In the sermon titled 'Delighting in the Sabbath,' Mike Davenport discusses the spiritual significance and benefits of observing the Sabbath as a day of delight, as intended by God. He references Isaiah 58:12-14 to illustrate how the Sabbath should be a day of joy and reverence, free from personal pursuits, to honor God. The sermon uses the story of Jack and his toy truck to highlight the balance between understanding God's intentions for the Sabbath without being burdened by excessive rules or neglect. Davenport emphasizes three main actions: rebuilding and repairing spiritual foundations, removing and relinquishing personal pleasures, and reveling in God's promises. The sermon draws parallels between the promises tied to the Sabbath and the experiences of Adam and Eve, noting that these promises are enhanced post-fall. Observing the Sabbath leads to delighting in God, experiencing spiritual elevation, and receiving the heritage of Jacob. The speaker concludes by inviting listeners to embrace the Sabbath as a day of spiritual enrichment and connection with God.

Isaiah 58 verses 12 through 14. Those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a 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." Let's turn to the Lord in prayer once again.

Oh gracious God, we thank you, we praise you, we adore you this day. Lord, you have made this day and you have done so for us. Lord, you are the Lord of this day. Help us to acknowledge the day, the reason for the day, and Lord to benefit from it. Teach us from your Word.

Give us pliable hearts that we might be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Lord, help us to do that today by the help of your spirit. In Christ's name we pray, amen. You may be seated. Kim bought her son Jack a remote controlled monster truck, but didn't give him any instructions about how to use it.

What do you think happened? Yes, within an hour the truck was in pieces and so was Jack. He had taken it outside, set it off at top speed, didn't know how to turn the wheels, and therefore smashed it right into a wall. Well, Kim felt really, really bad about this because she had not taken the time to instruct him, to teach him how to use the truck properly. So she bought him another truck and this time spent hours and hours going over all the minute instructions.

Then she added lots of rules of her own about how he was to use it, where to use it, and so on. Well, an hour or so later she recognized she wasn't hearing Jack playing with that truck. Worried that there had been another accident, she went to check and found him sitting on the ground, just staring at the truck, which was still in its box. What's wrong, Jack? I'm scared of using it.

I keep reading all the instructions and then consider all your rules and I'm just so scared. I'll get it wrong. Without instructions, he broke the first truck. With too many instructions, the second truck broke him. In both situations, the truck was useless and Jack was miserable.

The gift that should have given him and his mom joy had made them both sad. They were sad because the first truck was misused due to a lack of rules and sad because the second truck was underused due to too many rules. That was a story that I ran across just last week from David Murray in a blog post that he had made. I felt it was very appropriate as we consider this day together. Well, having dealt in the past two weeks with benefiting from the Sabbath and remembering the Sabbath, We come today to what I'm calling the third foundation message in the series, Delighting in the Sabbath.

And that's the title of the message this morning, Delighting in the Sabbath. Delighting in that remote control truck was something that Jack was not free to do. God has given us a day of delight. It was given as a benefit for mankind, as a gift for us. Unlike Jack's mother, God did not leave us without instruction concerning the day, nor did he like the mother in that second truck, nor did he load us down with so many instructions that we are left in a place that we can't find a light.

Brethren, get this clearly fixed in your mind and in your thinking, God wants us to find delight in this day. That's His desire. He wants us to have delight. That's His will. And the point that is being made in the story is that there is no delight in this day.

If there is no delight in this day, it's either due to a lack of understanding as to how to use the day in order to derive that benefit that God is tied to it, or the lack of delight is due to so many restrictions that go above and beyond what God has instructed us out of His Word by either exhortation or principle. And so I would like for us to consider this morning what God is calling his people to here in this text. He calls us to the following three things which form our outline this morning. The first thing he is calling us to, removing, reverencing, and relinquishing. And the third thing we are called to, reveling, writing, and receiving.

So let's consider the first thing that God is calling us to here in this text, rebuilding, raising, repairing, and restoring. Those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in." Well, in order for us to rightly understand our text this morning, we must apply the hermeneutical tools of looking at the greater context, which is the surrounding verses, as well as the tool of understanding those who initially received these words from Isaiah. What was the condition of these original recipients? Well, consider with me first the condition of those to whom it was written.

