Podcasts about holy sabbath

282. Family Sabbath: Pause and Delight with Eryn Lynum   Mark 2:27 NIV “Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”   *Transcription Below*   Eryn Lynum is a certified Master Naturalist, Bible teacher, national speaker, and author. Eryn lives in Northern Colorado with her husband, Grayson, and their four children, whom they homeschool—mainly in the great outdoors. Eryn has has been featured on FamilyLife Today, Proverbs 31 Ministries, Christian Parenting, MOPS International, Bible Gateway, Her View From Home, and For Every Mom. Every opportunity she gets, she is out exploring God's creation with her family and sharing the adventures. To learn more about Eryn, visit ErynLynum.com.   Eryn's Books Eryn's Free Resources Mentioned Nat Theo Podcast   Topics and Questions We Cover: What can this look like to daily align our activities with our deepest values? What do people actually do on this day of rest and what do you recommend for families? Are there any other practical benefits we're missing out on if we neglect rest?   Thank You to Our Sponsor: Leman Property Management Company   Related Savvy Sauce Episodes: 81 Rest with Doctor, Author, and Speaker, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith 99 Sabbath Rest with Sandy Feit 175 Practicing Sabbath with Shireen Eldridge   Connect with The Savvy Sauce on Facebook, Instagram or Our Website   Gospel Scripture: (all NIV) Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”   Romans 3:24 “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”   Romans 3:25 (a) “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”    Hebrews 9:22 (b) “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”    Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”    Romans 5:11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”    John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”   Romans 10:9 “That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”    Luke 15:10 says “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”   Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”   Ephesians 1:13–14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession- to the praise of his glory.”   Ephesians 1:15–23 “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”   Ephesians 2:8–10 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God‘s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.“   Ephesians 2:13 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.“   Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”   *Transcription*   Music: (0:00 – 0:09)   Laura Dugger: (0:11 - 1:34) Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host, Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here.   Leman Property Management Company has the apartment you will be able to call home, with over 1,700 apartment units available in Central Illinois. Visit them today at lemanproperties.com or connect with them on Facebook.   Eryn Lynum is my wonderful guest for today, and she's the author of this beautiful book, The Nature of Rest. We're going to discuss all things related to rest, ways that we can prepare for it, how we can enjoy and delight in it, what good gifts God has for us with rest, and then how to reflect well on the rhythms in our life, and so much more.   Here's our chat. Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, Eryn.   Eryn Lynum: (1:34 - 4:03) Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.   Laura Dugger: Well, I'd love for you to start us off by sharing your personal journey and tell why you are so uniquely qualified to teach and write about rest, as stress can literally kill you.   Eryn Lynum: Yeah, that's correct. So, when I was 14 years old, I was diagnosed with a potentially fatal autoimmune disorder. And kind of the context of that season, I was preparing to go overseas for the first time on a missions trip. So, I was going to be in Africa for two months. And so, before you go do something like that, you have to go to the doctor and get a checkup and vaccine recommendations, all the things. And so, my parents took me in.   Again, I was 14 at the time, and we had no reason to believe that there was anything wrong. There were no red flags. Besides, I had been a little tired, a little dizzy once in a while, but really, we just thought, okay, well, I'm growing up, my body's changing. But when the nurse took my blood pressure that day, it was 56 over 48, which is deathly low.   And so, immediately, that's a red flag. And I undergo more testing and hospital visits and seeing specialists. And they diagnosed me with something called Addison's disease. And Addison's disease, it's where your adrenal glands no longer function. So, maybe you've heard of adrenal fatigue, where someone is so taxed out that their adrenal glands can't keep up because they're meant to produce cortisol, which is our stress hormone. Well, Addison's disease is the worst-case scenario where you can't come back from it, barring a miracle. Like, my adrenal glands don't work, and they haven't for over 20 years now.   And so, you know, this system that God has given us meant to cope with stress, and it's that fight-or-flight response. At that young age, I no longer had that. And so, stress became quite literally deadly to me. And at that point, my parents, they began coaching me in biblical stress management, so identifying stressors in my life.   You know, when your shoulders start creeping up, and you can feel that tension in your neck, and knowing that those are signs that, okay, you need to step back, you need to calm yourself. Like the Psalms talk about, “I have calmed and quieted my soul,” and to bring everything to the Lord and cast all your anxieties upon Him. And this is really where I can see, in my life, I developed a very consistent prayer pattern in my life where just all day long, like conversing with the Lord.   And so, that's been a big part of this. But yeah, that's really what began leading me into this deeply restful lifestyle was out of necessity. But really what I've seen since then is God designed all of us to live and thrive through rest. Like this is His original design.   Laura Dugger: (4:04 - 4:27) I love that so much. And you articulate this so well in your book. But before I ever encountered you, I had never heard of the term master naturalist before. So, if you want to share anything about that, it would be great. And as a master naturalist, where do you see these rhythms of rest in nature?   Eryn Lynum: (4:28 - 6:54) So, a master naturalist, it's really a fancy term for nature teacher. And I pursued this because my degree and my passion are in biblical theology. And I've always been passionate about rightly handling God's word of truth from 2 Timothy 2:15.   And I began to see as my own family, my husband and I, we have three boys and a daughter, and now they're 14 down to seven. But when they were younger and we started spending more time outdoors, I started to see, okay, God has given us so many visuals and materials in nature with which we can teach about Him. Coming from Romans 1:20, that His invisible attributes, those things we can't see about God, are clearly perceived through what He has made. And I saw that also Jesus in the gospels, He used nature all the time to teach.   And God throughout scripture, like it's not just Genesis 1, nature narratives are strong throughout scripture. And so, I thought if God and Jesus use this methodology to teach, then certainly we can. And so, that's why I went through this training and taught, teach with this method is because, you know, the more we understand these materials, the more we see of God and the more we can communicate about Him.   And so, I was working as a master naturalist in our city and teaching my own programs. And I started to incorporate it more and more into my book and then later on in my podcast. And at the same time, God was leading my family into celebrating Sabbath. We had come into this season where we were just exhausted, like running businesses and raising and homeschooling kids, like all of us, no matter our circumstances, face this very real human existence of fatigue. And so, we came to a place where rest was no longer optional. It was critical and vital.   And so, I'm living in these two realms of learning about nature while I'm learning about scripture. And then God is bringing us into deep rest. So, I started to ask the question, where do we see rest in scripture? And I found that it is everywhere. The roots of rest run deep and wide throughout scripture. And also asking, where do we see rest in creation in nature? And it's also everywhere there that God designed all these cycles and these rhythms and all of his plants and creatures, even the ones that we think of as so frenetic and busy that God designed them to thrive through rest.   Laura Dugger: (6:55 - 7:04) And will you give a specific example then of something in nature as it's so apparent that it's designed for rest?   Eryn Lynum: (7:04 - 8:28) Definitely. Let's focus on one of those ones that we often think of as really busy, the hummingbird. I opened the book with the analogy of a hummingbird because when you think about a hummingbird, what do you picture in your mind?   Laura Dugger: (7:17 - 7:19) Busy, constant movement in and out.   Eryn Lynum: (7:20 - 8:28) Yeah, exactly. Like they have to visit between 1,000 and 2,000 flowers every day to get all the nectar that they need. And so, they are always like here and there in the next place. And they look like this little thing just zipping through the air and you can't even see their wings beating because they can be up to 70 times a second. It's this blur of motion. And we think about that little hummingbird, and we can sometimes feel like that little hummingbird just zipping from one thing to the next, thinking there's no time to stop.   But the hummingbird does stop. It has a very strategic method of rest called torpor. And torpor is kind of like a mini hibernation where the little bird is going to go into this deep state of rest. It lowers its body temperature by around 50 degrees and becomes completely unresponsive. And this is a regular thing that the hummingbird does, and it enables it to continue its God-given, good, busy, fruitful work. So, it's this picture of, you know, busyness is not bad. God created us for fruitful work, but it's all meant to be sustained through deep, rhythmic, intentional rest.   Laura Dugger: (8:28 - 9:06) I mean, immediately that makes me think of the weeks, even that I'm most productive, I've probably prioritized my sleep the best of it. And if I get great sleep, even if it's extra hours, that doesn't take away from the rest of the day. That probably makes my time even multiplied.   Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I love, you point out so many times how God just clearly designed his creation to enjoy this gift of rest. So, you mentioned some of the nature parts. What about some of the foundational scriptural truths on this topic?   Eryn Lynum: (9:07 - 11:52) Yeah, well, of course, where's the first place that we get the idea of rest in the scripture? Yeah, exactly. So, God completes his work of creation and then he rests and he didn't need to rest. Isaiah 40:28 tells us that he, the creator of the world does not grow weary or tired.   I believe that one reason, and I talk about a couple of them in the book, but I believe that one main reason God rested was to stop and delight. That word Sabbath, it comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat, which can mean to both stop and delight. Like think about God finishing his creative work, bringing, bringing everything from nothing. Ex nihilo is that theological term, everything from nothing. Creating not only the animals and the plants, but the textures and the math and the shapes and the like everything he needed to make these things. And I imagine he just wanted to stop and enjoy it. I can even picture him going through creation and listening to the birds and taking in the colors and the shapes of the clouds.   What a beautiful reminder to us, because I know for myself, I'm so prone to just run from one thing to the next, like check it off the list. What's next? But here God is modeling for us. Stop delight, praise him for what he just allowed us to accomplish, to create, to do before rushing on to the next thing.   And so, we get that first mentioned there at creation, but then think about when Sabbath was actually established, there's a framework, there's a structure it's Exodus 16. And the context here is the Israelites. They're doing what they do. They're wandering and grumbling. They're hangry and God shows mercy to them in the form of quail and manna, but he has very specific instructions for them. He says for six days, you shall gather it, but not on the seventh day. Don't go out. It is a solemn day, a Holy Sabbath to the Lord.   That's the first mention of Sabbath, that word in scripture, but consider the Israelites. They had no context for what God was calling them to do. Surely they could think back to the creation story. Okay. God worked and then rested, but they had very little idea of what he was asking them to do. This was an act of faith. God was saying, stop gathering, trust me.   And this is so hard for us because like we are so prone to gather, gather, gather, do produce work more out of this scarcity mindset. But this picture is showing God is a God of abundance and his math works. When we trust him to be the provider, not ourselves. And we take that risk on rest. He provides abundantly through it.   Laura Dugger: (11:53 - 12:05) Absolutely. And within this gift then of rest, how can rest actually reorder and re-energize our lives?   Eryn Lynum: (12:05 - 14:03) I love this question because throughout the book, we talk a lot about reordering and creating margins. So, we can rest and reprioritizing. You know, it's so interesting when we look at the creation narrative, where we get that first mention of rest, because it's backwards to what we normally think.   Think about this. God created for six days and then he rested. Adam, the first human was created on that sixth day. So, Adam's first full day was a day of arrest, dedicated to rest. And in this, we see that God worked and then rested. But we, humanity, we were always meant to begin from rest.   And you see that even in the Hebrew tradition of a day, their day begins at evening. Their day doesn't start with, let's get up and get to work. Their day starts with, let me go to rest to get ready for the work. So, first we have to reorder our concept of rest, not see it as a reward. Oh, I'm going to work, work, work, get all the things done so that maybe I can rest this weekend or on vacation, or when the kids are out of the house or in retirement, that's backwards to the biblical framework. We are meant to begin from rest.   So, starting there. And as we do that, my family has found after sabbathing for three and a half years now, everything else kind of falls into place. And that happens when you operate by God's design. You know, rest allows us to tend to the most important things. Those deep values, whether like that should be of course, faith and family. So, getting clear on your values is really important. Like what is most important to your family faith? Maybe it's community generosity. Maybe it's physical health, mental health, all these things do better. And we have more time to tend to them when we first make room and space for rest.   Laura Dugger: (14:04 - 16:28) And now a brief message from our sponsor.    With over 1,700 apartment units available throughout Pekin, Peoria, Peoria Heights, Morton and Washington. And with every price range covered, you will have plenty of options when you rent through Leman Property Management Company.   They have townhomes, duplexes, studios, and garden style options located in many areas throughout Pekin. And make sure you check out their newest offering, the McKinley located in Pekin is a new construction addition to their platinum collection featuring nine foot ceilings, large spacious layouts, beautiful finishes, such as courts, countertops, and garages. You won't want to miss this outstanding new property in Peoria, a historic downtown location and apartments adjacent to OSF Medical Center provide excellent choices.   Check out their brand new luxury property in Peoria Heights, overlooking the boutique shops and fine dining on prospect. And in Morton, they offer a variety of apartment homes with garages, a hot downtown location, and now a brand new high-end complex near Idlewood Park. If you want to become part of their team, contact them about open office positions.   They're also hiring in their maintenance department. So, we invite you to find out why so many people have chosen to make a career with them. Check them out on Facebook today or email their friendly staff at leasing@lemanprops.com. You can also stop by their website at lemanproperties.com, check them out and find your place to call home today.   It never ceases to amaze me how God's economy and his math are just different. Sometimes upside down from ours, but I feel like when you're speaking, it reminds me of Matthew 6:33, “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” So, if we actually obey, I think there are so many blessings that we can enjoy from this gift of rest. So, you're talking about our values. Then what can this look like to daily align our activities with our deepest values?   Eryn Lynum: (16:30 - 18:30) Yes, this is an ongoing practice because the enemy is always trying to distract us from what is most important. And that word there is key distract. And so, first we have to learn to identify those distractions, the things that are pulling us away from what is most important, but you know, getting to those core values and on my website, I have, my husband and I developed a family values guide that helps you step by step to really figure out what are our deepest values.   So, that's erinlynum.com/values. But really what it is, is this practice of getting clear on God's best for, for us and for our families and for those around us and, and making sure that we are aligning and realigning because it's going to get out of alignment, those values with God's agenda. You know, a lot of days I just start my day with a restful pause.   I call them in the book, Selah pauses. And I am quite literally, I am sitting before the Lord, my eyes closed and my hands just up in this posture of surrender and receiving. And I will say, Lord, I am surrendering my own agenda, my own expectations for this day. And I want to receive your power, your presence, your peace. And then throughout the day, just taking those checks.   Like I practice these daily Selah pauses and moments of rest because think about Selah in the Psalms. It can mean to pause, to contemplate, to redirect. And we need to do that often because as a day goes on, I think we lose energy and focus. You know, at the beginning of the day, we might feel really like focused. And this is what I'm getting done today. And that can waver like that can wane out as the day goes on. And so, constantly just checking back in.   Okay, Lord, what is it you have for me to do today? And how do I tend to those most important things? But you have to take that restful pause to be able to do that.   Laura Dugger: (18:31 - 18:46) That's good reminder. Okay. So, to check back in with the Lord and then can you give another example of one family and what their value is and how they live that out in their daily life. And maybe even what requires us to say no to.   Eryn Lynum: (18:47 - 20:15) Ooh, that's a fantastic question. Hmm. Can it be for my own family or do you want me to give them love it from your own family?   Okay. I was asked this question recently. Someone asked me, how do you make time to be outside as a family? One of our core family values is to be out exploring in God's creation. And this has been harder in different seasons. And we have two middle schoolers now, you know, we are, we have a lot going on.   And so, it can very quickly happen where at the end of the day, we're like, wow, we really didn't spend much time outdoors today, but how we prioritize this is you do have to say no to other things. So, we're a homeschooling family. And just as an example, it can be very tempting to feel like, am I doing enough? Am I teaching them enough? We need to check off all these boxes and get the lessons done. And it's constantly surrendering that and realizing, you know, I know that our value of being outdoors is important to God. I know that he is meeting my children there. He is meeting me there. He is giving us rest and rejuvenation there.   So, trusting with that, again, going back to the Israelites, stop gathering, stop checking off all the boxes, stop trying to provide and meet your own expectations. And instead stay super focused on what God has called you to and ruthlessly get rid of the rest, anything that's keeping you from that.   Laura Dugger: (20:16 - 20:36) I love that personal example. Thank you for sharing. And how can we also in our own families or in our own life, how can we distinguish which activities are vital for the abundant life in Christ that he offers so that we don't settle for less?   Eryn Lynum: (20:38 - 22:46) I love that you bring up that, that term, the abundant life. In John 10:10, that Christ came, that we might have life and life abundantly overflowing to the fullest, like brimming over is what that word means. And that scripture also says the enemy comes to steal and kill and destroy.   And I believe that one of the enemy's biggest schemes and methods for that is to send us into hurry and hustle mode. And he does that through distraction and discontent. And so, so much of this is pressing back against distraction and discontent and getting back to how God created us to thrive.   And again, I believe that that is through this, this gift of rest. You know, you talk about, you asked about settling for less. The enemy is going to put a million things in our life that would cause us to want to settle for less.   Let me give you an example of him trying to distract us. There was a recent weekend where we were coming up on the weekend, and I had several friends reach out and ask about me doing these things like these different opportunities coming our way. Like, do you want to do this? Do you want to do this? And each of them were for on Saturday and that's usually when our family Sabbaths. And so, I had this tension because these were good things.   It's hard to say no to a good thing, but I kept feeling again and again, the Lord saying, no, rest with your family, rest with your family. And it was so sweet because come Saturday morning, I was out on our back deck sipping coffee with my husband for hours, having incredible conversations, reading great books. The kids are playing in the yard.   Several times I caught myself thinking, I almost said no to this by saying yes to other things. And again, they were good things. This life is full of good things, but God's rest is one of the best things for our families. So, it's learning to be okay with saying no to those good things. So, you can say yes to that better thing.   Laura Dugger: (22:48 - 23:17) Examples are so helpful. And that requires a level of discernment and going to the Lord to ask him, but I'm wondering if you even have a system in place for how you discern that, or is it a gut piece that you follow or any practical ways that each of us can discern what's the right kind of busy that's good. And what's the wrong kind of busy and the things that we want to say no to.   Eryn Lynum: (23:18 - 25:05) Yeah. Going back to, again, busy is not bad. God created us for fruitful work, but I think, you know, when we are following Christ and God's spirit is within us, he's going to give us that sense of this is the right kind of busy.   This is the wrong kind of busy. And practically, you know, if it has any notion of distraction, like if you're doing this thing to just distract you or to procrastinate on better things, if it has a note of busyness, you know, some people will be like, well, some people, the enemy makes us want to think that sitting on our phones can be restful because you're not technically doing much of anything, but that distraction is stealing God's true gift of rest for us.   And so, you know, our family, as we practice Sabbath throughout the week, I know that come Saturday, we have a full day of rest. And sometimes it's tempting to add a little work into there, to let it seep out of those edges of the work week and kind of into our Sabbath. And as you practice this more and more and begin just ruthlessly protecting that time, whether it's a full day, whether you start with a half day, God is going to make you more sensitive to those things. Because sometimes I'll like work it out in my mind, like, oh, this isn't work. And really like it's definitely, it's definitely trying to serve my work during the work week.   And God is saying, no, like step away from that and allow me to refresh and rejuvenate your spirit so that when you go back to the work, you do so much more powerfully energized, restful, and ready to do that work to the very best of your ability with God's power.   Laura Dugger: (25:07 - 25:36) That reminds me of a previous guest I'll link to. He did two episodes, but Jeff Henderson just said he's a pastor too. And he said, sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap.   I would agree on that, which you've kind of been sharing a little glimpses of your family's experience with Sabbath, but let's just zero in on Sabbath and I'll just try and go through a series of questions. But first what's the importance of Sabbath?   Eryn Lynum: (25:37 - 26:55) Well, first God commands it. Like if God commanded it, then surely it's important, but that can also sometimes cause us to get a little legalistic about it. What is it? What isn't it? Well, it is meant to be a gift, meant to be a blessing. It's meant to empower us and what God created us for and calls us to.   And so, keeping that just center, this is meant to be a gift, but we see it all throughout scripture, the importance of rest and rest in God's design. It's celebration. Like it's not idleness. It's not doing nothing. Although sometimes like that's the most beneficial way that we can rest. Like you talked about a nap.   I love a good nap on Sabbath, but also it can be energizing activities, inspiring activities. I also love a good long walk on Sabbath. Sometimes I love cooking with fresh ingredients and working on a meal during Sabbath because I don't get much opportunity to do that during the week. Sometimes I love going out and working in the garden because that's life giving and I don't have time to do that throughout the week. And so, getting back to this concept, this idea of Sabbath and rest are celebratory. Like when we do it well as a family, it feels like a mini vacation every week.   Laura Dugger: (26:56 - 27:15) Ooh, I love that. My husband said that before about date night and I connect with that, that it's a little mini reprieve, a mini vacation each week. But then that leads me to the question because I bet so many people share their Sabbath activities with you. What do families actually do on this day of rest?   Eryn Lynum: (27:16 - 31:46) Yeah, that's a great question. And first I'll say that it should look different from family to family. We are all in unique seasons. We have different stories, different scenarios. Again, if you can't start with the full day, now I strongly believe strive and work toward that full day. That's God's design.   And we've seen the most blessing from that. But if you have to start smaller with a half day with four hours, start there. So, it's going to look different. If you have newborns, like a newborn child, it's going to look different and that's okay. No going into it, that it's going to be messy. Hebrews says strive toward rest, work toward rest. It's so counter-cultural. We have to work toward it. So, just going in, knowing these things is very helpful.   It's also going to grow, adapt, and change throughout the seasons. Our family has seen that. But a typical Sabbath for our family right now is we follow the traditional Friday evening to Saturday evening for the most part. Some people ask me, why not Sunday? Isn't Sunday the Sabbath? Well, for us, Sunday is set aside for church community and fellowship and corporate worship. And that's so life-giving to our souls. But by the time I get home from church and I'm making lunch for the family, like I'm not rested physically. So, we needed a separate day set aside for rest.   And so, Friday afternoon, we start preparing where we're going to band together and just pick up the house, get it ready, wash all the dishes and just start preparing our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our home for rest. And then we start Friday evening with communion as a family, just breaking bread and celebrating what Christ did on our behalf. And again, that, that idea of celebrate, and this marks it as special. Okay. We're heading into Sabbath. Some families will like light a white candle for Sabbath, just really marking it. And then we have, we toast to the week. So, we'll pour sparkling juice and just toast and say, “Hey, what did we see God do this week?” Like going back to that idea of stop and delight, we are setting a hard stop to the week. We are delighting. What did we see God do? What did he help us overcome? What can we thank Him for from this past week? And then we'll do an easy dinner. Think tacos, take and bake pizza spaghetti.   