In his sermon 'Sabbath Work,' Peter Allison explores the complexities of Sabbath observance by examining Luke chapter 6. He highlights how Jesus and his disciples were criticized by the Pharisees for picking and eating grain on the Sabbath, which Jewish traditions considered unlawful. Jesus defended their actions by citing the biblical precedent of David eating the showbread when in need, emphasizing that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Allison explains the controversial term 'second first Sabbath' as possibly referring to the Sabbath following the wave offering of the barley harvest. He stresses the importance of understanding both the spirit and letter of the law, arguing that the Sabbath is meant for works of necessity and mercy, not burden. The sermon concludes by linking Sabbath observance to sanctification and God's love, pointing out that the Sabbath serves as a sign of God's covenant and a foretaste of eternal rest. Allison urges believers to view the Sabbath not as a burden but as a delight, reflecting their love for God.

Please turn in your copy of God's Word to Luke chapter 6. Hear God's Word. Hear God's word. Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first that he went through the grain fields And his disciples plucked the heads of grain and ate them, rubbing them in their hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?

But Jesus answering them said, Have you not even read this, when David did what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he went into the house of God, took and ate the showbread, and also gave some to those with him, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat. And he said to them, The son of man is also Lord of the Sabbath." Now it happened on another Sabbath also that he entered the synagogue and taught, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. So the scribes and Pharisees watched him closely whether he would heal on the Sabbath, that they might find an accusation against him. But he knew their thoughts and said to the man who had the withered hand, Arise and stand here. And he arose and stood.

Then Jesus said to them, I will ask you one thing, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy? And when he had looked around at them all, he said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he did so. And his hand was restored as whole as the other. But they were filled with rage and disgust with one another what they might do to Jesus.

May God incline our hearts to perform His statutes forever. Almighty Heavenly Father, your Word is precious, is more precious than gold and silver to us. It is truth. Sanctify us, Father, by your word this morning. And please open the scriptures to us by your Holy Spirit.

May your word, Lord, be proclaimed in the power of this Spirit. May you apply it to our hearts and to our lives. May you teach us. May you do this through a vessel of clay that the glory might belong to you this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, the Sabbath and the observation of the Sabbath and what is appropriate on the Sabbath, is a question that is often discussed today. It's a question that many people have different ideas on, and this is no different than Jesus' day. They too debated or had discussions and differences on what is the proper observance of the Sabbath day. What is the Sabbath day for? Why has God given it to us?

And what should we be doing on this day to honor the Lord, to obey His commandments? For this question, this Sabbath day, is one of the Ten Commandments that God spoke from Mount Sinai. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. It's one of the two positive commands.

The other one is the fifth commandment, to honor our father and our mother. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. What does this mean? How are we to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy? Well Jesus addresses both the misunderstandings regarding the Sabbath day and he gives to us in this text the Sabbath rightly understood the Sabbath misunderstood and and miss applied and the Sabbath rightly understood and rightly applied so the Jesus is walking through a field of grain on the Sabbath day and the disciples are hungry and so they are plucking the heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands to remove the chaff, blowing to break the chaff from the grain, blowing the chaff away out of their hand and eating the raw grain.

And the Pharisees say to them, why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day? Jewish traditions had made it unlawful to eat grain on the Sabbath day. Jewish traditions had sprung up about all sorts of things. There were hundreds of these traditions, these rabbinic traditions. So they considered rolling the grain to remove the husk.

That was sifting. Rubbing the heads of wheat, that was regarded as threshing, cleaning off the things that adhered to the grain, that was sifting it out, bruising any of the grain, that was considered grinding it, tossing it in your hand that was considered winnowing it. And all these things were work that was forbidden, they thought, to do on the Sabbath day. But if somebody wanted to move a sheaf of wheat in their field, well they could put a spoon on top of it and then in order to move the spoon, they could move the spoon and the sheaf of wheat and that was okay. Just some of the absurdity, the ridiculousness of some of these traditions that had arisen, that had become as fixtures and laws in the people's minds, that this was how to keep the Sabbath day.

