In his sermon titled 'The Happiest Day of the Week,' Scott Brown emphasizes the importance of observing the Lord's Day, or Sunday, as a day of delight and spiritual rest, guided by the teachings of Isaiah 58:13-14. He argues that the way one perceives the Lord's Day significantly impacts the experience, urging believers to view it as a day of joy rather than obligation. Brown highlights the critical role of parents in shaping how the day is celebrated within the family, suggesting that it should be planned and filled with meaningful activities such as worship, prayer, and fellowship. He stresses that the Lord's Day is meant to be a benefit to man, providing spiritual nourishment and rest rather than mere leisure. By changing one’s mindset and embracing the day with joy, it becomes a source of happiness and spiritual growth. Brown provides practical suggestions for making the day joyous, including reviewing sermons, singing, praying, and engaging with scripture. He concludes by encouraging believers to strive for greater delight in the Lord, ensuring that the day remains a cornerstone of spiritual life.

Okay, open your Bibles to Isaiah 58. Isaiah 58, we'll be reading from the section on the Sabbath, verse 13. Isaiah 58 verse 13. If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath of delight the holy day of the Lord honorable and shall honor him not doing your own ways nor finding your own pleasure nor speaking your own words then you shall delight yourself in the Lord and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father the mouth of the Lord has spoken Lord we thank you for your matchless grace communicated to us in all of your ways All of your commandments are good and are for our happiness and we're so thankful for them. Pray that you would illuminate your Word to us this afternoon.

In Jesus name, amen. The focus of this message really is going to be on verse 14 of the verses that I just read. I'd like to talk about practical actions for how your family can make the Lord's Day the happiest day of the week. Yes, the happiest day of the week. Yes, the happiest day of the week.

The Scripture leads us in that direction. Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord. You know, we've had such delightful days fellowshiping together on the Lord's Day. I'm just so grateful for the happiness of the church and the sweetness that we experience when we're together. Of course the food is also very delicious.

What this passage of scripture does is it gives New Covenant believers some very practical thoughts for celebrating this day of worship. And what Isaiah does is he explains one of the most useful reasons to be thoughtful about the Lord's day, to enter into his gates with thanksgiving. And it is a day to turn to the most pleasurable activities of the soul. That's what God does. He always tells you where the pleasure is.

He always leads you to the joy. He always leads you to living waters and that's why it's so clear from the Word of God happy is that people whose God is the Lord and that's what this is about that's what that's what the Lord's Day is all about and you know over the past months Mike has sought to make the biblical case that God desires for us to keep his rhythms of life on the Lord's Day and here in this last session on a long session Mike preached on every possible Sabbath text that exists pretty much. And so you really had a pretty deep dive over the months on the Lord's Day. But all of the instruction I think is summed up in really that's one word delight God desires to delight your soul and so he calls you to do the most delightful thing for your soul And that is to gather with the people of God to worship God To celebrate to read the word of God to pray to gather to greet one another with a holy kiss, and all that kind of stuff. So God's ways are always so good.

He has prescribed a day of delight for the family, and it is the Lord's Day Sunday. Solomon told us, and it's true, if you're a Christian you know it's true all his ways are pleasant ways and all his paths are peace all of them God issues no useless commands they're all for your good And Jesus said that the day was made for man, not man for the day. In other words, the day is a benefit to man. It's a blessing to man. And to disregard it or to have seasons where you're not involved in it is harmful to your soul.

So I'd like to talk about how to celebrate the Lord's Day. Now Mike has been talking about why pretty much. Now I want to talk a little bit about how in terms of some of the practical matters. And the critical factor for how really begins in your mind. It begins in the way that you think about things.

The way that you think about this day makes all the difference in the world. If you think it's kind of an optional thing, if you think it's something that you can kind of do if you feel good enough to do it, or if the government hasn't told you that you can't do it, then you know how you think about it really forms what you will do with that day. But what God does is he promises that if you change your mind about that day, He'll give you delight. This starts by calling it a delight. Verse 14, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth.