We use paperware, which is a bit controversial since I work as a master naturalist, but it has been an easy button for Sabbath that I'm not worried about like dishes piling up on the counter. And then we'll, we'll wrap it up with a sweet treat like ice cream and then our kids go to bed, or they'll listen to audio books. Audio books have been massive for our Sabbath because they're screen-free because we do put away all screens and work like devices on Sabbath, but they can listen to good books.   And my husband and I, we read, like people ask me, when do you find time to read? You don't find time to read. You have to make time to read. And for us, that's on the Sabbath mostly. And then Saturday we sleep in, we get up pretty early during the week and the kids just know like you don't wake mom and dad on the Sabbath. Like that's their day to sleep in.   Again, if you have a newborn or young children, that's gonna look different and that's okay. But for us, that's the season that we're in and our kids, they'll make themselves first breakfast and then eventually we'll get up and we'll join them for a second breakfast or some Sabbath. I don't want to cook at all. And so, it's just take and forage. And you know, I usually have a grocery delivery the day before or go to the grocery store and make sure we just have a ton of good stuff in the house. So, no one's, you know, everyone has what they need.   Then the rest of the day, it is just a day of delight. Reading books, playing games, being out in creation, visiting with neighbors, having great conversations together. Sabbath is this space where you get to do all those things during the week that you're like, oh, I wish I had time for that and you just don't get to them. Like recently my daughter during the week, she really wanted me, she's seven. She wanted me to sit down and watercolor paint with her, which I love doing, but it was a really busy week. And I just didn't have the space.   And so, I told her like, “Hey, I would love to do that. Can we do that on Sabbath?” And she was so happy with that answer. And come that Sabbath a few days later, she remembered, she came up to me. She's like, mom, it's time to paint. And she got all the supplies, and we went and sat outside at our picnic table and painted for the afternoon.   You know, Sabbath does so much for me as a mom to remove that guilt of the things I don't feel like I have time for because I know, and my kids know, Sabbath is coming and that's our day to be together and do those things.   Laura Dugger: (31:47 - 31:57) Hmm. Okay. That makes me curious. Then to how much of a vote does everyone in the family get for what Sabbath will look like?   Eryn Lynum: (31:57 - 34:02) Oh, that is a great question. No one's ever phrased it to me like that before. I love that. What we found that's been important to keep in mind is that we all individually find different things, restful and inspiring. I'll give you an example. One Sabbath, my husband, especially in the spring, he loves to work in the yard on Sabbath because he spends most of his week. He runs a construction company on the computer or on the phone. And so, in the spring, he wants to be out in the yard and trimming his fruit trees and just working with God's creation. And so, one Sabbath he comes and he has like the clippers in his hand and he's like, “Hey, let's go work on the yard.”   And I was like, that's great. You do that. I'm going to go read my book in the hammock. And I fell asleep for two hours while he worked on the yard. And so, a lot of this is being okay that yes, a lot of it's going to be together. Like I talked about, we did, we do communion together and we do meals together. And a lot of times we'll be out on a hike together. That's a favorite Sabbath activity. But a lot of times we're also doing separate activities.   The kids are enjoying their books or their audio books or their painting or their, uh, visiting the neighbor kids. And my husband and I are reading books on the back deck. And so, it's okay that there's going to be some together time and some separate time, you know, just being flexible with it. Like our first year of Sabbath, we went, we had to go like hardcore. We had to learn to stay. I think about in the book, I talk about the word abide meno in the Greek and it can mean to stay, to dwell, to remain.   So, we've spent our first year of Sabbath, not getting in the car. We stayed home and learned to just be home together. And after that year, we started to miss our time. We live in Colorado, missing our time hiking in the mountains. And so, we changed it. We said, okay, well, toward the end of Sabbath Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, let's go hike or let's go have a picnic in the wilderness. And just being open to that, that God's going to change you as a family and change you individually. And just growing up in a Sabbath practice together.   Laura Dugger: (34:03 - 34:20) I like the freedom that you're communicating there. And then when you mentioned the neighborhood kids, it makes me curious. Do you encourage community for some of those who recharge with other people? Would you recommend Sabbath thing with others or just keeping it your family?   Eryn Lynum: (34:21 - 36:16) Absolutely. We love inviting others into Sabbath. And it actually started with, we started our Sabbath practice. It was so sweet because God convinced us to do this. And then our first Sabbath was on January 1st. That happened to be the first Saturday that we did it. So, it was like this fresh start. And right around that time, we had moved to a new neighborhood. And our neighbors near us are Messianic Jews.   And they follow Shabbat, the traditional Shabbat. And they invited us into that. It was the sweetest evening, and they have children, young children, like we do. So, like there's chaos and there's mess. And then there's sweet times of singing together and scripture reading. And they follow it much more the traditional method than our family has.   But it was so sweet to be invited into that and to get a picture for how to invite others into this rest. And so, absolutely, we encourage, especially our kids having friends over. And we do usually ask parents, hey, can you drop them off? And then we can bring them back maybe like later that day toward the end of our Sabbath. Or if you want to come pick them up. Because again, we like to just stay home if we can.   But our kids are to the point now too where they can ride their bikes over to friends' houses. And we're fine with that. They might not be home on Sabbath once in a while. It's not a regular thing. But they're getting fed. And we know that the people they're with are people who share our values, people that we do life together.   We love having bonfires in the backyard on Sabbath. Now one thing I have to be careful of is I don't want to invite people over and feel like I need to host or clean up first. And so, for one, we don't have full families over a whole lot on Sabbath because I just don't want any sort of self-induced, self-imposed pressure.   But sometimes it's so much fun to just be like, hey, let's go meet at a park and have a picnic dinner. Or let's have a family over and do a bonfire. Just making sure that you're keeping it really, really simple if you are going to incorporate community.   Laura Dugger: (36:17 - 37:54) Guess what? We are no longer an audio-only podcast. We now have video included as well. If you want to view the conversation each week, make sure you watch our videos. We're on YouTube, and you can access videos or find answers to any of your other questions about the podcast when you visit thesavvysauce.com.   Some of these things, like you said, “They do require forethought where you have the groceries coming or certain things in place. And I think you even refer to it as a sacred striving.” So, it's important for us to learn more about that. And here's a quick story.   I just remember we've moved states quite a few times in marriage. But when I was a young mom, there was a mom in the next season of life, and she had more kids than we did. And we went to church together, and she was just like, “Oh, we learned about Sabbath. That's not a thing for moms with multiples.” And I always wrestled with that, and I love her. She's a wonderful person. Maybe she's even changed her stance on that, so it's not to speak ill of her. But I do think that we can struggle with that because that's not an actual truth. I do think that's a message from the enemy.   So, I guess this is a two-part question. How do we protect ourselves from buying into a storyline that is not true that may hold us back from Sabbath? And then also, what is kind of the both and? It's both restful, and it requires a lot of work up front to make this a reality.   Eryn Lynum: (37:55 - 41:19) It does, and knowing that, that it is going to take work, but God's going to bless it. Think about Isaiah 55:10-11, that says, “Just like the rain and the snow go forth and produce life and bring forth life from the land, so my work goes out and does not return void or empty. It produces that which I sent it out for.”.   That is true for Sabbath and rest because, again, we find it all throughout scripture. So, know that it's going to take hard work, but God will not allow it to return void. He will bless our efforts as we step into His design that He created us for.   I talk about in the book a few ways that you have to prepare mentally, physically, and spiritually. So, mentally, for me, I have to just totally remove anything mentally that's going to distract me from rest. So, I own a business, and so a lot of my work is on the computer and on the phone. I will answer, so this is like Friday, I'll answer any lingering emails, those ones that are going to be on my mind if I don't get to them. And then I put an away message on my email. So, if anyone emails me on our Sabbath, it sends an automatic reply that says, hey, thanks for your message. My family's resting. It has a little blurb in there about Sabbath. I'll get back to you in the new week.   That gives me permission to not even look at my email. In fact, people expect that I'm not looking at my email if I'm keeping my word. And so, this has just freed me up mentally to step away, and then I literally put my laptop in my closet.   With my phone, I set it to a Sabbath mode, and you can create these different focus modes if you have a smartphone, so that I can only receive messages from my mom in case of emergency. And our people, our friends, they all know this now. Like, oh, I'm not going to hear back from Erin because it's Saturday for the most part.   And so, these little things that you might just need to mentally prepare yourself. And then physically, that goes back to preparing our home. So, this is not a deep clean that we do prior to Sabbath. It's just tending to the things that are going to distract me if we don't get to them beforehand. So, again, washing all the dishes and having the kitchen clean, vacuuming. Like, that's like just a hack to make the house feel clean is I feel like it's clean if it's vacuumed.   So, just these little things, and then physically also doing that grocery order. And I have a free Sabbath guide on my website, erinlynum.com/family-sabbath. And it walks you through creating your Sabbath grocery list so that every week you have what you need in the house. These little things that truly make it, Sabbath easier and more successful.   And then preparing spiritually, going into this, like a lot of times I'll know, okay, I'm going to study this on Sabbath. For our first year, I just had like this stack of books on Sabbath that I would work through on our Sabbath. Right now, I am parked in Genesis 1 and have been for weeks. And so, just preparing spiritually, you know, this is a time of communion with our creator, with our heavenly father. And so, just having an idea of, you know, this is how I want to spend time delighting in God on the Sabbath.   That might be a long walk. That might be time in the word or time of worship but making sure that that is a keystone part of your Sabbath practice.   Laura Dugger: (41:20 - 41:45) And, you know, it really is possible. I just think so many of us celebrate holidays and we do the same thing where we plan, prepare, prioritize ahead of time so that we can delight in that day. And what a gift to get to do that weekly. So, with all of these amazing benefits, why do we still resist God's design for rest?   Eryn Lynum: (41:46 - 43:00) Because we live in a fallen world, broken by sin, and the enemy wants to do everything he can to keep us from this. This is God's design and our faith, and our souls and our families flourish in this design. And so, the enemy is going to do whatever he can to keep us from it.   He's going to insert fear. He's going to insert distraction. He's going to insert doubt. You know, when we started this practice coming up to it, I was thinking, there's no way, like how are we going to get everything done in one last day a week, all these doubts. And yet what we found so quickly is that as we took this step of faith, we quickly became so much more productive and effective and creative during the work week, because we were starting from rest and following God's design.   We resist this because it is counter-cultural. Everything in society is set up against us doing this and succeeding in this. So, again, going and knowing that our war is not against flesh and blood. It is against the powers of the spheres, like things unseen. The enemy is against us, but God is on our side. And as we step into his design, he's going to make much of it.   Laura Dugger: (43:01 - 43:12) Okay. So, if we are convinced and we want to give this a try, what is a practical first step to just obeying this and receiving this gift of rest?   Eryn Lynum: (43:13 - 45:23) Yeah, super practical here. Two first steps. The first is to set a day and time. Now you're not committing to this forever. And again, if you, if a big hesitancy here is I can't do a full day. Okay. Work and pray toward that but start smaller. If it's four hours on a Wednesday, guard that time. Ruthlessly guard it. Don't let anything be written on the schedule besides that.   So, set a day in time and then write two lists. This is going back to the idea of stop and delight, right? Your stop list. These are things that send you into hurry and hustle mode, things that are related to normal work, things that feel heavy. Some of them are so important.   Again, our work is important, but this is going to be things like devices, media, regular work, answering emails, phone calls. It might be driving in traffic. It might be spending money. Write down those things that feel heavy. That's your stop list. The things you're not going to entertain on that day or that time.   And then write your delight list. This might be hard at first because what I've found with myself, with many of us is that we forget what we delight in but causes that childlike sense of play and wonder. This is learning to be human again, coming back to those things.   So, it might be playing music or listening to music, working with fresh ingredients, reading a good book, writing by hand, watercolor painting, going for a walk. What we find is that a lot of people who spend time during the week in front of a computer want to be outdoors on the Sabbath, but people who run a landscaping company might want to be inside with a great book. So, just writing down those things that are, again, those things that you think during the week, oh, I really wish I could get to that.   Only we don't. Those are your delight list. So, now you have a day and a time. You know what you're not going to do, what you're setting aside, even physically, that should probably most definitely be your phone. Stick it in a drawer. I have my Sabbath drawer where I put my phone, and then you know what you're going to do and spend that day on.   Laura Dugger: (45:24 - 45:47) That's so good. And for those who have been listening for a while, they could even put their phone in their RO box, and I could link to that episode as well with Joey Odom. That's incredible about where our phone could be in its right place.   But Eryn, are there any other practical benefits that we might be missing out on that you've seen as a result of this Sabbath rest?   Eryn Lynum: (45:48 - 49:44) One of my favorite benefits is how it unlocks our creativity. Whether you work in a career or position that you consider creative or not, God designed all of us to be creative, to produce. And so, what I have found is that my work, my work is very in that creative sphere, writing books, creating podcast lessons for children.   It's very creative work. And I've found that Sabbath is this day where God gives my mind rest. It's so incredible thinking about how he wired our brains to thrive through rest, and science points to that that a restful mind is better at problem-solving, connecting ideas, remembering details.   And so, as my mind is allowed to rest on Sabbath, and I'm out on a walk in nature, or I'm reading a good book, or I'm writing by hand, when it comes time to sit down at the computer Monday morning, I am ready. I am flowing with ideas. They are there.   And I'll give you an example. This one isn't from Sabbath. It's from one of my daily rest rhythms that I call Selah Pause, and that's a walk in the morning. And this might be a little controversial, but this is not an easy stroll. I have my rucking pack on, and I'm trekking up a hill, which is not physically restful, of course, but it's mentally restful for me. I love it.   And so, it was in January, so it's frigid out, and everything's covered in snow, and I'm in all my snow gear, and I'm trudging up this hill. And at the time, I was dealing with a problem in my podcast where it was a good problem. We had spent the month teaching about God's designs in the human body. So, we had taught kids about God's designs in cells and DNA and the heart and the brain, but I didn't want to just let this series end. I wanted to wrap it up in some powerful way, and I didn't know how. So, I could have stayed home that morning and hashed this out and been at the computer, and how should I end this thing?   Instead, I went on this walk, and God just dropped this idea in my mind. And it was this idea. He said, ask the kids how they are wonderfully made. And that was the top. The theme was wonderfully made. And so, I put it out there to my email list. When I got back from that walk, I said, hey, I would love to hear how you kids believe you are wonderfully made by the creator. And I opened up this little voice mailbox on our website, and I didn't know if anyone would respond. And then I'm like, what if they don't? And then I don't know what to do because I said I'm going to do this thing.   I tell you, message after message came in from children from ages. I think it was three or four up to 14 from all over the world. And I was weeping as I edited that episode. I had planned to add something at the beginning and the end to build out this episode. I didn't do that because it was, I believe it's 22 minutes straight of children saying, this is my name.   I'm five years old. I live in England and I'm wonderfully made because God made me to read well or God made me fast. Or one little boy shared, he said, I know I'm wonderfully made because my mama lost a baby before me. And I'm here and I'm wonderfully made. And I'm weeping.   And this idea that God gave me, I would have missed it if I hadn't taken that pause to be out in his creation walking that day. And so, that's a very roundabout way to get back to your question of what are the other benefits? We hear from God when we make time for rest. And if we keep just rushing and hurrying, I'm concerned that we are walking by so many opportunities to hear from his spirit and to let him unlock that potential within us.   Laura Dugger: (49:45 - 50:22) Oh, I love that. And I'm even reminded of one other thing that you write in your book that today, one way we can practically experience his original design of rest is by stepping outside. And you're full of tips and ideas like that, but I so appreciate those stories.   So, you've equipped us with this foundation of rest and ways that we can prepare for it, how we can enjoy and delight in it. And so now, Eryn, how can we reflect well on our rhythms of work and rest?   Eryn Lynum: (50:25 - 53:19) So, much of this is reflection. So, much of this is stopping to consider where God is at work in our lives, where we need to recalibrate, where we need to realign, where we need to step back into his pace because we're trying to run ahead of him. And one way that we can see it, you know, like you might ask the question, am I at rest? Even me sometimes on Sabbath, I'm like, am I doing this right? Like, is this actually restful? Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?   I think we can answer that question by the fruit in our lives, the fruit inside of us that God is producing and the fruit that we are producing. So, one thing I kind of sum up the book on is this question of, are you growing in truth and love? Because the enemy, when he gets us away from God's rest and into hustle, into distraction and hurry, we are not fully experiencing God.   And so, our levels of experiencing his love and offering it to others is going to suffer. Our experience of hearing his truth and living that truth out in our lives is going to suffer. And so, the opposite is true that as we live at rest, this whole concept of abide, that is living at rest, not just these rest practices, but living at rest in God's restful presence, we are going to be producing more love and more truth.   So, that's like a key visual. And then I love on that idea of abide. We spent a whole week on abide in the book and, you know, John chapter 15 being the abide passage. And what we see there is there's these 11 mentions of that word abide. And they all refer to us abiding in Christ, Christ abiding in us, God's word abiding in us. So, all this connectivity between Christ and God and us and his word.   But then it's, I think it's verse 16. There's a different mention of meno, abide. And it says that he wants us to go out and produce fruit that abides. So, this is different. It relates to our fruit and that word abide. Yes, it can mean dwell, remain, stay, but it can also mean continue and endure.   God created us to produce fruit and fruit that endures. Doesn't rot, doesn't fade, but continues into eternity. So, we can look at, okay, am I personally in my spirit? Am I growing in truth and love? Because God's spirit actually has the space to minister to me when I rest. And is that rest directly affecting the fruit of my life?   These are key things that we can look at and ask to see. Are we truly living from God's rest?   Laura Dugger: (53:19 - 53:53) I love questions so much. And that's so good to reflect then on the fruit that's being produced. And a mentor many years ago said, you never reap what you sow in the same season. So, that's a great place to even begin just reflecting. What did we do in the past season and what fruit are we reaping now? And where do we want to go then from here?   And one place we could go from here after this chat is to follow you. And you've mentioned your podcast. Do you want to elaborate on all the places that you're available?   Eryn Lynum: (53:54 - 55:03) Yes, thank you. So, the new book, The Nature of Rest is available wherever you get your books, along with my second book, Rooted in Wonder: Nurturing Your Family's Faith Through God's Creation. And that's all about taking our kids or grandkids, the next generation outside and reconnecting the dots between creation and creator. Really returning nature study and time outdoors to its proper place as theology and the study of God.   So, those are available anywhere, including Amazon or my website, which is my name, erynlynum.com. And then my podcast is Nat Theo, short for Natural Theology. It's nature lessons rooted in the Bible. It's a podcast for kids and families where we dive deep into science and all the design and intelligence we see in creatures and plants. And we tie it all back to biblical truth so that our kids are learning science and theology at the same time.   And that's available on any podcast platform, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, right on my website, erinlynum.com, as well as YouTube. We actually provide visuals so you can watch what you're learning about as well.   Laura Dugger: (55:04 - 55:22) So, incredible. We will add links to that in the show notes for today's episode. And Eryn, you may already be familiar. We're called The Savvy Sauce because savvy is synonymous with practical knowledge. And so, as my final question for you today, what is your savvy sauce?   Eryn Lynum: (55:24 - 56:34) I love this question. And this is one that actually I was like, oh, I'm not asked this much. I'm going to have to really think deeply on this one.   It's get outside every day. That seems so simple, even though it's not really simple in practicality. But one thing I've learned through rest and through time outdoors is that 10 minutes matters. Like if you think I don't have time for this, but you have a 10 minute slot, go for a walk and see how God just communes with your spirit. Even in the dead of winter, if you live somewhere cold, like if it's safe to do so. For me, I had to buy like the best pair of snow pants I could find because I used to really dislike the winter. And I would just become like really down in those winter months.   And so, God just convinced me, don't go outside every single day if it's for 10 minutes. And then pretty often he just extends that. Like I think I'm going out for 10 minutes. And sure enough, I'm like playing with my kids outside. It's much longer.   But yeah, as best as you can, just prioritize that. If you have to do it first thing in the morning to make sure it happens, go for a walk and watch the sunrise. And God is going to minister to your soul through his creation.   Laura Dugger: (56:35 - 56:54) Amen. Amen. That is so good.   And this conversation has been so rich. Eryn, it is just very clear you have filled up on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you have just poured out goodness and love and truth for all of us, all over all of us today. So, thank you for all that you shared. And thank you for being my guest.   Eryn Lynum: (56:55 - 57:03) Thank you. Thank you so much for that encouragement. That means a whole lot to me. So, thank you. And for the opportunity for a great conversation.   Laura Dugger: (57:03 - 1:03:10) I really enjoyed it.    One more thing before you go, have you heard the term gospel before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you, but it starts with the bad news.   Every single one of us were born sinners, but Christ desires to rescue us from our sin, which is something we cannot do for ourselves. This means there's absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So, for you and for me, it means we deserve death, and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved.   We need a savior, but God loved us so much. He made a way for his only son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute. This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with him.   That is good news. Jesus lived the perfect life. We could never live and died in our place for our sin.   This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus. We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished. If we choose to receive what he has done for us, Romans 10:9 says, “that if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”   So, you pray with me now. Heavenly father, thank you for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to you.   Will you clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare you as Lord of their life? We trust you to work and change lives now for eternity. In Jesus name we pray.   Amen. If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring him for me. So, me for him, you get the opportunity to live your life for him.   And at this podcast, we're called The Savvy Sauce for a reason. We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So, you're ready to get started.   First, tell someone, say it out loud, get a Bible. The first day I made this decision, my parents took me to Barnes and Noble and let me choose my own Bible. I selected the Quest NIV Bible and I love it.   You can start by reading the book of John. Also get connected locally, which just means tell someone who's a part of a church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you.   We want to celebrate with you too. So, feel free to leave a comment for us here. If you did make a decision to follow Christ, we also have show notes included where you can read scripture that describes this process.   And finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, “in the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” The heavens are praising with you for your decision today.   And if you've already received this good news, I pray you have someone to share it with. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.