To keep the Sabbath day. And so they they accuse Jesus and the disciples of then doing what it is what is not lawful what they thought was not lawful to do on the Sabbath day. And Jesus defends his disciples against this unbiblical and man-made tradition about what is proper or improper to do on the Sabbath day. Now the Bible does teach in Leviticus 23 that it is not lawful, was not lawful, to eat the grain of the harvest until the wave offering on the feast of the first fruits. That is a command in Leviticus 23.

There is one word in this text. It is the only time this word is word in the entire New Testament. I think it is explicitly to tell us, to inform us, that Jesus' disciples were not breaking this command to eat of the grain harvest before the feast of first fruits. And that word, it says it happened on the second Sabbath after the first. That's the way it's translated, but in the Greek it is one word.

And it's a word that nobody is too sure what it means. Because it's not a typical word. It's not a typical Greek word. It's not used anywhere else in the New Testament. Or maybe even anywhere.

So the word is literally the second first Sabbath. The second first Sabbath. That's what the word literally is. The second first. The word is second first.

It's the second first Sabbath. So you could say it happened on the second first Sabbath. Now there's a lot of opinions, differing opinions and uncertainty about what that word means. What is the second first Sabbath that this is happening on? I think the best explanation that I can find is this.

So we know that the Passover is on the 14th of the month of Nisan. That's when the Passover is given, on the 14th day of that month. On the 15th day, the next day, is the first day of Unleavened Bread. Now that was a Sabbath. It was a holy convocation, a day in which they were to do no work and they which they were to gather together and have a holy assembly So you had the Passover on the 14th of the month?

You had this first day of unleavened bread, which is a Sabbath a day of holy convocation on the 15th of That month And the day following that Sabbath was the 16th day then of the month Nissen. And That was the day that they were to offer the feast of the first fruits. They had this wave offering of the barley harvest. And that day was also used as the starting point for counting the seven Sabbaths to Pentecost. So there were seven weeks, seven Sabbaths they were to count.

And then the day after was Pentecost, the 50th day. That's why it's called Pentecost, 50. So you have this Passover on day 14, you have this first Sabbath, this holy convocation of the feast of unleavened bread on the 15th. On the 16th is this wave offering of the barley harvest. And they were not to eat of the grain before that wave offering.

So then After that day, remember you count seven Sabbaths. And so the first Sabbath would be the first Sabbath of those seven. And so that's essentially the second first Sabbath. Remember you have the first Sabbath on the day after the Passover, and then you have, you count out seven more days, and that's the first Sabbath of the seven to the Pentecost. And so some believe, and I think this is the best explanation of this word, that is the second first Sabbath.

And that's literally what this word says, the second first Sabbath. So Luke is very specific here in saying that this, which Sabbath this is. This is the Sabbath after the wave offering of the barley harvest. And so it was permitted to eat of the grain at this point. So Jesus' disciples were not eating this grain before they were allowed to do it.

But they were eating it on the Sabbath. And so when the Pharisees accuse the disciples of eating the grain which was not lawful to do, they are accusing them because it was on the Sabbath day. They're not accusing them of stealing because the law specifically allowed people as they are walking through a field of grain to take in their hand and eat the grain. That was not stealing. That was something that was explicitly allowed.

They were not to harvest the entire field, but they were to leave the corners unharvested so that the poor could come in and glean on that field. Those are proper things. Those are not stealing to come in and glean. It wasn't stealing as you were walking by a field of grain to take and eat some of it. Now, it would be stealing if you brought your basket and you started cutting, taking the grain and putting it in your basket and carrying it off.

That was stealing. But to just take what you could eat as you were walking was not stealing. Deuteronomy 23, 25 says that. Now I don't think that applies in a city where you have some person has a fruit tree in their front yard on the sidewalk as everybody's walking by. That's different.

