In this sermon, Scott Brown explores Nehemiah chapter 13 and confronts the issues of Sabbath-breaking, profaning the Sabbath, and the need for repentance. He uses the analogy of thieves stealing Sabbath delight and compares it to pickpockets distracting their victims. Nehemiah emphasizes the importance of maintaining the boundaries and sanctity of the Sabbath, reminding the people of the disasters that occurred in the past due to Sabbath-breaking. He takes action by shutting the gates and warning those who compromise the Sabbath. Nehemiah also acknowledges his own need for mercy and repentance. The sermon highlights the need for believers to prioritize Sabbath delight and rejoice in the Lord.

Today's text comes from Nehemiah chapter 13. We'll start in verse 15 and read through verse 22. In those days I saw people in Judah treading wine presses on the Sabbath and bringing in sheaves and loading donkeys with wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day on which they were selling provisions. Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish and all kinds of goods, and sold them on the Sabbath to the children of Judah and in Jerusalem.

Then I contended with the nobles of Judah and said to them, What evil thing is this that you do, by which you profane the Sabbath day. Did not your fathers do thus, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath. So it was at the gates of Jerusalem, as it began to be dark before the Sabbath, that I commanded the gates to be shut and charged that they must not be open till after the Sabbath. Then I posted some of my servants at the gates, so that no burdens would be brought in on the Sabbath day.

Now the merchants and sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice. Then I warned them and said to them, Why do you spend the night around the wall? If you do so again, I will lay hands on you." From that time on, they came no more on the Sabbath. And I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves, that they should go and guard the gates to sanctify the Sabbath day. Remember me, oh my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to the greatness of your mercy." Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that you have given us such a day as the Sabbath day. Father you are so kind to us to give us a day to rest and to delight in you. But our flesh is weak and so often we turn to our own thoughts, our own ways, and our own pleasures. Or even so we'll take up the yoke and burden of work. So Lord we need you to strengthen us today, to help us to delight in this day.

Father, help us to see those little things, those habits that we have that profane your Sabbath day and help us to sorrow over these ways that we have sinned against you. Help us to turn and repent. Father, bless the preaching of your word. Bless our Elder Scott as he comes and seeks to exposit this passage. Give him strength to preach to us today.

Let his words be your words. May your spirit penetrate our hearts and help us to leave here submitted to your word and your will. These things we pray in Jesus's name. Amen The title of this sermon is confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight and you should think about this matter in terms of thievery. There are always thieves among the people of God.

I'm reminded of the great stories that came out of the revival that took place when Charles Spurgeon was preaching in London. The crowds were so dense, There was such a crush of people that there were pickpockets moving through the church in Spurgeon's church, and he warned the people about it. But a pickpocket works stealthily, you know. Before you know it, your wallet's gone. But how do they do it?

Well they well they distract you is what they do They might be right in your face but a pickpocket wants your attention to be in another place than where your treasure is And so a pickpocket would lead you to look in a certain direction or feel a bump on your body somewhere in order to distract you from what he wants, your wallet. And the devil works that way in churches as well to be a thief, a thief of Sabbath delight. He works the same way that a pickpocket works. He works the crowd and he distracts the crowd from the thing that really is their true treasure. And so we're going to be walking through how Nehemiah confronts the thieves of Sabbath delight in this passage.

Now, just for some coordinates and context, this is really the second part of Nehemiah's confronting paganism that he has discovered after he's been gone for some years. And he comes back and the first thing that he discovers is that the people have allowed the Ammonites to invade the worship of God. They've allowed worldliness to enter into their worship and the whole operation of the temple. And it got so bad that they even quit paying many of the Levites to do their work. They went back to their fields.

So there was this great distraction in matters of worship after Nehemiah had been gone. And then here in this section, he confronts their really profaning of the Sabbath, to use the word that Nehemiah uses. And then finally, thirdly, he confronts the way that marriages have been conceived of and conducted, that marriage has ceased to become about the glory of God. It was just probably about looks and love, basically. And you could marry whoever you wanted to marry, and they completely lost a sense of God's glory in the determination of why you should marry someone.

So these three issues are there, and I've been calling this a three-part message on cleansing from everything pagan. In verse 30, you find this statement. Nehemiah says, I therefore cleanse them, cleanse the people of everything pagan. So that's what's happening here. Nehemiah has been gone a long time.

There's been drift, Drift in their worship, drift in the Sabbath, drift in their marriages. By the way, three great institutions that God has established, Nehemiah is confronting their disobedience. Now we know how it all started in verse one. They read the Word of God, and they saw that their departure from the Word of God regarding their worship. In this section, it was happening at the same time.

The Word of God was being read. They were recognizing that there was a departure from God's ways in the worship of God, and the thieves of delight were working the crowd like crazy. They'd been working the crowd for a long time. They'd been distracting them here, bumping them there, putting their hands and pulling their true treasure from them. And it happened by degrees, and it happened stealthily the way that it always does among the people of God.

