Delight: The Discipline of Dayenu

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 It is such a privilege that you would watch today’s message on the Sabbath. Now, we wanted to give you a warning. There are some technical difficulties in this video. We have a new space, and with that we’re trying to learn some things with our cameras. And so our camera died because we just. Quite frankly didn’t have an extension cord cuz we’re using it for so many other things.

So the audio will be perfect. Our great tech director, Tommy, actually used his iPhone, so there’s like a few minutes where it’s black, but just keep listening. I’m gonna read the overview for this message and then this message will begin. A key element of Sabbath is the practice of delight. When we take time to stop and to rest, we find ourselves more aware of the goodness and beauty in the world around.

This recognition and enjoyment of creation is called delight, and it’s something that God himself does. Scripture is full of God delighting in his creation, including us. God delights when we delight, but most of us are too unaccustomed to delight. Simply put, we don’t know how to play. We know how to indulge, how to escape, how to numb, but few of us have cultivated the Godly qualities of playfulness and.

In our lives, God Institutes Sabbath, not as a day of restriction and rigid. But that’s a day of delight. So we become people defined by our joy. When we use Sabbath to practice delighting in God, in others, in creation, and in ourselves, we allow the spirit to form us into people of delight. Enjoy today’s message.

Open . Your Bibles. To Genesis chapter one. In recent days, there’s actually been a lot of talk about revival. I don’t know if you guys have seen it, have you heard about Asbury University? There should be a picture here up on the screen. It’s a small Christian college in Kentucky that wound up attracting over 50,000 people around the world because they heard about this college led Gen Z led service that never.

For 16 days straight, that’s when you know it was Gen Z. Cuz Gen X millennial we’re asleep. We’re not gonna be up at 2:00 AM but Gen Z said, let’s keep worshiping the Lord. And so people are going from, again, around the world to find out what is this? How did this happen? And what’s, sadly we begin to ask, because we’re so American, what’s the formula?

How did this start? So we can duplicate it? Stories are coming out more and more how it all happened. And it turns out it all started from a bad sermon. Literally the pastor text his wife right after preaching chapel service and said, laid another egg. Be home soon. Now if you think laying an egg means you got a zero, it just did not do well.

And and so he was really discouraged. But what happened? And a picture that on the left hand side of your screen, there was just a few students who never. Chapel mass message ended and it was all about actually how can we become a people of love, which is a huge theme that we’ve had during this Sabbath series.

And what they were doing is they just sat at the altar confessing their sins, acknowledging who God is, praising Jesus for what he’s done. Now people’s trying to figure out this formula and there, from what we could tell, there’s two things. Number one, students in their twenties confessing their. Hard to do.

Especially publicly. A lot of us like to just admit to God, but not to each other. And then a really boring sermon. Every pastor’s thinking, that’s a miracle. Nobody that. See there we are not even funny. That’s funny guys. Come on. And so I worked on that line too. That’s what’s sad. And so this has been molding around my mind and my spirit.

I want us to see revival in our own community or awakening, whatever term you want to use. So I’ve been thinking about this and came across this paragraph from one of the most influential Christian writers of the 20th century. His name is GK Chesterton, and he has this paragraph again that really speaks, I think, to our moment.

He says, the Saint is a medicine because he is an anti. Indeed. That is why the Satan is often, Saint is often a martyr. He’s mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.

Therefore, it is the paradox of. That each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it the most confession of sin that contradicts our society a lot. But church, I believe we’re in a series exaggerating rests because we are in a world that neglects it the most. There doesn’t seem to be anything more contradictory than a community of people practicing Sabbath for 24 hours to the glory of.

Every single week, and that’s what we’re trying to do. . We’re trying to create a space for the grace of God and it really will contradict. Think about it. We no longer live in a world as we looked at week one, that stops for 24 hours. In this series, I’ve already shared with you stat upon stat about how we’re working more than ever before, right?

