The Miracles of Christ - Jesus, the Jews and the Sabbath

[0:00] continue our subject of the miracles and I'm deterring just a little as I mentioned earlier because of the really volatile issue that has existed or existed between our Lord and the religious establishment as regards the Sabbath and we pointed out to you earlier that in connection with our Lord's ministry it was really early on early on in his ministry before he even had a full complement of 12 apostles that the religious establishment had already decided Jesus needed to go they saw him as a threat he was gathering a great deal of support from the common people the claim was out there on the part of many that he was the Messiah and if enough people start buying into that they are going to get revolutionary and testy and what will happen then the Romans will clamp down on us big time and as is revealed in John's gospel and I think it's the only place that says it the high priest was saying that the Romans will come they're already there of course but he meant that they will pronounce or they will come down on us and take away our place and our nation because the religious establishment served at the pleasure of the Roman government that occupied them they allowed them to pursue their religion they allowed them to go through all the rituals and the animal sacrifices and everything and the and they were actually under an obligation that is the religious establishment was under an obligation to the Roman authorities listen you keep your people in line because if you don't we'll replace you we'll fire you we'll take care of you we'll move you out and replace you with somebody else and they knew that so they served actually at the behest of the

[2:11] Roman government and they were very much aware of that Jesus was making all kinds of claims and the teaching and the miracles that he was doing and people were becoming more and more influenced the crowds were getting larger and the religious establishment began getting very very nervous and one of the the high priest in fact it was in John's gospel says when they got together discussed this he said you know he said you guys you're not thinking you're not doing anything don't you realize that it is far better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be sacrificed and that's what's going to happen if we don't take this Jesus person into consideration and take care of him ourself that's what's going to happen so they were concerned about privilege perks position and all the rest and they decided Jesus was going to have to go and the thing that they were going to use that seemed to be a ready-made incident for them was Jesus attitude toward the Sabbath now if you know anything about Judaism especially historic Judaism there are two things that are just absolutely critical in the minds of the Jews number one circumcision eighth day baby boy circumcised otherwise he's not considered a bona fide member of the covenant of Israel circumcision was absolutely essential and the second the Sabbath remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy that was the biggie and they had so what shall I say they had so contaminated the true teaching of the

[4:01] Sabbath that it had become a burdensome thing for the whole population of Israel and God never intended it to be a burden he intended to be a blessing it was designed to accommodate the needs of the human body for a day of rest and relaxation and they had turned it into a nightmare they had begun nitpicking they developed all kinds of details and and nonsensical things regarding the Sabbath and as a result they had made it a burden instead of a blessing so that was going to be the number one objective that would give them the what they believed to be the right the justification for literally ordering the execution of Jesus and very early on they decided to do away with him now he's going to live under that kind of a threat for about two and a half to three years before they actually are able to carry it out with the arrest in Gethsemane taking him to eventually to Pontius Pilate and the sentence of death being pronounced upon him so this Sabbath thing is very very critical and we pointed out earlier on how that it still has a certain amount of authority in a number of places today and I was researching this a little bit to try to get a better handle on it and I can well remember and I'm sure you probably can too how that years ago when we were all younger most all the stores were closed on Sunday and this was a result of what was called the blue laws and the reason they were called the blue laws it's quite interesting because in the first place when the government came out with this they were printed on blue paper imagine that the blue laws were printed on blue paper and they were called the blue laws because blue was the descriptive name that was given to human vices such as it was considered blue or indecent behavior adult blasphemy fornication and drinking were all considered blue now some of you may remember the old blue light districts and it was a way of advertising sex for sale if a woman had a blue light in her window it meant that she was approachable for sex and there are certain places today where that's still utilized that way it's kind of a tip off especially if you know where to go in places like Holland and Netherlands and so on so it was designed the blue laws were also in addition to being on blue paper they were designed to curb or eliminate blue activity which was indecent sexual blasphemy drinking carousing all kinds of stuff like that and if you are familiar with the name