So that's the situation that we find. Also, too, if you remember back in chapter 10, all the things that Nehemiah is confronting here, they actually entered into a written covenant never to do again. In other words, they broke the covenant that they made in chapter 10. We don't know how long previously this was. It could be two years, maybe as many as 12 years ago, they entered into a covenant.

And now on these three areas, the worship of God, the keeping of the Sabbath, and the doctrine of marriage, they have departed from. And all those were elements of the covenant that they entered into in chapter 10. And so you have here this historical record of the last testimony in the Old Testament. You have a people who can't keep their covenants with God, And that is a picture of God's people. They cannot keep, they cannot keep every law of God.

And so they need a covenant keeper. They need a Savior who is Jesus Christ, who never broke any of the Sabbath laws, who never broke any law of God, and he is the substitute of those who cannot keep God's laws, which would be all of us. So that's what we find here. Now, my focus this morning in terms of the interpretive grid, there are different ways that you can approach this passage, but I want to let you know what I'm doing with this text. My interpretive focus is verses 17 and 18, and there's a particular word that appears twice in those two verses, and it is the word profaning.

Profaning the Sabbath. And here I'm trying to give you a grid for how I want us to see this passage of Scripture. The word that Nehemiah uses here for profane is a word that means to wound. In other words, to hurt it. But it can mean to kill it as well to wound it or kill it So to profane something is to mix it up to diminish it in some way To make it not what it was meant to be To when you wound when you wound someone they just they can't do everything that they were meant to do.

But the devil doesn't only wound things like the Sabbath delight, he can kill it. In this case, I don't think he'd killed it, I think he wounded it. And the delight that God has called for the Sabbath is so easily wounded, just like the stealth of a pickpocket can come around and bump you in one way and distract your eyes over there and all of a sudden you've had a downgrade in your net worth. And that's what happens with us as well. Now, also just by way of introduction before we get into the text, Mike and I have talked about this matter of the Sabbath a couple of times in preparation for our time this morning, but one of the things that he mentioned that I thought was very helpful is he said, you know, there are two ditches That you can fall into regarding the Sabbath.

They're two big ditches and they're big and the first is a careless hard-hearted loophole seeking Compromising antinomianism. I might didn't use all those words, but that's kind of what he meant Okay, you can you can have this careless hard-hearted loophole sinking seeking. Everything is just fine with me I don't have to obey God's laws. I don't even have to listen to this. That's one ditch.

I'm free in Christ, I can do whatever I want. Jesus has paid for all my sins and all my Sabbath breaking, so everything is just beautiful, right? Then there's the other, there's a second ditch and that's a dead, heartless, lifeless, stiff, rigid Legalism that really doesn't understand delight and isn't really desiring delight They're just desiring to in a wooden way try to keep some law in a stiff lifeless Unchristian way where the love of Jesus just isn't there. But you do it all right, technically, by the book. Those are two ditches that you can fall into.

But there's nothing more tragic for a human being than when we, through our own actions, we diminish the power of the glory of the delight of God that He's designed for us. And there are ways in which we with our own hands or that we in following the culture around us unravel the fabric of joy that God has designed for us. And we do this many times by turning away from the means of true and lasting joy, and the Sabbath is one of those means of celebrating this delight that God has designed for His people. And so the focus of This whole text is Sabbath breaking, and he's confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight here in this passage. And when we think about the Sabbath, I want to encourage us to think about everything that the Bible says about the Sabbath, Because what was happening here was dealing with those things, and I'm going to get to that later I'm going to walk through several passages of scripture that sort of refresh our minds about what the what why God did establish the Sabbath but in in general just in simplest terms God God established the Sabbath to provide for mankind a protected time of spiritual and even physical and maybe even relational rejuvenation.

Okay, God did that for mankind. And he, preserving good things like that always requires boundaries. It always requires what you do. And it's not just a matter of the heart it actually does have much to do with what you do and Nehemiah makes this very clear as do all the other passages of Scripture on the Sabbath and if there are no boundaries there is no protection God has provided a boundary called the Sabbath and There are these boundary lines of this day in the Sabbath that Provide protection for this rejuvenation that we need and we need that rejuvenation relationally We need it with God we need it spiritually. We need it physically We need it with everything And God has provided a day to help us with that.

But there are ways that we allow the pickpocket or the kleptomaniac, the devil himself, to distract us, to bump us here, to get our eyes over there, and to take us away from Sabbath joy. You know, we've read earlier about the building of the walls of Jerusalem, how walls are a picture of salvation, they're a picture of a lot of things, but way back then when we were in the middle of the wall building in the earlier chapters of Nehemiah, I read a couple of times Proverbs 25-28, And it's really relevant to the boundaries for rejuvenation that God has set for the Sabbath. Here's what Solomon says, like a city that is broken into and without walls is a man who has no control over his spirit. And God has designed a particular day where we enter into a zone, a control zone, where we're fixing our minds upon God and His glory exclusively for an entire day, not half the day, the entire day. And, But it's easy to have chinks in the walls or whole stones from the walls falling out, and all of those are designed to diminish Sabbath joy.

