In the sermon 'Preparing for and Profiting From the Sabbath', speaker Mike Davenport delves into the importance of preparation for the Christian Sabbath, highlighting that proper preparation is key to truly profiting from this holy day. He draws parallels between the meticulous planning for vacations and the necessary preparations for the Sabbath, emphasizing that we should afford the same importance to the Lord's Day. Davenport outlines three forms of preparation: practical, physical, and spiritual. Practical preparations include organizing daily affairs in advance, while physical preparations involve ensuring one's body is rested and ready to engage in worship. Spiritual preparations are rooted in a clean heart and readiness to seek God, as illustrated by Psalm 24. Davenport challenges the notion of observing the Sabbath from sundown to sundown, suggesting that a full Sunday observance aligns better with the New Covenant. He concludes with an exhortation for believers to prepare their hearts, allowing them to fully appreciate and benefit from God's holy day.

Well, I'd like to continue our study of the fourth commandment by focusing in this afternoon on a portion of the paragraph from the confession that we looked at earlier today from paragraph eight, chapter 22, dealing with religious worship and the Sabbath day. And it's this portion that I want to focus on. It's the kind of in the beginning of it where it says, the Sabbath is then kept holy unto the Lord when men, here it is, after a due preparing of their hearts and ordering their common affairs of forehand. And that's what our focus will be this afternoon. I've titled the message, Preparing for and Profiting from the Christian Sabbath.

Preparing for and profiting from the Christian Sabbath. Preparing for and profiting from the Christian Sabbath. And I would say those two things are tied together. Profiting from will most often occur because it's been prepared for. Now preparing for the Sabbath is not some attempt on my part to encourage something new.

If you recall from our study in the Gospel of John, Jesus, and I'm not looking for a day of the week, Jesus died on what day? What does the text tell us? Preparation day. That's what John tells us. It was the preparation day.

It was a day set aside for the preparation of the anticipated Sabbath that occurred that afternoon. Similar preparations for the Christian Sabbath was evidently no strange idea to the men who put our confession together. This is the wording, after due preparing of their hearts and ordering their common affairs beforehand. And such preparations have been observed by even the most unlikely Gentile converts. I would refer you to the autobiography of John G.

Payton, Missionary to the cannibals in the New Hebrides and the work of grace that God brought on those cannibals who embraced wholeheartedly not only the day of the Lord, they began to call Saturday preparation day, preparation day. So let's consider first practical preparations, practical preparations. The idea of preparing for the Lord's Day Sabbath should not seem strange to us. Now notice I said, should not seem strange to us. I didn't say it does not seem strange to us.

It may seem strange to you at this moment. Well, why do I make that distinction? Well, simply put, we make plans for everything in life that is important to us. We make plans for everything in life that we consider important, whether it be holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, house moves, whatever the particulars are, if we place any sense of importance on the occasion we prepare, right? I'm not making this stuff up am I?

We prepare. Let's take vacation. Some of you have taken vacations this summer. In fact, some of you just got back from vacation within the last week or so. What generally happens before we go on vacation?

Now I know As soon as I say that, you're going to remember that one time where it didn't go like, you didn't have time to plan, just this and that and the other. So work with me here. I'm talking about the perfect scenario that's closer to what normally happens than maybe that one time. So usually, way before you leave for vacation, you choose a destination. I don't think any of you drive out of the driveway not sure where you're headed.

Then you choose a place or places to stay while you're on vacation. In conjunction with the choosing of the place to stay, you determine the dates of your vacation based on your personal calendar and based on the dates of availability at some of these favorite places that you've found online. You then begin to look at some of the things to do while you're in that area on vacation if you did not already decide and choose the destination based on those activities. But either way you've figured out what it is you can do. Whether it was before you chose the place to go or afterward.

You may have put in a vacation request to your employer and if you're as busy as I am you've maybe had to work some extra time in preparation for being away and if not you had to sit down with your co-workers and say, hey look, this is what could actually come up while I'm gone. Let me tell you where I am in the process. You may have to carry it across the finish line, but let me tell you where I am." You've made preparations. But then there are plans that start taking shape as you near the day of departure. There are pets maybe to make arrangements for.

There's shopping for food or maybe some needed medication. You realize you may be running out like midway so you make sure you get your medicines or maybe there's particular clothing or supplies that are going to be needed for the type of vacation that you're planning. Then there's the packing of all the items that you will be taking with you. Then all of those house specific planning. There's the holding of the mail, there's the watering of the plants, the removal of trash that you don't want sitting there for a week, the setting of the thermostats and lights and security if you don't have some of those fancy apps that can control it all no matter where you are.

So you run around like a chicken with your head cut off and why do you do that? Why do you do that? Because when you get on vacation, you don't want any of that crowd in your mind taking up your time because it's important to you. You want to enjoy it. You want to delight in it.

