Pastor Cal Lord's Recent Sermons
God’s Way To Recharge Your Batteries
Exodus 20:8-11 July 29, 2007
A Tacoma, Washington, newspaper carried a story about a basset hound named, “Tattoo.” One
evening, Tattoo’s owner accidentally shut the dog’s leash in the car door and took off for a drive
with Tattoo still attached to it. Tattoo didn’t have much of a choice but to run alongside the car.
Thankfully, police officer Terry Filbert noticed a car go by with the little basset hound he
described as "picking [up his feet] and putting them down as fast as he could." He chased the car
to a stop and rescued the dog, but not before he had reached a speed of 20 to 25 miles per hour.
(The dog was fine but asked not to go out for an evening walk for a long time.)
Some of us know how little Tattoo feels. We live our days just “picking up our feet and putting
them down as fast as we can.” And there seems no end in sight. I was talking to someone the
other day and they told me that they had just returned from a vacation. Now they needed a
couple of days to recover from it before they went back to work. I think we can all identify with
that. Life is just too busy. Even our leisure time seems to turn into something that can easily
overwhelm us.
In his medical practice, Dr. Richard Swenson sees a steady stream of hurting people coming
into his office. He claims that a majority of them suffer from a chronic ailment which has
reached epidemic levels in our country. Do you know what it is? SARS, maybe? Or AIDS?
The disease Dr. Swenson is concerned about is what he calls a lack of “MARGIN.” “Margin is
the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. It’s something held in reserve for
contingencies or unanticipated situations.
“As a society, we’ve forgotten what margin is. In the push for progress, margin has been
devoured. We’re overloaded.”
Swenson describes the results of this kind of living this way:
“… we feel distressed in ill-defined ways. We are besieged by anxiety, stress and fatigue. Our
relationships suffer. We have unexplained aches and pains. The flood of daily events seems
beyond our control.”
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
I don’t think life is supposed to be this way. When Jesus promised his followers that they
would have an abundant life, I don’t think he was talking about having a life that is so filled with
activity that it is bursting at the seems. But that seems to be what we have today. We live in a
24/7 world where the clock never stops.
So maybe the idea of keeping the Sabbath is not irrelevant in 2007. When God said you shall
work six days and rest on the seventh, he wasn’t trying to curb our production, he was trying to
preserve our sanity and good health.
Christians hold a wide array of beliefs about the Sabbath.
We debate over whether it should be Saturday or Sunday. We argue over the things we can and
cannot do. We disagree as to whether it is for Christians or something specific to the Jews. We
ask whether it is an obligation or a commandment. Are we to honor God or use it for ourselves?
When we get caught up in theological and philosophical debates, we often miss the point.
The Sabbath is a gift from God. You see our bosses don’t care about us. When the Israelites
were slaves in Egypt they were called to work seven days a week. As free men, God told them
that they would never to do that again. He promised them they would always have a day off. To
make his point he gave them a commandment that wasn’t only for them, but for their entire
household.
This applies to us today as well. Christ has set us free from bondage. We don’t have to bow
down to anyone else. On the seventh day we can rise up and praise God and enjoy his creation.
Now I loved the idea of the blue laws. Close all the stores. Shut down all the factories. Lock
the doors to all the entertainment venues and make people stay home. They will have to spend
time with the family. It will build better community, The problem is that the blue laws made the
Sabbath feel too restrictive. For some people it felt more like a punishment than a blessing. So
even good Christians eventually rejected the blue laws and helped vote them out of existence.
But you can’t get away from the fact that the world God created has rhythms of work and
rest, light and dark. There was a pattern to things that allowed for rest, recreation and renewal.
You worked all day and then you rested so your batteries could be recharged to work another
day. But technology allows us to ignore those rhythms.
We’ve got electric lights that burn all night. We’ve got cars, trains and airplanes so we can
go travel the globe and make connections. We have computers to store information and the
internet to tap into a world wide web that never stops. We have got DVR’s so we can design our
television schedule to watch the programs we want into the night. We’ve learned to multi-task so
that we can watch the news on tv, write a report on the computer and listen to our favorite
music on our ipods. When we do finally get a day off, we are too exhausted to do anything but
sleep. In essence, we have become so busy we have forgotten how to rest.