So as you can see in your outline, Nehemiah is addressing this drift. And as you can see in the outline, I've divided this message into seven sections, and I'm calling those seven ways that Nehemiah confronts the thieves of Sabbath joy And I want to say we should do the same thing right here And of course as you can imagine, you know when you have to preach a passage of scripture like this, it tears you apart It tears your whole life apart It shows you your own weaknesses your own sins your own laziness your own lack of vision your own lack of preparation your own lack of even preparing your whole family or even your church for something like this. So when I'm looking at my face in the mirror here, it isn't pretty in every angle. So there are these seven, I'll state them now. Nehemiah observes the Sabbath breaking, that's the first way he confronts it, verses 15 and 16.

Secondly, Nehemiah contends with the leaders who are allowing it, that's verse 17, in the same way that he contended with the people regarding worship, he's now contending on the Sabbath. And thirdly, Nehemiah reminds of the disasters from breaking the Sabbath, That's verse 18, that's really critical. Number four, Nehemiah stops commerce on the Sabbath. That's also in verse 19. Number five, the fifth way that he confronts this is he threatens the compromisers.

And then sixth, he engages the government of the church, and seventh, he prays for mercy. Because whenever you're confronting anyone about the Sabbath, you know that there are three fingers pointing back at you. And Nehemiah recognizes that, and he prays for God's mercy upon him. Anyone who desires to restore right Sabbath worship will not ever do it perfectly and so he needs mercy. Okay so there it is let's jump in now The first way that Nehemiah is confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight are described in verses 15 and 16, and that is he observes Sabbath breaking.

In verse 15, in those days I saw the people in Judah treading wine presses on the Sabbath and bringing in sheaves and loading donkeys with wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day on which they were selling provisions. Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish and all kinds of goods and sold them on the Sabbath to the children of Judah and in Jerusalem. Let me make a few observations. First of all, the people are working on the wine presses, the treading presses, this is the production of goods, it's kind of like running a factory, They're creating something of value.

You know, I read last week that half of the, fully half of the female workforce in the United Kingdom works on Sundays. Families are separated there at that time. They're also bringing in the sheaves. This is processing materials and handling things that are going to become products of blessing in the form of food. And it's interesting, when you look at the way the Jews began to interpret the Sabbath, they fell off on this legalistic, lifeless side of it, and they created hundreds of totally unbiblical laws.

Like, for example, in this matter of bringing in the sheaves and cultivating for a harvest and planting seeds, they took this very idea and concluded that you couldn't comb your hair on the Sabbath either because combing was like cultivating. It was like putting a furrow to the ground and so you should not come here. I'm so thankful that everyone here has not embraced this ridiculous idea. The hair is not, I don't see anybody with a bad hair day. But all these ridiculous laws, you know, can be concocted.

We need to stay with what the Bible actually says about what should and shouldn't be done on the Sabbath and not try to create our own laws. The Sabbath was made for man. You know, Nehemiah is not a killer of joy here. He's a builder of joy. Let's be really clear about that.

He's not a killjoy. He's a kill builder. I mean, he's a joy builder. And so then My wife will frequently tell me how many times I've turned statements around in my preaching with the...and everyone's just so forgiving, or asleep, one of those two. And notice also they were loading donkeys with wine.

Now they're burdening their animals. Do you remember Exodus 20? You're not...you're even supposed to give your animals a day of rest. By the way, that's what animals want to do, if, you know, they do. If you...you have to...you have to make an animal work on any day.

You know, you have to lead them to do work. But on the Sabbath, they get to do just what's natural to them, and that is to rest. But you're supposed to give them a rest. But here the donkeys are getting all loaded up on the Sabbath. It's wrong to load your donkeys up and make your animals work on the Sabbath, too.

And in Leviticus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, this is explicitly stated, not your donkey, not your animals are explicitly mentioned. Notice also there's pressure from the outside. Look at verse 16. The men of Tyre, these great businessmen cruising in with all their awesome products, and it's Black Friday on Sunday, and they're dangling all these great products at great prices that you just can't live without, and they're in the city trying to lure the people of Judah. They've got their fish and their goods, and I mean, they're looking for a new market, the people of God and Judah.

And now they actually have a new market that maybe they hadn't had before. But this is pressure from the outside. There's always going to be pressure from the outside to break the Sabbath. Institutions will be pressures from the outside to help you to break the Sabbath. The whole marketing mechanism of the world and all the emails you might even get on the Sabbath to go buy something, your family, your friends, your relatives, they're going to provide you opportunities.

What are you going to do When there are these pressures from the outside, they're always going to be there. But have you capitulated to those pressures on the outside? Have you just said, oh, oh well, oh fine, I'll just cruise along like a dead fish down the stream and do whatever the gentiles are doing. Because these pressures on the outside are real. Everybody's doing it.