Well, the previous verses say, if you call the Sabbath a delight, You should start calling it what it is. It's not a burden, it's not a responsibility, it's a delight. So start calling it a delight. It begins with how you think about it and how you talk about it. And if you know if this if the Lord's Day is boring, then we have to ask why.

Why is that? Parents can make the Lord's Day a bore to their children. Now we have the advantage of gathering you know into the the wee hours of the afternoon you know and So our children are with us that we're eating together We're celebrating together, but then the afternoon comes and the evening and what do you do that parents have a tremendous responsibility? For their families for what they do on the Lord's Day. You can make the Lord's Day a bore.

You can make the Lord's Day an offense by the way that you celebrate it, particularly though by the way that you plan the day, by the way you order the day. You can make it a bore or you can make it a delight. Making children sit like statues on the Lord's Day is not typically the way to make it a delight for a five-year-old. It exasperates them and it deprives them of profitable activity. And there are ways that on the Lord's day parents can cause their children to sin.

The apostle Paul speaks of this in Ephesians chapter 6. He talks about exasperating your children. In other words, you're causing your children to sin. Parents can do things that cause their children to sin. And I think one of the things that parents can do is to make the Sabbath a bore.

So it is designed to be a happy day, it is designed to be a holy day, holy meaning like no other day. And so we need to be engaged in our thinking we need to call it a delight and and create the delight as much as we can for our children Okay I'm gonna throw a zinger line at you right now. Are you ready? Okay. If your children are bored on the Lord's Day, it's probably your fault as parents.

If your children are bored on the Lord's Day, it's probably your fault. Don't blame the day. So you might need to have some adjustments to be made. But don't let that, don't let boredom continue on the Lord's day. You don't want to let that happen.

That is bad news. It's no fun on the one hand, but it's pure disobedience to God. So we don't want to blame the boredom on the day. Please don't blame it on the pastors, okay? I'm gonna blame it on the parents because in the law in Exodus chapter 20, it's so clear in the fourth commandment that its parents that govern that day parents are the ones that are given the responsibility to make that day what it is where nobody's working you know and but where they're where they're delighting so it's a tough job frankly isn't it it takes you have to get off your couch potato mentality hey It's a tough job but somebody has to do it.

And God says who has to do it, his parents. Scripture is very clear, okay? I'll just summarize Exodus 20. The jurisdictional responsibility for keeping the Lord's day and making a delight falls directly on the parents and the family. Exodus 20 verses 8 through 11, Deuteronomy 5, 12 through 15.

It's the Lord who has made it that way. So if your Sundays are not a delight the way that God prescribes them, then look to yourself, identify the flaws in the way you're leading your family. God passed the jurisdictional responsibility to you as parents for ensuring that your family rests and delights. How about that? God has called you parents to make a day a very special day of delight.

Isn't that amazing? You know somebody came to me a while back and said, you know, I don't really believe, you know, that what you say about the Lord's Day is true. And I said, well, okay, here's the bottom line. Here's what I'm gonna do whenever I talk about the Lord's Day. I'm gonna say, make the day a delight.

Make the whole day a delight. Use every minute of the day you possibly can to make that day a delight. I said do you think God is going to condemn me for that when I face him? So I don't think so. So there are There are particular restrictions for the Lord's Day.

They're very clear. There are only very, very few restrictions mentioned in the Bible. Cease from work. Cease from regular activity. Cease from idle talk.

Cease from doing your own thing. That's it. God doesn't give you a laundry checklist, except he gives you principles. You know, he built us in such a way that we have a conscience. We know when we're not delighting in the Lord.

We know when we're working, right? We know that. We don't need the pastors to come and tell us. We know. And when we become disconnected from the delights of the Lord, we know that.

And it happens all the time on the Lord's Day. What it does with me. You know what that's like. But what God does is he wants to call us all back to greater delight than the lack of delight that we then we slipped into on the Lord's Day. You know most of us have broken the Sabbath before we get to church, right?