There is an ancient Greek legend concerning the great storyteller, Aesop (of Aesop’s Fables). It
seems a man saw Aesop playing childish games with some little boys and began to make fun of
him for wasting his time in such frivolous activity.
Aesop picked up a bow (as in bow & arrow), loosened the string, and laid it on the ground. Then
he said to the man, “Answer the riddle, if you can. What do we learn from the unstrung bow.”
The man looked at the bow for a while, but had no idea what point Aesop was trying to make.
Finally Aesop said, “If you keep a bow always bent, it will eventually break; but if you let it go
slack, it will be more fit for use when you need it.”
People are like that, too. That’s why we all need to take time to rest. God showed us how.
Loosen your bow and be refreshed and let your batteries be recharged. And the Sabbath is God’s
gift to enable us to be refreshed and restored.
At this point, some of you are thinking, “If the Sabbath is about rest and refreshing, why am I
not still in BED??!!!” And the answer is, because the most important aspect of the Sabbath is
worship. It is not enough just to rest. Worship empowers us and enables us to refocus our lives
and our hearts on God. – which is what we need desperately in order to be refreshed not just in
our bodies, but in our spirits. I think a lot of us have the wrong idea about worship. You see
God doesn’t need our worship. But we need to worship Him.
When we truly enter into worship – I am not talking about just showing up and sitting in a pew,
but when we come actively seeking God’s presence in Worship, a transformation takes place.
We get charged up and there is a renewal of our soul. I think the greatest compliment you can
give a preacher or worship leader, or choir director is to say that you left feeling uplifted and
renewed.
I hear so many people say they don’t come to church on Sunday because it is their only day off
and they need to sleep in. I am going to tell you something: You are always going to be tired if
you don’t make worship a central part of your life. Sleeping alone cannot renew your spirit. If
that was the case you would feel better the more you sleep. Ask anybody who sleeps too much
how they feel… they will tell you they feel sluggish. Ask someone who leaves a Holy Spirit
inspired worship service how they feel and they will tell you they feel alive.
Now I know some of you are probably thinking that is all well and good but you didn’t see the
hassle we had in just getting to church this morning.
Little Johnnie couldn’t find his shoes, Mary spilled her cereal on her dress, the dog got out and
we had to chase her down, the hot water ran out before dad could take his shower, Bob was out
too late and didn’t want to get out of bed and you can fill in the blanks for your family. Sunday
mornings are often a chaotic time for our families. When we finally walk through the doors all
we can do is grin and bear it. The butterflies are flying and we can’t calm down and we carry
that with us.
So how do we get the most out of the Sabbath? The secret to beating this kind of Sunday
morning anxiety is to prepare for it in advance. In Jewish homes – at least in Jesus’ day – the
day before the Sabbath was always called “Preparation Day.” It was the day when they got
everything ready so that they wouldn’t have to work on the Sabbath itself.
Their food had to be prepared ahead, their clothes needed to be washed and ready. Imagine
making these preparations in a day before freezers & microwaves! But think how much easier
Sundays might be if you had clothes laid out and ready the night before. If you made sure on
Saturday that you had something ready for breakfast and for lunch on Sunday. How about if you
made sure you (& the kids) got to bed at a decent hour on Saturday night, so that getting up on
Sunday wasn’t torturous?
If we don’t prepare for a Sabbath, we won’t receive all the benefits from it that we could. Apart
from time to worship, the Sabbath should be focused on activities that strengthen relationships
and give needed rest and refreshment. What that means will depend largely on who we are and
what we normally do during the week.
If you have a physically strenuous job, you may want to just stretch out on the couch or find
something relaxing to do on Sunday afternoons. If you have a hectic life where everyone is going
off in different directions during the week, you could plan time to do something together on
Sunday. If you sit at a desk all day, you could look for an activity where you could get some
exercise. Maybe you could combine a couple of things and take a hike as a family or sit down
and play a game together. The most important thing is to take this special time God gave you and
to use it wisely. Don’t waste it or over look it. Don’t let anyone rob you of it. It is a gift from
God.
Isaiah 58:13, 14 shares a promise of the Lord, "If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD’s
holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please
or speaking idle words, 14 then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride
on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob."
This is God’s way to recharge your batteries and give you the energy you need to enjoy to claim
the life he has put before you. So keep the Sabbath and you will be blessed.