[7:24] William Penn who gave the name Pennsylvania to the state by the way considered the father of the state of Pennsylvania William Penn was a Quaker and that's interesting too by the way why did they call them Quakers well they called them Quakers because they Quake then they called Shakers Shakers because they Shake and that was a physical by the way just an aside Quakers Quakers were religious people whose whose beliefs and doctrine supposedly had such an immense impact upon them that it moved them physically caused them to literally physically Quake and it became a kind of a badge of identity of the Quakers indicating that they were profoundly impacted by spiritual things that in times of prayer and preaching etc they would actually

[8:26] Quake and then the Shakers I guess was a take off on that and there was a Shaker colony no longer exists but you can visit it as a tourist site in Kentucky and they are called the Shakers so you got the Shakers and the Quakers and a woman by the name of Mother Lee was the founder of the Shakers and you can still go down there and visit that place and I did several years ago and it's quite fascinating they placed a great deal of emphasis upon labor hard work industry thrift etc and the reason they died off was because they believed that their spirituality required sexual abstinence and no sex means no babies and you're not going to have any way to proliferate or to reproduce yourself so eventually they died out so you got the Shakers and the Quakers and both of them had to do with the physical manifestation of what they believed they were feeling as a result of their activities so this is something that developed as a result of

[9:34] Christ's resurrection on the first day of the week because the Sabbath was deeply entrenched in the psyche and the theology and the doctrine of the Jewish people and it was one of the commandments in fact it was the seventh commandment that was given and it required no labor and no work on the Sabbath day and the word Sabbath Shabbat in Hebrew literally means seven and it was the day that God rested and I think I pointed out to you before that God didn't rest because he was tired from all week's work when you consider God being who he is think of this when God created the heavens and the earth he did so without what we would call an expenditure of energy now that's completely mind blowing because everything we do requires energy

[10:41] I don't care if you scratch your head it requires energy to do that to take a step and when the Bible says that all power resides in God that means exactly what it says all power all human power all horse power all machine power all electrical power all water power all kinds of power that exists even the power that is present for the revolving of the planets and the orbit and everything it is all vested in God and because he possesses all power it is not depleted he is the ongoing full complete source of all power it is his power that makes everything that is powered power including every step you take we are talking about a being with no limitations a being whose personhood we just cannot begin to comprehend and that is tied with his omnipresence and of course his omniscience so this whole concept of the

[11:57] Sabbath and the seventh day was intended to be a blessing for man and it was a time for him to reflect on spiritual things and a time for him to give his body rest so he was prohibited from engaging in work and in the Jewish economy the days always began with what we call the evening and you read in Genesis the evening and the morning were the first day and right from the get go in the very first chapter you have an illustration of how God's thinking is almost always the opposite of ours because we vision a day as day morning and evening but God says no it's evening and morning and the evening and the morning were the first day this meant that the Jewish Sabbath as God established it began with sunset not sunrise began with sunset on what we would call what we would call

[13:01] Friday evening and it continued until sunset Saturday and by the way the days of the week Monday Tuesday Wednesday etc you won't find any of those in the Bible because most of them are names given after a pagan deity so all through scripture you find the first day of the week seventh day of the week the eleventh day of the week or what I mean of the month they never used the term week and everything was based on a 30 day month and it was lunar and it was different from our calendar today so all of these things are factored in in connection with our observance of what we call Sunday and you even have to be careful how you use that word observance because people have different attitudes regarding that it is interesting to note that in the New Testament the Apostle

[14:03] Paul refers to all of the commandments that are given in the Ten Commandments with the exception of the fourth and he never talks about observing Sunday as what we do today as what is called the Christian Sabbath it's a misnomer to call it Sabbath at all because the Sabbath has never changed it is still sundown Friday to sundown Saturday but misunderstanding has caused many Protestants in particular well probably Catholics too to consider that the Sabbath has been moved from Saturday to Sunday and that is completely untrue it was never moved and it hasn't changed and the Sabbath is still Friday night Sunday sundown until Saturday sundown and then begins the first day of the week but we do read in the epistles where they gather together on the first day of the week not the last day on what we would call then