But we keep coming back to delight in the Lord. God gives us help. How did Mike say it today? God gives us help to be diligent to observe the day. And of course, the day itself is one of those.

So let's make it really simple. God is teaching us to eliminate the things that distract us from glorifying our Redeemer and finding our joy in His words, in His ways, and in His work. And we don't need a whole bunch of laws about the Sabbath to help us to figure that out. We usually know when we drift, we have a conscience. You know, the Holy Spirit doesn't make you a total idiot where you have to have instructions for absolutely everything.

You know, you read the Word of God, you know what it says, and the Holy Spirit is there to tell you, you know, that you're not delighting in him. So everyone knows when they're pursuing irrelevant things. Everyone knows when they're not entering into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Everybody knows when they're not doing that. So you don't need a Sabbath policeman for that.

You know, God has already revealed it to you. So obviously Isaiah is directing us to delightful celebration. So, regard the Sabbath a delight, call the Sabbath a delight. Next, give the special day honor as the day we are called to call it the holy day of the Lord. There in Isaiah we call the day a holy day to the Lord and we call it honorable, we call it just wonderful.

And we set our hearts on God to honor him. I'm just taking words out of the text of Isaiah 58. So we turn away from our own ways and to do his ways we turn away from our pleasure seeking our own pleasure and seek and finding the pleasure of the Lord, you know, by shutting down the trivial life that we often engage in. And then he says not using idle words nor speaking your own words. In other words, don't be trivial in your speech.

Consider that on that day particularly set it aside to talk about truly important and wonderful things. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight. Oh Lord my strength and my Redeemer. Okay now I'm going to start giving you some laundry list of things to do. Okay first thing is examine your heart.

To help your children enter fully into the joys of the Lord then parents need to be certain kinds of people and they need to examine themselves. Examine yourself first of all, do you delight in the Lord? If you don't, then you need to do a deeper examination. Do I know the Lord? Am I a Christian?

Have I been redeemed? Am I following Jesus Christ? Has he changed my life? Am I a different person because I was saved and baptized? That's the most important question to ask.

If you don't delight in the day, then you ought to ask a much deeper question about whether you're even a Christian at all. And then set yourself in a disposition of gladness, you know, on that day. You know, David said in Psalm 122 verse 1, I was glad when they said it to me, let us go into the house of the Lord. And I would just encourage parents to show your delight by snapping into action, help your children build excitement for the day, teach them the applications of the Word of God for the day, you know, help them help them to understand the sermons, you know, sing the songs, help them to understand the songs, you know, we've sung several songs already this morning, several passages of scripture have been read, just help them understand in glory. There's some great texts that were read today right from the beginning of the service, and prayers prayed, and we just sang, wow, one of my favorite songs a minute ago, Come all ye piney hungry poor, your Savior is ready for you.

I love that song. But snap into action and you know, help your children understand what's going on on the day. It'll, yeah, it'll take work on your part, But guess what? It's a tough job if somebody has to do it. And parents are the ones that have to do it.

The next thing is to prepare. Prepare the ground for the Lord's day. The Jews observed a day of preparation. This was the day before the Sabbath and what families did is they prepared meals and whatever is necessary to make the Sabbath the day of rest. They got all the mechanical details of life out of the way so that when they woke up on the Sabbath they were ready, free of all kinds of labors that are necessary on a regular day.

Another thing I think we ought to be doing is planning. You need a plan for the day. Now, our gatherings sort of provide a lot of structure for the plan, right? I mean, at 10 o'clock we come in here and we start worshiping God, praising God. So, you've got a lot of stuff already planned out right now.

We're making it easy for you, right? We're supposed to in that sense. But plan the day. Think about what you're going to do in the afternoon. Don't just let it happen.

You know, for most of us, if we don't plan for a gap in the day, nothing fills the gap. But God has actually wired us and actually wired this day to be a day where we actually plan for delight in the afternoon. I'm going to give you 11 ways, there are many more, that families can continue the day of delight at church. Number one, review the sermon in the afternoon when you get home. Number two, take a walk.