Exodus 20:8-11 July 29, 2007
A Tacoma, Washington, newspaper carried a story about a basset hound named, “Tattoo.” One
evening, Tattoo’s owner accidentally shut the dog’s leash in the car door and took off for a drive
with Tattoo still attached to it. Tattoo didn’t have much of a choice but to run alongside the car.
Thankfully, police officer Terry Filbert noticed a car go by with the little basset hound he
described as "picking [up his feet] and putting them down as fast as he could." He chased the car
to a stop and rescued the dog, but not before he had reached a speed of 20 to 25 miles per hour.
(The dog was fine but asked not to go out for an evening walk for a long time.)
Some of us know how little Tattoo feels. We live our days just “picking up our feet and putting
them down as fast as we can.” And there seems no end in sight. I was talking to someone the
other day and they told me that they had just returned from a vacation. Now they needed a
couple of days to recover from it before they went back to work. I think we can all identify with
that. Life is just too busy. Even our leisure time seems to turn into something that can easily
overwhelm us.
In his medical practice, Dr. Richard Swenson sees a steady stream of hurting people coming
into his office. He claims that a majority of them suffer from a chronic ailment which has
reached epidemic levels in our country. Do you know what it is? SARS, maybe? Or AIDS?
The disease Dr. Swenson is concerned about is what he calls a lack of “MARGIN.” “Margin is
the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits. It’s something held in reserve for
contingencies or unanticipated situations.
“As a society, we’ve forgotten what margin is. In the push for progress, margin has been
devoured. We’re overloaded.”
Swenson describes the results of this kind of living this way:
“… we feel distressed in ill-defined ways. We are besieged by anxiety, stress and fatigue. Our
relationships suffer. We have unexplained aches and pains. The flood of daily events seems
beyond our control.”
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
I don’t think life is supposed to be this way. When Jesus promised his followers that they
would have an abundant life, I don’t think he was talking about having a life that is so filled with
activity that it is bursting at the seems. But that seems to be what we have today. We live in a
24/7 world where the clock never stops.
So maybe the idea of keeping the Sabbath is not irrelevant in 2007. When God said you shall
work six days and rest on the seventh, he wasn’t trying to curb our production, he was trying to
preserve our sanity and good health.
Christians hold a wide array of beliefs about the Sabbath.
We debate over whether it should be Saturday or Sunday. We argue over the things we can and
cannot do. We disagree as to whether it is for Christians or something specific to the Jews. We
ask whether it is an obligation or a commandment. Are we to honor God or use it for ourselves?
When we get caught up in theological and philosophical debates, we often miss the point.
The Sabbath is a gift from God. You see our bosses don’t care about us. When the Israelites
were slaves in Egypt they were called to work seven days a week. As free men, God told them
that they would never to do that again. He promised them they would always have a day off. To
make his point he gave them a commandment that wasn’t only for them, but for their entire
household.
This applies to us today as well. Christ has set us free from bondage. We don’t have to bow
down to anyone else. On the seventh day we can rise up and praise God and enjoy his creation.
Now I loved the idea of the blue laws. Close all the stores. Shut down all the factories. Lock
the doors to all the entertainment venues and make people stay home. They will have to spend
time with the family. It will build better community, The problem is that the blue laws made the
Sabbath feel too restrictive. For some people it felt more like a punishment than a blessing. So
even good Christians eventually rejected the blue laws and helped vote them out of existence.
But you can’t get away from the fact that the world God created has rhythms of work and
rest, light and dark. There was a pattern to things that allowed for rest, recreation and renewal.
You worked all day and then you rested so your batteries could be recharged to work another
day. But technology allows us to ignore those rhythms.
We’ve got electric lights that burn all night. We’ve got cars, trains and airplanes so we can
go travel the globe and make connections. We have computers to store information and the
internet to tap into a world wide web that never stops. We have got DVR’s so we can design our
television schedule to watch the programs we want into the night. We’ve learned to multi-task so
that we can watch the news on tv, write a report on the computer and listen to our favorite
music on our ipods. When we do finally get a day off, we are too exhausted to do anything but
sleep. In essence, we have become so busy we have forgotten how to rest.
There is an ancient Greek legend concerning the great storyteller, Aesop (of Aesop’s Fables). It
seems a man saw Aesop playing childish games with some little boys and began to make fun of
him for wasting his time in such frivolous activity.
