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You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indy. This summer, we're going through the Gospels, learning about how understanding the tougher sayings of Christ can lead to a deeper connection with Him. Now here's the teaching.

I'm going to ask you to stand again for the reading of God's Word as we recognize it indeed is God speaking to us from His Word, Mark chapter 2, and the passage today is 23 through 28. Please hear the Word of the Lord. One Sabbath, He, Jesus, was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way, His disciples began to pluck heads of grain.

The Pharisees were saying to Him, Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? And He said to them, Have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for anyone but the priests, to eat. And He gave it also to those who were with Him, and He said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

This is the Word of the Lord. Well, good morning again. As Pastor Tom mentioned, my name is Nathan, one of the pastors here at Faith.

I'm excited for us to get back into this series, the hard sayings of a kind Savior, specifically looking at this passage from Mark chapter 2. As we enter into this time looking at Sabbath, I'm going to invite that for each one of us, we have, we're creatures of habit. We have traditions, we have ways we go about doing things. And so when we encounter something like the idea of Sabbath, which might be a little foreign to us, we might initially push back against it, but I'm going to invite you, for us all, to just take a moment and invite the Lord to speak through His Word to us, to reveal His truth to us maybe in ways we have not seen or felt it before.

So let's go to the Lord for just a moment. Heavenly Father, we confess that we are creatures of habit, but we are asking you to breach into our lives, to reach into our minds and our thoughts, captivate them by Your Word. So may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart be pleasing in Your sight because You are our Lord, our rock, and our Redeemer.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. My wife, Claire, and I have four kids, and we would kind of both agree together that one of the best feelings as a parent is when you have a young child, probably yours, that you're holding, and there's that moment where, you know, they're old enough, like right now Arthur, our youngest, he's ten months old, he's very strong and sturdy, and when you hold him, oftentimes he just wants to, like, look around. You try to get him to snuggle into your shoulder, and he just pushes back, he wants to see what's going on, right? But that moment, whether out of exhaustion or maybe because he, you know, sees a stranger and is being shy, but the moment where he kind of snuggles into your shoulder or when a child lays their head down, it just, I mean, it makes your heart melt, and it's just this beautiful moment of just like, oh, I've been chosen worthy to receive such a good gift of a baby snuggle, right? And as adults, I don't think we really have, you know, that kind of an equivalent, right? Like, what is that for you, that you would feel something so profoundly, you know, peaceful and relaxing that you just kind of melt into it? I mean, for me, that's my living room couch.

You know, a good, the sign of a good couch is one that takes about five minutes to get out of because you're just so enveloped in it, right? I don't know if you guys, maybe that for you, that's your bed. But when we think about our lives, our lives are constantly restless. We're longing for moments like that where you can just lay on the couch or lay in your bed or when you wake up in the morning and all the things that ail you, like your back, no longer ail you in the morning.

Well, as followers of Jesus, our spiritual lives and our physical lives are intertwined. We are restless in our lives. Our schedules are often so overloaded with nonstop lists of things to do.

We all like to use our technological advances of our digital calendars and Google calendars and those do help us stay organized, but we might even confess that we would feel lost without those calendars, that there's too many things to juggle. We've got house projects, youth sports, laundry, finances and budgeting, clean the house, make sure you schedule those doctor's appointments, get that oil changed, don't forget to try and eat healthy, do something intentional for the people you care about, plan the meals for the week, make sure you're not late for church on Sunday, but get lunch in the crock pot before you leave to come to church, schedule that coffee with that person you've been meaning to get in touch with. It never ends and that's supposed to be the weekend rest that we look forward to so often.

And honestly, in this moment, probably like me as I was sitting over here ready to come up to preach, you're already thinking about the things that you have to do when you get home. You're already thinking about the work that you have to do this week because that's how our minds are wired, we're wired to keep going from one thing to the next. It's a vicious cycle.

And today, as we look at this passage in Mark chapter 2, we hear Jesus respond to the Pharisees by saying the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And initially, you might be asking yourself, what makes this saying so difficult? This isn't that confusing, seems pretty straightforward, doesn't strike us as being controversial. It might be slightly confusing for his disciples.

Maybe it was a little bit annoying to the Pharisees who believed that the disciples were breaking the Sabbath. And it might be slightly confusing for us as believers because we're no longer obligated to follow the Jewish ritual and ceremonial laws. What might be difficult for the Pharisees in one way might be difficult for us in another way.

Hard for us to be free from the moral obligation of Sabbath while at the same time not giving up on remembering or celebrating the Sabbath as a good gift from God. Jesus has so much more that he is offering than just freedom from moral obligation or celebrating the Sabbath as, you know, a nice nap on a Sunday afternoon. So what is that invitation that Jesus is making? That's kind of the question we've come back to week after week in this series.

