The Sabbath: A Sermon

by John Warton

Nevertheless, if God himself had said nothing about it, it would have been the duty of man, the rational creature of God, and indebted to God for so many blessings—for so many noble powers and faculties, to have set apart some portion of the time which God gave him to the especial honour of the bountiful Giver—to have employed that time solely in thanking him for his precious gifts and his gracious providence—in meditating upon his glorious perfections and his marvellous works—and in serving and worshipping him by all other means, with such peculiar, extraordinary tokens of love, and gratitude, and veneration, as would not have been possible, or not suitable, at every time, and in every place; but only at the appointed time, and in some appointed place.

This, I say, would have been the duty of man, if left entirely to the use of his own reason. But no individual could have determined for himself, and still less were all men likely to agree with each other, what the portion of time to be set apart for this purpose should be; how much the beneficent Author of their being, and of all their enjoyments, would expect of them to consecrate to him; and how often the consecrated time should return, so as to please God, and draw down from above his further blessings upon them.

This, then, which we should have been quite unable to decide for ourselves, God has decided for us. He has himself, in his infinite wisdom, determined what is fit and proper both for us and for him. He has not put us under the necessity of reasoning upon so important a matter at all; from the very beginning He appointed it for an everlasting law, that the portion of time to be dedicated to his especial service and worship should be one day out of every seven days: that six successive days should be ours for labour of body and of mind, and for all the needful business of this present life; that the seventh day should be his, for a holy rest unto the Lord—for celebrating his wondrous works—and for a more quiet, undisturbed consideration of our own immortal concerns, and all the spiritual business of the life which is to come hereafter.

But the seventh day, then, if we will use it thus, is ours as well as his; it is ours more than all the six which go before: it is ours in its own sublime, peculiar sense, to give us a foretaste of eternity by withdrawing us from temporal things; in short, it is one of the best gifts of God to man. O taste and see how gracious the Lord is! The Sabbath is to his own glory; but what would man be without it? The most wretched of beings in every way; worn out before his usual allotted time with unintermitted toils; brought down to the grave by a premature old age and decay; and, what is still worse for him, with diminished hopes of happiness in another and a better world. The Sabbath, thanks be to God! brings with it, if we will, a sweet, a tranquil, a refreshing rest: it repairs and renews the languishing, the broken powers of body and of mind; it sends us forth again to our duties on the following day with new strength, and a new spirit, more adequate to the performance of them; cheerfulness sits upon our brow, instead of a perpetual gloom; health, instead of the sad hue of a thousand maladies, which never-ending, never-pausing labour must have necessarily produced. And if the Sabbath has been spent as God intends that it should be spent, no small advance has been made towards some happy mansion in our eternal abode. We have heard, we have read, we have thought much about our blessed Redeemer—about our own salvation—about the bliss and glory of heaven. We have put ourselves into every way, private and public, of receiving every grace of which we stand in need, and which God, through Christ, has promised to bestow. We have prayed more at home than the business of the world will permit us to do on any other day; we have assembled in the church, as often as the church was open, to receive the mercies to which we are entitled, by God’s gift, only as we are members of the church; we have confessed our sins there with bended knees and a penitent heart; we have said with heartfelt thankfulness, “Amen,” to the covenanted pardon of God announced by the minister of Christ; we have partaken of all the divine ordinances blameless; if the holy table was decked, we have feasted upon the heavenly banquet of our great Saviour’s body and blood. These have been the holy deeds of the well-spent day; and holy deeds like these will qualify us for the rewards of eternity, if, under the continued influence of the Holy Spirit, encouraging, strengthening, and sanctifying us, we persevere unshaken in the same course to the end. The Sabbath-day, then, is ours more especially; God, in consecrating and hallowing it to himself, has done so to our present and eternal profit. By means of it we perform the better all the business of men, all the business of Christians, all the business of those who aspire to heaven.

Now, there can be no doubt, but that God, being infinitely wise, and also most intimately acquainted with the peculiar wants and infirmities, and with the whole nature of man, whom he himself created, and upon whom he bestowed what nature he pleased, foreknew, and therefore decided from the very first, that one-seventh of man’s time was necessary to be, and consequently should be, released from labour, and devoted to a holy rest. But the way which he took to show this to us, and to give us, at the same time, an awful and striking sense of it, is perhaps one of the most wonderful instances of all the wonders of his providential care of us. He himself, in his mighty work of the creation of this world, tasked himself to a six-days’ labour, and rested on the seventh day, in order that man, following his example, might use the same proportion of labour and rest.

And this He has told us in his holy word; He has not left it to us to find it out by our own reason; He has informed us himself. It had been easy for him, for Omnipotence, surely, to have made the world, and all the creatures that fill, diversify, and adorn it, in a single day; nay, in a single hour; yes, truly, in a single minute. As He said, “let there be light, and there was light;” so He had only to say, “let there be a world,” and there would have been a world. In a single instant of time, in the very twinkling of an eye, all the miracles of creation that are visible to us, and all that are invisible, beyond the ken even of our imagination, at the Divine fiat, at the simple sound of the omnific word, would have sprung into existence at once, and into all the well-being, order, and harmony, by which all things will consist, in the same beauty and perfection, unto the end. But then there would have been nothing in such a proceeding for the moral instruction, or for the temporal and eternal benefit of men. He set bounds, therefore, to his own boundless power; He reduced infinite down to finite; He controlled his own almighty energies, and ordered his work, a whole world, so as to finish it in six days; He knew that a seventh day of rest was needful for man; and, therefore, He bestowed it upon him as a merciful boon, secured to him indefeasibly for ever by the express pattern of his own doings, and by the positive command to copy that pattern throughout all ages.