It's not a field And if everybody walking by took a piece of fruit off of their tree, there wouldn't be anything left for them. But in a field where you're walking by a field, it was appropriate. So Jesus' disciples are doing this. As they are walking, they went through the grain fields and they were eating the grain as they walked. And so when they accuse the disciples, Jesus answers them with calling to their mind something that happened in the Old Testament.

David, when he was hungry, he was fleeing for his life from Saul and he went to the high priest and asked for the showbread to be given to him, which was not ordinarily lawful for him to eat because he wasn't a priest. That account is in 1 Samuel 26. Let me just read that. David's fleeing. He came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest.

Ahimelech is afraid, and he wonders why he's alone, and David gives him an answer that he's on the bit the king has ordered him on some business and He asked him for the bread the show bread Or whatever can be found and the priest told David Himalak said well there is no common bread but there is holy bread if the young men have at least kept themselves from women. And David said, Yes, truly women have been kept from us three days. And The vessels of the young men are holy and the bread is in effect common even though it was consecrated in the vessel this day. So the priest gave him the holy bread for which there was no bread there but the showbread which had been taken from before the Lord in order to put hot bread in its place on the day when it was taken away. So, only the priest was allowed to eat that bread.

And David wasn't a priest. Only the priest and his family, if it was his daughter, his children, his wife, they could eat that bread. But David wasn't a priest and so he wouldn't have been allowed to eat that bread. But Jesus said, have you not read about this incident? David did this and was justified in doing this.

Because we have to look at the purpose of the law. We have to look at the proper purpose of the law. Why does the law exist? We have to look at the situation in which we find ourselves. We have to look at the situation in which we find ourselves.

We have to look at the situation with respect to ourselves, so the situation that's around us and the situation with respect to ourselves. We have to look at the motives and the goal of what we are doing. I mean, this is true with all of the commandments of God. The Bible says that we're not to kill, not to murder. It's actually unjust killing.

Well, what is unjust killing? Well, taking someone's life when we are not authorized to do so. Well how do we know when we're authorized and when we're not authorized? Well We have the examples of the law of God as it is applied in various situations. God's Word tells us that if somebody comes into our house at night and we are unsure about what they are doing, or we are concerned that they are there to harm us, that it is proper if we use force to defend ourselves.

And if we are using force to defend ourselves at night that somebody is killed, then we are not guilty of shedding their blood. God's Word says that those who won't work shouldn't eat. Those who won't work shouldn't eat. But we don't apply that to babies and say that they won't work so they shouldn't eat. That would be absurd.

We understand that because we understand the purpose of that commandment is to tell us how to deal with somebody who is lazy, somebody who is unwilling to work. What is just, what is loving to them is that they shouldn't eat. We don't apply that to babies. So we understand then that the laws have to be rightly applied. We have to understand the context of the law, the situation in which we find ourselves, our situation, Our motives, our goals, all of these things have to be addressed as we apply the Word of God.

Now that's not to say that the Spirit of the Law trumps the letter of the Law. That's a common misunderstanding. The spirit of the law does not trump the letter of the law. The letter of the law doesn't trump the spirit of the law. That's not what we're saying.

The letter of the law and the spirit of the law are not in conflict. When we rightly understand what the letter of the law is saying, then we are also rightly understanding the spirit of the law. And so these two are not in conflict. Are we saying that a higher law trumps a lower law. We're not saying that we have to break a less important law in order to obey a more important law.

We know that there are greater and lesser commandments, but we're not saying that we ever have to break a lesser law in order to keep a higher law. Why? Because The law is one. The law is a reflection of the character of God. And God is, there's one God.

And James says that if we break one commandment, we break all the commandments. Because to break one commandment is to break the one law of God. And so the law is not in conflict with itself. We never have to break one law in order to keep another law. Since the law is a reflection of God's character, God's character is not in conflict with itself.

