging them to believe, by showing them the superiority of Christ.

He makes it clear that the rest is to come by belief, by faith. Faith in what? Or more accurately, faith in whom?

Well, Christ, the Messiah! The one who is better than Moses and whose New Covenant is better than the Old. Or to put it another way, believing the Gospel, the good news. Look at Chapter 4, verse 2, “For indeed we have had good news preached to us...”

The "Rest" Of The Gospel

And so the case is made in Chapter 4 that this rest comes from believing the good news, and in verse 7 the writer emphasizes that the day to believe the good news is “Today”. It’s always “today”, isn’t it? Today is the day of salvation, today is the day to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ if you haven’t.

Thank God we are still under the New Covenant. It’s still “today”.

That’s why Hebrews 4:9,10 says, “There remains, therefore, a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.” That’s our Sabbath. See that?

A Shadow of Things To Come

That’s why we read in Colossians 2:17 that the Old Covenant Sabbath was just a shadow of things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Christ is our Sabbath, our better Sabbath, because He paid for our sins, and gave us forgiveness for all of our sins, past, present and future, and declared us Righteous in Him.

So we can rest from our works. We can rest from our performance as a means of gaining the love and favor of God. He already loves us and He has already favored us in Christ. That’s our rest. That’s our Sabbath.

Now I should mention, if you might be reading the King James version, that Hebrews 4:9 doesn’t say “Sabbath rest”, it just says, “rest”. But the Greek word is Sabbatismos, and it’s the only place it occurs in Scripture. It’s the word for Sabbath, applied to the beautiful rest from our works that Christ has provided.

It Is Finished

And one more thing about Chapter 4, verse 10. When it says, “For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works...”, those words translated “rested” are written in the verb tense which means they are DONE, they are completed, they are finished, just as Jesus said on the Cross, “It is finished”.

What that means is that when you believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, when you became a Christian, when you were saved, you permanently entered into His rest. He no longer holds your sins against you, because you have rested from your works and His work on the Cross has paid for your rest.

Why is that important? Because it tells you, “Don’t be restless, now that you’ve rested.” Don’t jump back into the Law-based mode and try to earn God’s love and favor. Rest in the love and favor that He already has for you, paid for by Jesus on the Cross.

And that’s why the writer of Hebrews can go on to tell of the better priesthood, and the better promises, and the better sacrifice, and the better blood. Because under the Old Covenant, there was this awful veil of separation between God and Man, but under the New Covenant, the veil has been torn, and we now can come boldly or draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, to receive mercy and find grace to help in time of trouble.

Christ In You, The Hope of Glory

We not only can approach the throne of God boldly, we have the very Christ Himself inside us, Christ in you the hope of glory.

That’s our Sabbath. That’s our Sabbath rest.

And that’s why Jesus, just before one of his Sabbath confrontations with the Pharisees, in Matthew 11:28,29, said, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls.”

Have you entered that rest? Have you believed on the Lord Jesus Christ? He died on the Cross to pay for sins, and to give the free gift of His righteousness to all who would come to Him. Then He rose from the dead, and is alive today. Believe in Him today, if you haven’t.

And if you are already a believer, you have entered into that rest, that beautiful Sabbath rest which is Jesus Christ. Your works, your performance, are no longer the requirement for God’s favor. He has given us all spiritual blessings in Christ (Eph. 1:3) He loves you and desires your close fellowship with Him.

Oh, you will do works. But they will be the works worked in you by His Spirit, His very life. For it’s God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13).

Friends, rest in Him, your Sabbath rest.

Part 1

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 2

This week's audio message:

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 2

Grace For Life audio archives are here.

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 1 (Transcript)

Before talking about the Sabbath, or Sabbath-keeping, or Jesus as our Sabbath rest, let me first admit that in America, the Sabbath is no longer considered much by the vast population.

In my home town, Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I was a little kid in the 1950’s, the Sunday Sabbath was not only taught in most churches, but was legislated by the city itself, or forced by the pressure of Christian church groups.