God not only calls His people to serve Him with skill, excellence, and Spirit-filled devotion, but He also commands them to rest in Him with trust and obedience. In Exodus 31 we see the balance of sacred work and sacred rest: Bezalel and Oholiab are filled with the Spirit for service, while the Sabbath is given as a covenant sign of God's presence. Our lives, too, are meant to reflect this holy rhythm, working unto the Lord with all He provides, and resting in His covenant grace.

Readings: Isaiah 58:9b-14 | Psalm 103:1-8 | Hebrews 12:18-29 | Luke 13:10-17. Preached for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost (2025-08-24).

The Biblical Feasts of the LORD and their Prophetic Fulfillment:  Shabbat. In this episode, host Chaim Goldman, “The Watchman” continues his 8-part series. What is Shabbat? Do you have to, or do you get to? Observing Biblically: Can the Sabbath be moved? The immense spiritual significance of the Holy Sabbath; and how you can receive the blessing of the Sabbath.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new MP3 sermon from Discover The Word With Dr Jim is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: EX#117 The Holy Sabbath Subtitle: Exodus From Hebrew Speaker: Dr. James M. Phillips Broadcaster: Discover The Word With Dr Jim Event: Midweek Service Date: 4/5/2024 Bible: Exodus 31:12-17 Length: 38 min.

First Fruits of Zion teaches that the whole Bible, including the Law of Moses, that is, the Torah given to the Jewish people, has relevance and practical application for Gentile Christians. Some Messianic Jews disagree; they argue that the Torah is for Jews only. Today's guests, FFOZ Senior Educator Aaron Eby and Director of Torah Club Damian Eisner are here to challenge the idea that the Torah has nothing to say to Gentiles. – Episode Highlights – Terms are confusing if they are not well-defined. Many people stumble on the Jewish Jesus online but many times the source of the information they stumble on is what we would call Hebrew Roots. First Fruits of Zion is part of Messianic Judaism, and there are some important distinctions. The community of faith is composed of both Jews and Gentiles. But despite us being “one in Messiah,” First Fruits of Zion believes that it is important to maintain our unique identities. Why do we think so, and how do we advise Jews and Gentiles to avoid blurring the lines of distinction? Acts 15 documents an important time in the life of the apostles when they decided on the course of faith for Gentiles who were coming to faith in the Jewish Messiah. What does this passage teach about Jewish and Gentile obligations to the Law? The Sabbath and the Jewish festivals are full of richness in meaning and blessing. What does the remembrance and observance of the Sabbath and the other biblical holidays look like for Jewish people, and what would they look like for a Gentile disciple? – Chapters – 00:00 Welcome to Messiah Podcast. 02:05 First Fruits of Zion is a Messianic Jewish organization, not Hebrew Roots. 13:08 What is distinction theology? 20:00 The apostles' expectation of Gentile disciples. 25:22 Interpreting Acts 15 and Acts 21 and the four prohibitions for Gentile disciples. 29:38 The synagogue has always been a place for Gentiles to learn about the God of Israel. 40:43 What does the distinction between Jewish and Gentile observance of the Sabbath look like? 55:51 How can Gentiles interface with and observe Jewish holidays like Passover and Tabernacles? 01:04:51 Is 1 Corinthians 5:8 an invitation to Gentiles to celebrate Passover? 01:11:34 A biblical model for do's and don'ts for Gentiles. 01:15:23 Gentiles are adopted to be part of the family of God. 01:20:32 First Fruits of Zion does not subscribe to what is commonly known as “one law theology.” – Episode Resources – Restoration: Returning the Torah of Moses to the Disciples of Jesus https://ffoz.store/products/restoration-book From Sabbath to Sabbath: Returning the Holy Sabbath to the Disciples of Jesus. https://ffoz.store/products/from-sabbath-to-sabbath-book The Holy Days: Returning the Biblical Festivals to the Disciples of Jesus. https://ffoz.store/products/the-holy-days-book Messiah Podcast is a production of First Fruits of Zion (https://ffoz.org) in conjunction with Messiah Magazine. This publication is designed to provide rich substance, meaningful Jewish contexts, cultural understanding of the teaching of Jesus, and the background of modern faith from a Messianic Jewish perspective. Messiah Podcast theme music provided with permission by Joshua Aaron Music (http://JoshuaAaron.tv). “Cover the Sea” Copyright WorshipinIsrael.com songs 2020. All rights reserved.

