This morning in Bible Study, we read the following passage from Isaiah 58:13-14:
If because of the sabbath, you turn your foot From doing your own pleasure on My holy day, And call the sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, And honor it, desisting from your own ways, From seeking your own pleasure And speaking your own word, Then you will take delight in the LORD, And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; And I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, For the mouth of the LORD has spoken. (NASB)
The Lord tells us that if we will refrain from seeking our own pleasures and speaking our own words; if we call the Sabbath a delight, then we are given a glorious promise. That promise is that we will then take delight in the Lord. We will ride on the heights of the earth. He will feed us with the heritage of Jacob. In other words, if we take time to sanctify the Sabbath, we will derive from the Lord a delight greater than any the world can offer us. Do you want to have great joy and pleasure? Then this passage tells us that if we will honor the Sabbath as God commands us, then we will have that joy available only in this sanctifying of the day. Let us delight in the Sabbath for in doing so we are delighting in the Lord of the Sabbath.
“This is real faith: believing and acting obediently regardless of circumstances or contrary to evidence. After all, if faith depended on visible evidence, it wouldn’t be faith. ‘We walk by faith, not by sight,’ the apostle Paul wrote.”
I see honoring the Lord’s Sabbath the same way - regardless of contrary evidence (the imagined joy of doing our own things) by faith we obey and are surprised by joy!
Left by Robin on June 15th, 2008