We can never seem to stop, especially with the advent of internet, we. Take home. We take work home with us. We’ve also lost the art of rest. Even talking with some of you, and it’s been beautiful as you talk about this last week’s practice was resting, you’re like, I don’t know how everything for me is productive.

How do I stop? How do I do that? And it’s been really difficult. And we even said last week, most of us, we just think rest is something to buy. So a $10,000 vacation or something to laugh at on a coffee cup because we know it’ll. Happen for us. Now, if I were to be fair, there are pockets of groups out there who are stopping and rest.

Once a week, and this includes secular atheists Pico Ayer. He is famous for this Ted Talk and he wrote a book called The Art of STEs, and he talks about practicing as secular Sabbath. He actually goes and meets with monks like Thomas Merton and he learns their strategies for resting for Sabbath thing, and then he churns it into something to do outside of the God thing, right?

For them it’s practice. Mindfulness, say no to the hustle and just slow. Once a week, but today these last two elements we’re talking four different elements to Sabbath, that word Shabbat. It means to stop and rest. Now it’s delight and also worship. These last two elements, delight in worship, I believe, are uniquely Christian.

nobody else can duplicate this into a godless lookalike. And so I encourage you today to lean in. Last week, we covered the last two weeks, sorry. We’ve covered what we don’t do, which is we stop and rest. So we don’t do a lot of those other things anymore, at least once a week. And then these next two weeks are more about what we do, and these two things are uniquely Christians.

So I want to talk to you today about the Sabbath discipline of delight, the Sabbath discipl. Of delight. If there’s something more neglected than rest, it’s delight, and honestly, probably for good reason. , we are still living in the wake of a post covid world. Some of us, our lives will never be the same.

Sadly, there’s still acts of violence on our children, and it’s causing a lot of us fear and uncertainty, let alone all the political unrest and conflicts, not just around the world, but also in our backyard. And also, sadly, and we really understand this as a church community, you have friends and loved ones who died too.

To disease and illness and accidents and tragedies, and the list could go on. And so there doesn’t seem to be, at least today, a single person, I would argue in this room who isn’t well acquainted with grief. So if we are well acquainted with grief, how can we have delight? We seem to be too depressed to give ourselves even permiss.

To have delight. I remember the first time I experienced grief was when my grandfather passed away, and I remember having so much grief that I was guilty about eating. Anybody. I guess that’s a really common thing, right? It’s just this overall sense of sadness that I think is permeating our culture today.

But church, we have the antidote, and thankfully this antidote comes in the form of a command from God, which we’ve looked at in Exodus 20 in Deuteronomy. And it’s also based on the character of God. So again, turn with me if you haven’t already to Genesis chapter one. We’re also gonna be in Mark chapter two if you want to turn to that.

And if you did bring your Bible today, that’s okay. We will have the scriptures on the screen. Genesis one, verse 31. It says, God saw all that he had made and it was very good indeed. Evening came and then morning, the sixth day. Can I just point this out real quick? This is free in the Hebrew concept of a day.

The day starts. , this is actually why the traditional Sabbath is to start at dinner at sundown. But why? Cuz that’s the start of the day. For us as Americans, we think the start is whenever we woke up. So for some of us, that’s 4:30 AM for others of us. It’s 11:00 AM whatever, no judgment, right? But actually the day starts at night, which I love because one of the first things we do is to rest and sleep, which shows the rhythm of God’s creation.

It’s Mo We are living from grace not working for anyways. I’ll stop J chapter two verse one. So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed on the seventh. God had completed his work that he had done and he arrested. That’s that word Shabbat we’ve been looking at, which we would call in the noun form Sabbath on the seventh day from all his work that he had done, and God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy or set apart for on it.

He rested. Shabbat from all his work of creation. Now again, this word rested. We’ve talked about length the last two weeks. It literally means to stop and to rest, but also it this resting and stopping communicates this imagery of God delighting in his work. Notice verse 31, he looked at all and it was very good indeed, and it’s not that God needed a.