By Chuck Smith in Vero Beach, FL - February 3, 2024 - Are we on a cycle that involves the Holy Sabbath? Is this commanded assembly observed by the entire heavenly realm? Join as we study these questions along with some little-known facts about Sunday worship otherwise known as the "Lord's Day".

Father, we thank you for your holy word and we thank you that you are a holy God and we have transgressed your holy law. And it's because of our rebellion. It's because we do have, every single one of us, a problem with authority, a problem with your authority in particular when you call us to do things that go against our own will. And Lord, you didn't leave us in our sins and trespasses. You didn't leave us in our rebellious, recalcitrant, our stubborn stiff-neckedness. Instead, you sent your son Jesus Christ, who submitted perfectly to every single facet of the law, every single tenant of the law, every single law. And you submitted Jesus to the will of the Father like no one before you, like no one after you. And you did that in order to provide a way for us to be saved. And you went to the cross instead of experiencing the blessing that you deserved for your law keeping, you took the curse that we deserve for our lawbreaking.And Lord, you were crucified, you died and you were buried. And we thank you that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you were resurrected. And now you call every single one of us to repentance in particular the areas of our life where we do want to seek our own will instead of yours. You call us to repent and not be stiff neck and I pray today, soften our hearts, soften our necks, soften our wills, and make us a people that long to obey you because your will is good and your will is perfect and your will is holy. You do not call us to anything that is short of your blessed will. Everything you call us to is for our good and it's ultimately for your glory. And when we glorify you the most, that's when we experience your presence the most and we experience the joy that you would have for us.Lord bless our time, the holy scriptures today. Holy Spirit, we love you. If there's any places in our lives where we are grieving you or where we are in our obstinacy, turning from your leading, I pray today, Lord, make us filled with the Holy Spirit to keep in step with the Spirit. Doing nothing to grieve your spirit. Lord bless our time in the holy scriptures and give us grace and give us your presence. We pray this in Christ's name, amen. We're continuing our sermon series through the Gospel of Mark called the Gospel of Mark and the Secret of God's Kingdom. And the title of the sermon today is Beware Stiff Nakedness. A few years ago, my third daughter at Katharina, Ecat for short, she started a dog sitting business and she got this dog that was small yet incredibly strong to watch for a few days and she loves dogs and she loves dog sitting.And dog sitting is the closest that she's going to get to having a dog, although she is hoping for a miracle and praying for one. So though it was Ecat's responsibility to watch this dog, I don't know what happened, but it wasn't her walking the dog, it was my second daughter, Elizabeth, went out to give the dog a walk and it was winter time, it was cold outside and 20 minutes goes by, she's not home in 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and we got to worrying and we went to look for her and we found her stuck on a street corner trying with all her might to drag this dog, to turn this dog in the direction of home to no veil. She tried talking to the dog, pleading with the dog, cajoling the dog, bribing the dog with snacks. And every time she would pull on the leash to turn her home, the dog stiffened its neck and dug in. And it took a strong word of command to get the dog to come, a stronger yank of the leash to get the dog to turn right.And from the side, if you saw what was happening here like that looks like excessive force, but it wasn't excessive and force was the only thing that the dog could understand, it was actually loving force. What was the goal? The goal was to get the dog home where it's warm and toasty and by itself the dog wouldn't make it out on the streets. The dog was stiff-necked. And that's the same phrase that God uses to describe the behavior of unbelieving people, people who see God's work, see sign after sign and don't take God at his Word. People who intentionally reject God's Word to do their own will. There's a curious passage in Nehemiah where Nehemiah summarizes quick in a pithy way the history of the people of Israel. In Nehemiah 9:13, speaking of God, "You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your Holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses, your servant.You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst. And you told them to go into possess the land that you had sworn to give them. But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments. They refuse to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you've performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love and did not forsake them." You read this and you say it's unbelievable. These people saw miracle after miracle with a crescendo of parting the Red Sea and they walked through and the armies of the Egyptians, they were swallowed up by the water.They saw miracle after miracle, they heard the voice of God, they saw the evidence of God's work. And then as soon as they realized that to be free from captivity means to be in submission to God and his word, they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I prefer slavery. And they appointed a leader to bring them back. And you say, how could they ever do that? Well, friends, just look into your own heart, look at your own history, how often do we come to Christ, have our sins forgiven? And then the Lord says, "Repent, believe, and follow me." And we start following and realize, "Oh, this is so much harder than I'd ever anticipated. The sacrifice is so much greater than I'm willing to make." And you turn back to sin, the word of God presents hardheartedness as the root cause of stiff nakedness. Why?Because in the scriptures, the heart isn't just the seed of emotions, it's the center of the will. So you end up doing exactly what you love most. And if you love yourself more than you love God, you place yourself in the position of God. And if you take God's rightful place on the throne of your life, the very life that God gave you, then there will never be evidence enough for the existence of God, for the veracity of his word, for his clear commandments. God is the ultimate authority. And to believe in God is to love His authority. To believe in God is to submit to His authority no matter how we feel about the commandment. Even when every fiber in your being bristles with rebellion, at those moments, we must cry out to the Lord. Lord, soften my heart, Lord relax my stiff neck.And those sticking points are the places where if we receive God's will, the absolute greatest transformation happens in our lives. However, if the Lord reveals a point in our lives where our necks have stiffened up against His will where we remain recalcitrant, when he pulls on the leash, there is potential for the neck to break. Proverbs 29:1 says, "He who is often reproved, yet stiffens his neck will suddenly be broken beyond healing." And today we approach a text where Jesus deals with the hard hardness of the stiff nakedness of those who should have known better, the Pharisees, the religious leaders, the politicians, those who followed Herod and the Herodians. And then he turns His attention to the disciples and He says that rebellious spirit that you see in the Pharisees and the Herodians, watch out that that spirit does not grow in your hearts. So today in Mark 8:11-22, would you look at the text with me?"The Pharisees came and began to argue with Him, seeking for him a sign from heaven to test Him. And He sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation seek a sign?" "Truly I say to you, no sign will be given this generation" and He left them, gotten to the boat again and went to the other side. Now, they had forgotten to bring bread and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them saying, watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus aware of this said to them, why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes, do you not see and having ears?Do you not hear? And do you not remember when I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? They said to Him "twelve." And the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? And they said to Him, "Seven". And He said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" This is the reading of God's holy, inert and fallible authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts, three points of the frame up our time, be not a stiff-necked sign seeker. Second, beware the leaven of stiff-neckedness. And three battle hardheartedness by remembering. First be not a stiff-necked sign seeker. After Jesus feeds the 4,000 Gentiles, Mark tells us that he gets in the boat and they went to the region of Dalmanutha on the western, more Jewish shore of the lake.And that's where the Pharisees meet Him. And that's verse 11. The Pharisees came and began to argue with Him, seeking from Him a sign from heaven to test him. Now, if you haven't been with us, the Pharisees, just a quick recap, were the religious leaders. They're the gatekeepers of the Jewish faith. They're the self-proclaimed representatives of God. So when Jesus shows up and starts telling people the Pharisees, He starts telling them that he's the promised Messiah and actually he's the Son of God. While they've got concerns. He can't be God they reason. Why? Because they know God. God is on our side, they figured. We have God figured out. We're the professionals here, Jesus. Moreover, if Jesus is right, then they're wrong, but they can't be wrong, not this wrong, not this wrong about the most important question in the universe. Who is God and what does He demand of me?And moreover, if Jesus is right, then they have to change their lives and they don't want to change their lives. They like their lives. They like their prestigious, lucrative positions. They like the honor that the people give them. They like the glory they receive and the praise from the people. Moreover, Jesus is preaching not just that they are to obey God more, he's preaching that they can't save themselves at all. He's preaching that apart from repentance, that they have no standing before God. He's preaching repentance, which means a change of life, but they don't want to change their life. And also Jesus, who are you to teach us about God? You didn't even go to rabbinical school and we don't even know who your father is. And they cast all kinds of insinuations upon Him. So they come to Jesus and they begin to argue with Him.This is a phrase that's used with a nuance of hostility. They're saying, "Jesus, prove your authority. Prove that you are who you say you are. And prove it in exactly how we say it." Here's the marching orders, Jesus, obey them dutifully and then maybe we'll follow you. But here's the thing, God doesn't take commands from us. We can pray to God and we can bring our requests to God, but we can't command God. And by definition, God does not obey humans and the posture of their heart behind this phrase "Prove to me that you're God," well, it's a posture of authority over a subject. They're standing in authority over Jesus, Jesus we're telling you what to do if you want us to believe. He's God and which means He doesn't obey us, we obey him. And the very second he starts to obey us is the very second we usurp his throne, which He doesn't allow.They came to test Him seeking from him a sign from heaven what Jesus had just been doing, sign after sign after sign. Perhaps they weren't privy or witness to the sign of feeding of the 4,000, but they had definitely heard about it. If you feed 5,000 men, if you give 5,000 men a free lunch, it doesn't even have to be that great, a free mediocre lunch, they're going to tell everybody about it. I got a free lunch. It was awesome. It was free. Partially our strategy behind feeding people. February 4th is our first monthly community lunch, make sure to come at 1:00 PM February 4th and bring your friends so they tell all their friends about it. No. And then also they saw some of the miracles. They saw the exorcism in chapter three. Jesus cast out a demon from a person and the Pharisees charged Jesus with doing this spiritual work by the power of Satan himself.And Jesus calls them out and says, "No, no, no, you are on the side of Satan actually and you've blasphemed the Holy Spirit," and seeking a sign despite the existence of previous signs, despite the eyewitness accounts of different signs. What the Pharisees do is they demonstrate that they're spiritual heirs of the disobedient wilderness generation, the generation that was led out of captivity from Egypt and led into the wilderness and they did not believe God, and God turned from them. In the Old Testament, it's not always a mark of disobedience to request a sign from God. If you remember Gideon, he famously laid a fleece before the Lord to ascertain whether God was going to choose him as an instrument in military deliverance. Hezekiah asked for a sign and received it that he would be healed of his grave illness. Isaiah seven, God insists that Ahaz actually asked for a sign from heaven and God sends it.In other places, signs seeking is presented negatively in particular with false prophets. God did warn that false prophets will come and they will try to verify their teaching with signs and miracles, but if they give signs and lead people into apostasy, those people aren't from God. Deuteronomy 13:1-5, "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder and the sign or a wonder that he tells you comes to pass. And if He says, let us go after other gods which you have not known, and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord, your God, is testing you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear Him and keep His commandments and obey His voice and you shall serve Him and hold fast to Him.But that prophet or that dreamer of dream shall be put to death because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of slavery to make you leave the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from your midst." And perhaps this was at the heart of the strategy of the Pharisees to accuse Jesus of being a false prophet. So that was their assumption that you're teaching something false, something against the scriptures, and here's the sign that you did. Therefore, Deuteronomy 13, we have reason to condemn you. They were seeking a sign to test Him. And this phrase to test is a phrase that's used often to describe Satan. Satan was a tester of the tempter in Matthew chapter four, where Jesus has been fasting for 40 days.Satan comes to tempt Jesus Christ with signs. He said, take these stones and turn them into bread to prove that you are who you say you are. And then Jesus responds with a quotation of Deuteronomy chapter 6:16, which is a reference to the incident at Massa and marimba. We'll get to that. But Deuteronomy 6:16, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested Him at Massah. You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and His testimonies and His statutes, which He has commanded you." You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, he's the one that gives us tests. He's the one that puts us to the test. We don't return the favor. Sometimes people ask me, you want to go bungee jumping? You want to go jump out of a plane with a parachute?And I say, I don't have enough faith. I don't have enough faith in that stuff. And my verse that every time that comes to mind, whenever that whole category of I don't want to put the Lord to the test, like, oh, this is a great opportunity. That's not what he's talking about, he's talking about don't test the veracity of God's word, especially if God's already proven it time and time and time again, don't test Him. And this wasn't a request, it was a test similar to the testing of God by the Israelites at Massah and Meribah in Exodus 17. So Exodus 16, God sends manna from heaven, an incredible miracle, people see that God is providing. And then chapter 17, they test Moses again, they want water. And their question is, does God love us? Is God even with us? And they're testing God.And the same phrase that's used here in Mark where the Pharisees test God, peirazō, peirazein, that same saying, that same phrase is used in Exodus 17 in the Septuagint which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Exodus 17:1, "All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of sin by stages according to the commandment of the Lord and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore, the people quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. And Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me?" "Why do you test the Lord?" But the people thirsted there for water and the people grumbled against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?" So Moses cried to the Lord, "What shall I do with these people?"They're almost ready to stone me. And the Lord said to Moses, "Pass on before the people taking with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand, the staff, with which you struck the Nile and go." "Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb and you shall strike the rock and the water shall come out of it and the people will drink." And Moses did so on the sight of the elders of Israel and he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, because they tested the Lord by saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?" Is the Lord among us or not? After miracle, after miracle, after miracle and they were just fed with manna the day before, but it's just a human need, thirst, they suffer just a little bit and all of a sudden they're questioning God.They're grumbling against the Lord. And we see that all throughout the scriptures. This episode is brought to the forefront just to remind the people of Israel do not be like your forefathers. Psalm 95:7-11, "For He is our God and we are the people of his pastor and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness. When your father's put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For 40 years, I loathed that generation and said, "They are people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways." Therefore, I swore in my wrath they shall not enter my rest." The parallels are clear between what Jesus was doing here and Mark and what God was doing with the people of Israel.Moses fed people with manna, in the same way Jesus feeds the 5,000 and then the 4,000, and then we have this text about not testing God and not being stiff-necked. Numbers 14, God swears that the wilderness generation that tested him will not enter Canaan. So in a sense you can diminish blessing from your own life by testing God. Through our own stiffness we actually keep ourselves from blessings that the Lord would have for us. The people resisted God and were stiff-necked against God and they missed out on the promised land. Numbers 14:21, "But truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord, none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these 10 times and have not obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers and none of those who despise me shall see it."And the Lord was keeping track 10 times, he says they were stiff-necked and didn't obey. And why? Because they weren't just testing Moses, they were testing God. To test God is to undermine his authority and to undermine his authority is to hate him. And in our text, the Pharisees weren't just testing a representative of God, they were testing God himself, God incarnate. Psalm 78:17, "Yet they sinned still more against Him, rebelling against the most high in the desert. They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved. They spoke against God saying, "Can God spread a table in the wilderness?" He struck the rock so that the water gushed out and streams overflowed. "Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?" What's Jesus' reaction to their testing? Verse 12, "And He sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation seek a sign?Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation." He sighed deeply in His spirit. If you remember when He healed a deaf man before He healed the deaf man, he looked up to heaven and he sighed deeply, partially because He is exasperated by the consequences of the fall, the repercussions of the fall, which includes sickness. And here He's exasperated at their unbelief, people that should have known better, people who have received God's Word and God here is exasperated with them. Scripture teaches us to not grieve the Holy Spirit, meaning when the Holy Spirit tells us what to do, it leads us in a certain direction and we say no, we're stiff-necked against the Holy Spirit. He does grieve. He is grieved by our disobedience and we are told not to quench the spirit or grieve the spirit but be filled with the spirit.Similar reaction Jesus feels in the next chapter where a gentleman comes and he says to the disciples of Jesus, "Can you cast out a demon from my son?" And the disciples couldn't do it. Jesus comes down the mountain of transfiguration and He says this in Mark 9:19, "Oh faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?" The stubborn refusal to believe lay at the root of the Pharisees attitude. To those in such a state of unbelief, even a sign, if it was given, it wouldn't convince because a lack of belief, the root cause of the lack of belief in God is not a lack of evidence, and it's not a difficulty of the intellect or the reason. No, it's a difficulty of the will. John 7:17 says, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority."And Jesus is saying, "Do you want proof that the words that I'm saying are true?" Well, do you want to do God's will? Because if I prove to you that God exists but you don't want to do God's will, it's actually more condemnation. I don't want to give you illumination that will lead to more condemnation if you want nothing to do with God's will. And certainty in the faith deepening of the faith, it is a gift of those who are obedient to the Lord. Is your will to do God's will, and that is the way to deepen your faith. The Pharisees were blind and as someone said, none are so blind as those who will not see. That's their attitude and such an attitude of sign seeking runs diametrically opposed to the biblical concept of the nature of faith. Jesus told Thomas when Thomas said, "Until I put my hands in the wounds of the resurrected Christ, I'm not going to believe."And then he sees Christ and Christ showed him the wounds he didn't even have to touch. He believed and he said, "Blessed are you Thomas." But more blessed are those who have not seen. You've seen and you've believed, but more blessed are those who have not seen and believe. Why? Because if you see a miracle, if Jesus gave the Pharisees another miracle, another sign at this moment, it's not faith that leads them to believe in God. No, it's just a logical conclusion. Of course this is God. Of course I'm going to place my faith in God because I've seen the evidence. It's a logical conclusion and the Lord wants a deeper faith and he wants us to take a step of faith given the evidence that he's given us. And he says, "This generation, truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation."And that's a phrase that's used before the flood in Genesis six where there's an evil and adulterous generation and same phrase that's used for Israel in the wilderness. And he says that you're not going to get a sign. Another translation says, God forbid that a sign should be given you. Perish the thought that I would do such a thing. There's an intense emotion. And what He's saying is, "No, I'm not doing it." God's not in the business of sending authenticating signs on demand. God isn't a pinata. God isn't a vending machine. God clearly tells us these are the terms on which you come to me, and you don't get to dictate the terms. Jesus has given them all the evidence they need to come to faith. The Pharisees are without excuse.,They can't plead ignorance, nor can they say that God hadn't given them enough information.You're alive. Why are you alive? Where did you come from? Where did life come from? You live in a material world, where did all of this come from? It didn't come from nothing. Nothing can come from nothing. And then on top of that, the moral law is written on your heart. When you read the 10 Commandments, you're like, yes, life would be better if everyone lived like this. And no, I have not lived like this. So what's the penalty for transgressing on the holy law of God? The penalty is damnation. The penalty is to be rejected by God. Therefore, I need grace. And this is exactly what they were unwilling to ask for. And it's not as though these people are unintelligent, on the contrary, they were probably some of the smartest people in Israel at the time. They knew the prophetic passages about the Messiah and Jesus fulfilled them perfectly.But they refused to believe. Why? Partially because Jesus called them out for their self-righteousness. You present yourself as righteous, but you are far from it and it's all facades of righteousness and it's all hypocrisy. And Jesus called them to repentance and they didn't want to be called to repentance. You're calling us sinners, Jesus, we're not sinners, we do all the right things, you're probably the sinner. A lot of us, today, we want miracles to believe in the Lord. And sometimes it is fine to ask for a miracle. It's fine to ask for a sign from the Lord. It really depends on what posture of heart that you ask the miracle with which you ask for the miracle. And then the point, are you looking for a miracle so that you can deepen your obedience and submission to the Lord? Or are you looking for an excuse to rebel against him?We do have miracles. We experience miracles every time a person comes to faith, especially in a place like Boston, one of the greatest miracles, the fact that anyone would turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ. Regeneration incredible miracle. Another miracle is the holy scriptures, the word of God, the Bible, two million miracles, two million words, give or take order of magnitude. 