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Sacramento Central SDA Church

Chris Buttery

Pause for Peace

This morning's message is another very important topic, a pause or pause for peace.

Not long ago I heard the interesting story about a young lady by the name of Paula Johnson.

Now Paula Johnson, she gave birth to a baby that she named Kaylee.

And she took Kaylee home and then something interesting actually happened.

In the fullness of time, Paula had blood tests performed on herself and on young Kaylee and those blood tests revealed that Kaylee wasn't her daughter.

Somehow at birth at the hospital her baby and a Rebecca Chittum's baby had been switched.

So they both had taken home the wrong baby.

Now, so what do you do after 3 years and you discover that your baby isn't really your baby, it's somebody else's baby, and that somebody else's baby isn't their baby, but it's your baby?

I don't know what you do, very difficult.

But what we do know, and what anyone that knows anything about anything knows and adoptions tells us this, that it's not necessarily necessary to give birth to a child in order for that child to be your child.

So even though Paula had technically been raised, raising someone else's baby, after 3 years that child was her own.

In effect, she had 2 children, 1 that she had raised and 1 that she had given birth to.

She decided to look into it and try to get it resolved and when this was happening she discovered that around that time the other mother Rebecca Chittum and her husband had met a tragic death around around I-81 in Virginia.

So here was Paula Johnson with Rebecca Chittum's baby and her own child was now being raised by the other grandmother.

I don't know what you do, you probably need the wisdom of Solomon to figure something like that out for sure.

I don't know the end of the story, hopefully it ended appropriately.

There was a switch that took place and it created tremendous heartache, tremendous confusion.

And similarly, the Bible talks about a switch that took place God gave the human family a very special Gift it was stamped with the mark of his authority It was something that contained the blessing of God in the purposes of heaven but the enemy of souls caused a switch to take place, and a counterfeit was offered to humankind in its place.

Now this has everything to do with the Bible and naturally with our study here this morning.

I want to ask you to turn with me in your Bibles to the Gospel according to Mark and we're looking at chapter 2 here this morning Mark chapter 2 and we're reading verse 27 and 28 Mark chapter 2 verse 27 and 28 The Bible says, and he said unto them, and this is Jesus speaking now, Mark chapter 2 verse 27, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

Therefore the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath." Because I still hear pages turning.

The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

God gave the Sabbath to humanity to be a blessing.

He said to the human family, here is a day for you.

Loaded with blessings, packed it with full of meaning and he gave it to the human family back at creation.

Now we understand it certainly wasn't a Jewish institution or something conjured up for for a particular benefit of the Jewish people.

This was something that God gave to the entire human family and he gave it back there in the Garden of Edom when God created the world in 6 days, then on the seventh day he rested.

The seventh day Sabbath is God's loved gift to the entire humanity.

And if a person's still wondering or in doubt about which day the seventh day of the week is, they just need to look at a calendar.

Any good calendar, with exception of some calendars floating around in Europe today that folk decided to use to try to help people figure out when the weekend was.

So their weekday starts on Monday and then of course you have the weekday Saturday and Sunday but apart from that calendar in an attempt to try to figure out the weekend, most calendars, all calendars, bar those, simply just tell us that the seventh day of the week is not Sunday, it's not Monday, it's not Wednesday, it is in fact Saturday.

Now when we approach the idea that the seventh day Sabbath, when we approach this idea and that God would have us keep the Sabbath, unfortunately there are folk who understand or hear us telling them that you need to keep the Sabbath in order to be saved, you understand.

Now what we've said and we'll say it again is that if you love Jesus, that if you love Him with all your heart, that love will lead you to keeping His commandments.

Remember it was Jesus that said in John 14 verse 15, if you love me you'll keep what?

That's just the natural outflow of a heart filled with the love of God God didn't come along Jesus didn't come along and say hey if you if you love me prove that love by keeping my commandment No, he said go ahead If you if you love me that love is going to transform your life and lead you to doing my will, you see.

If we love God and we appreciate Him and respect what Jesus did for us on Calvary, this is gonna cause a tremendous, emphatic change to come into our life.

You're just not gonna be wired, you're gonna be wired rather altogether differently.

Now you will love to keep my commandments.

Sabbath keeping doesn't save a person, you see.

We learn from the Word of God, for by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves it is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast." Now unfortunately some folk come along and here talk about the 10 Commandments and they'll talk about how they are just grievous and a burden and difficult and hard to manage but then you read over there in 1st John chapter 5 and verse 3 for this is the love of God that we keep His commandments and His commandments are not what friends?