So my question is this, do we love the Lord's Day enough? Do we love it enough? Is it important enough to us that we actually make preparations for the day ahead of time? Maybe it's some meal preparations. That's what the cannibals there in New Hebrides did.

They had meal preparations. Maybe it's just getting the kids all bathing in bed on time, making sure the ironing is taken care of, that we don't wake up in the morning and you look at a shirt and it looks like somebody slept in it for three weeks. Maybe it's getting gas in the van ahead of walking out there Sunday morning and finding out you're on empty. Maybe it's getting the kids clothes just simply laid out, you know, trying to figure out what it is they're going to wear. Making sure the Bible bag is packed and ready to go and the table is set for breakfast.

That's silly, you might say. That's going overboard. My friend, would you consider it legalistic in regard to God's day when you wouldn't think it's so legalistic about your vacation? Are you being legalistic because you held the mail before you went on vacation? Before you made arrangements for the dogs?

You packed? Before vacation? Before you left that? That's legalistic. We wouldn't say that.

We wouldn't say that. You would consider your vacation ruined if you waited until you arrived at your destination to do all of the things you could have taken care of beforehand, would you not? So should you be surprised if Your delight in God's day is not what it should be when you've done little to prepare for it. And we've only spoken about practical preparations. There are other important preparations that we should be making.

So secondly, physical, physical preparations. Take note of how God knit us together in our mother's wombs. He knit us as physical and spiritual beings. We commonly call it, hey, we've got a body, we've got a soul. These two things are inextricably tied together.

The health of one has an impact on the other. If we've not prepared ourselves well in regard to our physical needs, We most likely are not prepared for God's day spiritually. Dear brothers and sisters, how can you expect to profit from the preaching of the Word of God when you are struggling to stay awake and alert in the service due to staying up too late on Saturday night, preoccupied with work or entertainment or even hospitality. The choices made, the lack of planning, the late alarm Sunday morning, and late arrival to church will have an impact on your delight in this day. The turning away from your own thoughts, your own words, your own desires, do you really think that you can just flip a switch when you come and find your seat and sometimes a couple minutes into the service before we find that seat.

It's just a switch. We flip a switch and everything is just gone. All of those things that we've been thinking about or we had to take care of because we didn't prepare. It's not possible. Maybe the issue is maybe it's not lack of sleep.

Maybe you got plenty of sleep. Maybe for you it's running yourself so hard on Saturday, be it work or recreation, that you're forced to use your Sunday as a day of recovery. My friend, We must ask ourselves uncomfortable questions. Could this be due to finding greater delight or assigning greater worth to the things of Saturday, more weight, more worth than to these things that are wrapped up in our Sundays. Could it be?

If we should love our Mondays to Saturdays more than our Sundays, which for the Christian are to be a foretaste of eternal rest, What makes us think that A, we are going to find any delight in heaven, or B, that we are actually spiritually prepared for an eternity with Christ if we don't enjoy God on the one day of the week that he claims as his own, what makes us think that we're going to enjoy an eternal Sabbath rest? Well, some may wonder then if naps on the Lord's Day are forbidden. It may well depend on why they are needed and how long they are. Is the NAP due to necessity because of age or providentially not sleeping well the night before? Maybe there's some sickness you're dealing with.

Okay. Is the NAP necessary as preparation to be able to better engage in some of those works of piety that we talked about? My children probably wish there are some Sundays when I read to them out loud that I had taken a 20-minute nap because I'll start reading and words will just start coming in. They're like, Dad, oh where was I? I don't even know where I was.

So are there things, and maybe there's hospitality, that if we're going to give ourselves to, we're going to need a little nap to help us. It's for a good end, right? A brief nap may very well fit into the category of necessity or even mercy if our plans involve others. But if a lengthy nap is necessitated by poor choices on Saturday or as a result of not making due preparations beforehand, how does that fit into the categories of piety, necessity, or mercy? Brothers and sisters, are you preparing your own physical bodies for the Sabbath in such a way as to squeeze the most delight out of God's day?

Third, Consider with me the necessity for spiritual preparations. Spiritual preparations. David declares in Psalm 24, 1 through 6, we looked at this together one afternoon several months ago, who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who may stand in his holy place, he who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully, He shall receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is Jacob, the generations of those who seek him, who seek your face. Dear ones, can we contemplate a passage like this and think that we can simply come skipping into the presence of God, that we can approach the demands of our God to keep this day as a holy day without some form of spiritual preparation.

Clean hands, Pure heart, idle free, seeking His face, these and these alone are the ones who may ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in his holy place. What are some ways to prepare yourselves spiritually? Well, consider the rightness of confession of sin. Think back over the course of the week concerning your conduct, and not just your conduct, but the state of your heart. Spend some time searching your heart and pleading like the psalmist for the Spirit to come and to search and to reveal Anything, everything that keeps you from cleanliness of hands and purity of heart, consider reading and meditating upon God, even reading his word, reading a good book, anything just to start to soak your heart.