And so our obedience to The word of God never requires us to break one part of it in order to keep another. It's impossible to do. It's impossible to do that. And Jesus here also is not abrogating the fourth commandment. He's not coming back and saying we don't have to keep the fourth commandment anymore.

That was an Old Testament thing. He doesn't say that. He goes back to the Word of God and cites this example of David in something that's not even directly related to the Sabbath. He cites this example of David eating showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, but only the priest. And he holds that up as an example of what it means to keep the Sabbath day.

That Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath teaches us that the Sabbath is for works of necessity. Jesus said here that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. He is the one who made this day. He is the one who calls us to set it apart as a holy day. And he's the one who instructs us on what it means to do that.

And Jesus here is here instructing the Pharisees that the Sabbath is for works of necessity. David was hungry. David was on the king's business. David was engaged in saving lives, his own lives and the lives of those who were fleeing with him. And David needed food to eat.

And Jesus is saying here that it is right, it is good, to on this Sabbath day where we are called to rest from our work, that it is right and good to engage in works of necessity. Things that are necessary for people to eat. There were provisions in the Old Testament for people to be able to eat on The Sabbath day it's not wrong to do works that are necessary to eating And it wasn't wrong for For him elect to give David that showbread because David and his men needed food. They were hungry. They had no food.

That was food that was available. However, there was a requirement that they needed to be kept from women, not to have had marital relationships. That was a requirement because to do that made one unclean for a day. And David says, no, that part of the requirement has been satisfied, has been kept. Certainly, somebody can last for 24 hours without eating, you can fast that long.

So there was an absolute requirement there that was not broken. But Jesus goes on and it's on another Sabbath day, But in all of the accounts, in all of the Gospels, these two separate events are put back to back because they both deal with the Sabbath as it's rightly understood. It happened on another Sabbath day that Jesus enters a synagogue. So we see once again Jesus is still going to the synagogues on the Sabbath day. He's not forsaking the assembling together and he's going to teach and there's a man there who has a withered hand And so the scribes and Pharisees are watching again.

They've been doing this a lot. Whenever Jesus is around, they are watching to see if they can catch Him doing something that they can accuse Him. And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, He calls this man with a withered hand. He calls him out and says, here, stand here in front of everybody, where everybody can see you and see what's happening. And then Jesus asked them this question, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil, to save life or to destroy?

And then he looked at them all. You need to see his penetrating gaze when he had looked around at them all, given each of them a chance to answer this question. Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath? Is it lawful to save a life? Or is it lawful to do evil or to destroy?

And he looked at each one of them, eyeball to eyeball. Nobody said anything. And so then he said to the man, stretch out your hand. Stretch out this withered hand that you can't move. And the man stretched it out.

This man was crippled. He did not have an arm with which to do work. And that was something that was crippling to him. So Jesus is saying it is right, as Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus is saying it is right to do works of mercy on the Sabbath day. To not to see that, have this person here and not to care for them, not to do a work of mercy, healing, would be to do wrong, it would be to destroy, to do evil.

Healing the sick, feeding the hungry, rescuing the perishing. As Jesus says in another place, getting the ox out of the ditch is a work of mercy. Many times you could say that works of mercy and works of necessity, the distinctions are often... It's often a matter of both. There's an element of necessity to it and an element of mercy.

When we eat, There's an element of necessity to that. It's also an element of mercy that we feed people. When farmers milk animals, there's an element of necessity and an element of mercy to the animal in that work. When we help people, there's an element often of mercy and an element of necessity. Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath says it is right, It is necessary that we are willing to perform works of mercy on the Lord's day.

Because, as Jesus said in another one of the passages, the Sabbath was made for man. In Mark 2, Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. God didn't make man in order to fit into the Sabbath. Jesus is saying God made the Sabbath for us. Ezekiel 20 says, God says, moreover I gave them my Sabbath to be a sign between them and me that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them." The Sabbaths have been given as a sign to us that the Lord sanctifies us.