I'm sorry, everyone is doing it. How could it be so wrong if everybody's doing it? Well, Nehemiah is trying to correct that kind of thinking. They were following men. Now, you know, are there external pressures that have affected any of us in our breaking of the Sabbath?

In order that Sabbath delight would be stolen, the kleptomaniac of external distractions is always an issue. And you know, what is it that's luring us away from the delight? What's bumping us that's causing our attention to go one direction while we're being stole blind by that by the by the devil himself who kills and steals and destroys? And we just should be help us to ask these questions is there is there any way that I'm doing this notice how easy it is for God's people to slip back it hasn't been that long they actually signed a covenant okay to quit living like this but they were vol they were vulnerable and they and they slip back Nehemiah is now calling them to repentance. And in the midst of all this, I'm confident he's reminding them that they ended up in the Babylonian captivity because they didn't keep the Sabbath.

490 years of not keeping the Sabbath, and they were committed to 70 years of captivity as a result of their not keeping the Sabbath for those 490 years. So it's extremely serious. And so we have this world of external pressures. Now I think in the church too we have a Christian culture surrounding us that's an external pressure. It's very difficult to find a church even nearby here.

I only know personally of one church within 45 minutes of where we're standing, maybe a half hour where we're standing, that has the doctrine of the Sabbath that the Westminster Confession and the Baptist Confession of Faith maintains. It's almost impossible. I mean, there are hundreds of churches within 15 minutes of here, hundreds of them. And it's almost impossible to find churches that actually celebrate the Sabbath the way that Nehemiah and the way that I would say Jesus contended that we should keep the Sabbath. It's interesting, people sort of prioritize the commandments of God.

And this fourth commandment, it seems to be the most ignored of all the ten commandments, and there are even Christians who maintain there are only nine commandments for today, and the fourth commandment doesn't matter anymore. We don't want you to kill people, but the Sabbath not such a big deal We have this ranking, you know of the command stealing not good Sabbath Well, I don't know, you know, are there nine commandments are there ten? I think that's a really important question that needs to be asked. But there was a really interesting study that just took place in Britain, and most people in Britain think that only six of the Ten Commandments are really all that relevant today. And Let me give you a breakdown of this.

Ninety-three percent in Britain still think that the commandments against murder and stealing are critical. Eighty-seven percent, now we're going lower, think that you should not bear false witness. Seventy-three percent agree that adultery is not so great. We're getting lower. 61% say that not coveting other people's possessions is important.

31% say that not worshipping idols is essential. 20% agree that you should not worship other gods, but the bottom of the bucket is the fourth commandment, and 19% say that keeping the Sabbath is important. And I think that's a reflection, that that that that you see in the United Kingdom has really filtered down to even even the modern church, even evangelical churches. And This is why we, you know, in our church, we just, we really want to encourage people to keep the Sabbath the way that the great confessions of faith describe it and to do all you can. Now, let me read paragraph 8 in chapter 22 of the Baptist confession of religious worship in the Sabbath day The Sabbath is then kept holy unto the Lord when men after do preparing of their hearts.

That's critical ordering their common affairs beforehand do not only observe a holy rest all day from their own words, words and thoughts about their worldly employment and recreations, but are also taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of worship and in the means of necessity and of mercy." Now, There are many passages of Scripture that can...that ought to be used to support that, particularly Genesis chapter 2 where God, before the giving of the law, God rested in Exodus chapter 20 and Isaiah 58 and Exodus 16, Nehemiah 9, now in Nehemiah 13, Jeremiah 17 is critical, Revelation 1-10 is critical, And Matthew 12, 1 through 13 is also critical. And even Acts 20, there are several places where we would contend that the keeping of the Sabbath is for today. And there are ten commandments and not just nine for the church today. Okay, so the first way that Nehemiah confronts the thieves of Sabbath delight is he observes Sabbath breaking and that's what we should do. Let's observe ourselves and how we conduct the day.

The second way that Nehemiah is confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight is by contending with the leaders who are allowing it. That's verse 17. Then I contended, that's an important word, in other words he confronted them with the nobles of Judah and said to them, What evil thing is this that you do by which you profane the Sabbath day? So Nehemiah is bringing them back to the seriousness of the keeping of the Sabbath. And I just want to say something that I said to Deborah and Claudia on the way to church.

We underestimate how important it is that the people of God have a day of delight in Him. We underestimate that. And so Nehemiah is contending with those who have authority over it, and they are profaning the Sabbath. Do you see that word? The word is in verse 17, and it's also in verse 18, by which you profane the Sabbath day.

And it's a word that means to wound, to somehow disable, or to even actually to kill it and to pierce it and to defile it, to pollute it in some kind of way. It's a word that contains that range all the way from polluting something, making it not so pure to something where you're actually killing it. That's sort of the range of the word that's used here. And so Nehemiah is telling that they're killing a good thing, they're wounding a good thing. Now by the way, they're still celebrating the Sabbath in certain ways, they're probably still going to the temple and offering sacrifices, but they've added this other thing, they've profaned it, they've polluted it, they've diminished it, they've harmed the delight that God had designed for the day.