Consider praying for yourself and not only for yourself, for your family, For those who gather and for the one who has to deliver the Word of God to pray that God would prepare both you and him for the message brought. Pray for the blessing of the Word on the entire congregation. The entire congregation. Could it be that this, more than anything else, separates us from our Puritan forefathers in the faith? You see, there are so many areas of life that they seem to excel us.

J.I. Packer in his book, it's like on the kind of my mind right now, A Quest for Godliness. He says, we see ourselves as pygmies spiritually to these giants. Could it be, could it be that this is what separated them? Could it be that their preparation for the Christian Sabbath caused them to profit so much more from this day, and that they were able to have greater delight in the day and thus in their Savior, and thus having ascended the hill of the Lord and having stood in His holy place they received blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of their salvation and it carried them and set the stage for the whole rest of the week.

I guarantee you they just did not excel us during the course of our week without the profit from this day. Allow me to, this is the second time I'm going to do this today, read a lengthy quote from George Swinock and I pray that the things he writes will be less and less strange to us and to our ears and far into our experience than they may now be. He writes this, quote, prepare to meet thy God, O Christian, betake thyself to thy chamber on the Saturday night. Confess and bewail thine unthankfulness for and unfruitfulness under the ordinances of God. Shame and condemn thyself for thy sins.

Entreat God to prepare thy heart for and assist in thy religious performances. Spend some time in consideration of the infinite majesty, holiness, jealousy, and goodness of that God with whom thou art to have to do in sacred duties ponder the weight and importance of His holy ordinances how they concern thy salvation or damnation, thine everlasting life or death, how certainly they will either further thine unchangeable welfare or increase thine endless woe. Meditate on the shortness of the time of the time that you have here, how short it is, how near thy life may be to an end, How few Sabbaths, how speedily and how easily God may take down thine earthly tabernacle, how there is no working, no laboring, no striving in the other world to which thou art hastening and continue musing and blowing till the fire burneth. Thou canst not think the good thou mayest gain by such forethoughts, How pleasant and how profitable a Lord's day would be to thee after such a preparation. The oven of thine heart thus baked in as it were Overnight would be easily heated the next morning.

The fire so well raked up when thou wentest to bed would be the sooner kindled when thou shouldst arise. If thou wouldst leave thine heart with God on the Saturday night, thou shalt find it with him in the Lord's day morning." End quote. Well, as I close the message there, there may be some here that practice a sundown to sundown Sabbath or maybe have considered it, the Sabbath beginning at sundown Saturday and continuing to sundown Sunday, thus seeking to make it more like the original Jewish observation, not the day, but time period. Well, as I draw this to a close, let me urge you to reconsider making Sunday a full Sabbath day, even in light of what we've considered together. Here are some things I would urge you to think through.

First, there are, these are portions of the Jewish observation that passed with the ending of the Old Covenant. We're not Jewish. We're not under the... We're under the New Covenant. They were under the old.

There are differences in how we approach the Sabbath. There have been changes brought on in the New Covenant. Secondly, you don't observe any other day of the week this way. You don't. If your child has a birthday, you don't start celebrating at sundown the night before.

You don't. That morning as they come down the stairs it's happy birthday because that's the day. Nothing else in our present way of considering a day uses a sundown to sundown. It's not in our culture. Third, you are most likely not going to spend any time in preparation, and I say that most likely, Or what ends up happening is that a portion of what you call Sabbath is not actually Sabbath but actual preparation for Sabbath which is now cut short due to preparations.

And then fourthly, it divides this day into two categories. There's holy and there's common during the course of this one day. It makes an already difficult task even more difficult. Focus upon the works of piety and mercy, especially for the children. It makes it difficult.

Such a division of the day will most likely cause a division of the heart and you will find yourself cheating the day by starting later on Saturday or maybe cheating it on the backside of ending it early on Sunday. And I would just say listen the hours of sleep that begin our Sunday and end our Sunday they're just a wonderful buffer for our faithful observance and I would argue maximum benefit from God's holy day. So just a simple urging of reconsideration if maybe that's your practice. Well may God give us help to prepare for this holy day and to thereby more and more profit from it. That's God's design and it would be a benefit to his people.

Let's pray. Gracious God, we thank you for your goodness and your mercy to us. Lord, we pray that you would take these thoughts and Lord that you would cause us to more and more run the way of your commandments with an enlarged heart. Lord we don't want to do these things without our heart being the driving cause. So Lord what we know in our minds and what we have learned, Lord, write it upon our hearts and give us hearts that obey.

In Jesus' name, amen.