Alcohol couldn’t be sold on Sundays, stores and other workplaces were closed on Sunday, sports were strongly discouraged, and in most neighborhoods one would not even mow their lawn on Sunday, because of peer pressure.

While this may sound to some of you like a documentary about some bizarre religious cult, believe me, this was the tradition of much of America before the ‘60’s, and European Reformed Church influence dating back to the Reformation of the 1500’s.

And I’m well aware that much has changed these days. And yet there are many who still think of Sunday as the Sabbath Day, and practice various levels of abstaining from work, or demanding certain practices on that day, to fulfill religious duty. And there are still Christian sects and cults who teach Seventh Day or Saturday Sabbatarianism even to the point of requiring it for salvation.

So I want to look at Sabbath Keeping in this and one other message. This time we’ll deal with the abolishing of Sabbath Keeping in the New Covenant, and next time dig deeper into the subject of Jesus Christ as our new Sabbath rest.

First, Some Old Covenant Scriptures

Exodus 20:8, "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."

Exodus 20:10, "but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you."

Exodus 20:11, "For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the 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."

Exodus 31:14, "Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people."

Exodus 31:15, "For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the LORD; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death."

Israel Only

Before we go any further, notice this: you will notice that this was a covenant with the nation of Israel only. There was no universal Sabbath commandment for the nations, the Gentiles.

“Wait a minute”, you might say. “What about in Genesis? Didn’t God say something about the Sabbath after He created everything in six days, and rested on the seventh?”

Well, here is what He said:

Genesis 2:2, "By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Genesis 2:3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made."

No commands here. Certainly nothing about refraining from doing anything on the seventh day. But way back then, God was filtering into our thinking something about this idea of rest. Rest from working.

How Serious Were The Sabbath Commands?

But back to Israel in the book of Exodus.

Was God serious about this Sabbath-keeping for Israel? He sure was. This was part of what we call the Mosaic Covenant, or Old Covenant which God made with Israel at Mount Sinai. And God was VERY serious about the Sabbath. Profane the Sabbath, and you die. That was the Law.

The actual Sabbath commandments for Israel were bad enough. But by the time Jesus walked the earth, the Pharisees were holding up a much tougher bunch of rules that they actually held ABOVE the Law.

For example, the law included detailed regulations regarding what constituted a "burden" that could not be carried on the Sabbath; for example, pieces of paper, horses hairs, wax, a piece of broken earthenware or animal food. Generally a burden was anything as heavy as a dried fig, or a quantity sufficient to be of any practical use (e.g. a scrap of paper large enough to be converted into a note or a wrapper).

It prescribed what might or might not be saved if one’s house caught on fire. Only those clothes that were absolutely necessary could be saved. But one could put on a dress, save it, then go back and put on another. One could not ask a Gentile to extinguish the flames. But if he did so voluntarily, he should not be hindered.

One could eat food on the Sabbath lawfully only if it had been specifically prepared for the Sabbath on a weekday. If a laying hen laid an egg on the Sabbath, it could not be eaten. But if the hen had been kept for fattening and not laying, the egg could be eaten, since it would be considered a part of the hen that had fallen off!

These regulations considered studying the Mishna on the Sabbath more important than studying the Bible. The Hagiographa (the Old Testament "Writings") were not to be read on the Sabbath except in the evening. And there are many other similar examples.

Of special interest to us are the laws regarding harvesting and healing on the Sabbath. Even the slightest activity involving picking grain—removing the husks, rubbing the heads, cleaning or bruising the ears or throwing them up in the hand—was forbidden.

Yet if a man wanted to move a sheaf on his field, he had only to lay a spoon on it; then, in order to remove the spoon, he might also remove the sheaf on which it lay!

Did Jesus Break The Sabbath?

All this is important in order to realize that Jesus never broke the Sabbath. He lived under the Old Covenant, and was expected to obey the Sabbath laws, and He did.

But He did not obey the rules of the Pharisees, and that infuriated them.

Ironically, by adding to the Law of God their own rules, the Pharisees were breaking the Law of God. Listen to Deuteronomy 4:2, "You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you."

Is The Sabbath For Us Today?

Now, what about us? Is the Sabbath for us today?