And that's why it's so easy for us with our own hands to unravel the whole fabric of joy and to turn away from the means of joy that God has given his people and it's always it's always a tragedy to pollute something to diminish it to wound it now my my guess is nobody's killed the Sabbath here, but we've all probably wounded it in certain ways. And so that's what he's talking about. And they were wounding the best things in life. They were they were wounding the things that would give them everything their hearts really desired. True everlasting joy and delight in the Lord.

And so Nehemiah starts with where the responsibility lay here, and in the Bible it's very clear in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy chapter 5, the responsibility for keeping the Sabbath is laid upon the shoulders of the family. That's where it starts. Fathers and mothers are the ones who are the appointed authorities to maintain Sabbath's keeping in the family. And you know, if you have a family, you know that, you know, everybody in the family, you know, the thieves of Sabbath joy sometimes come in really small packages, you know, and because of their desires you're getting pickpocketed. Or it might be your own laziness, or it might be your theology, but whatever it is, parents are the ones who are responsible and they must give an account.

I would also suggest that elders of churches have some responsibility. We too will give an account for what we do. You have these three jurisdictions in operation here in this text, The civil, the family, and the church, all of these are impinging on the Sabbath in this passage of Scripture. It's an interesting one from a jurisdictional standpoint to study it. And so the church has often failed to speak and Therefore the civil realm capitulates as well.

And here's our encouragement, keep the Sabbath no matter who does in this culture. Maintain a witness that God is the most delightful, satisfying contemplation of the human soul. And when you celebrate the Sabbath, that's what you're saying. Now if it's just a dead, lifeless, legalistic, rigid thing, then it's meaningless. But before watching world, it's critical that the church celebrates the Sabbath.

That's what had been lost. And the men of Tyre showing up with their fish and all their goods and nobody's telling them except when Nehemiah shows up that God is the most delightful thing and God has commanded his people to enter into a day of light. And by the way, God takes care of his people even on the Sabbath. They don't even have to work. They get 52 days of vacation a year.

God's people are really a blessed people. God's going to feed His people even if they quit working on a day. And the men of Tyre sang, what? Are you serious? Well, that's what the men of Tyre were supposed to hear, that they weren't hearing it from the people of God.

So this is a public act of visible testimony that God is the only true delight of the human soul of mankind. And so there the Gentiles were not... They were not able to discern that people... That God's people had put their trust in God. And they could see no difference in the way that they were living and the way the people of Judah were living.

Okay, so the second way that Nehemiah confronts the thieves is he contends with the leaders who are allowing it. And then thirdly, he reminds of the disasters from breaking the Sabbath. That's verse 18. He goes back and he gets historical on them. He says, did not our fathers do this?

And as he's saying, don't you remember? Seventy years of captivity. This is what this has already happened. Are we just gonna repeat this again? And did not our God bring all this disaster on us and all this city?

Remember Nebuchadnezzar charging into Jerusalem and destroying everything? Don't you remember that? Do you remember your sons being castrated and taken to Babylon to be servants of Nebuchadnezzar? Do you remember that? Do you want your sons castrated again?

Do you want to lose everything again and be deported, you know, 1200 miles away? Is that what you want to do? So that Nehemiah is getting historical here, and then he says, yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath. So the breaking of the Sabbath exposes you to the wrath of God. That's what he's reminding them of.

It's a very serious matter. This is why Jesus confronted the buying and selling on the Sabbath in His own day. And this is why Jesus also confronted the Pharisees for their dead, lifeless, rigid, heartless celebration of the Sabbath. Jesus was confronting, you know, both...those in both ditches. Jesus was confronting, you know, both side, both those in both ditches.

Now, in order to establish some just very radically clear language about the dangers of Breaking the Sabbath turn to Jeremiah 17, please turn to Jeremiah 17 and we're gonna pick it up in verse 19 and you have a very similar Situation Jeremiah is preaching, you know right at the time the Babylonian captivity is happening. Jeremiah watches the armies of Nebuchadnezzar invade his city. He sees it happening and he's there and he's been, he watches all the hardship and trouble and crying that took place. Jeremiah prophesied this before it happened. Thus says, thus the Lord said to me, go stand in the gate of the children of the people by which the kings of Judah come in and by which they go out and in all the gates of Jerusalem." So God commands Jeremiah to do the same thing that Nehemiah is doing.

He's standing in the gate. Go stand in the gate and say to them, hear the word of the Lord you kings of Judah and all Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem who enter by these gates thus says the Lord take heed to yourselves and bear no burden on the Sabbath day nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem nor carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day nor do any work but hallow the Sabbath day as I commanded your fathers but they did not obey nor incline their ear." And then you read of the devastation that took place. Look at the end of verse 27. "'Then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and it shall not be quenched So the gates will get burned down down that's what happened and guess and guess what had just happened They just rebuilt the gates. They had just hung the gates They had been celebrating the the completion of the wall and all the gates, and they were celebrating and singing, and just a few years later they slipped back into the same zone that they had fallen into before.