Rejoice in the glory of God's work in creation. Wow, it's a beautiful day out there today. I love taking walks on Sunday afternoons. Number three, sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs together in the afternoon. Number four, pray together.

Number five, memorize scripture together. Number six, listen to a sermon together. Number seven, Read Pilgrim's Progress or listen to it on audio. Number eight, read a biblically sound book about church history or a Christian biography. Number nine, write down your thoughts from your time at church.

Number 10, have little ones draw pictures about the sermon. Number 11, Take time to sit and talk about the week before and the week ahead. So those are just really practical things that you can do but seize the day. You know make it make it work. Make it the best day.

Make it the happiest day of the week. Make it the best planned day of the week in your own schedule. So there are various excuses that we make about not celebrating the Lord's Day. There are reasons that we can give to avoid celebrating with the saints on any given day. Many people over the last eight or nine months have used the government orders as an excuse not to engage in the Lord's Day.

That's tragic. But you know when you have a lot of little children in your house, it can cause families you know to be at their wits end on the Lord's Day. And just getting to church is like a major operation. Just finding enough shoes. I mean, I sympathize.

There are families in this church that have, you know, seven children under the age of seven. And it can be a little bit rough, right? So we need to have compassion. But I was talking to one of my daughters about this, and she was saying, you know, when you're kind of in the midstream of this life season where you have lots of kids running around, she said that worrying about it can cause a temptation and because it's difficult, you justify or you wanna justify being absent from your local church because it takes quite an effort to make it happen when you have a lot of little kids. And you know, mothers of small children invariably are going to be tired at the end of the week and it's very tempting to think, well it's supposed to be a day of rest and the only way we're going to get a day of rest is by staying at home.

So my daughter was telling me, she was just reminding me about you know the fact, rest on the Lord's Day doesn't necessarily mean leisure. In fact, it's not really talking about leisure. The day is not primarily a day of physical rest of doing nothing, but it's to do other things that are more nourishing to the soul, to make it a day of spiritual rest. And so what we do is that we rest from our usual work in order to be encouraged and find spiritual rest in the church. And it's more challenging for parents with young children for sure.

But we might think that physical rest is what we need. But pampering ourselves is not typically what we need. When we commune with the Lord and we honor his commands, he provides rest for our souls. When we gather with the saints and receive the encouragement that he has before us, we find rest for our souls and it sets us up for the coming week of more week of more labors. I'm going to close with a statement by Thomas Watson explaining this better than I have.

When the falling dust of the world has clogged the wheels of our affections, that they can scarce move towards God. The Sabbath comes and oils the wheels of our affections and they move swiftly on. God has appointed the Sabbath for this end. So there you have it. The Lord's Day was designed to be like oil and water and sweetness and delight for the whole family, and I just want to encourage all of us together to to make it happen and if you have children you know you know guide your children to ride on the high hills of the earth and celebrate the day and make the day a delight and the promise is there you shall ride on the high hills of the earth so that's the promise of the day God's commands are all good they're all for our benefit And I'm very grateful for a church that loves to gather on the Lord's Day.

And because you do, you're always here. And when we say let's pray, almost everybody comes to pray. It's really remarkable, I love it. I'm so thankful for you all. But I don't think any of us are completely saturated with delight.

And so God would have us go further in our delight. I just pray that as the days go on there's more happiness in this place from the delight in the Lord, not in anything else. If our delight is in anything else it won't be delight, not for very long anyway, but delight in the Lord. So there you have it, Practical applications for how your family can make the Lord's Day the happiest day of the week. Would you pray with me?

Father we thank you for your wonderful commands. We thank you for The ways that your commands draw us into a far better life, a higher life, a happier life. Lord, your ways are pleasant ways. We're so thankful for your kingdom, your kingdom of joy, your kingdom of peace. All of your ways are such pleasant ways.

Amen.