Here's Pastor Alan Wright with today's blessing—a biblical, faith-filled vision for your life. Do you feel oddly out of tune with the world? I mean, sometimes feel misunderstood, maybe even maligned. Good, it means you're a citizen of another kingdom, a foreigner to the spirit of the age. In the kingdom of God, your royalty.
You're seated with Christ. You're destined to reign, but in the kingdom of this world, your lofty estate is unrecognized. Your real identity is unknown.
So, I bless you, like a Daniel in a foreign land, to remember your worth, to refuse the culture's idols, to rejoice in God's rule, to remain in the promises of God, and to remember Him. Who was the ultimate alien, Christ, our exile, who has been highly exalted? Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Allen Wright. If you just be more than you are now, then maybe you can fit in. That's what six is.
It's never getting to seven. It's never getting to the moment of liberty where you can just relax because you're loved. I'm saying that six six six means never seven, never seven, never seven. It means never rest, never rest, never rest, never Sabbath, never Sabbath, never Sabbath. Never, never, never be loved just for who you are.
That's why six six six is anti-Christ because Christ came to be your Sabbath. He's your seven. Yes. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light.
I'm Daniel Britt. Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series "Gateways to Grace" as presented at Renolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now, which can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at pastorallen dot org.
That's pastorallen dot o r g, or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. While at our website, please let us know how we may pray for you. Submit your prayer request to our prayer wall and be uplifted and encouraged as the community around this ministry starts praying for you and receive notifications as you're. Request is prayed for.
That's the prayer wall at Pastor Alan dot org. We're honored to stand with you in prayer. More on all of this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Allen Wright. Let's start with this: the Sabbath is something that is utterly unique in the ancient world, and honestly, it is in the modern world.
We don't really know why it's a seven-day week.
Some people, some historians say it went all the way back to the Babylonians, but most say it began with God and His word. Because seven doesn't divide into thirty or thirty-one days of a month, could have been a five-day week, could have been a ten-day week, could have been a whatever week, but it's seven days. There's something about this rhythm that was really important to God that there be this rest day, and it's odd, you know, in our culture now to even think of something like that. It was weird how we handled this. I was when I was young, we still had in North Carolina the thing we call the blue laws.
And it forbade certain things on Sundays, and businesses were closed. And and and the thing that a lot of people gripped the most about it, you couldn't buy liquor till six p.m. on Sunday. There was a whole bunch of people just waiting around till six p.m. on Sundays.
I ain't gonna get there late, you know. Like we didn't know what to do. Like, is that what Sabbath is? Like, okay, you can't buy liquor, you can't buy cigarettes. That's what Sabbath is.
And and then and then finally, when Seven Eleven came, you know, and it was open more than Nine to five was like wow that changed the world around us like that and now everything's open all the time and we're a little bit impatient if we can't get it the next day or on that moment so it's a little odd what it is but you know the oddest thing of all about Sabbath is to me the oddest thing about this being one of the Ten Commandments for example is that God would have to ask it of us at all. Isn't that seem a little strange to you? That God would have to put this into one of the Big Ten. Hey, rest some. I mean, like, this is not the thing that parents usually have to like say to their teenager.
Hey, stop making up your bed so much. You know, we are tired of you cleaning up that room. Just take the day off and let it get get it get messy. What teachers say to their class? I am so tired of you going home and working all weekend on your homework and getting ahead on your assignments.
If anybody goes home this weekend and does any homework whatsoever, you get an F. It just doesn't make sense, right? That's not the way we talk. We always want to do more, work harder, be better. And God comes in in the middle of all this and says, "Stop and rest.
Enjoy being." In fact, the prophecy comes through Isaiah's pen in Isaiah fifty-eight. If you call the Sabbath a delight, if you call the Sabbath a delight, I'll make you ride on the heights of the earth. I'll feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father. If you call the Sabbath a delight, why wouldn't we call it a delight? What what what what wouldn't be delightful about?
A wonderful, delicious day off to be with friends and family, and feast, and relax, and have fun, and have romance with your spouse, and and laugh a lot, and let the children play, and what? Why? Why are we having to be told that we need to make it our delight? Shouldn't it just be? Then evidently, we needed to be told this.
Because what should be the easiest commandment to keep that God ever gave seems like it's one of the hardest. Isn't that weird? You know, the the Jewish people they wanted to understand.