In these hard sayings, Jesus is making an invitation into deeper relationship with him. So what is that invitation? I think what Jesus is inviting us into is come to the Lord of the Sabbath and find rest for your soul. That's the invitation, to come to Jesus, come to the Lord of the Sabbath and find rest for your soul.

And as we unpack this passage from Mark chapter 2, we will see three truths about the Sabbath and why this was a hard saying for the Pharisees, why it was a hard saying for his disciples and why it's also a hard saying for us to accept. And there are many truths about the Sabbath. I chose three, right? This is not an exhaustive list of everything that we could possibly say about the Sabbath.

We need to do a little bit of legwork, though, as we come to this passage, right? What was the world that Jesus was in that made Sabbath so controversial, specifically what the disciples did so controversial? What had Sabbath become in Second Temple Judaism, which was that period of time between when they rebuilt the temple after exile and when the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD? This is the situation that Jesus and his disciples are living and ministering in. What were the thoughts of Sabbath and how did we get to where we are? Well, the Sabbath was one of the primary ways you set yourself apart as Jewish, right? We'll get to the Old Testament commands in a minute, but essentially, the more you kept the Sabbath, the holier or the more set apart you were. The Pharisees and especially the Essenes, whom we kind of maybe know as the Qumran community where we found the Dead Sea Scrolls, they had turned Sabbath and especially the laws around Sabbath into a very strict, legalistic way of life.

Not every Jew in Israel at the time of Jesus held to such strict standards, but it was modeled for them by the religious elite. And we'll get to more of this legalism in a minute because this legalism is exactly what Jesus is preaching against. So why did the Pharisees not like what Jesus' disciples were doing on the Sabbath? From how they see things, Jesus, a rabbi, a teacher, was leading his disciples and he was leading others astray because he was allowing them to work on the Sabbath when they gathered some heads of grain as they were on their walk.

But in their defense, Sabbath was serious. It was not to be taken lightly. And not just in their mind, but even when we look at the Old Testament.

Exodus 31 says that anyone intentionally violating the Sabbath should be put to death. And Numbers 15 tells an exact situation of that. While they were wandering in the wilderness, a man is caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath.

They take this man to Moses and Aaron. Moses and Aaron, like, are we really going to enact this law? So they inquire of the Lord and the Lord says, take him outside the camp and stone him. Remembering and observing the Sabbath was not a frivolous activity.

This was serious to the point where they would say it's a matter of life and death. And in Mark 2, 23 to 28, we see these key moments or movements in the passage. Right, first the disciples pluck and eat some grain on the Sabbath as they're out for a walk with Jesus.

Then the Pharisees call them out and ask their rabbi, Jesus, why they would break the Sabbath. Then Jesus references 1 Samuel 21 about David and the ceremonial bread. And then he ends with two statements.

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And finally, this last moment, he says, so the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. So, as we turn and look at these three truths about Sabbath, once again, we're barely scratching the surface.

There's a lot that can be said and a lot of books that have been written, and no, I did not read every book about Sabbath before getting up here. But if you want a little peek behind the curtain of sermon development and, you know, how I and other pastors maybe come to these things, for this message specifically, I consulted a great source on Sabbath, which is my wife. She's done lots more reading, she's done lots more studying, and she's actually the one who has helped lead our family into that practice from time to time.

And so, if you have any questions, don't ask me, ask Claire. Well, let's get into these truths about Sabbath. The first one is this.

The Sabbath is a gift, even for believers. Even here we are in 2026, the Sabbath is a gift. Jesus tells the Pharisees and the disciples in verse 27, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Jesus is pointing out the nature of the Sabbath and reminding all how the Sabbath was not intended to be a burden to the people of God, but a gift. And to understand what this means, that the Sabbath is a gift, let's go back to where Sabbath comes from. God's people, he brings them out of slavery in Egypt, and at Sinai he gives them the covenant.

Part of the covenant was the Ten Commandments. And the fourth commandment is to remember the Sabbath. In Exodus 20, the Lord to his people says this, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day.

Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Notice that this command is not keep the Sabbath day and remember that it's holy, but it's the other way around, to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. The essential command is to not forget.

Much of the Old Testament, specifically the problems of the people of Israel, can be summed up with one thing, and they forgot. Not just forgetting the Sabbath, but they forgot what God had done for them, they forgot about who God was, they forgot about how his laws were made for their flourishing. So the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord.

On it they're to do no work, no work for their children, their slaves, their servants, their animals, or the visitors or sojourners in their midst. And so it is a gift, not just to God's people, but also for God's creation and even the strangers among God's people. The Sabbath is actually for everyone.

And this commandment is patterned after God's rest during creation. The Sabbath day is already holy because the Lord blessed it. It is set apart.