Now let us see, then, how we stand as Christians. Do you think it likely, however, that so merciful a religion, as that of Christ, should take this merciful ordinance of the Sabbath from us? Do you think it likely that the same God, who, under the law, ordained a Sabbath, even for the miserable brute creation, that the poor cattle might rest from their labours as well as their rich owners, should abolish it under the gospel? Of all incredible things this would be the most incredible, that God should care so much for beasts, which perish, as to provide them a temporary repose from bodily toil, and none for man, who has an immortal soul to be saved, or lost, for ever; after having redeemed him, too, by the most astonishing method of the sacrifice of his own beloved Son. O they of little faith, who reason thus! But, blessed be God! it is not so. As Christians, we are still the posterity of Adam; and, if we partake, alas! of all the evils that sprung from Adam, at least we partake of this one benefit. Sin has not deprived us of it, but made it the more necessary for us. Again, as Christians, we are not indeed the posterity of Abraham, according to the flesh; and, therefore, we are not necessarily under any part of the law given to the Jews; except it might have pleased the Author and Finisher of our faith to adopt any part of it into his gospel. But this he most clearly did with respect to the ten commandments, of which the hallowing of the Sabbath is one. He fulfilled and abolished every thing ceremonial, which concerned the Jews only; he retained, and gave a new force and sanctity to every thing moral, which concerns all mankind; and, without doubt, it is in every view a moral duty, that the thing made should worship the great Maker, on solemn days, which shall often return—that they should return, as they do, on every seventh day, we owe to God’s gracious providence. “The Sabbath,” as our Lord beautifully and mercifully said, “was made for man;” and, consequently, whilst man remains upon this earth, a stranger and a pilgrim, travelling along a weary, rugged road, towards some better country in the distant prospect before him, the Sabbath too remains; on the authority of our blessed Saviour it remains, to refresh us all on our journey; to support and comfort us under the fatigue of it; and to cheer us with the thought of the everlasting Sabbath in heaven, of which it is the type and the shadow.

And this it does the more effectually, because we Christians keep our Sabbath on our own Lord’s day. The Jews keep theirs on the day of their wonderful deliverance from bondage in Egypt; and very properly. But their deliverance from bondage in Egypt was the type and shadow of our grander deliverance from the bondage of sin and death; which deliverance was then most evidently and undeniably accomplished, when our Saviour triumphed openly over both, by rising from the grave, alive and victorious. Well do we call the first day of the week, the revered day on which he did it, the Lord’s day; and well have all Christians ever since, assured of their redemption by his resurrection on that day, consecrated and hallowed it for their Sabbath for ever. So that now all the reasons which could ever have operated amongst mankind for the keeping of a Sabbath, and still more reasons, operate upon us Christians. We keep one day in seven in memory of the creation, as the rest of men should do; but we keep that day, in preference to all others, which reminds us, more forcibly than any other, of our second creation; of our being begotten again to a new life; of our more interesting creation in true righteousness and holiness, after having fallen from the divine image of the holy Creator himself. And, as our sacred religion is founded upon the religion of the Jews, and was shadowed out and prefigured by it, we are naturally led from the antitype to the type; from the thing prefigured and shadowed out to the thing prefiguring and shadowing it; and we look back with reverence to the Jewish Sabbath, so awfully and terrifically appointed, which commemorated on a chosen day a great temporal deliverance of theirs, prefiguring a still greater spiritual deliverance of ours.

What shall we now say, then, my beloved, Christian brethren? Shall we not remember the Sabbath-day, to keep it holy? And how shall we keep it holy, if we employ ourselves on that, as on other days? “The Sabbath was made for man;” but how was it made for him, if he labours, as on the other six days; if he pursues the same worldly objects, and torments himself with the same anxious cares; if he chooses this very day for his journies; for his pleasures; nay, even for his vices; and aggravates every sin by the abuse of that which was intended to heal it; to give him time and repose for self-examination; and to enable him the better to make up the solemn account of every action, word, and thought, between himself and God?

God blessed the Sabbath-day, and sanctified it for his own glory; but how does it promote his glory, whilst the generality of his faithless, ungrateful people, even in this Christian nation, never enter his sacred courts on that day, to give him the honour due unto his name in the presence of their fellow-men. And “shall I not visit for this, saith the Lord?” Much, indeed, very much is it to be feared, that he will visit, with some terrible calamity too, and soon also, this country of ours, so dear to us all, so much our boast and pride, which he has hitherto guarded with an extraordinary protection, and exalted above other nations with unparalleled renown and power. The breach, the dishonouring of his Sabbaths, he will keenly resent, and unsparingly avenge. What he denounced to the Jews should perpetually sound in our ears—“Verily my Sabbaths shall ye keep for a perpetual covenant; they are a sign between me and you throughout your generations for ever; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you. They are holy unto you; every one that defileth them shall surely be put to death.” It is a despite done to God himself, directly and personally; it is a scorn both of his majesty and his goodness, which cannot but provoke him to consume the guilty in his wrath.