Who was the audience? What do we know about them? Well, Isaiah tells us a lot about them. We've had 57 chapters teaching us about this people. In Isaiah, in the opening chapter of the book, describes this people.

This was a people who were following the rules established in regard to outward form as it had to do with the worship of God. There was a multitude of sacrifices and burnt offerings. There was an abundance of incense and prayers. There was no end to feasts and Sabbaths and assemblies and sacred meetings, yet in spite of all of that, God calls them to repentance and actually to stop the sacrifices and meetings until they cleaned up their hearts and lives. He calls them to come have heart dealings with God, that their sins may be wiped clean.

Then if you fast forward here to chapter 58, as was read earlier in our service, we find out more about this audience and we also begin to see our text in a clear way by the broader context of this chapter. Here we find the God of Israel bringing an indictment against this people. Cry aloud, spare not, Lift up your voice like a trumpet. Tell my people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins." God has something to bring to their attention. His people have sinned.

They have transgressed the law of their God. In spite of the indictment from God Himself, notice His own acknowledgement of the situation in verse 2, "'Yet they seek Me daily and delight to know My ways as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God. They ask of Me the ordinances of justice and take delight in approaching God. You see, on the surface, just as in chapter 1, all seems to be good, but there seems to be a noted distinction between their view of their ordinances and their actual practices. They do these things as if they were a nation that was concerned with righteousness when in actuality they were far from any such righteousness and any such concern for it.

Well, in verse 3, God takes note of their complaint. Why have we fasted, they say, and you have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls and you take no notice?" Without doubt, this is reflective of the anticipated resistance to the declaration that Isaiah is commanded to bring like a trumpet because it was already their current complaint. They felt as if God was not giving them their due. They thought that by simply seeking Him daily in the ordinances and wanting to better understand His demands and by asking for just decrees and wanting this feeling of being near to Him, they thought by this and this alone that they had earned the right of the blessings given in the last verse of our text, the blessings of riding on the high hills of the earth and being fed with the heritage of Jacob, their father.

You see, right pursuits and well-informed minds and well-structured questions and desires of the blessing of God are not enough. These all are good and righteous things to pursue and do, but only if such pursuit, knowledge, yearnings, and desires result in us being a holy nation who practices righteousness and doesn't reject the moral law of God. But this was not the case with this people. And so, we come to verse 12 in our text, and we see that right there among God's own special people, There were spiritually desolate ruins. There were neglected and forsaken biblical foundations, foundations that spanned many generations.

There were broken and decimated walls that left them spiritually vulnerable, and the streets were spiritually uninhabitable. God was going to very soon make Jerusalem a living picture of the state of their hearts. Ezekiel 20 declares that God brought the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of their beloved Jerusalem upon them because of two things, the syncretism of their own hearts in worship and because they profaned His Sabbath day. They profaned his Sabbath day. That's the reason.

Syncretistic worship and profaning the Sabbath. Before there could be any heart restoration, before God could look upon their keeping of His own ordinances again with delight, changes had to occur. There was a need for rebuilding, for raising, for repairing, and for restoring. And so he says, those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach the restorer of streets to dwell in Today is such a day in our culture and not just out there but within the walls of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is raising, repairing, and restoring that needs to happen within our own walls, the walls of this church and the walls of our families. God says that there are those from among you who will rise to do this. Dear ones, are there some among us who are ready to stand for the crown rights of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, and to answer the call to be a repairer of the breach, a restorer of streets to dwell in. Brothers and sisters, this is not some new thing. The places to which we are called go way back.

They are old places. The foundations to which we are called go way back, back many generations. We are not to follow trends. We are not to go with the flow. Listen, The fact that God is looking for repairers and restorers means that something that already exists is in need of attention.

And the Lord of the Sabbath considers it worth the attention. It's worth the attention. Our American culture is characterized by out with the old, in with the new. Newer is better. This day that God has established is not something to be abandoned or ignored.