And you know, There are several passages of Scripture that define what keeping of the Sabbath should be all about. Here we have one snapshot here, and I want to suggest that to interpret this instruction about the Sabbath, one should recognize the whole doctrine of the Sabbath. What was Nehemiah really dealing with here, okay? And I want to give you seven critical texts here. First of all, Exodus 20, the Sabbath day, is a rest from labor that really is a picture of the rest that God gives for souls.

Secondly, Deuteronomy chapter 5, the holiness of the day. There's some similarities of Deuteronomy 5 to Exodus 20, but the focus of the message of Deuteronomy 5 is that God rested and so should you, and there's lots of detail there. Exodus 20 is the most extensive, most detailed text on the Sabbath. And then the third text is Isaiah 58. This is, this is, we hear the message of the delight and the pleasure that God desires for the Sabbath.

And here's what Isaiah says, call the Sabbath a delight, call it a delight, start calling it a delight, stop calling it bondage, stop calling it restrictions, start calling it a delight because that's really the purpose of it. We often use the wrong words to describe the Sabbath. Yeah, God does want to have a protected day with boundaries, but why? It's for delight. It's not for bondage at all.

And if you think about it as bondage, then you're either not thinking about it right or your heart doesn't know the delight of the Lord. It's one of those two things. Then the fourth text is Hebrews 4 and here the writer of Hebrews speaks and of what really is the crescendo of The whole magnificent contour of the meaning of the Sabbath and that and that is it is rest. It's eternal rest. It's rest God desires his people to have rest from their labors.

He did that in Jesus Christ. You don't labor for your salvation. God and His Son labored for your salvation, and He labored perfectly. And then the fifth passage is in New Maya 13, where you have the profaning of this delight and the great judgment that comes upon those who rejected the sixth text Is a text in Matthew chapter 12 where Jesus declares the beauty of it He says the Sabbath was made for man. It was for healing.

It's for doing good on the Sabbath. You know, many of the miracles that Jesus performed were on the Sabbath day. When we get into the Gospel of John, you'll see that. But why was Jesus always healing on the Sabbath day? Because the Sabbath was made for the healing of man's soul.

And Jesus heals blind and deaf and lame people to tell the story that when you are experiencing his Sabbath, He's healing your lame limbs. He's restoring your hearing. He's restoring your sight. He's healing you. So that's Matthew chapter 12, I desire mercy not sacrifice.

And then the seventh that I want to identify is in Nehemiah chapter 8, verse 10. Remember that great scene? They all gathered together and they said, bring the book! They brought the book. It was such a day of joy.

And you remember, remember what Nehemiah said? It was on the Sabbath day. He said, the joy of the Lord is your strength He said he said don't mourn or weep in verse 9 in chapter 8 He said go your way eat of the fat and drink of the sweet in other words go home go home and rejoice in the Lord, which I think that means you should probably have shakes on Sunday afternoon when you go home. I think, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, I don't know, you decide. Send portions to the needy, In other words, make it a day of compassion.

Don't let your heart go hard where everybody else in the world, you know, spreads around. Some people might not have the ability even to have a meal like that, and you know, maybe you need to bring them in. And he says, be still and do not be grieved. Those are the commands. And the Sabbath is one of God's great recipes for fighting sorrow.

And He cares about us in our sorrows. And so He says, this day is a holy day of the Lord. The joy of the Lord is your strength." Why am I saying all this? It's a disaster for us to turn away from the Sabbath. Not only are we deprived of the blessings of God, but we expose ourselves to the wrath of God, And that's why Nehemiah, in verse 18, he warns them of the disasters from breaking the Sabbath.

It's a disaster. And then The fourth way that Nehemiah confronts the thieves of delight is that Nehemiah stops commerce on the Sabbath, verse 19. He just stops the commerce. No more buying and selling, and he goes out there. So it was, verse 19, at the gates of Jerusalem as it began to be dark before the Sabbath that I commanded the gates to be shut and charged that they must not be opened till after the Sabbath.

You know, he's interrupting transactions, You know, they're handing money through the gate. You know, we've got to get a little bit more squeeze out of this, you know, this financial opportunity. But he shuts the gates right when it starts getting dark and they will must not be opened until after the Sabbath. Then I posted some of my servants at the gates so that no burdens would be brought in on the Sabbath day. You know the blue laws of North Carolina that just expired not very long ago were in keeping with this.

You had civil laws that said you have to close your business on Sunday. And most states had those laws, and they disappeared not that long ago, actually. When we first moved here, almost nothing was open. That was in 1988. Oh my, have things changed.

There's been drift, significant drift, and somebody needs to shut the gates. Some companies have decided to shut their gates on Sunday. Praise God. They should, and we should do the same thing. And so, first, Nehemiah stationed at the gate, this is personal observation, then he takes action, he shuts the gates.