Tons of work for him and he’s exhausted, so now he needs to rest. No, it’s the stopping to just reflect and to be grateful for this beautiful creation that he made. That is very good. Jewish scholars argue that God created one thing on the seventh day, so we see here he didn’t create anything, right? He stopped from all those things that just enjoyed it.

But Jewish scholars say they did. He did create one thing, and it’s called manha. This is a Hebrew phrase, which literally means happi. Stillness. Peace, joy, Manha. If you had to pick one chapter in the Bible that describe Manha, it’d actually be how we started our service today. Psalm 23, right? He leads me beside quiet waters.

I can sit along green pastures. This sense of just genuine delight and God is saying, okay, now that I created all these things, this thing that I am now communicating to the world is on the Sabbath. We simp. Delight. Now be honest. When you imagine God, do you think of him as happy or joyful or even playful?

If we don’t, we need to rid our Bibles better. . This is the guy that we s serve GK Chesterton. Just one more time, and I’m done with him. I promise. He actually describes the playful nature of God. It’s one of my favorite quotes of all time. He says the following, he says, children want things repeated and unchanged.

They always say, do it again. And the grownup person does it again until he is nearly dead. He was clearly a parent. Good luck Caleb and Shelby now right? Until they’re nearly dead. So for grownup people are not strong enough to exalt in mono. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult. I monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun, and every evening do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all Daisy alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the. Appetite of infancy in this line is just incredible for, we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we friends.

God is playful and we are not, which is why we need a Sabbath to remember that discipline of. Edward Freeman. He’s a brilliant rabbi who passed away 27 years ago, but he foresaw all the problems America’s facing today. It’s pretty incredible. I was so radically shaped by it. I titled my book after his phrase, non-anxious presence.

He actually warned that we were creating a society that doesn’t want leaders and eventually producing a society where we can’t even make leaders anymore. It’s incredible. But he has this line that I think is a scathing judgment on who we are today in our culture. He says, A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.

Have we lost that capacity? Certainly. And that’s to our detriment. And the reality is God is a God who is joyful, who is even playful. And on the Sabbath we participate in that. Now, turn to Mark chapter two. If there’s anybody in the. Who had zero idea on what it means to be playful and to be happy, and to live with delight.

It would be the Pharisees. So open to Mark chapter two. Jesus is going to be confronting the Pharisees and really their understanding of the Sabbath. Particularly they could not understand this discipline of delight. Verse 23, mark chapter two, it says On the Sabbath, he was going, Jesus threw the grain fields and his disciples began to make their.

Picking some heads of grain. So the Pharisees said to him, look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? And so he said to them, have you never read what David and those who are with him did when he was in need and Hungary, how he entered the house of God in the time of abitha the priest and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and also gave some to his companions.

Then he told them the Sabbath was made for. and not man for the Sabbath. So then the son of man, that’s Jesus is Lord even of. The Sabbath. There’s so much happening here. Also, just notice when he says, have you never read? He’s talking to Pharisees. The Pharisees literally have the Old Testament completely memorized.

So he’s con just saying you, I think you forgot a line. He’s confronting them. He’s rebuking them. But to understand this passage, there’s something we must notice. The culture of Jesus’s day was the exact opposite of ours when it comes to the Sabbath. And so Jesus’ line here about man wasn’t made for the Sabbath.

That is confronting to the p. But the line that confronts you and me is the other line that Sabbath was made for man. Most of us just don’t even think of Sabbath as a concept to participate in that. It’s old and antiquated, and so we need to look through the scriptures and remember, Jesus himself said Sabbath was made for the good of man.

Now the other thing is the Jewish people, because they love Sabbath so much, they were intent on following this Sabbath. What they did, and this is what religious quote religious people do, is they added a ton of extra rules to make sure they don’t break the Sabbath in their minds. The Jewish rabbis says that they were building a fence around the Torah and.

They’re trying to make society so difficult where this is the way to break the rule. They made a fence way over here, so even if you went to the fence, you still weren’t in danger of breaking the rule. Does that make sense? So they added all these extra traditions when I was eight who’s been to the Grand Canyon?