We are not to toss it aside for some new thing in some better way. Jeremiah 6, 16, thus says the Lord, stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths where the good way is and walk in it, then you will find rest for your souls. Are you content with the old paths? Or will you go against the exhortations of Solomon and remove those ancient landmarks, the boundaries that have been set for all time. The report is coming to our ears today as it did in Nehemiah's ears.

The report of the church of our day, especially in regard to God's holy day, the wall of Jerusalem is also broken down and its gates are burned with fire. Is your response to that report anything like Nehemiah's? This was his response, so it was when I heard these words that I sat down and wept and mourned for many days. I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven. What was it that broke his heart?

It was the condition of the city and that there were none to repair, none to restore. This is the need of the day, rebuilding, raising, repairing, and restoring. That is, this is where God calls us to start. There are areas in our lives in regard to His day that require our attention. And may our response be like the response of the people that we studied back in Nehemiah.

Then Nehemiah said to the people, you see the distress that we are in, how Jerusalem lies waste and its gates are burned with fire. Come and let us build the wall of Jerusalem that we may no longer be a reproach. So they said, let us rise up and build. Then they set their hands to this good work. So we built the wall.

And the entire wall, by the middle of Chapter 4, the entire wall was joined together up to half its height for the people had a mind to work. But that's not all our passage calls us to. Secondly, we find our text calling for removing, reverencing, relinquishing. Removing, reverencing, and relinquishing. Verse 13, if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a 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.

The jackhammers have stopped pounding. The wheelbarrows have stopped rolling. The saws have stopped cutting, and the hammers have stopped swinging. All the burned and broken debris from the ruins has been cleared. The breach has been repaired.

The streets have once again become inhabitable. Structures are now standing on firm foundations once again, but God doesn't stop here with His exhortations. Verse 13 moves, as it were, from the forms and the structures of the day that are now standing, and He turns to the inner workings, even the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. I think we can safely say that the attitude of the heart revealed here in verse 13, it reveals to us the very reason that all of these things were in desolation and ruins to begin with. The need for restoration and repair points to neglect.

It points to neglect. This need has now arisen. God has called them to the work, but now there are more exhortations. And brothers and sisters, we can build everything back up the way God wants it. We can be sure to dot all the I's and cross all the T's.

We can get that park that we talked about in an earlier message, that that park that was created by the Lord of that city for us to enjoy, we can get that park back the way God wants it. But if we fail to address these issues in verse 13, It's only a matter of time before the weeds begin to grow, before the trees die out and the lake becomes stagnant again. And the day will once again be desolate and in ruins. So what does God call us to in this verse? Well, Removing, reverencing, and relinquishing.

What do we need to be removing? Well, we need to remove our foot from the Sabbath. God in the first chapter of Isaiah described the worship of this people in this way, trampling His courts. They were trampling His courts. Now, they were bringing sacrifices.

They were bringing incense. They were bringing prayers. God looked and He said, you're trampling my courts. But we see the way that they were doing that right here in this chapter. At the end of verse 3, God says, in fact, in the day of your fast, you find pleasure.

You find pleasure and you exploit all your laborers. And then here in verse 13, when he says, turn away your foot from the Sabbath, he goes on from doing your own pleasure on my holy day. Brethren, those words should arrest our attention. My holy day, Not just holy, it is a holy day. He says it's my holy day.

Many in our day, just like the people of Isaiah's day, think they can throw a little worship God's way on a Sunday morning and then spend the remainder of the day pursuing their own pleasures. And have you ever noticed, especially down here in the Bible Belt, have you ever noticed how they love to hang on to that no work, Only rest line when it comes to why they can't go to the office or cut the grass or get to that honeydew list. Well, they find it very convenient to lean on the command. It's a day of rest. I'm going to the lake to do my rest.

Yet when you seek to tell them about God's demands, that's old covenant. That doesn't belong to us. Well, why don't you go to the office? Can't work? Can't work.

They've tipped their hat to God. They've acknowledged Him, but in reality, what they are actually doing is trampling God's day. They are profaning the rest of the day. It's my holy...two hours? Three hours?