It's not just what's in your heart, you've got to shut the gates, okay? Thirdly, when he shut...when did he shut the gates? As it began to be dark. Interesting, the wording...like, when does the Sabbath start? Is it, is it midnight to midnight?

Is it sundown to sunrise? When is the time? I'm not here to make a big argument about that, but you know, here the word literally is when the shadows, when they threw shadows, when the gates began to throw shadows, when is that? I don't know. I don't know.

But it's sometime. And here's, here's my admonition. Pick sometime. Okay, Pick a time. I don't know, is it like three, you know, three minutes before technical, you know, sunset that you read on your, on your, on the weather channel of your iPhone?

Is that, is it that minute? Is it that very second? Well, maybe it should be, but it should be sometime. I don't know what you do when you're in Alaska and it's summertime and the sun never goes down. You know, you don't really have a complete sunrise and sunset, you know, or if you're way up in the Arctic where my mom and dad, you know, were, you know, in the early part of their marriage, you know, they were up so far north that it never got dark at all.

So, I don't know what the exact time is, but pick a time that seems in your soul to make sense. But don't just say, well, you know, it's summertime in Alaska somewhere. Don't say that. You know, pick a time and be faithful to it. So it happened as it began to be dark before the Sabbath.

And then notice that Nehemiah communicated in the form of a command. I commanded the gates to be shut. And I just want to say that's what parents should do. They should command that the gates be shut at a particular time. And then, next, Nehemiah posts guards.

He was the governor there, most likely, and this was a civil action. He posted guards, much like the blue laws in North Carolina. You know, do we have gates that are unguarded? You know, are we opening doors that we should not open? Is there something that needs to stop?

Is there a door in your life on the Sabbath that needs to shut? Is there? Is there something in the way that's downgrading, that's wounding your delight on the Sabbath? And so then we have the fifth way that he's confronting the thieves of the Sabbath's delight, and that is he warns the compromisers, the merchants. He goes outside the people of God.

Now he's talking what seems to me to be the merchants from Tyre, these awesome product handlers, you know, that are out there. They're on the outside of the gates. Now the merchants and sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice. So they shut the gates, but the guys came anyway and they set up their tables, you know, and they were trying to lure people out like that and then he goes out and he warns them He says why do you spend the night around the wall if you do it again? I'll lay hands on you How lay hands on you now?

What does that mean The word actually means to loose or to send you away. If you do it again, I'm coming out here and I'm going to tell you to leave. That's the terminology that he uses. And then they didn't come anymore. And you know, there are all these little...

I just think it's a fixture of these things, these little pickpockets that are just going to lure you outside the gate a little bit, just to slip a few dollars, you know, through the crack in the wall and maybe get it thrown over the top or whatever, you know, whatever kind of, you know, thing that's really impinging on your Sabbath delight. And so he is clearly and resolutely setting himself against it. Why? Because the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. But Jesus came to give life and to give it more abundantly.

That's what Jesus said in John 10. Because there are thieves of Sabbath delight, and they are everywhere, and they're all over this room, and so just make sure, you know, when you get bumped, realize who's bumping you in that direction and then the sixth way that he's confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight is that he engages the government of the church that's in verse 22 and I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves and that they should go and guard the gates to sanctify the Sabbath day." You know, who are the Levites in this story? You know, is it the deacons? Is it the elders? I don't know, but it's the people who are working for the promotion of the worship of God.

Those guys at least need to say, not on our watch. Okay? By the way, that's our position as elders, not on our watch. We're not buying and selling things here today. Our pattern has been to say, you know, we have this big, beautiful piece of property.

We don't want to use it for sports on the Sabbath. Use it for the worship of God, the meditation of God. While you're on this turf that we have governance over, that's what we do. Now that's just, that's always been our position. I don't, have we ever stated that publicly?

This may be the first time we've ever really stated it publicly. I'm not sure. Possibly in an email or something like that. But we want to be a church that prioritizes the glory of God when we're together and to learn how to give glory to God all day long like would you like to do that like would you like to be able to do that I mean you know you don't do it every Sabbath I don't it's a struggle isn't it but do you want to be a person who is like what David talked about, let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Everyone who has breath praising the Lord.

Would you like to learn how to have a day that's so nourishing, so soul satisfying, so soul delighting, that you delight yourself in the Lord? And it's not your words that you're interested in, it's God's words. It's not your ways that you're interested in, it's God's ways. And you want to saturate your whole day like that. Do you want that?

Well, as a person who's speaking these things, I recognize that I want it, but I fail, you know, in it. In laziness, in vision, in preparation, and things like that. But do I want more? Yes, I want to be better. I want our family to have the most delightful day of the Sabbath.

We possibly can. And God has told us how to focus on it. Okay, the seventh way he's confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight is by dealing with himself. Verse 22, remember me, oh my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to the greatness of your mercy. Nehemiah is also convicted.