[15:07] Sunday and we can only surmise that it was done because our Lord was resurrected on the first day of the week it's a sign of a new beginning and the first day of the week does not begin with Sunday morning the first day of the week begins with Saturday evening at sunset so as I pointed out to you before we don't know exactly what time of day our Lord came out of that tomb all we know it was the first day of the week could have been as early as what we call Saturday evening or as late as what we would call Sunday morning it would still be the first day of the week we do know this that when the women arrived at the tomb to finish the preparations for burial the Lord had already risen and it was still dark so that puts it within some kind of a time frame and

[16:09] I'm not saying that he rose Saturday evening I'm saying he could have because it would still been the first day of the week would begin Saturday evening and it would continue until Sunday evening at sunset so it's a controversial issue in many places today and I did a little research on this regarding Sabbatarianism and by the way that's a concept that is just a word that is given to discuss and deal with the issues of the Sabbath and if you are familiar with Seventh Day Adventists we have a church Seventh Day Adventist church here in town it's out on Bird Road and they have two emphases one is they observe what they believe is the Sabbath which is Sunday they think has been the Jewish Sabbath has been moved to Sunday so they observe it on Sunday and they begin with

[17:13] I mean on Saturday and they begin with their church service on Saturday morning just like most churches do on Sunday morning and they put an emphasis on the Sabbath and they believe that we are responsible for keeping the Sabbath in fact I can remember and it's well I guess it was 60 years ago in reading some theology the Seventh Day Adventist and they took a very strong position that those who did not keep the Sabbath which they believed to be Saturday and they worship on Saturday are people who have already the mark of the beast and that was their teaching now that has since been changed and I've had the pleasure of talking with a number of Seventh Day Adventist people over the last 10 or 15 years and it is remarkable how they have discarded some of those things and we would say they have not come to our position at all but they have certainly eased off the necessity of the

[18:19] Sabbath and I'm confident that a great many of these people who are Seventh Day Adventists are true believers I don't have any question about that their faith is in Christ and you can be you know you can be wrong about a whole lot of things but if you're right about Jesus who he is and what he did and why he did it and how it affects you if you're right about that it doesn't make that much difference what you're wrong about and as I've often said every one of us has wrinkles in our theology I don't care who you are and the time is coming when they're all going to get ironed out and some of them are going to need more ironing than others but nobody has this thing all together so with all due respect to these folks and by the way they're called Seventh Day Adventists because they observe their day of worship on the seventh day and the word Adventist is tapped onto the part of their name because of the emphasis they place upon the advent of

[19:25] Christ and they are great believers in prophecy and in the eventual future coming of our Lord Jesus Christ so I know some folks who are Seventh-day Adventists and apart from that one particular thing that they still hold dear they don't believe that their salvation is connected with that like they did years and years ago back in the times when William Miller was one of the prime movers in the 1870s 1880s I think something like that so it's remarkable how they've and I don't know what else to call it other than the purification of some of their doctrinal beliefs particularly regarding salvation so what I'd like for you to do is look at this for just a moment as to how we relate to it today because I can well remember growing up when West Main Street lived in the 600 block of West Main Street and I'm sorry 700 block of West Main

[20:26] Street and right across the street was a business establishment clothing and furniture store small organization and it's called the Family Mart and it was owned and operated by a man who was Jewish and of course he was closed all day Saturday Friday evening Saturday but he was open on Sunday which was unusual and that meant that people could go in there on Sunday because all the other stores were closed and you couldn't find hardly anything and I'm talking about you know 60 70 years ago you couldn't find hardly anything that was open on Sunday and it was considered unacceptable to be open on Sunday and that all changed when it all changed when money got in the way and stores began being competitive because well if so and so is going to be open on Sunday they're going to get all the business so I'm going to have to be open on Sunday in order to compete and that started kind of a Sunday revolution and now so many things are open on Sunday and the question is is that appropriate turn to