Amazing. My wife will not raise her hand cuz I haven’t taken her yet. I’m a terrible person. She’s from. anyways, to the glory of God. Now, when I went to Grand Canyon, here’s why I’ve never gone again, babe. So we went to the Grand Canyon when I was eight and they had you guys, those fences everywhere.

And it’s always if I just was just like 10 feet closer, I could see something beautiful. But this fence is holding me back. So my dad constantly, the whole trip we were there would jump over the fence and then he would act like he was dying. Oh no. And oh, I was so stressed. I was a mess. I was crying.

To, he’s a bad person. He found joy out of an eight year old crying, don’t we all? Now, I’ll never forget that and I don’t, I, I just can’t do it again. This is what that is communicating okay, there’s where you break the rule way down there, but because we don’t even want you to slip and fall to your death, which Google it by the way, people who do that joke actually die, dad.

So they make this fence so that you don’t even get close. This is what the Hebrew people thought they were doing, and what they created was this thing called the Mishna First. It was this oral tradition of rules they were coming up with and probably it started from a good place. Things like the traditions me and my wife have for our Sabbath is we always have french toast for breakfast.

And it would take something like, Hey, you need french toast for breakfast, something that works for us. And it would be me saying to the whole church, you must have french toast every Saturday morning. That’s silly. It doesn’t make any sense. , but this oral tradition kept passing on and they formalized all of these rules into the ishk.

So when Pharisees said to Jesus, you are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath, what law are they alluding to? It’s not the Bible, it’s not the Torah. They’re referring to the ishk. . So a lot of us, we don’t know that context, so we assume Jesus just breaks the Sabbath. He doesn’t care about the Old Testament.

No. He’s bringing back the original intent that the Old Testament had about what Sabbath should actually be. isn’t that good? So it’s things like you can’t walk a certain distance on the Sabbath, which is why all Jewish communities are around a synagogue. I think it’s pretty neat. Can you imagine there’s some of us in here, we love each other enough, we’ve joked about making a compound, right?

It’s what if we all just lived in the same neighborhood? Like how cool would that be? It’s not biblical at all, and I think it’s gross and weird, but you. We’d all wear red. It would be nice, we’re the community that lives 12 years longer, remember this is who we are. They’re like, they’re crazy, right?

So anyways, that is what they did. They had all these extra rules and Jesus is confronting those. The Pharisees missed the whole plot line. The Pharisees have lost Sabbath as a day of delight, and it became a day about all the rules. Case in point, let’s read a little further. Chapter three verse one.

Jesus entered the synagogue again and a man was there who had a shriveled hand. In order to accuse him, they were watching him, who’s they, the Pharisees closely to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath. And so he told the man with the shriveled hands stand before us. Then he said to them, is it lawful?

So he is looking to the Pharisees, knowing they’re trying to trap, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do. to save life or to kill, but they were silent. That’s how much they’ve misunderstood the plot line cuz they couldn’t say, yeah, you need to do good. They couldn’t even do that anymore. Verse five, after looking around at them with anger, I love this frustration that Jesus has.

He was grieved at the harness of their hearts and told the man, stretch out your hand. So he stretched it out and his hand was, Immediately the Pharisees jumped up for Joy, had a revival, and 50,000 people came. No, that’s not what it was. Huh? What did they do Immediately? The Pharisees went out and started plotting with the Herodians against him, how they might kill Jesus.

This is how much they missed the mark. Instead of throwing a party, the Pharisees threw. And this may be why some of us are so against Sabbath because you have been around Pharisees who have warped the whole purpose of Sabbath, and they have claimed it was the Bible that they were pointing to. But I’m here to tell you, read your Bible.

It is not true. This is a day of delight and a day of joy, and one reason Jesus came back is to set that right and to call us to say, no Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Write this down. The Pharisees thought Sabbath was removal to get approval, but it is making space to delight in God’s grace.