No. My holy day. Robert Martin wrote, no religious ritual during part of the day can make up for profaning the rest of the day. It doesn't make up for it. My dear friend, God has a special message for His church, and it's this, cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet, tell my people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins.

Praise God for those from among God's church who will stand in the gap and proclaim the crown rights of Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, who will not allow the desolate places just to sit there in ruins, who will turn away their foot from trampling the day by doing their own pleasure. Own pleasure, but not only removing, but also reverencing, reverencing. And call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord, honorable, and shall honor Him." We are exhorted to call the Sabbath a delight. The word in the original carries an emphasis that doesn't come through in the translation. Literally, it says we are to call the day exquisite delight, exquisite delight.

We are exhorted to call the day a holy day, a day separate from all others, a day of the Lord belonging to Him in its entirety, not the few hours, the whole day. We are also exhorted to proclaim with the entirety of our being in what we say and in what we do, that this day is to be honored by all because the Lord of heaven and earth attached such significance to the day. It has His blessing resting on it. It has been distinguished by Him with an honor above all the other days of the week. We are exhorted here to honor Him, honor Him, the Lord of the Sabbath.

And brothers and sisters, we honor Him when we stop trampling his day by doing our own pleasure rather than delighting in his good gift. But that's not all it means to honor him. Our text places a comma after shall honor Him because what follows also describes how we honor Him. And that leads us into the third thing under this second point still, and that is relinquishing. The text is calling us to relinquish some things.

Yes, there are some things that we are to take up and do in order to honor God, calling the Sabbath an exquisite delight, treating this day as a holy day, as the day to be honored, but the text goes on to tell us that there are also things that we must relinquish in order to honor Him. And note that these things are all tied to the Sabbath. They're tied to the Sabbath. The honor of God is tied to His day and how we treat it and how we approach it. Children, do you know what the word relinquish means?

That's a big word. What does that word relinquish mean? Well, it means this, to surrender, to abandon, to give up something completely. You see, in order to honor God on his day, what is it we must give up completely? What's the text calling us to give up?

Our text tells us not doing your own ways, not finding your own pleasures, not speaking your own words. You see, six days are given to us for our own ways, our own pleasure, and our own words. Now, that doesn't give us autonomy in regard to those things or to those days. All is still to be done to the glory of God and in a biblical framework. We are to mortify our flesh in the midst of these activities the other six days of the week, but the day that God claims as His own day is to be a day filled with the activity of His things, with the things He delights in, and with His Word, which is to dwell in us richly.

Six days of the week are our market days, but the Sabbath is a market day for our soul, for our soul to go and get the things that it needs to feed upon Christ. I hope to explore how it is that we honor Him on this day in a future message to look at what it actually means to keep that day holy. But for now, I just want to emphasize what our text emphasizes. The text demands that we see our honor of God and of the special day He established tied to our relinquishing the right to choose and pursue our own ways, our own pleasure, and our own words. You see, many in our day have, they've done well in regards to relinquishing?

The problem is what they've relinquished is the Christian Sabbath and not their thoughts, their words, and their own pleasures. Oh, they may relinquish, may relinquish these things for a few hours, but to relinquish them for a day? That is asking too much. That's a return to bondage. Really the picture I have from reading my Bible is that we were in bondage like Israel was to Egypt And God wanted to set His people free in order for what end?

That they may go aside and worship Me. My friend, when it comes to the Sabbath, when it comes to this day, if we don't like the manna that God provides, and we don't like the milk and the honey that is promised, If we are not willing to relinquish and give up the fish, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic for what God has in store for us, then we have need to question whether we're even willing to remove our foot from the Sabbath, whether we are willing to honor our God, whether we are truly willing to relinquish our own ways, words, and pleasures so that God would receive all the honor. It's His holy day. To honor Him requires devotion to His ways, His pleasure, and His Word. So the first thing God calls us to in this passage, rebuilding, raising, repairing and restoring.

The second thing He is calling us to, removing, reverencing and relinquishing. And now third and finally, God in this passage is calling us to reveling, writing, and receiving. Reveling, writing, and simply receiving. Verse 14, 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.