66 books, 1,189 chapters written by 40 different authors over 1,500 years, three different languages used Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, every jaw, every tittle of it given by the inspiration of God that holy men of old Roe as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. It's incredible through the centuries that the Lord has preserved the holy scriptures. This is the miracle. It's right before us, right before us supervised by the Holy Spirit and it tells us everything we need, everything we need to know about God, who he is, about the person of God.It tells us everything we need to know about how we can be reconciled with Him, saved from sin, saved from eternal damnation and tells us how we are to live in order to glorify God and honor him. Mark 8:13, "And he left them and got into the boat again and went to the other side." So in the beginning of the passage, Jesus crosses over from gentile land to Jewish land, exchanges a few sentences with the Pharisees. They're like, "We want to sign?" They're like, "I'm not giving you a sign." Gets in the boat and leaves. And here it is just a reminiscent of the departure of God and Deuteronomy where He turns his face away from rebellious people. Deuteronomy 32:20 and He said, "I will hide my face from them and I'll see what their end will be for they're a perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness."Point two is beware the leaven of stiff-neckedness. Here now Jesus turns from the Pharisees to His own disciples. In verse 14, now they had forgotten to bring bread and they had only one loaf with them in the boat and he cautioned them saying, "Watch out. Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." The word leaven, it's not synonymous with yeast. In ancient times, yeast was rare. Dough was rather made by leavening or mixing into a small amount of dough, a piece of the previous week's dough that had been leavened. It was kept back for that purpose. If you make yogurt at home, it's the same process. Kombucha, kombucha, really delicious, really good for you apparently. But it's like you make a batch but you save a little bit of that batch to make the next batch, that's what the leaven is.And the power of the leaven is that it has power to permeate the whole dough. This is what Jesus is talking about. And in context of the Hebrew scriptures, during Passover, they had unleavened bread and they would cleanse their house from any leaven because the leaven was a sign of something that could permeate the whole thing. And here in this context that leaven is evil, it's stubbornness, it's stiff ness. And Jesus saying, "Disciples, be careful if even a little bit of this bitterness in your heart, even a little bit of the stiff-neckedness in your heart and any tiny aspect of your life because it has the power to take over. Unbelief because of non-submissive hearts is the unseen pervasive influence. 1st Corinthians 5:6 says, "Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven, leavens the whole lump?" Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are on leaven for Christ?Our passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So he says, be careful of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians. In verse 16, they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. They just witnessed Jesus feed 5,000 men and then they witnessed Jesus feed 4,000. Jesus is clearly talking about spiritual matters, but they missed the point. To show us just how far they are from understanding who Christ is completely what his ultimate goal was in coming, which is to save us from the leaven of sin within, to give us new hearts that long to obey God. And in response to their misunderstanding, Jesus unleashes a series of questions. He ask eight questions, five critical questions that echo passages from the Old Testament, then two additional questions that recall the two miraculous feedings and then a final critical question.But the point is watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. "Watch out, beware." It's a double warning meaning this is how important it is to heeded this warning. Beware that you do not get infected with the stubborn unbelief. The stiff-neckedness of the Pharisees and the Herodians. Both were stiff-necked but seemingly in opposite waves. If you look at the surface, if you just look at their appearance and their lives, it seemed like the Pharisees were the religious ones. The Herodians wanted nothing to do with religion. But Jesus calls both of them stiff-necked. The Pharisees played the religious game. They pretended to be followers of God, they pretended to do all the right things. They pretended to go through the motions, but they weren't following God's law, they were following human interpretations of God's law and they were following human traditions, thus proving that they didn't love God, nor did they want to submit to his authority.They thought that they knew God, but when God showed up, they didn't even recognize Him. And here the word is particularly relevant for those who have been in the church for a while or perhaps you've grown up in the faith or perhaps you come from a Christian family where your parents believed or your grandparents believed. You know the lingo. You know what to say, when to say it, you know how to behave in church, how to behave around believers, but deep down inside your stiff-necked and you want nothing to do with God. And here the lesson is, don't stiffen your neck when the Lord corrects you or when he corrects your traditional thought patterns. Patterns that we inherit from the world, inherit from the school system, inherit from the university system. Where you learn one pattern or thinking and you come to the scripture and you're like, "Whoa" it rubs you the wrong way.You're offended by it. And what do you do at those moments of offense? Do you stiffen your neck or do you say, "Lord, help me understand, Lord, give me eyes to see? Lord, help me receive your word." Don't say, I could never believe that. Don't say, I could never believe in a God that commands that. Herod, on the other hand, he didn't even pretend to be obedient to God. He was the king, who was God to tell him what to do? He did as he pleased. He was Allah unto himself. When John the Baptist confronted King Herod, king Herod loved the sermons. He's like, "Oh, great sermon John, Mr. Baptist, now you're imprisoned. I'll call you again when I want another sermon." And John shows up again and Herod's like, "Give me a different sermon." He's like, "Nope, I got one sermon for you, Herod, repent of your adultery, you shouldn't do this." And Herod wanted to listen to the sermons, but he wanted nothing to do with submitting to God.John called him to repentance, which assumed a change of lifestyle, Herod wanted nothing to do with that. Both the Pharisees and the Herodians had the same leaven, a refusal to release power over their life and a stubborn refusal to believe and obey. So how do we fight the hardheartedness, the stiff-neckedness? This is 0.3, battle hardheartedness by remembering, remembering what? Remembering the work of God in your life. We are to document the work of God in our life. We are to remember, force ourselves to be reminded. Verse 17 and Jesus aware of this said to them, "Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened?" Jesus is warning the disciples against being infected by the same evil impulse that the Herodians and the Pharisees were infected with.But He gives them questions which assumes that there is hope for them to learn. He doesn't just rebuke them and say, "You are hardhearted." He asks them, "Are you hardhearted?" Because at that moment their hearts perhaps were hard, but they didn't think the hearts were hard. Just like it shows us the blinding effect of sin to its own reality in our lives, it is a blind spot. When you are in sin, until someone confronts you of that sin, usually you don't even realize. And He does assume that they're going to grow. He's given them evidence upon evidence and He continues to do so. But until now, if you just think about how much they've seen, they witnessed Jesus heal, they witnessed Jesus cast out demons. They witnessed Jesus comma storm. They witnessed Jesus confound the Pharisees as He ate with tax collectors and sinners. They heard about Jesus preach about the kingdom.They even preached sermons themselves. They went on a mission trip. They preached the word of God. But here in the presence of Jesus Christ, it's almost like all of that has been wiped clean. This shows us that spiritual amnesia is real. It's almost like we have a physical memory what happens in our life and then we have a spiritual memory. What happens in our soul? What happens when the Holy Spirit moves us, the work of God and our lives? And it's almost as if sometimes the spiritual memory just turns off. It's wiped clean. Back in the day, I remember there was a movie called Men in Black with Will Smith and they're like the memory thing, the memory stick, it's like you just don't remember anything. It's like Satan has this stick and he comes to us and like I have been born again, I have experienced God.I love the word of God. I go to church, and say, "Am I even a believer?" Does God even exist? That's what Jesus is getting at, that this is real and we are to remind ourselves of the realities of God's work in our life. Verse 18, "Having eyes, do you not see and having ears? Do you not hear and do you not remember?" Do you not remember? And he's calling them to remind themselves of the work of God in their lives. Jesus questions echo Moses words and to Israel and Deuteronomy 29:2. And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, you have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants and to all his land. The great trials that your eyes saw, the signs and those great wonders. But to this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.And we see the same themes of the insensitive heart, the blind eyes and the deaf ears. Same references we see in Jeremiah 5:21. "Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but see not who have ears but hear not. "Do you not fear me," declares the Lord? Do you not tremble before me?" Ezekiel was told this in Ezekiel 12:2, "Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house who have eyes to see but see not and have ears to hear but hear not for they are a rebellious house." And do you not remember... At our community group a couple of weeks ago, someone said, we do whenever there's new people, we say name, where you're from. And then someone said, tell us the date you were baptized. And I was like, you know what? That's a great question. I should know exactly the date that I was baptized.And for me it was October 29th, 1996. I was baptized at age 16 outside in a lake in Connecticut, in Ashford, Connecticut. I was raised in a Russian Baptist church. The lake was freezing. There was little bits of ice. And the pastor told me, well, it's better than hell. And then he baptized me. So that was my upbringing. But you should know, you should know when the Lord called you to himself. You should know when you were baptized, you should know about how God has answered prayer in your life. A prayer journal is very useful where whatever your prayers are, you write them down and then go back to the prayer journal three, six months, a year, and it's uncanny how God answers prayer sometimes precisely everything we asked for and precisely the same way. Sometimes he answered the prayer and it was absolutely the opposite of what you asked for.But you're like, oh, given time has passed, this is exactly what I would have prayed for had I known everything that the Lord knows, and it's incredible. We are to remind ourselves, I can't help but think of the words of Moses in the book of Deuteronomy when the people of Israel are about to enter the promised land and they're standing on the planes of Moab and Moses is explaining, your life is going to change dramatically. You're no longer going to have the provision of the manna that the Lord was sending you on a daily basis, but you are entering into the promised land, the land of splendor that's flowing with milk and honey. And he says, when you do and when you get comfortable, make sure at those moments and particularly those moments that you remind yourself of where you came from and what it took to get you here.Deuteronomy 8:11, "Take care lest you forget the Lord your God, by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them. And when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who led you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know. That he might humble you and test you to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.You shall remember the Lord your God for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may confirm his covenant, that He swore to your fathers as it is this day. And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so shall you perish because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God." We are to remind ourselves of the great work of God in our life. And then when the people of Israel passed over the river, Jordan, Joshua who was the military leader, he sets up memorial stones in the river and on the bank of the river. Why? Because he says, when your children, the next generation, when they come to you and say, "Hey, what are those stones all about?"And you are to remind them and say, those stones are to remind us of the mighty acts of God that we have witnessed his greatness. He's done it in our generation. He will do it in your generation if you keep submitting. And we love the song, come Thou Fount, I love that song. It's tremendous. Come Thou Fount of every blessing. And there's a line about Ebenezer and everyone always thinks about Ebenezer Scrooge. That's not in the Bible, but the Ebenezer stone is and it just means stone of help. And it's a story where Samuel is bringing sacrifice to the Lord and then the Philistines descend upon Israel and the people of Israel go to Samuel and say, pray for us. He continues to pray for them. And then when they're about to get defeated, wiped out, the Lord miraculously intervenes and saves them from disaster.And they realized at the moment when they were outmanned, outgunned, outnumbered outmaneuvered. That's when the Lord showed up in the nick of time precisely the way they needed the help at the precise moment. And the stone of Ebenezer was to remind them, yes, God showed up before exactly as we had asked and he will show up again. Mark 8:19, Jesus continues. "When I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" They said to Him "Twelve". "And the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" And they said "Seven." He did the feeding twice. One time there were 12 baskets, the second time there were seven. And just in case the disciples forgot that there was seven, he gives them the answer in the question. And the number seven we know is important because the number seven is number of completion.The number 12 is important. The 12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples and Jesus, impartially I think he did that so they would remember, I fed the 5,000, there were 12 baskets. I fed the 4,000, there were seven baskets. It's to say when you needed the Lord, He came through and He came through in a way that you couldn't even imagine with leftovers. And then verse 21, He said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" The phrase here not yet implies the disciples will eventually understand. One of the truths about holy scripture is we never know the way we ought to know. There's always room left for growth. In 1st Corinthians 8:2 it says, "If anyone imagines that he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know." The very second you believe I got it, I read the Bible, I know this story.You don't know the way you ought to know. And I do this on a weekly basis, on a professional way, it'll make professional hours spent studying the word of God. The more I study, the more I read, my goodness, there's so much to know. And then I get blown away by how perfect scripture is. For example, here in this text, the seventh question, the last word of the seventh question is the number seven or God's just winking at us? Yeah, it is my book, I wrote it. So there's always room for growth. And Philippians 3:2 tells us, "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.Let those of us who are mature think this way. And if anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you, only let us hold true to what we have attained." He's saying the mature believer always understands that I have not known God the way I ought to. You're always pursuing God, you're always pursuing sanctification. You're always pursuing holiness. He's saying the immature person thinks that they've arrived and he says, but the Lord will reveal that also to you assuming they need revelation. The problem is the disciples have a hard heart because they don't realize the depth of the ministry of Jesus Christ. He isn't just a messiah who came just to fulfill prophecy and just to reinstate the glory of Israel and just to bring Gentiles to himself. No, he's come to save sinners. And the assumption there is sinners who can't save themselves.Pharisees cannot save themselves no matter how much they posture themselves as being religious. Herodians, they can't save disciples. You can't save yourself. Jesus came to save us from sin, which assumes that we need saving in a way that we cannot save ourselves. Why did Jesus cast out demons? To prove to us that there's a greater power than us out there vow of Satan, the power of demons. And if we are not protected by the Holy Spirit, we are vulnerable and susceptible to the attacks and oppression and even possession. Why did Jesus heal certain illnesses in the public settings? To prove that in the same way that the blind man can't give himself sight, we can't give ourselves sight of God. We need Him to do a miracle in us. Why does Jesus challenge the Pharisees on their self-righteousness? To show them that their self-righteous isn't enough to entrust them to God.It's not enough to bring them to heaven, they need to trust in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ didn't just preach, repent and believe, he also mirrored, he showed us the example of what it means at the breaking point, the moment where you do not want to obey what to do, Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, he knows exactly the mission that God has given. God, the Father gave him the mission to go to the cross and bear the penalty for the sins of all the elect, all who were trust in Him. And Jesus at that breaking point, He told the disciples, go pray for Him because this is the breaking point. There's so much stress that Jesus was enduring that says that the capillaries in his face were bursting and the blood mixed with sweat. It's as if he was sweating blood. He understood the immense pressure of what it means, not just to bear the excruciating pain physically of the crucifixion, but to bear the condemnation from God the Father for all of our sins.Jesus knew all of that. And He's on his knees and He says, father, if there's any other way, if there's any other way, let this cup pass for me. What's going on in his own heart? The same battle that goes on in our own hearts when we don't want to obey. He said, F, let this cup pass for me. And then what does he say? Not my will but yours be done. That's it. He didn't stiffen his neck and he went to the cross and he went to the cross to die, to be broken, for the blood to be shed, to provide a way for us to have grace, have access to grace. For all the times that we would not obey, for all the times that we said, Lord, not your will, my will be done. And that's the essence of sin. So, friend, today, if you are not a Christian, a follower of Christ, if you have not ever repented of your sin today, we're calling you today, accept the grace of Jesus Christ.Today accept the mercy of Jesus Christ. And when Jesus tells you that you're a sinner, just know He's telling you because he loves you. He's saying, you are sinner. You're a sinner, you're my beloved sinner. I love you so much to tell you you're a sinner. So repent, believe, and obey. Don't harden your heart. When you hear that message, don't stiffen your neck. I'll close it with the words of Isaiah, the prophet in Isaiah 55. Come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and he who has no money, come by and eat. Come by wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me; hear that your soul may live and I'll make with you an everlasting covenant,My steadfast, sure love for David. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this incredible word, a word of rebuke, but it's a loving rebuke because you want the best for us. And Lord, make us the people that when we hear your word, when we study your commandments, when we study your law, that we are quick to soften our hearts, that we are quick to soften our necks and say, yes Lord, your will be done not mine. And Lord, whenever we have doubts about if your will is good, let us quell those doubts by looking to the cross of Jesus Christ. Well, of course His will is good. Look how much He loves us, that he was willing to suffer in our stead on the cross. Lord Jesus, continue to give us the power of the Holy Spirit to be people who walk in the manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.