This is why we Sabbath, literally, joy and delight are God’s. and design for your. And we know that because of the Sabbath. So I want us to, we’re gonna get really practical for the rest of our time. I wanna challenge our community to part, participate in what we call Sabbath delight. So we’re gonna look at four ways to practice Sabbath delight.

We hope in your together groups this week, you put it into practice. If you’re not a part of a group, you can sign up today. You can do it on your red card. That should be right by you, or you can do it with your own family. But point number one, what are ways that we delight? Number one is to delight in.

First and foremost, Sabbath is not a treat yourself day. It’s a day about. We miss the plot line when we make it just about ourselves. Psalm 92 Shalu red in the beginning, this is actually, if you look at the description of the psalm, it is a song for the Sabbath Day. So traditionally, Psalm 92 would be read to start their Sabbath.

Pastor Caleb told me this week, that’s what his family does. They start their day by reading Psalm 92. Let’s read the first verse five verses again. It says, it is good. To give thanks to the Lord to sing praises to your name most high, to declare your faithful love in the morning and your faithfulness at night.

Look, morning and night during the Sabbath, we are just declaring, we are talking, we are bragging about God. Verse three, with the 10 stringed harp and the music of a liar. I don’t know how to do that, so I just turn on the music, right? But verse four, for you have made me rejoice. Rejoice is literally the verb form of.

Lord by what you have done. I will shout for joy because of the works of your hands. What’s the emphasis here? To rejoice in the Lord to make a big deal about what he is doing in your life? Verse five, how magnificent are your works, Lord? How profound your thoughts, his wife Paul says, I’m Philippians four.

Rejoice in the Lord. Always. Again, I will. Rejoice. Now, here’s the thing. If we don’t ground our delight in God, we will settle for counterfeits. The reality is when we begin to take joy in things that are not from God, it will damage our mind, our body, and our soul. Michael Hendricks. He has this amazing book called The Other Half of Church, I think it was my favorite read of last year.

He talks about, he actually co-wrote this with a neuro theologian. What a cool title. So he’s a neuroscientist, but also a theologian. So neuro theologian. He knows the brain and he knows the Bible. He says the following about pseudo joice things, finding joy in the wrong thing. He says, when our brain looks for joy and does not find.

We become vulnerable to pseudo joys. These are substances and experiences that trick our brain to temporarily shut off the unpleasant emotions, but they are non-relational and ultimately unsatisfying. By the way, this is why we think we should sabbath together. We think joy comes in community. What does Satan want you to do?

He wants to isolate you and look for non relat. Solutions joy substitutes can appear on the surface to be normal. Things like food, social media, and shopping. The more obvious pseudo joys are alcohol, drugs, sugar, and porn, low joy cultures, we’ll see an increase in these pseudo joy addictions increasing our joy will naturally calm our cravings for pseudo joys and building.

Should be an integrated part of any addiction group. Think about it. Some of us, we are struggling with sin and we think the solution is to get more miserable, but what if it’s to get more joyful? This is the answer of the gospel. Now, here’s a gr. There’s a great chance as we’ve been practicing Sabbath. I hope you haven’t felt the pressure of it being perfect these last couple weeks, but some of us have never experienced the fullness of.

Because we have stacked our day with pseudo joice that eventually leave us empty emptier than ever before. So what we need to do on this day is to delight in God Delighting a God is things like reading scripture, singing praise songs, pointing your gratitude to God. Like I love to delight in God by remembering his past faithfulness.

Like I like to look at my family and say Thank you. This is weird, but I like to remember my last, and I know I dogged it last week, but my last Disney World vacation, and I just play through all those great moments and go, thank you, God. Just finding joy and pointing it though to God and God alone.

It’s a really helpful practice. Now, delighting in God is foundational, but from that foundation we can also, number two, delight in. . So like I really I used to view Sabbath as a solo project, so I’ve been participating in Sabbath since about 20 18, 19 ish. I was not raised to do this, and so it’s still fairly new to me as well.