Author C.S. Lewis wrote, We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too easily pleased." End quote. Too easily pleased." End quote. Well, this verse, verse 14, comes on the heels of God just exhorting us to relinquish, to give up completely our ways, our words, and our pleasures.

My dear friend, he's simply asking us to lay down our mud pies. That's all he's asking us to do. Child, child of the slum, just get up, come with me. Lay down that mud pie. I've got better things for you." He's offering us something much better.

He promises things in response to our obedience. Remembering the Sabbath was made for man, how is it God would have us to benefit from the day? Well, the first thing is that He will cause us to delight in Himself, to delight in Him. He wants us to revel in Him. My dear friends, if you do not think that promise is worth the cost of some restoration work and the surrendering of your own will in ways, I don't have anything else for you.

I don't have anything better than that. Put your own desires and the blessings that you think that you derive from them on one side of the scale and then you put on the other the blessings of knowing God, delighting in God, delighting in Him. And I ask you, what side comes crashing down with the weight? Does the scale you use give clear evidence that the delights that come from honoring Christ far outweigh any delight that you could derive from the things He asks you to relinquish. For just one day, just the day, Enjoy them the other six, just this one day.

Can I ask you a question? I've had to ask myself this question, even in my own preparations for this message. This message. Is there room for delight in God in your religion? Is there room for delight in God in your religion?

Sometimes I fear that I don't know the depths of that delight. At times, I can even wonder if I truly know Him. You see, for us, dear ones, religion can become a list of rules or even an expanding knowledge or an ever-growing appreciation for our rich heritage. We can delight in our books. We can delight in our families.

We can delight in our conferences. We can delight in the sermons we are able to listen to. We can delight in one another. We can even delight in our Bibles, and yet, and yet not delight in our God. Our God.

The second thing God promises is that He will cause us to ride on the high hills of the earth. Now, this language may be strange to us, but it would have meant something special to those who received this message at the very first. Isaiah is here borrowing from the words from the Song of Moses found in Deuteronomy 32, it indicates the blessings that God intends for His people, especially as God brings them into Canaan. Many would therefore say because of that, that this blessing belongs only to the Old Covenant believer. But I would have you to consider that The picture of the blessings that came to them in Canaan is a foreshadowing of the blessings that God intended for the church of Jesus Christ.

Right here in this very same prophecy of Isaiah back in chapter 2, we read the following. Now remember, he said, I'm going to cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth. Now it shall come to pass in the latter days, okay? In other words, not right now, this is latter days. It's pointing to the days of the new covenant that the mountains of the Lord's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow to it." How do you get to the top of the mountain?

You ride upon the high hills to get there. You stay down in the valley, you won't get there. Many people shall come and say, come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths." Do you see it? That's where the church is.

The church is on the highest mountain, and it's there that we go so we can delight in our God. He will teach us. He will show us how to walk in His paths. We will look at Hebrews 4 at another time in this study, but I must at least interject this here. The writer to the Hebrews writes, because if we think that the high hills of the earth as just tied to entering into Canaan and only Canaan, the writer to Hebrews writes, "'For if Joshua had given them rest, then he would not afterward, God would not afterward, have spoken of another day.

Do you see what's being said? The ultimate fulfillment of the promise did not come to those people under the hand of that Joshua. But those people knew something of that promise in real life, right there where they were in Canaan once Joshua brought them in. And dear brothers and sisters, this blessing here of riding on the high hills still belongs to the new covenant believer. The church of Jesus Christ in every age tastes the realities of the promised land here and now.

And they will experience it in its fullness in the world to come. You see all the promises, all the promises of God are in Christ Jesus, yes, and in Christ Jesus, amen. Revealing in the Lord, riding on the high hills, and thirdly, receiving, just simply receiving the rich heritage of Jacob your father. He says, I will feed you. You don't have to come up with it.

I'll just feed it to you, the rich heritage of Jacob your father." Well, as we saw the previous phrase tied to Deuteronomy 32, this phrase comes out of Deuteronomy 33. It comes out of Moses' final blessing for all Israel. He says this to Israel, yes, he loves the people. All His saints are in your hand. They sit down at your feet.