Aesop picked up a bow (as in bow & arrow), loosened the string, and laid it on the ground. Then
he said to the man, “Answer the riddle, if you can. What do we learn from the unstrung bow.”
The man looked at the bow for a while, but had no idea what point Aesop was trying to make.
Finally Aesop said, “If you keep a bow always bent, it will eventually break; but if you let it go
slack, it will be more fit for use when you need it.”
People are like that, too. That’s why we all need to take time to rest. God showed us how.
Loosen your bow and be refreshed and let your batteries be recharged. And the Sabbath is God’s
gift to enable us to be refreshed and restored.
At this point, some of you are thinking, “If the Sabbath is about rest and refreshing, why am I
not still in BED??!!!” And the answer is, because the most important aspect of the Sabbath is
worship. It is not enough just to rest. Worship empowers us and enables us to refocus our lives
and our hearts on God. – which is what we need desperately in order to be refreshed not just in
our bodies, but in our spirits. I think a lot of us have the wrong idea about worship. You see
God doesn’t need our worship. But we need to worship Him.
When we truly enter into worship – I am not talking about just showing up and sitting in a pew,
but when we come actively seeking God’s presence in Worship, a transformation takes place.
We get charged up and there is a renewal of our soul. I think the greatest compliment you can
give a preacher or worship leader, or choir director is to say that you left feeling uplifted and
renewed.
I hear so many people say they don’t come to church on Sunday because it is their only day off
and they need to sleep in. I am going to tell you something: You are always going to be tired if
you don’t make worship a central part of your life. Sleeping alone cannot renew your spirit. If
that was the case you would feel better the more you sleep. Ask anybody who sleeps too much
how they feel… they will tell you they feel sluggish. Ask someone who leaves a Holy Spirit
inspired worship service how they feel and they will tell you they feel alive.
Now I know some of you are probably thinking that is all well and good but you didn’t see the
hassle we had in just getting to church this morning.
Little Johnnie couldn’t find his shoes, Mary spilled her cereal on her dress, the dog got out and
we had to chase her down, the hot water ran out before dad could take his shower, Bob was out
too late and didn’t want to get out of bed and you can fill in the blanks for your family. Sunday
mornings are often a chaotic time for our families. When we finally walk through the doors all
we can do is grin and bear it. The butterflies are flying and we can’t calm down and we carry
that with us.
So how do we get the most out of the Sabbath? The secret to beating this kind of Sunday
morning anxiety is to prepare for it in advance. In Jewish homes – at least in Jesus’ day – the
day before the Sabbath was always called “Preparation Day.” It was the day when they got
everything ready so that they wouldn’t have to work on the Sabbath itself.
Their food had to be prepared ahead, their clothes needed to be washed and ready. Imagine
making these preparations in a day before freezers & microwaves! But think how much easier
Sundays might be if you had clothes laid out and ready the night before. If you made sure on
Saturday that you had something ready for breakfast and for lunch on Sunday. How about if you
made sure you (& the kids) got to bed at a decent hour on Saturday night, so that getting up on
Sunday wasn’t torturous?
If we don’t prepare for a Sabbath, we won’t receive all the benefits from it that we could. Apart
from time to worship, the Sabbath should be focused on activities that strengthen relationships
and give needed rest and refreshment. What that means will depend largely on who we are and
what we normally do during the week.
If you have a physically strenuous job, you may want to just stretch out on the couch or find
something relaxing to do on Sunday afternoons. If you have a hectic life where everyone is going
off in different directions during the week, you could plan time to do something together on
Sunday. If you sit at a desk all day, you could look for an activity where you could get some
exercise. Maybe you could combine a couple of things and take a hike as a family or sit down
and play a game together. The most important thing is to take this special time God gave you and
to use it wisely. Don’t waste it or over look it. Don’t let anyone rob you of it. It is a gift from
God.
Isaiah 58:13, 14 shares a promise of the Lord, "If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD’s
holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please
or speaking idle words, 14 then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride
on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob."
This is God’s way to recharge your batteries and give you the energy you need to enjoy to claim
the life he has put before you. So keep the Sabbath and you will be blessed.
| Welcome to the First Baptist Church of Norwich 239 West Main Street Norwich, Connecticut Phone: 860-889-0369 |
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