Well, what did he mean when he said don't work on the Sabbath? And so the scholars and rabbis came up with thirty nine different kinds of work. That by the time you got done with all the nuances of it, is like you would dread the Sabbath, like. You just like there are thirty nine things I got to remember that I can't do. There's a certain number of steps I better not take more than that number, or else I'm under judgment or something.
And Jesus came into this where the Pharisees had made the made a mess of the Sabbath and was a heavy yoke. And so Jesus had to say in Mark chapter two, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. What was he saying? The Sabbath is a gift to humanity. It is a gift.
Let us be up front with this. It's not a law for Christians. Paul says in Colossians, don't let anybody tell you you need to keep a new moon or keep a Sabbath or keep a certain feast. You're not under law. You're under grace.
And let me be clear about this. If you were to ask me, well, what are the list of things, Pastor, that we shouldn't do on Sabbath or we should do? Like I can't tell you, because what's work to one person is life-giving to another. I don't know how to tell you that. When our family goes on vacation, the first day, they pull out some impossible thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and lay it on the table in the middle of everything and say, "Yippee, we're on vacation." I hate jigsaw puzzles.
I can't find a single piece. I don't know what kind of dysfunction in my brain. But they said, "Come on over here, Alan. Get some work on this puzzle." You can hear it right there. Work.
That's why they call it work. Work on this puzzle. I look. I'll stare at it and I'll stare at it and I like. I'll get one and I'll find.
I'll try to cram it in somewhere. It doesn't fit. I can't even get them to do the ones that go around the edges that are supposed to be easy. I hate jigsaw puzzles. If you told me that I got to go on vacation and work.
Jigsaw puzzles for hours a day. I would much rather stay home and come over my office and do some ministry. Isn't that weird? I was talking to somebody in the prayer room this morning, and she was like, "I love mowing the lawn." Well, more power to you, mow the lawn on your day off. I hate it.
Don't make me do it. The principle here is that there's that which is restful, stress-reducing, life-giving, relationship-building, and recalibrating every week. Why wouldn't we call that a delight? What is wrong with us? Should be the easiest commandment ever, and we're driven to God.
It's clearly important, and it's going to point us to something even more important in Christ. There are two places where the Ten Commandments are given: Exodus and Deuteronomy, and it's interesting that the commandment to keep Sabbath. Is the same in each, but a different reasoning, a different part of why it's important in God's heart. And I want to show you this: Exodus twenty, verse eight. 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 day 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 is within your gates. In other words, I want it to be your whole culture, and of course, it looks like we've lost that forever. But it it would be wonderful if we had it, but we don't.
But every now and then, you can feel it just a little bit, like maybe Christmas Day. Where there's not any real pressure for you to land a big sales account on that day, because nobody wants you to call them. But this is what the principle was: it's for everybody in your community and in your family, all of you. And he said, "This is the reasoning." Verse eleven: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that's in them. And rested on the seventh day.
Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy. Did you see that? Look again. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that's in them, and rested on the seventh day. It's because the strangest, most wonderful, most surprising, and beautiful thing happens in the story of creation in Genesis chapter two, verse one.
Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished. And all the host of them, and on the seventh day God finished His work that He done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He done.
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from His work. Be clear about this: the whole of the old covenant narrative. And the whole thrust of the word of God is to point you to the purposes and power of God, which find within the trium Godhead Him to be altogether sufficient within Himself, and He never grows weary or tired, for He is all powerful and all knowing, and He is providentially watching over all things, and He does not slumber or sleep. But this is the picture. He nonetheless rested on the seventh day.
My Old Testament professor Walter Brueggemann says God does not spend the seventh day in exhaustion, but in serenity and peace. The fact that God rested is not to show that there is something in Him that was weary. But that there's something in him that is serene. He is not frenzied or worried about his world. He's so in charge that he can rest.
He's not anxious, and he made us in his image. And if we have a father in heaven who's not stressed out, he wants us in that image. We are designed to think like him, feel like him. We are created for peace, and if God could celebrate His work and relax into it, He invites us into that as well. And there's something important also in this verse.
I want you to see verse 11. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day. And made it holy. God has blessed the animals. He blessed Adam and Eve, and now we see him blessing time.
If you read the great Jewish thinkers about Sabbath, you'll see that there's a different way to think about time. Abraham Heschel has called the Sabbath a palace in time. He called the Sabbaths our great cathedrals. It's like not a physical structure, but a a beautiful structure of time. It is the opposite of way Shakespeare famously vilified time in his sonnets, calling time a bloody tyrant, devouring and swift-footed, age's cruel knife, as if time is the enemy of fair youth and of love.