[21:48] Romans chapter 14 if you would for just a moment we'll look at this and how it affects things today Romans chapter 14 this was a very controversial thing I remember reading an article about about baseball games I think I shared this with you before about baseball games in Philadelphia in the 1930s it changed it but up until up until the 1930s all the major league baseball teams could play baseball baseball on Sunday in virtually every city where there was a team and by the way I can remember I can remember when there were eight teams in the national league and eight teams in the American league and I can also remember when Cincinnati was invariably in the seventh place and the only team that was beneath them was in the eighth place and that was

[22:53] Pittsburgh they were always at the cellar and the only thing Pittsburgh had going for them was Ralph Kiner and he was a home run man of his day you know so you could play baseball in any city in the United States except in Philadelphia and that's where the Philadelphia Phillies were and the Philadelphia Athletics of course they've since moved to Kansas City but the schedulers of scheduling baseball had nightmares because you couldn't play baseball in Philadelphia on Sunday and in the 1930s city fathers passed legislation that was granting Philadelphia baseball teams to be able to play their games on Sunday but everything else remained closed so they made an exception for the true necessity which was baseball on Sunday well in Romans chapter 14 we've got what I think is probably the best consideration of this when Paul says except the one who is weak in faith but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions one man has faith that he may eat all things but he who is weak eats vegetables only and by the way

[24:11] I was talking earlier about Seventh Day Adventists and they come into the diet thing too because if you know anything about Seventh Day Adventists they are very very much opposed to eating meat they are strictly vegetarian and I remember years ago when I calling on a patient down at Kettering Hospital and Kettering Hospital was originally started by Seventh Day Adventists and by the way it's since become one of the leading medical institutions in the whole area and I was visiting a patient there congregation and was introduced to a Seventh Day Adventist minister and he was a friendly fellow and he welcomed me and we were chatting a little bit about the hospital and etc.

[25:01] and he said I want you to be my guest at lunch today and I said well thank you very much and he said and I want you to enjoy what we call our hamburger and I said what you call your hamburger and he says yes he says actually it isn't meat at all it is soy it is a soy burger but you can't tell the difference between a soy burger and a hamburger it tastes just as good and just as much like it I said no kidding he says yeah he says you'll see what I mean I want you to order one so I got this soy burger and it was awful I thought man if you think you can't see any difference you got a powerful imagination but I I can see I could really tell the difference but I tried to be as kind and thankful as I could and I managed to get it down after several sips of liquid and wash it down but I'll never forget that and yet these are these are these are kind gracious people and those that I've met

[26:15] I would have to say I think they are they're really really true believers but they still have this thing about the sabbath and about meat so this text addresses that in verse three let not him who eats regard with contempt him who does not eat and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats for God has accepted him and the implication there is this if God has accepted him regardless of what he eats or doesn't eat if God has accepted him can you how dare you how dare you reject someone God accepts you have a higher standard than God does if God accepts him what right do you have to reject him and of course by accepting he was talking about friendship or fellowship and our fellowship the basis for our fellowship is rooted and grounded in the person of Jesus

[27:27] Christ and if you are right about him you can afford to be wrong about a whole lot of things but if you are wrong about him it doesn't make any difference what you're right about that's he is the way the truth and the life so let's go on verse 4 who are you to judge the servant of another to his own master he stands or falls and stand he will for the Lord is able to make him stand now verse 5 one man regards one day above another that is he regards it as special sets it aside as a special day and we're thinking of course of the sabbath here and Paul I'm sure is thinking of that in his context because of his background and what was taking place in that day one man regards one day above another another regards every day alike do you see the word alike there is it italicized you know what that means that means it is not in the original text the translators put it in italics to let you know it is not in the original they added the word alike because it appeared to them to make more sense to add it than to leave it out and sometimes it does but sometimes it detracts from what the true sense really is and I think it does that in this case because what the text is actually saying in the original is to his own master he stands or falls or I'm sorry verse 5 one man regards one day above another another regards every day period for the believer in Christ every day is the