And, but the more I study it, it’s intensely communal and it’s very multi-generational. A friend of mine actually went to Israel a few years ago and participated in Shabbat. And he was shocked that the great grandmother was there with the great grandbaby and they were in community together too often of all people.

Us, we just think generationally, who’s my age, let’s hang out with them. But Sabbath is multi-generational. We’re actually really praying, we’re trying to figure out how to do this. We’re hoping it’s more natural that we don’t have to organize this ourselves as a church, but we really want you to create Sabbath.

I read this in a book subversive Sabbath by AJ Sobo, and he talks about getting three or four families together and you start Sabbath together every week. How cool would that be? And the other thing that was cool, he says, and if you have kids, maybe you have groups of a Sabbath community that has kids around the same age, and what you do is maybe on that next morning, You have all the kids go to one house and then those other three couples can go and just have a quick day date and you just rotate.

So the next week we’ll get the kids, we’ll make sure they don’t die. You guys have fun, right? That’s like the ultimate goal right there. And this is what we do. . So I think that’s really neat. Like it’s delighting in others. Delighting in the company that you have. There’s so much joy that me and my wife have found when we invite people over for Sabbath.

And that’s why I wanna really challenge you to practice denu at dinner. You’re gonna look at this in your together groups this week. This word denu is a Hebrew phrase, which literally means it would’ve been enough. But, so this was something they would say at Passover, and I think it’s something that we should all do at dinner for.

You’re at dinner and you’re with your community and you say you, you have, you take turns. Okay, I’ll go first. It would’ve been enough to have dinner, but God gave us dessert. Praise the Lord. Or it would’ve been enough to have friends, but God made you guys family. You see the rhythm here, it would’ve been enough.

This is already a blessing. But God, you outdid yourself and you gave us this. Blessing. This is how we can delight in God and also delight in others. There’s a in that book, the other half of church, that neuroscientist, he actually talks about joy is created from looking at someone face to face. So what I love to do at Danu at dinner is look at each other in the eye as we say.

Thanks. Another thing that I love to do, Jordan doesn’t know, but now she knows cuz she’s right here. I like to just stare at her on. And she’s what are you doing? Like the whole, just stop it, and we’re just like, just like still gazing in her face. It was just science. Apparently 10 seconds of gazing at each other.

Smiling creates like this real deep joy, right? What a beautiful thing to delight in. So here’s the thing, and here’s the pushback we get. Okay, that sounds great. Delight in God, delight in others, but what if my life is not good? What if we just had a major accident or tragedy or illness in our house, what do we do?

And the reality is this is why delight is a discipline. God is telling you. Even on those days, if it’s Sabbath, choose delight. Abraham Joshua Heshel. He is a rabbi wrote a really helpful book on the practice of Sabbath. He has this line. He says, the Sabbath is no time for personal anxiety or care for any activity that might dampen the spirit of joy.

The Sabbath is no time to remember sins, to confess, to repent, or even to pray for relief or anything we might need. It is a day for praise, not a day for petitions. Fasting. Morning demonstrations of grief are. The period of mourn is interrupted by the Sabbath, and if one visits the sick on the Sabbath, one should say it is the Sabbath one.

Must not complain. You will soon be cured. One must abstain from toil and strain on the seventh day, even from strain in the service of God. That’s hard, but much like a few years. Two years ago, me and my wife, we found out just before Christmas that we had a miscarriage and we had these jerseys made cuz it was our first boy and we were gonna share it with our whole family.

And so it was evident like, how can we be happy on Christmas day? This was supposed to be the day we told everyone we were having a boy, but we looked at each other and said, this is Christmas. Let’s just choose delight. Tomorrow we can stress about this and worry and cry, but what if today we just. And that was one of the best things we ever did.

Just enjoying that day for what it was, looking at what we had, and I think that’s what Sabbath is once a week. Choosing delight despite the circumstance. Let me keep going. Goodness. Number three, delight in creation. My preferred mode is biking. I like to just go out into creation. Thankfully my wife blessed me two days ago.