Because you always can worry about running out of time, but there's a different way to think about time. It's God's way. It is a way to think about time not as the enemy. And not to say if I only had one more day to my week I could get more done, but instead to see it as blessed of God, every moment to be lived. It is God's authorization of us living in the moment.
It is God's validating the sanctity of time. It is God shifting us. Away from thinking of time as a mean to a product, and instead sees time as the beauty of a process, and time as a place where we enjoy relationship and we can just be. He blessed it, and he blessed the time of it.
So, in some, in the commandment. In Exodus twenty, to keep the Sabbath, the reasoning is because God did a magnificent work of creation, and He finished it, and He celebrated it, and relaxed into it, and therefore remember that we're told in Deuteronomy we're given the same command, but.
Some different reasoning. This is another part of God's heart. Look at this in Deuteronomy chapter five, verse twelve. Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
And here's the reasoning. Here's a different reasoning. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath. Do you see the connection here?
The connection here is not like what was spoken of in Exodus, where it's connected to His finished work. Here, it is connected to His saving work. He had referenced this earlier, Deuteronomy five six. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
So God here in Deuteronomy is commanding Sabbath rest because He's the God who brought the slaves out of Egypt. And to understand the beauty of the gift of Sabbath, you must see it in the context, therefore, of a liberated slave people. That a people who were under the tyranny of Pharaoh and are liberated from the drudgery and labor of their lives—you see, Pharaoh was wicked. And when Moses came to Pharaoh, as the Lord had told him, and said, "Let my people go," Pharaoh dug his heels in. Exodus five four.
The king of Egypt said to them, Moses and Aaron, "Why do you take the people away from their work? Get back to your burdens." If you want to know what the voice of hell sounds like, there it is. Get back to your burdens. And Pharaoh said, "Behold, the people of the land are now many, and you make them rest from their burdens. God is the one wanting them to rest from their burdens, and the tyrant is wanting them to increase their burdens." The same day, verse six, Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters, the people, and their foreman, "You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks as in the past.
Let them go and gather straw for themselves." But the number of bricks that they made in the past, you shall impose on them. You shall by no means reduce it, for they are idle. Therefore, they cry, "Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God." Let heavier work be laid on the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words. God is saying. Go tell Pharaoh, I want my people to be free to rest in Me and worship Me.
And Pharaoh says, Work even harder. Pastor Alan Wright, our Good News message, Sabbath rest from the series, The Gateways of Grace. Please stay with us. Pastor Alan is back, joining me in the studio, sharing his parting Good News thought for the day. In just a moment.
What if growing closer to God isn't about trying harder?
So often we approach spiritual growth with a list of things we need to do: pray more, read more, be better. But what if the secret to spiritual transformation isn't found in greater effort, but in experiencing more of God's grace? In his book *The Gateways of Grace*, Pastor Alan Wright invites you to discover a fresh perspective on spiritual growth. Through timeless practices like scripture, prayer, meditation, wonder, and rest, you'll discover how to create space for the Holy Spirit to work in your life. These spiritual disciplines aren't obligations that earn God's favor.
They're gateways that open our hearts to experience more of God's goodness, peace, and transforming grace. When you give to Allen Wright Ministries, you help share the gospel with listeners around the world. And when you give today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's book, *The Gateways of Grace*, as our thanks. To discover these aren't just disciplines; they're gateways. Step through them and discover the grace that's been waiting for you.
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That's eight seven seven. Five four four forty eight sixty, or come to our website pastorallen dot org. Back here now with Pastor Alan in the studio, and our closing thought on the Sabbath rest. Yeah, how can that change our way of thinking if we get it? If we get it correct, there remains Hebrews says a Sabbath for the people of God.
Whoever's entered God's rest has rested from His works.
So. What Sabbath is in the end is that profound reminder. That we're not living in relationship with God according to our works, but according to His works for us.
So ultimately, rest is when we rest in the finished work of Jesus.
So Sabbath is both physical rest to our bodies, which I think is proven by science.
Now, you'd be really wise to rest and have a day every week where you just are enjoying. Relationship, and you put your work aside, but it is ultimately to say that Jesus is your Sabbath, yeah, and find yourself letting His finished work for you be the the joy and the energy of your life. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen dot org or call eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty. That's eight seven seven five four four forty eight sixty.
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