That the Lord is the one who sanctifies us. The Sabbath has been given as a sign to us, as a sign of the rest that God is preparing for us in heaven, our Sabbath rest. This day that God has given to us is given to us for our good. It's given to us because God loves us. It's given to us as a sign that God is our God, and that He's preparing a rest for us in heaven right now.

And We get to enjoy a foretaste of that rest each week. God gives us the Sabbath for our benefit. For our benefit. He's not giving it to us to put a stumbling block in front of us. He's not giving it to us to take our joy away.

Horrors. He's giving us this day because He loves us, because He's caring for us. He's giving to us a sign that He is our Father, He's our Lord. Our bodies need a rest. They need a rest from our six days of labor, from our regular vocational work.

It's healthy for us. It reduces our stress. It helps our immune system. It helps us to refocus our minds, restore our mental sharpness and acuity. The Sabbath is given to us to show to us that Jesus is our creator, owns our time.

And Jesus is our Redeemer, owns our time. He is our Lord. In giving to us the Sabbath and in calling for us to set it apart as a day of rest, a day of worship, Jesus is saying, I am your Lord. I am your provider. I care for you.

I love you. The Sabbath is a sign that we might know that it is the Lord who sanctifies us. The Sabbath is given as a means, as a day of our sanctification, for our sanctification. For our sanctification. See the 10th commandment is directed to our heart, to our motives, to our love of each other.

Do not covet your neighbor's wife, the seventh commandment. Do not covet his house, that's his possessions. Do not covet anything that is his, his name, his reputation. Speaking of the ninth commandment, but the fourth commandment in a very similar way speaks about our love of God. This is a day that God has given to us to set apart.

That's what it means to be holy. It means to set it apart as different, as special, as separate. And it's in that day is when we see what is the desire of our heart with respect to the Lord. Do we love the Lord? Is it our desire to give Him this day, to honor it by resting from our regular work, by spending this day in works of mercy, necessity, works of worship.

Every time we are faced with a choice of what are we going to do today? What are we going to do right now? And our heart is drawn to doing our regular work. Our heart is drawn to doing the things that are proper on the other six days. It is an opportunity for us to ask, Do I really love the Lord?

Is the desire of my heart to give this day to the Lord as He is asking? John says In 1 John 5, this is the love of God that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. Do we find that this is a burden on us? That, oh, I can't do it today because it's the Sabbath at all. Shoot.

Or do we find that this day is a delight to us? This day is given for our sanctification. It's a day that we can ask ourselves. It's a day that we can see whether our heart really does love the Lord. Or are we finding this day a burden?

If you find this day a burden, confess that to the Lord and ask him to make this day a delight. This is a day when our love of the Lord is shown and we can see, we can look at our own heart and ask ourselves, why am I wanting to do this? Am I loving the Lord here? Or is my love of the Lord growing cold? Lord growing cold.

Isaiah said, if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your own pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord honorable and shall honor him not doing your own ways, not finding your own pleasure, not speaking your own words. Then you will delight yourself in the Lord. Then you will delight yourself in the Lord. Then this day will be the day of the week the best, this emblem of our rest. Then we will find ourselves delighting in the Lord.

And we'll see that our desires to do our own pleasure, to do our regular work which is good on other days, we don't want that on today. And that's not a burden for us because we love the Lord. Then the Lord says, I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father. See if this day has become a day of, well, can I do this or can I not do this? Then you've missed the point of this day.

If this day just becomes a set of rules and restrictions, then you've entirely missed the point of the Sabbath day. The Sabbath day is about our love for the Lord. It's about what do we like to do. It's an opportunity that to show ourselves, to show to us what the desire of our heart is. Whether we delight in turning aside our foot from doing our own pleasure.

This is a, if you're like me, this is something that is every day, every Sabbath on your heart. And every Sabbath you're realizing, my inclination is to go this way. My inclination is to do my own will. And I'm finding this a restriction. Jesus is saying, call this day a delight.