[29:38] Lord's day this is the day the Lord has made let us rejoice and be glad in it every day is the Lord's day and there is a tendency to take one day and specify it and elevate it above all other days and as I mentioned some at one point in time even connected personal salvation with whether or not you observed that particular day and that is completely contrary to biblical truth whether it's Old Testament or new when God established the Sabbath he did it for man's blessing and benefit and by the way one of the designations used by our Lord of himself which is just really significant he said the son of man which is the way he often spoke of himself using himself in the third person the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath do you realize what that would have said and meant to the

[30:42] Jew of his day it would have said and meant to them this man is equating himself with God that's blasphemy that's punishable by death we owe it to God to execute that man that's exactly the way they looked upon it for he making that claim is just it stunned them the son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath what and it was a statement that stood all throughout his ministry and of course that was just one more thing and a really big item that put Jesus in the crosshairs of the religious establishment he's got to go if we let this go on it's going to affect well we've been there before so anyway he says the conclusion is let each man be fully convinced in his own mind this is a personal matter

[31:46] I do not have the right to tell you you must worship on a certain day matter of fact a believer in Christ ought to be worshiping every day you know what the word worship means it means worth w-o-r-t-h worth ship when you worship you are assigning worth value to the object of your worship you are assigning the ultimate worth and worthiness to God and you worship him I'm this is just an aside but it's a beautiful thing when the wise men the magi came from the east because they had heard that one who was born was born king of the jews and fellows those three magi had to be jews why why else would they even care to come from afar for one who is born king of the jews unless you are a jew and you know the significance of that and they said when they came there they came to what to worship what to worship a baby born king of the jews you do not worship humans and you do not worship angels you worship only deity only god is worthy of worship and when they came the magi came to worship we have come to worship him worship is is the modus operandi of every believer seven days a week and the idea of setting one day aside when everything stops is to just concentrate and focus on that and the point has been made that that our day of worship traditionally set aside which is

[34:17] Sunday begins Sunday morning in our estimation and then Sunday evening and as we pointed out earlier this was established way back when most of our civilization was agrarian and everybody had farms and land and crops and all the rest and animals livestock and you had to care for those and by the time the farmer got his chores done and the animals fed and all that good stuff early on Sunday morning it was 10 or 11 o'clock before he could get on his Sunday beaten clothes and go to church and that's essentially how Sunday morning worship was established here in the United States and started way back with the pilgrims actually you know the carryover from them and they saw it of course as the changing of the Sabbath that Christ's resurrection changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday did no such thing the Sabbath is still

[35:17] Friday night to Saturday night and Sunday is the first day of the week and it is not the Sabbath it is the first day of the week and we ordinarily associate Christ's resurrection with it so I'm going to pause here but I just want to make this let every man be fully convinced in his own mind he who observes the day observes it for the Lord he who eats does so for the Lord gives thanks to God he who eats not for the Lord he does not eat he gives thanks to God for not one of us lives for himself not one dies for himself and so on so questions or comments anybody yeah Dave yeah the italicized words are they are they only words that are added or are they sometimes words that are substituted for other words that were there in the original some of each but the problem is with italicized words and I don't there's no way to change this I'm sure but but there are a number of words that should be italicized because they're not in the original but they didn't italicize it and they weren't consistent about that so the only thing that you can say for sure is where you see a word that is in italics you know that it was changed it was inserted there because they thought it would make better better sense but they didn't italicize everything that isn't in there so some of them have done italics it's it's a it's a mixed bag and it's it's it's not not at all consistent and that's one of the frustrating things about studying in the original language other comments or questions well i remember reading some statistics years ago about men and women who were working seven days a week especially during the war all of our manufacturing components including everything from general motors and ford everything was transferred to making tanks and armored equipment and and military vehicles and everything and this vast economic giant was cranked up almost overnight turning out war materials and they were working in three shifts seven days a week to get as many ships and planes and things out as possible and i remember reading some statistics how that people who were working seven days a week sometimes ten twelve hours a day after a couple of weeks of that the efficiency factor began to fall off and the production factor began to decrease and the truth of the matter was these people were just wearing themselves down they were becoming overly weary because they were missing that day of rest and relaxation we call it R&R and little recoup and when you go this is this is the workaholic you know the guy that never quits and he's always working and always working and he is his own worst enemy because the body needs periods of rest and relaxation and not only in the sleep that we get at night but in the time the downtime and a day of the week seems to be just exactly what the body ordered well think of that think of that the God who designed these bodies knows that they need some downtime some