Father, we thank you for your holy word and we thank you that you are a holy God and we have transgressed your holy law. And it's because of our rebellion. It's because we do have, every single one of us, a problem with authority, a problem with your authority in particular when you call us to do things that go against our own will. And Lord, you didn't leave us in our sins and trespasses. You didn't leave us in our rebellious, recalcitrant, our stubborn stiff-neckedness. Instead, you sent your son Jesus Christ, who submitted perfectly to every single facet of the law, every single tenant of the law, every single law. And you submitted Jesus to the will of the Father like no one before you, like no one after you. And you did that in order to provide a way for us to be saved. And you went to the cross instead of experiencing the blessing that you deserved for your law keeping, you took the curse that we deserve for our lawbreaking.And Lord, you were crucified, you died and you were buried. And we thank you that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you were resurrected. And now you call every single one of us to repentance in particular the areas of our life where we do want to seek our own will instead of yours. You call us to repent and not be stiff neck and I pray today, soften our hearts, soften our necks, soften our wills, and make us a people that long to obey you because your will is good and your will is perfect and your will is holy. You do not call us to anything that is short of your blessed will. Everything you call us to is for our good and it's ultimately for your glory. And when we glorify you the most, that's when we experience your presence the most and we experience the joy that you would have for us.Lord bless our time, the holy scriptures today. Holy Spirit, we love you. If there's any places in our lives where we are grieving you or where we are in our obstinacy, turning from your leading, I pray today, Lord, make us filled with the Holy Spirit to keep in step with the Spirit. Doing nothing to grieve your spirit. Lord bless our time in the holy scriptures and give us grace and give us your presence. We pray this in Christ's name, amen. We're continuing our sermon series through the Gospel of Mark called the Gospel of Mark and the Secret of God's Kingdom. And the title of the sermon today is Beware Stiff Nakedness. A few years ago, my third daughter at Katharina, Ecat for short, she started a dog sitting business and she got this dog that was small yet incredibly strong to watch for a few days and she loves dogs and she loves dog sitting.And dog sitting is the closest that she's going to get to having a dog, although she is hoping for a miracle and praying for one. So though it was Ecat's responsibility to watch this dog, I don't know what happened, but it wasn't her walking the dog, it was my second daughter, Elizabeth, went out to give the dog a walk and it was winter time, it was cold outside and 20 minutes goes by, she's not home in 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and we got to worrying and we went to look for her and we found her stuck on a street corner trying with all her might to drag this dog, to turn this dog in the direction of home to no veil. She tried talking to the dog, pleading with the dog, cajoling the dog, bribing the dog with snacks. And every time she would pull on the leash to turn her home, the dog stiffened its neck and dug in. And it took a strong word of command to get the dog to come, a stronger yank of the leash to get the dog to turn right.And from the side, if you saw what was happening here like that looks like excessive force, but it wasn't excessive and force was the only thing that the dog could understand, it was actually loving force. What was the goal? The goal was to get the dog home where it's warm and toasty and by itself the dog wouldn't make it out on the streets. The dog was stiff-necked. And that's the same phrase that God uses to describe the behavior of unbelieving people, people who see God's work, see sign after sign and don't take God at his Word. People who intentionally reject God's Word to do their own will. There's a curious passage in Nehemiah where Nehemiah summarizes quick in a pithy way the history of the people of Israel. In Nehemiah 9:13, speaking of God, "You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your Holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses, your servant.You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst. And you told them to go into possess the land that you had sworn to give them. But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments. They refuse to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you've performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love and did not forsake them." You read this and you say it's unbelievable. These people saw miracle after miracle with a crescendo of parting the Red Sea and they walked through and the armies of the Egyptians, they were swallowed up by the water.They saw miracle after miracle, they heard the voice of God, they saw the evidence of God's work. And then as soon as they realized that to be free from captivity means to be in submission to God and his word, they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I prefer slavery. And they appointed a leader to bring them back. And you say, how could they ever do that? Well, friends, just look into your own heart, look at your own history, how often do we come to Christ, have our sins forgiven? And then the Lord says, "Repent, believe, and follow me." And we start following and realize, "Oh, this is so much harder than I'd ever anticipated. The sacrifice is so much greater than I'm willing to make." And you turn back to sin, the word of God presents hardheartedness as the root cause of stiff nakedness. Why?Because in the scriptures, the heart isn't just the seed of emotions, it's the center of the will. So you end up doing exactly what you love most. And if you love yourself more than you love God, you place yourself in the position of God. And if you take God's rightful place on the throne of your life, the very life that God gave you, then there will never be evidence enough for the existence of God, for the veracity of his word, for his clear commandments. God is the ultimate authority. And to believe in God is to love His authority. To believe in God is to submit to His authority no matter how we feel about the commandment. Even when every fiber in your being bristles with rebellion, at those moments, we must cry out to the Lord. Lord, soften my heart, Lord relax my stiff neck.And those sticking points are the places where if we receive God's will, the absolute greatest transformation happens in our lives. However, if the Lord reveals a point in our lives where our necks have stiffened up against His will where we remain recalcitrant, when he pulls on the leash, there is potential for the neck to break. Proverbs 29:1 says, "He who is often reproved, yet stiffens his neck will suddenly be broken beyond healing." And today we approach a text where Jesus deals with the hard hardness of the stiff nakedness of those who should have known better, the Pharisees, the religious leaders, the politicians, those who followed Herod and the Herodians. And then he turns His attention to the disciples and He says that rebellious spirit that you see in the Pharisees and the Herodians, watch out that that spirit does not grow in your hearts. So today in Mark 8:11-22, would you look at the text with me?"The Pharisees came and began to argue with Him, seeking for him a sign from heaven to test Him. And He sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation seek a sign?" "Truly I say to you, no sign will be given this generation" and He left them, gotten to the boat again and went to the other side. Now, they had forgotten to bring bread and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them saying, watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus aware of this said to them, why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes, do you not see and having ears?Do you not hear? And do you not remember when I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? They said to Him "twelve." And the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? And they said to Him, "Seven". And He said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" This is the reading of God's holy, inert and fallible authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts, three points of the frame up our time, be not a stiff-necked sign seeker. Second, beware the leaven of stiff-neckedness. And three battle hardheartedness by remembering. First be not a stiff-necked sign seeker. After Jesus feeds the 4,000 Gentiles, Mark tells us that he gets in the boat and they went to the region of Dalmanutha on the western, more Jewish shore of the lake.And that's where the Pharisees meet Him. And that's verse 11. The Pharisees came and began to argue with Him, seeking from Him a sign from heaven to test him. Now, if you haven't been with us, the Pharisees, just a quick recap, were the religious leaders. They're the gatekeepers of the Jewish faith. They're the self-proclaimed representatives of God. So when Jesus shows up and starts telling people the Pharisees, He starts telling them that he's the promised Messiah and actually he's the Son of God. While they've got concerns. He can't be God they reason. Why? Because they know God. God is on our side, they figured. We have God figured out. We're the professionals here, Jesus. Moreover, if Jesus is right, then they're wrong, but they can't be wrong, not this wrong, not this wrong about the most important question in the universe. Who is God and what does He demand of me?And moreover, if Jesus is right, then they have to change their lives and they don't want to change their lives. They like their lives. They like their prestigious, lucrative positions. They like the honor that the people give them. They like the glory they receive and the praise from the people. Moreover, Jesus is preaching not just that they are to obey God more, he's preaching that they can't save themselves at all. He's preaching that apart from repentance, that they have no standing before God. He's preaching repentance, which means a change of life, but they don't want to change their life. And also Jesus, who are you to teach us about God? You didn't even go to rabbinical school and we don't even know who your father is. And they cast all kinds of insinuations upon Him. So they come to Jesus and they begin to argue with Him.This is a phrase that's used with a nuance of hostility. They're saying, "Jesus, prove your authority. Prove that you are who you say you are. And prove it in exactly how we say it." Here's the marching orders, Jesus, obey them dutifully and then maybe we'll follow you. But here's the thing, God doesn't take commands from us. We can pray to God and we can bring our requests to God, but we can't command God. And by definition, God does not obey humans and the posture of their heart behind this phrase "Prove to me that you're God," well, it's a posture of authority over a subject. They're standing in authority over Jesus, Jesus we're telling you what to do if you want us to believe. He's God and which means He doesn't obey us, we obey him. And the very second he starts to obey us is the very second we usurp his throne, which He doesn't allow.They came to test Him seeking from him a sign from heaven what Jesus had just been doing, sign after sign after sign. Perhaps they weren't privy or witness to the sign of feeding of the 4,000, but they had definitely heard about it. If you feed 5,000 men, if you give 5,000 men a free lunch, it doesn't even have to be that great, a free mediocre lunch, they're going to tell everybody about it. I got a free lunch. It was awesome. It was free. Partially our strategy behind feeding people. February 4th is our first monthly community lunch, make sure to come at 1:00 PM February 4th and bring your friends so they tell all their friends about it. No. And then also they saw some of the miracles. They saw the exorcism in chapter three. Jesus cast out a demon from a person and the Pharisees charged Jesus with doing this spiritual work by the power of Satan himself.And Jesus calls them out and says, "No, no, no, you are on the side of Satan actually and you've blasphemed the Holy Spirit," and seeking a sign despite the existence of previous signs, despite the eyewitness accounts of different signs. What the Pharisees do is they demonstrate that they're spiritual heirs of the disobedient wilderness generation, the generation that was led out of captivity from Egypt and led into the wilderness and they did not believe God, and God turned from them. In the Old Testament, it's not always a mark of disobedience to request a sign from God. If you remember Gideon, he famously laid a fleece before the Lord to ascertain whether God was going to choose him as an instrument in military deliverance. Hezekiah asked for a sign and received it that he would be healed of his grave illness. Isaiah seven, God insists that Ahaz actually asked for a sign from heaven and God sends it.In other places, signs seeking is presented negatively in particular with false prophets. God did warn that false prophets will come and they will try to verify their teaching with signs and miracles, but if they give signs and lead people into apostasy, those people aren't from God. Deuteronomy 13:1-5, "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder and the sign or a wonder that he tells you comes to pass. And if He says, let us go after other gods which you have not known, and let us serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord, your God, is testing you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear Him and keep His commandments and obey His voice and you shall serve Him and hold fast to Him.But that prophet or that dreamer of dream shall be put to death because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of slavery to make you leave the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from your midst." And perhaps this was at the heart of the strategy of the Pharisees to accuse Jesus of being a false prophet. So that was their assumption that you're teaching something false, something against the scriptures, and here's the sign that you did. Therefore, Deuteronomy 13, we have reason to condemn you. They were seeking a sign to test Him. And this phrase to test is a phrase that's used often to describe Satan. Satan was a tester of the tempter in Matthew chapter four, where Jesus has been fasting for 40 days.Satan comes to tempt Jesus Christ with signs. He said, take these stones and turn them into bread to prove that you are who you say you are. And then Jesus responds with a quotation of Deuteronomy chapter 6:16, which is a reference to the incident at Massa and marimba. We'll get to that. But Deuteronomy 6:16, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested Him at Massah. You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and His testimonies and His statutes, which He has commanded you." You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, he's the one that gives us tests. He's the one that puts us to the test. We don't return the favor. Sometimes people ask me, you want to go bungee jumping? You want to go jump out of a plane with a parachute?And I say, I don't have enough faith. I don't have enough faith in that stuff. And my verse that every time that comes to mind, whenever that whole category of I don't want to put the Lord to the test, like, oh, this is a great opportunity. That's not what he's talking about, he's talking about don't test the veracity of God's word, especially if God's already proven it time and time and time again, don't test Him. And this wasn't a request, it was a test similar to the testing of God by the Israelites at Massah and Meribah in Exodus 17. So Exodus 16, God sends manna from heaven, an incredible miracle, people see that God is providing. And then chapter 17, they test Moses again, they want water. And their question is, does God love us? Is God even with us? And they're testing God.And the same phrase that's used here in Mark where the Pharisees test God, peirazō, peirazein, that same saying, that same phrase is used in Exodus 17 in the Septuagint which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Exodus 17:1, "All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of sin by stages according to the commandment of the Lord and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore, the people quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. And Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me?" "Why do you test the Lord?" But the people thirsted there for water and the people grumbled against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?" So Moses cried to the Lord, "What shall I do with these people?"They're almost ready to stone me. And the Lord said to Moses, "Pass on before the people taking with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand, the staff, with which you struck the Nile and go." "Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb and you shall strike the rock and the water shall come out of it and the people will drink." And Moses did so on the sight of the elders of Israel and he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, because they tested the Lord by saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?" Is the Lord among us or not? After miracle, after miracle, after miracle and they were just fed with manna the day before, but it's just a human need, thirst, they suffer just a little bit and all of a sudden they're questioning God.They're grumbling against the Lord. And we see that all throughout the scriptures. This episode is brought to the forefront just to remind the people of Israel do not be like your forefathers. Psalm 95:7-11, "For He is our God and we are the people of his pastor and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness. When your father's put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For 40 years, I loathed that generation and said, "They are people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways." Therefore, I swore in my wrath they shall not enter my rest." The parallels are clear between what Jesus was doing here and Mark and what God was doing with the people of Israel.Moses fed people with manna, in the same way Jesus feeds the 5,000 and then the 4,000, and then we have this text about not testing God and not being stiff-necked. Numbers 14, God swears that the wilderness generation that tested him will not enter Canaan. So in a sense you can diminish blessing from your own life by testing God. Through our own stiffness we actually keep ourselves from blessings that the Lord would have for us. The people resisted God and were stiff-necked against God and they missed out on the promised land. Numbers 14:21, "But truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord, none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these 10 times and have not obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers and none of those who despise me shall see it."And the Lord was keeping track 10 times, he says they were stiff-necked and didn't obey. And why? Because they weren't just testing Moses, they were testing God. To test God is to undermine his authority and to undermine his authority is to hate him. And in our text, the Pharisees weren't just testing a representative of God, they were testing God himself, God incarnate. Psalm 78:17, "Yet they sinned still more against Him, rebelling against the most high in the desert. They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved. They spoke against God saying, "Can God spread a table in the wilderness?" He struck the rock so that the water gushed out and streams overflowed. "Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?" What's Jesus' reaction to their testing? Verse 12, "And He sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation seek a sign?Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation." He sighed deeply in His spirit. If you remember when He healed a deaf man before He healed the deaf man, he looked up to heaven and he sighed deeply, partially because He is exasperated by the consequences of the fall, the repercussions of the fall, which includes sickness. And here He's exasperated at their unbelief, people that should have known better, people who have received God's Word and God here is exasperated with them. Scripture teaches us to not grieve the Holy Spirit, meaning when the Holy Spirit tells us what to do, it leads us in a certain direction and we say no, we're stiff-necked against the Holy Spirit. He does grieve. He is grieved by our disobedience and we are told not to quench the spirit or grieve the spirit but be filled with the spirit.Similar reaction Jesus feels in the next chapter where a gentleman comes and he says to the disciples of Jesus, "Can you cast out a demon from my son?" And the disciples couldn't do it. Jesus comes down the mountain of transfiguration and He says this in Mark 9:19, "Oh faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?" The stubborn refusal to believe lay at the root of the Pharisees attitude. To those in such a state of unbelief, even a sign, if it was given, it wouldn't convince because a lack of belief, the root cause of the lack of belief in God is not a lack of evidence, and it's not a difficulty of the intellect or the reason. No, it's a difficulty of the will. John 7:17 says, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority."And Jesus is saying, "Do you want proof that the words that I'm saying are true?" Well, do you want to do God's will? Because if I prove to you that God exists but you don't want to do God's will, it's actually more condemnation. I don't want to give you illumination that will lead to more condemnation if you want nothing to do with God's will. And certainty in the faith deepening of the faith, it is a gift of those who are obedient to the Lord. Is your will to do God's will, and that is the way to deepen your faith. The Pharisees were blind and as someone said, none are so blind as those who will not see. That's their attitude and such an attitude of sign seeking runs diametrically opposed to the biblical concept of the nature of faith. Jesus told Thomas when Thomas said, "Until I put my hands in the wounds of the resurrected Christ, I'm not going to believe."And then he sees Christ and Christ showed him the wounds he didn't even have to touch. He believed and he said, "Blessed are you Thomas." But more blessed are those who have not seen. You've seen and you've believed, but more blessed are those who have not seen and believe. Why? Because if you see a miracle, if Jesus gave the Pharisees another miracle, another sign at this moment, it's not faith that leads them to believe in God. No, it's just a logical conclusion. Of course this is God. Of course I'm going to place my faith in God because I've seen the evidence. It's a logical conclusion and the Lord wants a deeper faith and he wants us to take a step of faith given the evidence that he's given us. And he says, "This generation, truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation."And that's a phrase that's used before the flood in Genesis six where there's an evil and adulterous generation and same phrase that's used for Israel in the wilderness. And he says that you're not going to get a sign. Another translation says, God forbid that a sign should be given you. Perish the thought that I would do such a thing. There's an intense emotion. And what He's saying is, "No, I'm not doing it." God's not in the business of sending authenticating signs on demand. God isn't a pinata. God isn't a vending machine. God clearly tells us these are the terms on which you come to me, and you don't get to dictate the terms. Jesus has given them all the evidence they need to come to faith. The Pharisees are without excuse.,They can't plead ignorance, nor can they say that God hadn't given them enough information.You're alive. Why are you alive? Where did you come from? Where did life come from? You live in a material world, where did all of this come from? It didn't come from nothing. Nothing can come from nothing. And then on top of that, the moral law is written on your heart. When you read the 10 Commandments, you're like, yes, life would be better if everyone lived like this. And no, I have not lived like this. So what's the penalty for transgressing on the holy law of God? The penalty is damnation. The penalty is to be rejected by God. Therefore, I need grace. And this is exactly what they were unwilling to ask for. And it's not as though these people are unintelligent, on the contrary, they were probably some of the smartest people in Israel at the time. They knew the prophetic passages about the Messiah and Jesus fulfilled them perfectly.But they refused to believe. Why? Partially because Jesus called them out for their self-righteousness. You present yourself as righteous, but you are far from it and it's all facades of righteousness and it's all hypocrisy. And Jesus called them to repentance and they didn't want to be called to repentance. You're calling us sinners, Jesus, we're not sinners, we do all the right things, you're probably the sinner. A lot of us, today, we want miracles to believe in the Lord. And sometimes it is fine to ask for a miracle. It's fine to ask for a sign from the Lord. It really depends on what posture of heart that you ask the miracle with which you ask for the miracle. And then the point, are you looking for a miracle so that you can deepen your obedience and submission to the Lord? Or are you looking for an excuse to rebel against him?We do have miracles. We experience miracles every time a person comes to faith, especially in a place like Boston, one of the greatest miracles, the fact that anyone would turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ. Regeneration incredible miracle. Another miracle is the holy scriptures, the word of God, the Bible, two million miracles, two million words, give or take order of magnitude. 