He's convicted that he needs the mercy of God on this matter. So in confronting the thieves, he's confronting himself as well. And by the way, interesting, when he says, remember me, this is the exact same words that the thief on the cross used when he was converted. Remember me, Lord. Remember me.

I'm a sinner. Have mercy on me. I want to serve you and your kingdom. I want to obey your laws but remember me Lord. Have mercy on me in all the ways that I've fallen short.

This is not antinomianism, this is confession and repentance. You know, I recall that Spurgeon said that even your repentance needs to be repented of because you can't ever repent completely enough. I think that's what Nehemiah's doing here. He's repenting. Well, I'd like to turn to some applications here of these seven ways that Nehemiah's confronting the thieves of Sabbath delight.

And the first is kind of in the form of a question. Where have we as a church loosened up, maybe in ways that have been appropriate, or we as families or individuals, Single people that are here today, have you loosened up on the Sabbath such that Sabbath delight has been compromised? My guess is most of us have wounded the Sabbath, not killed it. Like we're here, you know. Maybe there needs to be a little healing of the wound that's necessary.

You know, like, do we prepare adequately for it so that it really is that day. There's a time for everything under heaven. There's a time to prepare for the Sabbath and there's a time to have these boundary, this time of protection, protected space in your life. Have you properly protected the space for worship, for the worship of God? And the other thing is that, you know, don't forget that everything that God commands is for the delight of His people, everything.

You know, He gave a book to teach us what's true, to guide us so it would be a delight. He gave us a place of worship, the tabernacle, the temple, and now the church, and even our bodies. Then He gives us ministers in the form of priests and Levites and elders and even deacons and then fourth he gives us a day he did all those things for our delight he did all those things because he loves his children and all of his commands related to those things are really for the blessing and the joy of his people. And Nehemiah was uncompromising in dealing with it. Now the greatest characteristic of the Sabbath is The joy that comes from rest in God.

That's the greatest characteristic of the Sabbath and That's why Paul said, you know rejoice in the Lord again. I say rejoice that's why David said delight yourself in the Lord delight yourself in the Lord be glad in the Lord and rejoice you righteous that's Psalm 32 and God has given us all these things so that our joy might be made full. You know, I was talking to Duane Krauss last night on the phone, and he was telling me about a psalm that he was meditating on, and I thought, that's perfect for us here in this church and He pointed me to Psalm 123 And I'll just read it to you because Psalm 123 gives a picture of what it's like to have that day of delight. And by the way, Psalm 123 is part of this collection of Psalms called the Songs of Ascent. They were the songs that the children of Israel would sing while they were going up to the temple to worship God during the great feasts established by God.

So picture families walking along the road, you know, children kicking rocks and they're singing these songs, you know, going up to worship God in the temple. And he gives three illustrations in Psalm 123. There's a creature, the first one is, I'm going to read it in a second, but there's a creature looking up to God, a creature made in the image of God, looking up to the Creator. And then there's a servant that's looking to his master, and then there's a maid who's looking at her mistress, her employer, and the eyes, the eyes are fixed. And let me read this, Psalm 123.

Unto you I lift up my eyes, you who dwell in the heavens. That's how you have a day of delight. Verse 2. Behold as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters, now there's the eyes are on the master and then like a maid who looks at her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God until he has mercy on us." That's a picture of Sabbath delight. You know, it was a while back somebody brought their well-trained dog over to our property, and that dog was swimming around and doing all kinds of things.

Here was the thing that we all noticed from the littlest child, we noticed that dog had his eyes on his master, always. And at the turn of a hand, the slightest sound or the slightest movement that dog would respond to. I thought that was a picture of having your eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of your faith. So here's here's here's the sort of the final application of this whole thing. For today, for all of us, multiply what increases delight in God.

Multiply it like no other day. The fundamental principle of the Sabbath is that there's a holy day, a protected space of time for this particular endeavor. And you know, it should be a day like no other like it's a day where you read the Bible more than other days It's a day where you should sing more. It's a day where you should pray more It's a day where you should probably recite more or memorize more or give thanks more. Here's the message, maximize, maximize the things of delight and don't let the thieves of delight, don't let the devil, the great kleptomaniac who bumps you on one side and steals you from you on the other.

Don't let him diminish the glory that this day could be. And so sing and read and pray and meditate and talk more about the glory of God and confront the thieves of Sabbath delight. They're everywhere and don't give in to them and remember that Jesus said the thief comes that he may steal and kill and destroy but I came that they might have life and might have it more abundantly. How about that? Would you pray with me?

Lord we thank you for the clarity, the beauty of your word. We thank you that it is such a blessing to our souls, which is why David said that your laws are his delight. Lord, we pray that you would just multiply your delight in us by the means of delight that you, our Creator, have given us, better than any other means that our affections or our culture could ever give us, but you, Lord, have given us the words of life. And so I pray that you would multiply it here on this very day. Amen.