[38:55] R&R some time to just relax from your labor and take it easy and it's also a good time to reflect upon what God has done for you and how you can be used for the rest of the week so it's a beautiful thing and the principle is the principle is that I think God established is that you are to recognize that your body has physical and your mind has spiritual needs and you are to use that time to come together in a time of fellowship and it's a beautiful thing what has been established in the body of Christ for this for what we call a day or a time of worship other thoughts or comments anybody yeah Roger when you first began speaking talking about they hounded Jesus almost from the beginning of his ministry and I was thinking of poor President Trump I can't imagine what that man went through whether you like him or not they hounded him for four years yeah that's true that's very true very true you know with with Jesus there's an interesting parallel there and I'm not comparing I'm not long comparing Trump with Jesus I mean that's a that's a stretch that nobody could make but but

[40:11] I'll say this the principle thing the principle thing that really grieved and aggravated the religious establishment was Jesus successes his healings his teachings the way he went over with the common people they couldn't stand that kind of competition Jesus made them look bad he didn't make them look bad by trying to make them look bad he made them look bad just by the good that he did and the comparison was so obvious they were squirming and uncomfortable and the left the left could not afford to have Donald Trump in for a second term because he almost killed them with the first term this guy actually did what he said he was going to do nobody does that but he did and the more he accomplished the worse it made them look just by comparison and they were out to get him now like I said don't confuse

[41:33] Trump with Jesus but the principle the principle is the same the opposition can't stand the success of the opposition and they do whatever they can to neutralize it diminish it deny it stop it whatever that's that's an act of desperation you know whenever a political entity engages in really truly bizarre off the wall off the chart activity to oppose something they're always doing it out of desperation they are scared to death for the success of their position so they've got to do what they can to tear down the other side and that's politics that's human nature frankly it stinks but we're immersed in it don't you think that's also true what atheists do they attack God oh sure so attacking God they're saying well they must believe in him yeah yeah there is no God and I hate him yeah go figure it's crazy what a world

[42:41] Don Mark when you keep referring to the original the original does not exist any longer does it no that's true well I'm talking about what I'm talking about are those documents excuse me those documents that are as close as we can get to the original and it's the whole the whole study of manuscripts and higher criticism is a subject in itself it's way over my head but there are men who have devoted their whole lives to trying to put together the original text and it is it is an enormous undertaking let me just give you this example for years and years and years the liberal critics were saying of the scriptures that you cannot put any reliability in the scriptures that it's been translated re-translated so many times nobody has any idea what was actually said in the original and the beautiful thing about that is that when the Dead Sea

[43:43] Scrolls were discovered in 1947 in that obscure cave in the Qumran the Dead Sea area one of the findings was a complete intact scroll of the prophecy of Isaiah and it was a beautiful thing and as the scholars began looking it over they discovered that the the text there was a thousand years older than the oldest that they had at the time to work from and when they compared them they were identical it was just amazing and here is a thousand year leap but it was still textually the same and it just wowed the establishment and it shut the liberals up for a while but of course they find something else to carve about but that's the nature of the beast so we've got every reason we've got every reason to have a profound and complete authority to the scriptures as we have them and the translations that are available they just differ of whip stitch and I've got one of my favorite volumes here it's called the 26 translation new testament and it's remarkable how the editors that put this together gleaned the content that is shared here from 26 different translations translations and that doesn't mean that they rendered all 26 of them because some of them were identical some translations