They're not grievous at all There's nothing burdensome about them when you come to the Lord Jesus and you discover that the 10...

He has 10 commandments and these things ought not weigh you down with a crushing force and squeeze the spiritual life out of you.

If you love God it'll lead you to obedience and doing His will.

Now, if the commandments are grievous to you, there's something wrong with the heart, and only Jesus can fix that.

So you've got to run back to Jesus and say, okay, this thing's a burden for me, so obviously the problem with me not your commandment so Lord change my heart and guess what he's gonna do he's gonna change your heart you understand now these are designed by God the 10 Commandments to be a blessing to humanity this thing about adultery that thing about killing and stealing the 1 about images and no other gods, those are blessings you understand, given by God to keep us in the hand and in the will of God.

Now unfortunately, the Jews made a big mistake way back there in the time of Jesus, because they attached all types of rules and regulations and requirements in the keeping of the of God's commandments to the extent that there were dozens of different rules dictating how a person ought to behave on the seventh day Sabbath.

They had bogged this down with all types of codes and rules and regulations.

That's why when Jesus came, He broke with convention.

He didn't break the commandments, He just broke with convention.

You see, to heal somebody was considered to be an act of work in the eyes of the legalistic religious leaders of his day.

To heal somebody was not work at all but in fact it was an act of mercy and kindness and Jesus was trying to help the folk back then understand that the Sabbath was to be a day of blessing and a day to be a day of gladness you understand.

There was a time when Jesus healed a man's eyes and that was 1 strike against him and then he bent, when he did that he bent over and he took some dirt and he spat in the dirt and he mixed it into mud and that was strike 2 because apparently taking a bit of dirt and a bit of spittle was considered hard labor and work and and so that's what the Pharisees were saying Jesus was working on the Sabbath therefore he was breaking the Sabbath they didn't like that you understand that that's just crazy thinking you see Christ came to show what the Sabbath ought to be a blessing and how it ought to be kept, how it's a blessing to humanity for their eternal good, you see.

God saw to it that the Sabbath was loaded with blessing.

Yes, it is 1 of God's commandments, no question about it.

But God took it and He loaded it with blessings, among which are the blessings of rest and the blessing of relationships.

The blessings of rest and the blessings of relationship.

Now God created 6 days, in 6 days, and he created the human family on the sixth day of that creation week and he could have stopped creating but he didn't.

God went ahead at the end of the creation week and he made something else.

You see, he put the human family in the Garden of Eden, then he made the Sabbath for them.

He didn't say, okay, I've made the Sabbath, now what am I going to do with this?

He made man, made the human family, and he gave them the Sabbath, you understand, a day that was going to be a blessing to them.

He sets it apart from the other days of the week, indicating that this is a day we step back from our normal work routine and we kind of release a little bit.

It's kind of like a valve that releases the pressure that builds up during the weekly routine.

And if we devote the day to physical, mental, and spiritual restoration, to building up a relationship with God and with family and other of God's friends, so He gave us this day in which to do that, a day in which to rest, you see.

And He gave the day so that we could be built up in Jesus Christ.

The day is about rest and it's a day about relationships.

You probably know that there are 2 Institutions that God gave in the Garden of Eden.

Of course 1 was the Sabbath the other was what friends?

They're both under attack today by the devil because a devil hates happy wholesome Relationships Both marriage and the Sabbath are made out of time.

Successful marriages are made, successful marriages take time, they're made out of time, you see, and the Sabbath is time between us and God, you see.

So the devil doesn't like that and he's trying to mess it up for the human family.

So what God did when he gave us the Sabbath and he said here's something that we can spend time together you gotta imagine that God is good when he does that.

Here's a day, he just comes to us and he says here's a day I'm gonna give you a day off it's just yours a day off and it's for you it's a gift and that you and I could spend time together what great God thought of an idea like that huh a great God to give us a day that we can spend focused on him worshipping him reveling in His goodness and His love.

He gave us a day and that, my friend, is a wonderful loving God to give us a gift like that.

Thankfully, with the Sabbath, it's the opportunity for us to say, no.

God gave the Sabbath so that it would be a blessing, so that no distance would come between us and Him, you understand.

Time that we could dwell in His presence, a time when we could have the blessing of knowing, getting to know Jesus even more as our Lord and our Savior.

Now, what I want to do here this morning is look at this from 2 different angles.

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