The command is not to make the Sabbath holy, but to keep it as holy because God has already set it apart. His people were told to rest, remember, and celebrate on the Sabbath. Because Sabbath is a gift, it's not a reward for the work that you have completed.

Once again, this is patterned after creation. Think back to the days of creation. On what day did God create mankind? Sixth day.

On what day did God rest? Seventh day. A couple of you are paying attention or remember Genesis 1, one of the two. But the first day for mankind on this earth, before sin had entered the world, before any work was done, the first day was a day of rest.

It was God's good gift to man to rest on that first day. There was work to be done. Work was part of the created order.

Adam had jobs to do in the garden. But before he did any of that, he rested because God rested. And so Sabbath is a spiritual freedom that allows rest.

It permits rest. And the contrast here is thinking about Israel and where they were coming out of. They were coming out of slavery in Egypt.

If you look at the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, the reaffirmation of the covenant between God and his people, it specifically ties the commandment of Sabbath to remembrance that they were slaves in Egypt. Remember that you were once slaves and that Yahweh brought you out of slavery with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. In slavery, they had no break, no rest, no day off.

For 430 years, they had no days off. But Yahweh now, he's not only showing the Israelites that he is more powerful than all of Egypt's gods. He's not just showing them that he was more powerful than Pharaoh.

He is showing the Israelites that he is more kind, gracious, and good than any other God, power or authority. Sabbath then is a gift for you, for your family, your community, even strangers. Sabbath is a day of celebration.

Maybe you're like me, kind of growing up in the church in the 90s. I grew up in a slightly conservative family where Sabbath meant, well, we don't mow the lawn on Sundays, right? Or we're not going to cook, we're going to go to a restaurant and make other people work for our meal, right? That's what Sabbath meant. And there's maybe a little bit of hypocrisy in that.

But Sabbath is traditionally a day of celebration. It's not what we might picture as like a dry, boring, quiet, silence and solitude retreat for the whole family. It's communal, families and communities gather together to celebrate a meal and worship as the Sabbath is approaching at sunset.

Now you might be sitting there wondering, wait a second, I didn't think Christians had to keep the Sabbath. Aren't we free in Christ because Christ fulfilled the law? Absolutely. That is true.

As believers, we are not obligated to obey and keep the Sabbath in the same way that God's people did before Christ. In the same way, there's no longer any sacrifices to be made for us. There's no purity laws that need to be kept.

And if you're not sure why, go back to our Leviticus series this past spring. Jesus has fulfilled it all. But the Sabbath is a gift.

And as a gift, it is a day of rest that God offers to all people. And it is still there. It is still offered as a gift.

Are you obligated to receive and enjoy the gift? Well, not exactly. No more than Tom Boyle over here is obligated to wear this fantastic Father's Day tie that he got, I don't know how many years ago, but I see him wear it every Father's Day. It's a gift and he does enjoy it.

Are we obligated to enjoy it? Maybe not all in the same degree. But this is a gift from God. It's a gift for us.

It's a gift for creation. It's a gift for mankind. It's a gift for strangers, for our families and communities.

But like any gift, it can be ruined if it's used improperly. That leads us to the second truth about Sabbath. And that is that the Sabbath can easily be distorted.

It truly can. It can be very easily distorted. And often it happens in one of two ways, either through legalism or through laziness.

First, let's look at legalism. Legalism is this strict adherence to rules. And for Sabbath, it's specifically this strict adherence to rules of how you properly remember Sabbath.

This is how you are to do it and do not diverge from these rules or restrictions. After the people of Israel had returned from exile and they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple, there was a sort of religious revival among certain groups. They committed themselves to holy conduct and the study of God's law, which are good things, but this also included a strict adherence to Sabbath and adding these extra rules around Sabbath.

So this legalism is what the Pharisees and the other religious elites were constantly chastised by Jesus for. They had God's law, but to be extra careful and extra holy, they made their own set of rules and regulations about the laws of God and specifically about Sabbath. They had something called the Melanchote, if I'm pronouncing that right.

I'm a little rusty on my Hebrew, but it's these 39 categories for all the different types of work that are prohibited on the Sabbath, and it gets into great detail and specifics. Of course, I'm not going to recount all 39 categories and subsets here, but here's just a few little interesting snippets of things that you might not think would be prohibited on the Sabbath, but the Pharisees would say, yeah, not only are you stopping your job if you're a carpenter, you're not building things, but down to the detail of here are types of things that are prohibited on a Sabbath, tying knots, cutting fingernails, hammering, boiling an egg, writing more than one letter of the alphabet, and I could go on and on. There's lots of these little rules that don't do that or you break the Sabbath.

Following God is about our heart posture towards him, and the Pharisees had made it mostly, if not entirely, about themselves, because they're saying, look at what I've done. Look at how I am set apart. You may not keep the law to this degree, but make sure you know that I do.

