Exodus 20:8-11 ESV
“Remember the Sabbath day,
to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the
seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work,
you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant,
or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days
the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on
the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
- Close
out all tradeoffs of the eternal for the temporal. God has created us for a purpose to bring glory to Him.
One of the areas that we are to glorify God is in the profession
(employment) that He has called us. It is just as high and important to
call by God to be a garbage man as a pastor of a local body of believers.
He has also given us a creation to enjoy with the purpose of giving Him
glory individually, family and corporately. Like all other areas of our
lives our sinful natures will take something good and make it evil by our
heart and actions. When God created the worlds in six complete 24 hour
days, He set aside the seventh to rest (Sabbath) He set the example for us
the priority of work is not a 24/7 exercise of our lives. I coined a
phrase a few years back that got me in trouble with a portion of our
church congregation. The term was vocational adultery. The
belief that one can be so engaged in the pursuit of a career, and/or money
that family, church and worse God are neglected. God's purpose for the
Sabbath was to force us to remember that our time on earth is limited and
to spend time on careers, pleasures, or other human pursuits at the
exclusion to worship of God individually and corporately was and still is
a bad trade off.
- Do you willingly and even look forward to working in a
constant overtime situation that keeps you and family from consistent
corporate worship?
- Do you engage yourself and family members
into activities that are scheduled regularly at the times of
corporate worship.
- Do you make an effort to ask and seek for time off to
corporate worship if you work a job that does schedule you during
corporate worship?
- Does it genuinely ache in your heart when you are forced by your profession to work during corporate worship?
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