The clear answer from Scripture is no.

We are under the New Covenant, and the Bible in the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 8, makes it clear that the New Covenant has made the Old Covenant obsolete (Heb. 8:13).

That alone is enough to make it clear that Sabbath-keeping is not for us today.

But let’s look at more detailed reasons why we are not Sabbatarians:

1.We read In Colossians 2:16-17,

16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.
17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Paul clearly refers to the Sabbath as a shadow of Christ, which is no longer binding since the substance (Christ) has come.

2.The Sabbath was the sign to Israel of the Old Covenant (Ezekiel 20:12). Since we are now under the New Covenant (Hebrews 8), we are no longer required to observe the sign of the Old Covenant.

3.The New Testament never commands Christians to observe the Sabbath.

4.The Church met on the first day of the week in the book of Acts (Acts 20:7), and even that is not a command, but merely a practice that sprang up, possibly in honor of Christ who rose from the dead that day.

5.We touched on this already, but nowhere even in the Old Testament are the Gentile nations commanded to observe the Sabbath or criticized for not observing it. That makes it clear that Sabbath-keeping is not meant to be an eternal moral principle.

6.Nowhere in the Bible does anyone keep the Sabbath before the time of Moses, and there are no commandments in the Bible to keep the Sabbath before the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai.

7.The apostle Paul warned the Gentiles about many different sins in his epistles, but breaking the Sabbath was never one of them.

8.In Galatians 4:10-11, Paul rebukes the Galatians for thinking God expected them to observe special days (including the Sabbath).

9.Nothing in Scripture indicates that Sunday has replaced Saturday as the Sabbath. Believers tend to gather on Sunday, which is the first day of the week, but there is no command of Scripture to do so.

Now you may have heard of a book by Jonathan Edwards called “The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath”. I once talked with a conference speaker who promoted Sabbath-keeping. And after the conference I went up to him and I said, "Okay, I'm a Realtor. If I go out and show a house on Sunday, am I in violation of the Sabbath, in such a way that the Church should rebuke me and discipline me?"

And he said, "Well...no...it's not that exactly, it's..."

And I said, "Well, how about 10 houses? How about 15 houses?"

"Well, no...it's not exactly..."

And he hemmed and hawed, and I said, "Isn't it true that the Sabbath has been done away with in the New Covenanat?"

He said, "You need to read Jonathan Edwards' The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath." Which is supposed to prove that the Sabbath has continued and that it's been changed to Sunday.

And I said, "I have read The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath" and I said, "basically it's not a Scriptural teaching at all".

And he became frustrated and said, "Well...", as if to say, "Well, there's just no hope for you if you think Jonathan Edwards is not being Scriptural."

And I said, "Let's examine the Scripture on that."

And all of a sudden he looked at his watch and said, "Uh...I gotta go...uh...I gotta go catch a plane."

And so ended the conversation. Because when brought straight to the Scriptures for the teaching on the perpetuity and change of the Sabbath, it just isn't there.

10.Lastly, Hebrews 4:9-11 makes it clear that the Sabbath was all along meant to be a shadow of Christ who came to be our Sabbath rest.

Now we will be covering this wonderful truth in greater detail in Part 2 of this message, but for now let me say this.

In Him there is a rest for the people of God, wherein they rest from their works.

In the New Covenant, Christ Himself is our Sabbath. He is our rest. We are saved by grace through faith in Him. But not only is our salvation not based on works, but the very love of God for us, His acceptance of us, and His favor on our lives is by grace.

It doesn’t mean we won’t have good works in our lives. God is working those in us through His Spirit. But we rest from our works as the way to earn God’s love and favor. He loves us, period.

Is the Sabbath for today? No, not the legalistic keeping of rules for a special day of the week. But our Sabbath is Jesus, and our rest is in Him, every day of the week, and forever. More in Part 2 next time.

Part 2

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 1

This week's audio message:

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 1

Grace For Life audio archives are here.

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 1

This week's message on Grace Walk Radio:

Jesus Our Sabbath Rest, Part 1

Grace For Life radio archives are here.