Friday, May 16, 2014
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I was thinking the other day about when my son informed me that our local supermarket near his high school had just installed a new air conditioning system. What he meant was that it had just been bulldozed! That store had been there since I could remember, and then in one day it was rubble in a vacant lot.
You've probably seen something like that happen in your area. Trees and wooded areas all over town are just disappearing quickly, suddenly becoming housing developments. And if there's a tree, let's tear it down and build a house. Couples who have been married for twenty-five or thirty years suddenly aren't couples any more. You and I live in a disposable world where things are dismantled or discarded everywhere we look, including some things that were never meant to be moved.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Disposable Commandment."
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from Exodus chapter 20. You might recognize that as the Ten Commandments chapter, and I'll begin at verse 8, "Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work." Then it goes on to say, "None of your employees and none of your family should work either."
You can almost hear those that work the land trying to rationalize this and say, "Well, that's pretty good. We'll do that except when it's real busy-like harvest time, planting time." Exodus 34:21, "Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest. Even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest." Well, God's pretty serious about this commandment. He's saying, "Even during your busiest season, whatever that is, you've got to have a day reserved and committed to rest and reverence."
If we look at a typical American Christian's Sunday, we might conclude that this is the disposable commandment. Well, there's no such thing, but no one challenges us if we disobey this one. We don't even have any real guilt; we don't even feel like we disobeyed a commandment. But check your Bible. It hasn't moved. It's still there. It's in the commandments.
In our busy lives, and I speak for myself, Sunday tends to become the catch-all day for the tasks you couldn't get done all week: the yard work, the spill over from your job, getting ready for Monday's work, work on the car, work on the house. Now, look, I'm the last guy who wants to start a new legalism. The Bible says, "When you've got an ox in the ditch and it just absolutely has to be done, well okay, you can take care of that on the Lord's Day."
But I'm talking about a reordering of our lives to do everything possible to reserve one day for rest and reverence. We've been commanded to do it. That's hard for me. My life is jammed. I've got to make that choice. It's going to be God, it's going to be family, it's going to be rest and recovery. That's what happens on the day that is called the Lord's Day.
It's hard to keep that commandment sometimes, but God has consistently honored that by making six days more productive for me than seven. It's kind of like tithing where God can do more with the 90% in your life because you gave Him 10%, than you could do with 100%. God seems to have closed all the loopholes here. He wants us to obey Him, no matter how busy we are.
Let's honor our Lord by reserving a day a week. I don't know who said we could knock down the walls around the Lord's Day, but this isn't like our local store. The commandment was never meant to be knocked down, because there are no disposable commandments.