We went snow skiing. Boarding is for people in her twenties. Okay, I’ve moved on. So it’s all about snow skiing and we had an incredible time. So just enjoy creation. Get out, go on a walk, walk with your dog if you’re a dog person. Now also, I’m learning, I’m not now. Enjoy the creation of. Treat it as a holiday.

Get out the best plates. I would argue we should have dessert only once a week. And my whole group on Tuesday was like, no, stop talking. And I was like, okay, whatever. But a key idea is I’m learning about Sabbath is we cannot delight if we always indulge. How is it a delight if you do it every single?

Dessert loses its delight if you partake on it every night. Many Christians, they actually save the special meal, the special dessert just for Sabbath. Marva Don, she has this great line. She says, in general, Americans don’t know how to feast because they don’t know how to fast make that day special by actually restraining yourself the other day.

Now this is the last form of delight and I think it could be most challenging for us in the room. Number four is to delight in our. Now this sounds a bit sacrilegious, doesn’t it? For too long. I think we’ve assumed it’s faithful to call ourselves a piece of trash, but the Bible is pretty clear. You and I are made in the image of God.

God delights in you so much that he sent his only son to die on your behalf so you can be with him for eternity. Christ has redeemed us. We are his children. We have an inheritance. We are a new creation. And so I honestly think we can only delight in ourselves when we truly understand the gospel because of the blood of Christ.

God is pleased with me because of the blood of Christ. God is pleased with you. He delights in you. This might be a key line for you to think about and mull over Your vision of God’s delight in you shapes the version of your delight in.

maybe you haven’t been able to delight in him because you have not had a vision of how much God actually delights in you and he doesn’t worship you. That’s for God and God alone, but he finds so much joy with you, with your progress or lack thereof, right? Once we understand the gospel, I think we can learn to delight.

Where you are is okay to delight in who you. As I’ve been studying Sabbath, people actually discern their calling in life when they begin to Sabbath for a while, because Sabbath trains them to delight and actually look at themselves, not for all of their warts and their issues, but to recognize your passions and your skills.

And it’s just this sense of humility of wow, thank you God for making me this. And so it gives you a calling in life on Sabbath. I like to reflect with gratitude and praise God where I’ve been. And I think about, oh man, ugh, five years ago, Trey, worst person to be around, but thank you God, like a little better, thank you Lord, and just delighting on what God has done. And it’s not in you, but in what God has done. Now this week’s practice will be up formed by jesus.com/sabbath and we, what we really wanna do is just to challenge you to delight. If you do anything this week, we ask you just to participate by doing day inu at dinner, hopefully with the community.

But let me encourage you before we’re done, you will receive pushback. Delighting will be met with resistance. This is not. But it’s worth it. As I was processing thinking with God, what are the two reasons that I don’t delight the lie? Number one for me is, I’m too contaminated with sin, right? God, I’m not, I’m, I don’t deserve to be happy today cuz I’m not holy.

I’m not. I’m not there yet. I have so many issues and my issues have issues and God, you’re ashamed of me. How can I find joy today? I just need to repent and be so sad. Now there is a moment for repentance. Don’t hear me wrong, but also we have to recognize some of us. That’s not the voice of Christ.

That’s the voice of. That’s the spirit of condemnation, not of conviction and joy. The second reason I find it hard to delight, number one, I’m too contaminated with sin, but number two, I’m too inundated with suffering. Maybe for you finding it a struggle because you’re thinking, how can I be happy when I am hurting, or how can I be happy when they are hurting?

But the reality is in Christ. My sorrow is cared for by Jesus. I know that he loves me and he care. Me and he sees me in my suffering. Seven Corinthians one, it says, he is the father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles.

So let’s pray. Father, I just ask you that we would be a people who delight.

God I can’t think of anything more contradictory to our culture than a community of people who choose to Sabbath once a week. God let it be said of our church that we are acquainted with grief, and yet we are anointed with gratitude.