Tuesday, December 15
The ups and downs of Israel’s experience with God were closely linked to the way they related to the Sabbath. God saw their unwillingness to respect the Sabbath as a sign of His irrelevance in their lives (Jeremiah 17:19-27). A renewed commitment to the Sabbath was also part of restoration – a signal that priorities were right. Isaiah 58 pictures an interesting contrast.
Read Isaiah 58:1-14. What is God saying to His people here that is relevant to us today?
The Israelites are posing as followers of God – in their worship, in their fasting – but the way they live their lives after they have finished worshiping shows that they are only going through the motions of correct behavior; there is no sincere heart commitment to the law of God.Isaiah continues in chapter 58 to identify what God does expect from His people.
This is not all. Read Isaiah 58:13, 14. Why does God focus on the Sabbath at the end of this chapter? The prophet uses phrases here similar to those in the rest of the chapter: keep “From doing thy pleasure”; don’t go “thine own ways”; avoid “finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words”, the prophet warns. In other words, the Sabbath isn’t the time to go through the routine of worship, only to be thinking your own thoughts and living a life irrelevant to the one of worship. The Sabbath is to be a “delight” and to be “ honourable.” In the context of the rest of the chapter, Sabbath is about delighting in learning of the character and purposes of God, and then living that character and those purposes in our relations to others. Knowing how to go through the form of Sabbath observance and worship is not enough. Learning must impact life. Sabbath is time for learning and living priorities.
Do you delight in the Sabbath? If not, what can you do to change that? Have you learned to “honor” the Sabbath? Discuss what this might mean with the rest of your Sabbath School class. Be as practical as you can.