[45:37] I mean out of one verse of scripture you may get only 12 actual variations and the rest the 14 others would be all identical so they didn't include them if they were identical but only if they were different and even the differences is so slight it's just a choice of words one expresses a little bit differently than the other but we have every reason to have complete confidence in the text that we have and the translations that we have and you know there have been all kinds of conflicts and criticism and almost wars over different translations and one dear brother I talked to about this years ago he was quite a language scholar and he said I can't imagine how much good could be done for the cause of Christ if people in the body of Christ would stop arguing over the translations that are used and just read and study the ones they've got but there are nitpickers and there are those you've got to cross every T like they do dot every

[46:43] I like they do or you're a heretic and that's that's sad it's division that weakens the body of Christ and there are so many divisive things in Christianity that separates us that keeps us from presenting the united front that the world really needs and they stand back and look at us and instead of saying behold how they love one another it's behold how they club one another and it ought not so to be but we know that's the reality we live in so other thoughts or comments feel free okay so today we've got a situation where practically everything is open wide open and and and and I have I have some regret about that because it does take away the emphasis and it removes from the public mind the fact that

[47:49] Sunday morning traditionally best place to be for those who name the name of Christ is to be together in a time of corporate worship I wouldn't trade that for the world but it does send a message to our secular society that doesn't make any difference you know it's all alike and I would dispute that I frankly I treasure Sunday mornings I wish more people did but I don't put any any you know any emphasis on it like those who don't worship on Sunday morning or sinning or whatever it's a judgment call and Paul said let everyone be fully persuaded in his own mind so that means I don't have the right to determine for you what you ought to do or when you ought to do it that's a personal thing and I feel the same way about finances about money about what people give and Paul took the position let every man lay aside for the first day of the week as the

[48:54] Lord has prospered him and it is grace giving and it is removed from the legalistic tithe that the Jews were under as well as the Sabbath that they were under as well as the dietary regulations and so on well I remember as I'm sure many of us do there used to be worship services not only Sunday morning but Sunday evening and also there was a what you call a prayer meeting on Wednesday yeah yeah well I remember an old saying that I kind of think it was maybe designed to put a holier than thou or maybe a guilt trip on on Christians I don't know but I remember hearing hearing a traveling evangelist who was after people who weren't in church like they should have been and he thought people who people who love how do you put this maybe you remember that people who people who love the church go on

[50:03] Sunday morning and people who love the Lord go on Sunday evening also and people who love the lost go on Wednesday night prayer meeting and you couldn't hardly help but see that little bit of guilt laid on people there you know that if you're not out on Wednesday evening that means you don't love the lost and if you're not out on Sunday evening that means you don't love the Lord you know so frankly I I think that church attendance ought to be something that we do out of desire not out of obligation or necessity and I told people that grace before I don't even want you here if you don't really want to be here if you'd rather be someplace else than be there I want people in the congregation who are there because they have a choice not to be there but they choose to be there because of what's available and the fellowship and the word and everything else and to me that's the only healthy reason for being in church is because you know what on Sunday morning there is no place else

[51:22] I would rather be than there with the brethren and the word being opened and the fellowship and everything because there's nothing like it in the world and it ought to be promoted by desire not oh well Sunday morning gotta go to church no you don't stay home and sleep in you know and you can do that without guilt depending on where you're coming from but it's a matter once again it's a personal thing I guess confession is good for the soul I'm kind of recovering legalist grew up in the time with blue laws and that sort of thing and heard those kind of things but went to a grace I like your term brethren church and that's where I received but even at the past mornings on Sunday I woke up I don't want to church today but when you get up this is the day the Lord had made you talk about recovering legalism man I remember when I first came to Christ back in 1956 legalism is just an automatic thing to fall into you had all these liberties before and now you come to faith in Christ and you want to cross all the T's dot all the I's and you impose all kinds of standards and things on you that God doesn't impose but you think they're necessary and I think legalism is almost automatic for a new believer and you grow and mature out of legalism and you come into the liberty that we have in

[53:03] Christ and that's a glorious thing hey guys thanks for being here enjoy the day and all of the head and thank you again for your presence