66 books, 1,189 chapters written by 40 different authors over 1,500 years, three different languages used Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, every jaw, every tittle of it given by the inspiration of God that holy men of old Roe as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. It's incredible through the centuries that the Lord has preserved the holy scriptures. This is the miracle. It's right before us, right before us supervised by the Holy Spirit and it tells us everything we need, everything we need to know about God, who he is, about the person of God.It tells us everything we need to know about how we can be reconciled with Him, saved from sin, saved from eternal damnation and tells us how we are to live in order to glorify God and honor him. Mark 8:13, "And he left them and got into the boat again and went to the other side." So in the beginning of the passage, Jesus crosses over from gentile land to Jewish land, exchanges a few sentences with the Pharisees. They're like, "We want to sign?" They're like, "I'm not giving you a sign." Gets in the boat and leaves. And here it is just a reminiscent of the departure of God and Deuteronomy where He turns his face away from rebellious people. Deuteronomy 32:20 and He said, "I will hide my face from them and I'll see what their end will be for they're a perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness."Point two is beware the leaven of stiff-neckedness. Here now Jesus turns from the Pharisees to His own disciples. In verse 14, now they had forgotten to bring bread and they had only one loaf with them in the boat and he cautioned them saying, "Watch out. Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." The word leaven, it's not synonymous with yeast. In ancient times, yeast was rare. Dough was rather made by leavening or mixing into a small amount of dough, a piece of the previous week's dough that had been leavened. It was kept back for that purpose. If you make yogurt at home, it's the same process. Kombucha, kombucha, really delicious, really good for you apparently. But it's like you make a batch but you save a little bit of that batch to make the next batch, that's what the leaven is.And the power of the leaven is that it has power to permeate the whole dough. This is what Jesus is talking about. And in context of the Hebrew scriptures, during Passover, they had unleavened bread and they would cleanse their house from any leaven because the leaven was a sign of something that could permeate the whole thing. And here in this context that leaven is evil, it's stubbornness, it's stiff ness. And Jesus saying, "Disciples, be careful if even a little bit of this bitterness in your heart, even a little bit of the stiff-neckedness in your heart and any tiny aspect of your life because it has the power to take over. Unbelief because of non-submissive hearts is the unseen pervasive influence. 1st Corinthians 5:6 says, "Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven, leavens the whole lump?" Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are on leaven for Christ?Our passover lamb has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So he says, be careful of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians. In verse 16, they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. They just witnessed Jesus feed 5,000 men and then they witnessed Jesus feed 4,000. Jesus is clearly talking about spiritual matters, but they missed the point. To show us just how far they are from understanding who Christ is completely what his ultimate goal was in coming, which is to save us from the leaven of sin within, to give us new hearts that long to obey God. And in response to their misunderstanding, Jesus unleashes a series of questions. He ask eight questions, five critical questions that echo passages from the Old Testament, then two additional questions that recall the two miraculous feedings and then a final critical question.But the point is watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. "Watch out, beware." It's a double warning meaning this is how important it is to heeded this warning. Beware that you do not get infected with the stubborn unbelief. The stiff-neckedness of the Pharisees and the Herodians. Both were stiff-necked but seemingly in opposite waves. If you look at the surface, if you just look at their appearance and their lives, it seemed like the Pharisees were the religious ones. The Herodians wanted nothing to do with religion. But Jesus calls both of them stiff-necked. The Pharisees played the religious game. They pretended to be followers of God, they pretended to do all the right things. They pretended to go through the motions, but they weren't following God's law, they were following human interpretations of God's law and they were following human traditions, thus proving that they didn't love God, nor did they want to submit to his authority.They thought that they knew God, but when God showed up, they didn't even recognize Him. And here the word is particularly relevant for those who have been in the church for a while or perhaps you've grown up in the faith or perhaps you come from a Christian family where your parents believed or your grandparents believed. You know the lingo. You know what to say, when to say it, you know how to behave in church, how to behave around believers, but deep down inside your stiff-necked and you want nothing to do with God. And here the lesson is, don't stiffen your neck when the Lord corrects you or when he corrects your traditional thought patterns. Patterns that we inherit from the world, inherit from the school system, inherit from the university system. Where you learn one pattern or thinking and you come to the scripture and you're like, "Whoa" it rubs you the wrong way.You're offended by it. And what do you do at those moments of offense? Do you stiffen your neck or do you say, "Lord, help me understand, Lord, give me eyes to see? Lord, help me receive your word." Don't say, I could never believe that. Don't say, I could never believe in a God that commands that. Herod, on the other hand, he didn't even pretend to be obedient to God. He was the king, who was God to tell him what to do? He did as he pleased. He was Allah unto himself. When John the Baptist confronted King Herod, king Herod loved the sermons. He's like, "Oh, great sermon John, Mr. Baptist, now you're imprisoned. I'll call you again when I want another sermon." And John shows up again and Herod's like, "Give me a different sermon." He's like, "Nope, I got one sermon for you, Herod, repent of your adultery, you shouldn't do this." And Herod wanted to listen to the sermons, but he wanted nothing to do with submitting to God.John called him to repentance, which assumed a change of lifestyle, Herod wanted nothing to do with that. Both the Pharisees and the Herodians had the same leaven, a refusal to release power over their life and a stubborn refusal to believe and obey. So how do we fight the hardheartedness, the stiff-neckedness? This is 0.3, battle hardheartedness by remembering, remembering what? Remembering the work of God in your life. We are to document the work of God in our life. We are to remember, force ourselves to be reminded. Verse 17 and Jesus aware of this said to them, "Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened?" Jesus is warning the disciples against being infected by the same evil impulse that the Herodians and the Pharisees were infected with.But He gives them questions which assumes that there is hope for them to learn. He doesn't just rebuke them and say, "You are hardhearted." He asks them, "Are you hardhearted?" Because at that moment their hearts perhaps were hard, but they didn't think the hearts were hard. Just like it shows us the blinding effect of sin to its own reality in our lives, it is a blind spot. When you are in sin, until someone confronts you of that sin, usually you don't even realize. And He does assume that they're going to grow. He's given them evidence upon evidence and He continues to do so. But until now, if you just think about how much they've seen, they witnessed Jesus heal, they witnessed Jesus cast out demons. They witnessed Jesus comma storm. They witnessed Jesus confound the Pharisees as He ate with tax collectors and sinners. They heard about Jesus preach about the kingdom.They even preached sermons themselves. They went on a mission trip. They preached the word of God. But here in the presence of Jesus Christ, it's almost like all of that has been wiped clean. This shows us that spiritual amnesia is real. It's almost like we have a physical memory what happens in our life and then we have a spiritual memory. What happens in our soul? What happens when the Holy Spirit moves us, the work of God and our lives? And it's almost as if sometimes the spiritual memory just turns off. It's wiped clean. Back in the day, I remember there was a movie called Men in Black with Will Smith and they're like the memory thing, the memory stick, it's like you just don't remember anything. It's like Satan has this stick and he comes to us and like I have been born again, I have experienced God.I love the word of God. I go to church, and say, "Am I even a believer?" Does God even exist? That's what Jesus is getting at, that this is real and we are to remind ourselves of the realities of God's work in our life. Verse 18, "Having eyes, do you not see and having ears? Do you not hear and do you not remember?" Do you not remember? And he's calling them to remind themselves of the work of God in their lives. Jesus questions echo Moses words and to Israel and Deuteronomy 29:2. And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, you have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants and to all his land. The great trials that your eyes saw, the signs and those great wonders. But to this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.And we see the same themes of the insensitive heart, the blind eyes and the deaf ears. Same references we see in Jeremiah 5:21. "Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but see not who have ears but hear not. "Do you not fear me," declares the Lord? Do you not tremble before me?" Ezekiel was told this in Ezekiel 12:2, "Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house who have eyes to see but see not and have ears to hear but hear not for they are a rebellious house." And do you not remember... At our community group a couple of weeks ago, someone said, we do whenever there's new people, we say name, where you're from. And then someone said, tell us the date you were baptized. And I was like, you know what? That's a great question. I should know exactly the date that I was baptized.And for me it was October 29th, 1996. I was baptized at age 16 outside in a lake in Connecticut, in Ashford, Connecticut. I was raised in a Russian Baptist church. The lake was freezing. There was little bits of ice. And the pastor told me, well, it's better than hell. And then he baptized me. So that was my upbringing. But you should know, you should know when the Lord called you to himself. You should know when you were baptized, you should know about how God has answered prayer in your life. A prayer journal is very useful where whatever your prayers are, you write them down and then go back to the prayer journal three, six months, a year, and it's uncanny how God answers prayer sometimes precisely everything we asked for and precisely the same way. Sometimes he answered the prayer and it was absolutely the opposite of what you asked for.But you're like, oh, given time has passed, this is exactly what I would have prayed for had I known everything that the Lord knows, and it's incredible. We are to remind ourselves, I can't help but think of the words of Moses in the book of Deuteronomy when the people of Israel are about to enter the promised land and they're standing on the planes of Moab and Moses is explaining, your life is going to change dramatically. You're no longer going to have the provision of the manna that the Lord was sending you on a daily basis, but you are entering into the promised land, the land of splendor that's flowing with milk and honey. And he says, when you do and when you get comfortable, make sure at those moments and particularly those moments that you remind yourself of where you came from and what it took to get you here.Deuteronomy 8:11, "Take care lest you forget the Lord your God, by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them. And when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who led you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know. That he might humble you and test you to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.You shall remember the Lord your God for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may confirm his covenant, that He swore to your fathers as it is this day. And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so shall you perish because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God." We are to remind ourselves of the great work of God in our life. And then when the people of Israel passed over the river, Jordan, Joshua who was the military leader, he sets up memorial stones in the river and on the bank of the river. Why? Because he says, when your children, the next generation, when they come to you and say, "Hey, what are those stones all about?"And you are to remind them and say, those stones are to remind us of the mighty acts of God that we have witnessed his greatness. He's done it in our generation. He will do it in your generation if you keep submitting. And we love the song, come Thou Fount, I love that song. It's tremendous. Come Thou Fount of every blessing. And there's a line about Ebenezer and everyone always thinks about Ebenezer Scrooge. That's not in the Bible, but the Ebenezer stone is and it just means stone of help. And it's a story where Samuel is bringing sacrifice to the Lord and then the Philistines descend upon Israel and the people of Israel go to Samuel and say, pray for us. He continues to pray for them. And then when they're about to get defeated, wiped out, the Lord miraculously intervenes and saves them from disaster.And they realized at the moment when they were outmanned, outgunned, outnumbered outmaneuvered. That's when the Lord showed up in the nick of time precisely the way they needed the help at the precise moment. And the stone of Ebenezer was to remind them, yes, God showed up before exactly as we had asked and he will show up again. Mark 8:19, Jesus continues. "When I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" They said to Him "Twelve". "And the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" And they said "Seven." He did the feeding twice. One time there were 12 baskets, the second time there were seven. And just in case the disciples forgot that there was seven, he gives them the answer in the question. And the number seven we know is important because the number seven is number of completion.The number 12 is important. The 12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples and Jesus, impartially I think he did that so they would remember, I fed the 5,000, there were 12 baskets. I fed the 4,000, there were seven baskets. It's to say when you needed the Lord, He came through and He came through in a way that you couldn't even imagine with leftovers. And then verse 21, He said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" The phrase here not yet implies the disciples will eventually understand. One of the truths about holy scripture is we never know the way we ought to know. There's always room left for growth. In 1st Corinthians 8:2 it says, "If anyone imagines that he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know." The very second you believe I got it, I read the Bible, I know this story.You don't know the way you ought to know. And I do this on a weekly basis, on a professional way, it'll make professional hours spent studying the word of God. The more I study, the more I read, my goodness, there's so much to know. And then I get blown away by how perfect scripture is. For example, here in this text, the seventh question, the last word of the seventh question is the number seven or God's just winking at us? Yeah, it is my book, I wrote it. So there's always room for growth. And Philippians 3:2 tells us, "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.Let those of us who are mature think this way. And if anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you, only let us hold true to what we have attained." He's saying the mature believer always understands that I have not known God the way I ought to. You're always pursuing God, you're always pursuing sanctification. You're always pursuing holiness. He's saying the immature person thinks that they've arrived and he says, but the Lord will reveal that also to you assuming they need revelation. The problem is the disciples have a hard heart because they don't realize the depth of the ministry of Jesus Christ. He isn't just a messiah who came just to fulfill prophecy and just to reinstate the glory of Israel and just to bring Gentiles to himself. No, he's come to save sinners. And the assumption there is sinners who can't save themselves.Pharisees cannot save themselves no matter how much they posture themselves as being religious. Herodians, they can't save disciples. You can't save yourself. Jesus came to save us from sin, which assumes that we need saving in a way that we cannot save ourselves. Why did Jesus cast out demons? To prove to us that there's a greater power than us out there vow of Satan, the power of demons. And if we are not protected by the Holy Spirit, we are vulnerable and susceptible to the attacks and oppression and even possession. Why did Jesus heal certain illnesses in the public settings? To prove that in the same way that the blind man can't give himself sight, we can't give ourselves sight of God. We need Him to do a miracle in us. Why does Jesus challenge the Pharisees on their self-righteousness? To show them that their self-righteous isn't enough to entrust them to God.It's not enough to bring them to heaven, they need to trust in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ didn't just preach, repent and believe, he also mirrored, he showed us the example of what it means at the breaking point, the moment where you do not want to obey what to do, Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, he knows exactly the mission that God has given. God, the Father gave him the mission to go to the cross and bear the penalty for the sins of all the elect, all who were trust in Him. And Jesus at that breaking point, He told the disciples, go pray for Him because this is the breaking point. There's so much stress that Jesus was enduring that says that the capillaries in his face were bursting and the blood mixed with sweat. It's as if he was sweating blood. He understood the immense pressure of what it means, not just to bear the excruciating pain physically of the crucifixion, but to bear the condemnation from God the Father for all of our sins.Jesus knew all of that. And He's on his knees and He says, father, if there's any other way, if there's any other way, let this cup pass for me. What's going on in his own heart? The same battle that goes on in our own hearts when we don't want to obey. He said, F, let this cup pass for me. And then what does he say? Not my will but yours be done. That's it. He didn't stiffen his neck and he went to the cross and he went to the cross to die, to be broken, for the blood to be shed, to provide a way for us to have grace, have access to grace. For all the times that we would not obey, for all the times that we said, Lord, not your will, my will be done. And that's the essence of sin. So, friend, today, if you are not a Christian, a follower of Christ, if you have not ever repented of your sin today, we're calling you today, accept the grace of Jesus Christ.Today accept the mercy of Jesus Christ. And when Jesus tells you that you're a sinner, just know He's telling you because he loves you. He's saying, you are sinner. You're a sinner, you're my beloved sinner. I love you so much to tell you you're a sinner. So repent, believe, and obey. Don't harden your heart. When you hear that message, don't stiffen your neck. I'll close it with the words of Isaiah, the prophet in Isaiah 55. Come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and he who has no money, come by and eat. Come by wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me; hear that your soul may live and I'll make with you an everlasting covenant,My steadfast, sure love for David. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this incredible word, a word of rebuke, but it's a loving rebuke because you want the best for us. And Lord, make us the people that when we hear your word, when we study your commandments, when we study your law, that we are quick to soften our hearts, that we are quick to soften our necks and say, yes Lord, your will be done not mine. And Lord, whenever we have doubts about if your will is good, let us quell those doubts by looking to the cross of Jesus Christ. Well, of course His will is good. Look how much He loves us, that he was willing to suffer in our stead on the cross. Lord Jesus, continue to give us the power of the Holy Spirit to be people who walk in the manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.