Jesus comes as our Savior. He's come to take the guilt of our sin. And every time our heart is drawn to do our own pleasure and we find that this day is becoming a burden then we need to turn our eyes back to Christ and say Lord help me to love you so that your commands are not a burden. Thank you Lord for giving to me this day to show me how my heart is being turned away from you. How I'm being drawn after my own pleasure to do my own will and help me to love you today.

And so this day then becomes an occasion of our sanctification, an occasion of our eyes being turned back to Christ our Savior, the one who takes away the guilt of our sin, yes even the sins of our heart and the sins of our desires to do our own will. See, this day is not about, can I ride my bike today or not? I don't know. You have to answer that. Not that there's no, no, absolutely no, no standards.

But what might be regular vocational work for one person might not be for you. If you're a bike racer and racing bikes and training is is something that you do then yes, this would be a day not to ride your bikes But if but riding a bike is simply a taking a relaxing walk around the block with your family, something that you don't ordinarily do, then it might be a good thing to do. It might be a restful thing to do on this day. Really comes back to what is the desire of our heart. Do we find our heart being drawn to do our own pleasure?

To speak our own words, to do our own will on this day? Do we find that this commandment as the Holy Spirit brings it to our mind, do we find that this is a burden to us? That it's a restriction upon us? Well then that's telling us our heart is not seeking the Lord. It's not loving the Lord at that point.

It's an opportunity for us to turn our eyes back to Christ, our Savior, and say, Lord, help me to love you with all of my heart, to love you today with my hands and my feet and my mind, to not speak my own words, to not do my own will, but to delight in this day. This is a day to realize just how sinful we really are. Even though we are redeemed, even though we have been justified, and even though the Lord is sanctifying us, yet there is still this sin that dwells in us, this day shows to us the coldness of our heart. It shows to us the selfishness of our heart, how much we want to do our own will. Every week it's a reminder.

It's a reminder. And we should use those reminders to turn us, for us to turn back to Christ our Savior. And Jesus has made the Sabbath for us. For us. He didn't make us so we could fit into a Sabbath day.

And I think all too often that's the way we think about this day. This is a day where we have to confine ourselves to something that God has made. And if we do it, we do it as a sort of, a little bit begrudgingly, a little bit unwillingly, a little bit like we are sacrificing to fit into this day that God has made. Jesus says it's just the opposite. I've made this day for you.

I haven't made you to fit into this day. This day has been made for man. It's been made because God loves us. He cares for us. He delights Himself in us.

He is our God, our Provider. He is our Bridegroom. He's given to us this day for our own sanctification. That's His will for us, our sanctification. And the Sabbath day is the first commandment to be ignored.

Whenever you see somebody wandering from the Lord, the Sabbath is the first day that goes. They start ignoring the Sabbath day. Whenever you see a culture beginning to turn away from the Lord, the observance of the Sabbath is the first thing to go. It's the first commandment to be ignored. Many States used to have laws outlawing buying and selling on the Sabbath day.

If you needed a prescription, an emergency for a medical situation, you could call a number and find out which pharmacy was open that Sunday where you could go get your prescription filled. But that, I don't think any of us remember those days. I don't. I just read about them. That was the first, that's the first commandment to go.

Because it's the commandment that more than any, they all speak to our heart, but this one is directly speaking to our heart about, do we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength. May the Lord bless this Sabbath and each Sabbath to your and my sanctification. Almighty Father in heaven, we thank you for this day, the day of all of the days of the week, the best. Help us Lord this day to call it a delight. And to turn aside our foot from doing our own pleasure, from speaking our own words, from doing our own will.

And to delight in your good gift to us. To remember this day, your love for us, in giving to us this day, in giving to us what our bodies so desperately need. Rest. Father, may today we rest in you, and may we look forward with eagerness, with anticipation to the rest that you are preparing. May we not lose sight, especially in the trials and the difficulties, for You have said that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed to us.

Oh Lord, in this day of our work we ask for your strength and your diligence to do it from you. We ask all these things in Jesus' name, Amen.