Within a legalistic mindset, we are wholly or set apart not by what God has already done, but what we choose to do in our own efforts. So then Jesus gives them an example to fight against this legalism, and he mentions this story from 1 Samuel 21. Jesus says this in verses 25 and 26.

Have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him? How he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar, the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priest to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him. So it's this story from the Old Testament, when David and his men were on the run from King Saul. They're hungry, without food, and they come to the temple, and with the permission of Ahimelech, the priest, they eat the consecrated bread.

It was bread that was not meant for common consumption. It was baked before the Sabbath and reserved for the priests, and Jesus' point is this. David technically broke the law from a legalistic perspective, yet scripture does not condemn him for it.

In his commentary on this passage, D.A. Carson says this, human need is a higher law than religious ritualism. The gist of the argument is the fact that scripture did not condemn David for his actions, and it shows that the rigidity with which the Pharisees interpreted the ritual law was not in accordance with the scriptures, and so was not a proper understanding of the law itself. Their strict adherence to the Sabbath, while having hearts far from God, was one of the reasons that Jesus consistently called out their hypocrisy.

So that's legalism, right? Only way to do it is to follow these rules. And then the second way that we often can distort Sabbath is through laziness, and that is resting, but without work or purpose or delight or worship or recognition of the God who is giving that rest. And we generally think we know what laziness looks like.

It's abusing the freedom that we have in Christ to not work. Jesus is coming back, right? I'm not saved by what I do, so I'm going to do nothing. We'd all look at that and say, yeah, that's laziness.

And this type of laziness was happening within the early church, and the Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians addresses it and eventually gets to the point where he just says, if someone is unwilling to work, then he shall not eat. Our lives until we die or until Christ returns are not to be filled with laziness. Ephesians says that we've been given good works to walk in that God has prepared beforehand so that we can walk in them.

But we're not earning anything by what we do, but we certainly should not be lazy until we're just waiting around until Christ comes again. We have responsibilities. And you might be thinking in this moment, well, looks like I'm in the clear.

I'm not too legalistic about Sabbath. Definitely, probably not actually practiced it ever, so I'm definitely not too legalistic. And I'm definitely not lazy, so I'm good.

But before any of us, myself included, you know, might want to dismiss the call of Sabbath on our life, let's look at this last final truth, and that is this. The Sabbath reorients our priorities. In verse 28, Jesus finishes by saying, So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

He has the authority to reorient the ceremonial laws of Sabbath. He is making the claim that he is the promised Davidic Messiah. The Pharisees, through their rules and regulations about Sabbath, had tried to, kind of in a way, set themselves up as lords of the Sabbath.

They were the experts about what you could and couldn't do. They were set up to be lords over the people because of their knowledge and understanding. And they had attempted to catch the disciples of Jesus on a technicality.

But Jesus reminds them that he is greater than the law because he is God in the flesh. And even though he's not making that claim as explicitly as he could have in that moment. What then is reorienting about Sabbath? Sabbath, yes, it points us back to creation.

It's a gift that reminds us that God has allowed us a day of rest from our labors and our toils. Sabbath also points us back to Christ and the work that he did in his death and resurrection. And that allows us to rest eternally.

We do not have to labor and toil for our salvation. We do not have to try and live perfectly. We cannot do it. 

And if we try, our efforts would be fruitless. Christ did perfectly what the Pharisees, his disciples, or even we could never do. And this obviously expands beyond the Sabbath to every aspect of God's law.

Jesus did it because we never could. By intentionally ceasing from work, both for money or housework, chores, it frees us up to keep the fourth commandment, which is remember. To remember that Sabbath rest is a gift from God.

We might resist that idea of Sabbath and say, I don't need that. Or, I don't have time for that. Or we might even come at it with an attitude of, I don't have to, so why would I? My question, if that's kind of your reaction, is what does that say about your heart posture or mine if as God, who is good and kind, is offering a free gift of grace, of rest, and our gut reaction is to reject it? Say, I don't need that. 

I don't want that. Do you have to accept this gift from God? Not necessarily, but don't you want to receive this gift from God? So maybe you want to consider, you want to reconsider Sabbath as a practice and a spiritual discipline. What then? Well, like other spiritual disciplines, like fasting or prayer, Bible reading, etc., the temptation is to turn a spiritual discipline into a list of rules.

Alright, here's step one, here's step two, step three, step four, step five. And I'm not going to do that. And most books about Sabbath don't do that.

You can find some helpful tips, but let's go back to that question for this series that we come to when we come across these hard sayings of Jesus. What is Jesus inviting us into? What is he inviting you into? Is your schedule so full that you leave no margin for others? Maybe you don't think you need rest.

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