gospel song,Health talk,knowledge,sermon.

gospel song,healt talk,knowledge, Sermon.

A new MP3 sermon from Byron Center Protestant Reformed Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Commanded To Keep The Holy Sabbath Subtitle: Lord's Day 38 Speaker: Prof. Russell Dykstra Broadcaster: Byron Center Protestant Reformed Church Event: Sunday - AM Date: 11/27/2022 Bible: Ezekiel 20 Length: 63 min.

To MP3 Converter Free (amvidia.com)

 The homily of St Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus (403 AD), read on the Holy and Great Sabbath (Holy Saturday) in the Orthodox Church.

Our hosts discuss how Christ brought death to an end as separation from God and from Life. He transforms natural bodily death to a necessary stage in life whereby the person is freed from the passions of their earthly walk. As Orthodox Christians, we celebrate that fact in the funeral service, which is connected to its celebration on Holy Saturday. It is a personal Holy Sabbath for the person, and they are still alive in Christ.

Our hosts discuss how Christ brought death to an end as separation from God and from Life. He transforms natural bodily death to a necessary stage in life whereby the person is freed from the passions of their earthly walk. As Orthodox Christians, we celebrate that fact in the funeral service, which is connected to its celebration on Holy Saturday. It is a personal Holy Sabbath for the person, and they are still alive in Christ.

Our hosts discuss how Christ brought death to an end as separation from God and from Life. He transforms natural bodily death to a necessary stage in life whereby the person is freed from the passions of their earthly walk. As Orthodox Christians, we celebrate that fact in the funeral service, which is connected to its celebration on Holy Saturday. It is a personal Holy Sabbath for the person, and they are still alive in Christ.

Bing Zang+Haleluyah // Lhaovo prasie and worship program.

-Sung Psalm- 92---There has never been a time when no one had to work on Sunday. But as we head further into our post-Christian culture, we are seeing more disregard for those who take the fourth commandment seriously...

Sabbath Timeline through History: Let's embark on a Genesis to Revelation timeline search of the Scriptures. We will create a Road Map showing us the History and application of God's Holy Sabbath. We will end the study looking into eternity. This Sabbath timeline will seek to prove that from creation to the end of time, then beyond eternity, the Holy Sabbath of God will remain. Watch The Video Here: https://youtu.be/TSRaCqQBvEA(BrotherLance.com) Free Music, Bible Studies, Videos & More!(Weshallbelikehim.com) Download Our Free 45 Day Devotional Book Today!

Caungkhing 91 // Lhaovo gospel songs.Kaoso mungdao: // Sermon.

Maplewood has been spending the summer exploring the importance of addressing mental health challenges--in the lives of those around us and in our own lives. This week, Pastor Joe explores one of the secrets to finding wholeness and holiness in our lives--the concept of Sabbath. Join us as we explore the words of Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, on what it takes to enjoy the benefits of Sabbath rest.

Caungkhing 91 // Lhaovo gospel songs.Kaoso mungdao: // Sermon.

Caungkhing 91 // Lhaovo gospel songs.Kaoso mungdao: // Sermon.

A new MP3 sermon from Grace Baptist Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: A Holy Sabbath Speaker: Charles A. Whitney Broadcaster: Grace Baptist Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/16/2021 Bible: Exodus 16:21-36 Length: 38 min.

Exodus Chapter 35 Summary In chapter 35, Moses gathers the children of Israel and reiterates God's command of six days of work and the Holy Sabbath is for rest. Anybody working, Moses declares by God, on the Sabbath will be put to death. Working to kindle a fire is considered working and should not be done on the Sabbath day. In Exodus chapter 36 summary, the people whom God put the wisdom and understanding to work in the service of the sanctuary all worked. And they all did a beautiful job. Bezaleel and Aholiab were two by name that Moses called who were wise-hearted from the Lord who gave the wisdom. In Exodus chapter 37 summary, descriptions of the tent of the congregation is described. A man named Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood and overlaid it with pure gold inside and out. He made the mercy seat also. The mercy seat was made of pure gold, it had a cherub on both sides of it with their wings spread high. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/timeoutwithjim/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/timeoutwithjim/support

1- The reasons-2- Today's validity of the Sabbath Day-3- Worshipping on the Sabbath Day-4- Beginning of the Sabbath Day

McDonald's is largest fast food restaurant chain in the world. There are nearly 40,000 stores worldwide totaling $21 billion in annual sales. I used to eat at McD's a lot as a kid and young adult. My favorite meal was the breakfast combo Sausage, Egg, and Cheese McMuffin, hash brown, and juice. Ray Kroc founded McDonald's on April 15th, 1955. He was a big thinker from the beginning and pioneered the franchise model, where you have a system for each new store empowering the spirit of the entrepreneur and leveraging the success of duplication. The company knows how to advertise with their jingles being some of the most well-known on the planet. They know how to entertain, bringing playgrounds inside their restaurants to get more kids to bring their parents. The company knows how to grow and scale. If you ever study this, you will be impressed. So many cleaning companies adopt franchise models as well for the same reasons. Like McDonald's, they can scale to incredible proportions.Truett Cathy founded Chick-Fil-A on May 23, 1946. He was also a visionary entrepreneur, but his focus was different. They have been open 9 years longer than McDonald's, but have only opened 2,600 stores and these are mostly in the United States. On the surface, it appears that McDonald's is right with it's slogans of "Have you had your break today?" and "I'm lovin' it!" People are taking their breaks and loving it with over 1 billion served! However, let's study this further. Truett Cathy was a christian man who decided to observe the Holy Sabbath and close his stores every Sunday. This was an unthinkable move as restaurants make a fortune on Sundays! Truett focused on customer service with a smile and treating every customer with love and respect. He wanted his team to love what they did as they knew they were not in the food business, rather the people business. They also get paid more per hour than McDonald's. Truett Cathy decided to only serve chicken and has become world-class at it. McDonald's serves beef and chicken. Personally, I love the Chick-Fil-A Spicy Chicken Deluxe with waffle fries. They also know how to advertise. Their 'Eat Mor Chikin' campaign is brilliant and hilarious, displaying poor-spelling cows begging us to eat chicken instead of beef. Truett Cathy's methods have created raving fans of his restaurants. In fact, there are loyal patrons willing to campout for free sandwiches at new store openings. It's called the "Chick-Fil-A First 100 Campout Giveaway". These patrons are proud of their affiliation with Chick-Fil-A. The only time I've ever seen anyone camping outside of McDonald's are the ones that live there. Oh, and I challenge you to drive by both of these fast food restaurants and see which drive through line is wrapped around the building!The typical Chick-Fil-A store is open from 8 am to 9 pm, while McDonald's is open from 5:30 am to 11 pm. Thus, the typical Chick-Fil-A store is open 78 hours compared to McDonald's 124.5 hours per week. However, something isn't adding up. McDonald's stores are open 60% longer and they have 15 times as many stores in the world, yet their annual sales are only a pinch over 5 times more than Chick-Fil-A. Do you know why?Read the rest of this article at the Solo Cleaning School website

Message from Bro Jeremy - at Friendship Baptist Church, Sturgis, MS. Originally August 16, 2020. Visit us and find more at: https://www.friendshipsturgis.com and https://www.facebook.com/fbcms/ Helpful Links: - Online Giving: https://www.friendshipsturgis.com/give - Kids: https://www.friendshipsturgis.com/kids - Family: https://www.friendshipsturgis.com/family Music by: The Chance by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://audionautix.com/

In this latest edition of AFA: Holy Week 2020, we talk about Holy Saturday and how Jesus rested from his work of redemption, on the greatest and most Holy Sabbath day ever celebrated. And we focus on what the experience of the Apostles on this day must have been like.

Sermon given by Pastor Mark Donaldson on Exodus 31:12-18 on February 23, 2020 at ElmCreek Community Church in Maple Grove, MN.

A Holy Sabbath To The LORD - Exodus 16:21-36

A Holy Sabbath To The LORD - Exodus 16:21-36

Pastor Tony takes us through what it means to "sabbath" on Labor Day weekend.

A Holy Sabbath to the Lord Exodus 16:22-30 Teaching the Mind -The Whole Counsel of God -Context of Exodus 16 -The meaning of Exodus -Are Christians required to obey the Sabbath today? Reproving the Conscience -Even if God told you clearly what he wants, would you obey? -The OT Prophets on the Sabbath -The Big 3 struggles today -Restlessness -Worldliness -Loneliness Correcting the Heart -Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath (Matt 12:8) -Matthew 11:25-28 Training the Will -Resolve to honestly evaluate the health of your soul -Resolve to come to Christ Daily in prayer and submission

While Pastor Bobby and Carlie are away taking a much needed Sabbath, Elder Andy Crawford teaches on how to keep the Sabbath.

My youtube channel called Good News This Morning: https://www.youtube.com/goodnewsthismorningfolks Daily Devotional Preaching: BROADCASTING ON Flame Christian and Community Radio:1521 MEDIUM WAVE in the North West of England at 7:45 am and 8:45 am and 1:05 pm every weekday or online: http://flameradio.org Mark and Pete, that 2 handed podcast http://www.markandpete.com The Good News Show https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-good-news-show

My youtube channel called Good News This Morning: https://www.youtube.com/goodnewsthismorningfolksDaily Devotional Preaching: BROADCASTING ON Flame Christian and Community Radio:1521 MEDIUM WAVE in the North West of England at 7:45 am and 8:45 am and 1:05 pm every weekday or online: http://flameradio.orgMark and Pete, that 2 handed podcast http://www.markandpete.comThe Good News Show https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-good-news-show

My youtube channel called Good News This Morning: https://www.youtube.com/goodnewsthismorningfolks Daily Devotional Preaching: BROADCASTING ON Flame Christian and Community Radio:1521 MEDIUM WAVE in the North West of England at 7:45 am and 8:45 am and 1:05 pm every weekday or online: http://flameradio.org Mark and Pete, that 2 handed podcast http://www.markandpete.com The Good News Show https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-good-news-show

My youtube channel called Good News This Morning: https://www.youtube.com/goodnewsthismorningfolksDaily Devotional Preaching: BROADCASTING ON Flame Christian and Community Radio:1521 MEDIUM WAVE in the North West of England at 7:45 am and 8:45 am and 1:05 pm every weekday or online: http://flameradio.orgMark and Pete, that 2 handed podcast http://www.markandpete.comThe Good News Show https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-good-news-show

Jeremiah 50:6,34

Support the show (http://www.rockdaytona.com/give)

10 Commandments Series

Feeling busy, overwhelmed, tired, or stretched to the limit? Begin 2013 by building some margin in your life. (part 4 of 6)

Pastor Lawrence Nelson