by Jim Hughes
Is. 58:13-14a Keep the Sabbath day holy. Don’t pursue your own interests on that day, but enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight as the LORD’s holy day. Honor the LORD in everything you do, and don’t follow your own desires or talk idly. If you do this, the LORD will be your delight.
This is a truth of God’s Word that has long plagued me. I understand that we no longer live under the Law. We are no longer compelled to obey the Law in order to be righteous and holy. Jesus has fulfilled the Law’s demands on us and has made us right with God.
But, I am convinced that the Lord’s Day should be a day we set aside for worship and restoration. It should be a day in which we break away from the normal routines of life and turn our thoughts to the Lord.
Rarely do we keep the Sabbath Day holy anymore. We fill it with all sorts of things that drain us. We take more delight in the things that we do than we do with the Lord. We squeeze in time for worship when we can, but it’s not the priority of the day. How is it honoring to the Lord to spend the day of rest he put into our week with activities that crowd him out of our thoughts?
So often we use the Lord’s Day as a day to catch up on what we did not do the rest of the week. We catch up on our rest, our laundry, our housework, our work in the yard, our paperwork, etc. For many of us our workplace compels us to work. Each of us must decide how we handle the Lord’s Day. I wonder how many of us have ever prayed and asked the Lord what we can or cannot do. All I know is that the Lord speaks about it a lot in His Word for a reason. He considers it to be an important matter and so should we.
If you want the Lord to be more of a presence and pleasure in your life, a good place to start would be to examine the way you spend your Sabbath, or Sunday, rest. Do you keep the Sabbath Day holy?
About the Author:
Spending his formative years in Ft. Wayne, IN, Jim followed the love of his life to southeast Iowa where they married and have spent the majority of their lives. Jim has pastored several churches throughout his life and has worked many years in local factories to help support his family. The father of two married adult children and one son still at home, Jim is a first-time author.
C Through Marriage came into being through many years of pastoral and life experiences. The book first took on a life of its own over 20 years ago when I sought to address the much publicized moral failures of prominent leaders in the church. In the chapter on Chasity, I include the guideliness that I developed then to protect one's self from such failures.
I am a firm believer in order to make sense out of life you have to use much common sense. We need to get back to the basics of what has worked for many, many generations. If is isn't broke, why try to fix it? I strive to return to the basics of what really works in all my writings.