Everyone receives your words. Moses commanded a law for us, a heritage of the congregation of Jacob, and he was king in Jeshurun when the leaders of the people were gathered, all the tribes of Israel together. Do you see the heritage? Look at it right there and think of it in terms of Romans 9 where God declares, Jacob have I loved. Here is the heritage of the sons of Jacob.

God loves them. They are his saints and they're in his hand. They sit at his feet and they receive his words. They have a law that describes how their Savior wants to be served, and He rules in the midst of this gathered people as King. Dear ones, those who delight in the Christian Sabbath will revel in all that God is, will delight in and enjoy Him in ever-growing measures.

They will know the blessings of victorious living here and now as a foretaste of that which shall be their lot in the world to come, and they will feed on everything that flows from the love of God to His people." My dear friend, this is not merely just the view of the preacher. This is not some Sabbath version of your best life now. This is not the prosperity gospel of Isaiah. These promises, they're almost too good to be true, too hard to believe, but let your eyes fall upon the words. The text ends with these words, the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

That's where it comes from, straight from the mouth of God. The promises of reveling and delighting in God Himself, of riding victoriously in the heights and of receiving the feeding of the rich heritage Christ has given to His people through His sacrifice, those promises, my friend, are from the mouth of none other than the Lord of the Sabbath." And I'll have you to consider this, that only the first of these three promises, only the first of these promises could be claimed by Adam and Eve on that first Sabbath day. Okay? Only this first one could be claimed by them on that first Sabbath day. The second two are Sabbath promises that were added in as a result of the fall.

In that sense, we have more that we are able to delight in on this Sabbath morning than Adam and Eve did on the very first Sabbath on the seventh day of creation. Yes, they enjoyed Him with unsinning heart and pure motives and no distractions. Yes, they enjoyed His presence face to face. These delights yet remain for us who are God's people here this morning. But because of these additional promises, our delight can rise higher than our first parent's delight, at least on that first Sabbath.

You see, on that first Sabbath, Adam and Eve delighted in Christ as their creator. They delighted in Him as their creator. We, dear ones, can delight in Christ as our Savior. We can delight in Him as our husband. We can delight in Him as our husband.

We can delight in Him as our Redeemer. And we can delight in Him as our elder brother. On that first Sabbath, they could delight in the righteousness in which God had created them. On this Sabbath, we can delight in a righteousness that we are recreated in, a righteousness which is Christ's very own righteousness, Perfect righteousness without seam. We can delight in things Adam and Eve knew nothing about on that first Sabbath or in measures they knew nothing about on that first Sabbath.

Things such as mercy, pardon, forgiveness, and even love, because how did God demonstrate that love for us. He sent his son. My friend, the Lord of the Sabbath created this day for you, and these are the benefits that He has in store for all of those, all of those who will delight in His day. If you disregard His claims on this day of rest, you not only dishonor Him, you rob yourself You rob yourself of all these benefits and all these blessings. You rob yourself of delight in God in measures that He can expand.

That he can expand. This day is a day of delight and it's God's desire that it would be just that for you. But there may be some here who are strangers to these things. You don't know this Christ as your own Lord and Savior. And because of that, You have no part in the heritage of Jacob.

My dear friend, the narrow gate that leads to the promise of eternal rest remains open today. It's open today. You have that promise from God Himself that it is open today. But there is coming a day when that gate will close and it'll be shut forever. And there is such a thing as coming up short from that rest, that final rest.

Receive the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ by faith today. Believe in Him as your only hope for salvation. Therefore since a promise remains of entering his rest, let us fear, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them, but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. Today, today, If you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.

Amen. Gracious God, we do thank you for your word. Lord, we thank you that you instruct all your people from this book. Lord, help us to take to heart the things that you have set before us today. Help us to hear what the Spirit has to say to us and give us hearts to respond.

Lord, thank you. Thank you for giving us such a benefit, such an advantage. Oh Lord, may we delight in this day if for no other reason than that it honors you. But Lord, you've tied such great things to it. May we delight in this day in order that we may More and more know that great delight that's to be found in you.

In Christ's name, we pray all of these things. Amen.