Sabbath Rest – Luke 6:1-11

Luke 6.1-11 – Study Guide

Introduction:

There are two types of vacationers in the world. Type one are what we’ll call the Free Spirits; the blissful wanderers who pack a bag, pick a spot, and say, “We’ll figure out the rest when we get there.” All they need is a beach, a bed, and a vague notion of eating something—someday. These are the folks who show up to the Grand Canyon and say, “Cool ditch.” They trust the universe to provide, and if it doesn’t… well there’s bound to be a gas-station hotdog somewhere.

The other type of vacationer is what we’ll call the Vacation Generals; the spreadsheet travelers who don’t just take a vacation—they conquer it. They have binders, with color coded tabs that read: “Optimal Sunscreen Application Timetable,” or “Approved Nap Duration Limits.” Every meal is preplanned, every attraction is scouted with the precision of the 75^th Ranger Regiment.

Which are you: a Free Spirit or a Vacation General? How much structure does a vacation need, and when does structure begin to cramp your ability to take a breather?

Raise the Need, State the Destination, Give Signposts:

Luke 6:1-11 isn’t about vacation. But it is about rest: a sabbath rest that we all desperately need. In this passage, Jesus debates and confronts the Pharisees—the Sabbath Generals if you will—because they had turned the gift of Sabbat rest into a life-draining burden. Our text for the sermon can be found on page ____.

Now, here is something for us. This morning we restarted Sunday School. This week many of your kids started the school year. The Fall routine is coming. And all of those things are wonderful blessings from the Lord, and we should commit ourselves to excelling at school, laboring at work, and managing our homes for God’s glory. And as we spend all that energy… we need to learn how to rest.

Luke 6:1-11 teaches us:

1. The Purpose of Rest
2. The Problems with Our Rest
3. The Person Who Is Our Rest

The Text

On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. ² But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” ³ And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: ⁴ how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” ⁵ And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

⁶ On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. ⁷ And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. ⁸ But he knew their thoughts, and he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come and stand here.” And he rose and stood there. ⁹ And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” ¹⁰ And after looking around at them all he said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” And he did so, and his hand was restored. ¹¹ But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.

1. THE PURPOSE OF REST

Notice, this passage is all about the Sabbath. What’s that? The Sabbath is a day that God sets apart for physical rest and worship that we need.

First, the Sabbath is about physical rest that we need.

In Genesis 1 you see that God created the entire universe in six days and rested on the seventh. So, the Bible says that the Sabbath pattern of rest was established by God.

Question: does God get tired? No. Then why did he rest? He established this pattern for us, his creatures. He’s infinite and needs no rest. We are finite. We need rest, food, water, shelter and a host of other necessities. We call this the creation ordinance of the Sabbath. Our need of rest, our need of Sabbath is not the result of sin or the Fall. God patterned this for us before Adam and Eve ever sinned. With me so far?

Second, the Sabbath is about worship.

The second passage we need to consider in the Old Testament is Exodus 20. God redeemed the children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt, brought them to himself, and gave them his Ten Commandments:

1. No Gods Before Me
2. You Shall Not Make any Images to Worship
3. You Shall Not Take My Name in Vain
4. Honor the Sabbath Day.

Later, in Deuteronomy 5:15, God restates the Ten Commandment and says, when you Sabbath, you are to remember that you once were slaves in Egypt, and I delivered you. The Sabbath is your reminder that I’m your deliverer.

So, the children of Israel worked every week beginning with the first day of the week, Sunday, until Friday night at Sundown. From Friday at Sundown through Saturday at Sundown, they Sabbathed. They ceased from all their work. They stopped plowing fields, roofing homes, writing code, doing their algebra homework.

The weekly Sabbath was a gift, reminding them of their physical limits and their need for God to be their Redeemer and Deliverer. This is the purpose of rest. It’s a weekly reminder of our weakness and our need for God.

2. THE PROBLEM WITH THEIR REST

Our passages tells about two different Sabbaths in which the Pharisees critiqued and criticized Jesus. Let’s talk about them one at a time.

First, in verses 1-4, Jesus and his disciples are walking through a grainfield on the Sabbath. As they walk through, a few disciples grab a handful of grain, rub it in their hands to remove the outer layer of chaff, toss the chaff aside, and munch on the grain as a snack.

² But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?”

Why are the Pharisees so upset? Why are they accusing Jesus of breaking the law? Here’s what you need to know. All the Law of God said was, “Don’t work on the Sabbath.” That’s it. Don’t work. Take a day off. Refresh your body, refresh your relationships. Worship God. Do whatever you want, just don’t work.

But over top of that law, the Pharisees had built an entire system of laws. In the Jewish Talmud there are 24 chapters of extra Sabbath laws. So, they said, it’s not lawful for a tailor to carry his needle. Nothing could be sold, bought, or washed. You can’t bathe because water might flow off of you and wash the floor. The Pharisees said you could not pull a grey hair on the sabbath because that was akin to reaping. Some of you have done a little reaping and some of you wish you could.

And when they Pharisees saw Jesus’ disciples eating grain on the Sabbath they were accusing them of breaking 4 of their own man-made laws.

1. Picking the grain was considered harvesting by the rabbis
2. Removing the chaff was considered threshing.
   3. Discarding the chaff was considered winnowing.
3. Easting was interpreted as food preparation.

Every mouthful puts them in violation of 4 rules.

Now here’s the bottom line: the problem is that the Pharisees had turned the gift of rest into work. God gave a free day of rest, and they added mountains of rules and burdens for the people to keep.

They turned rest into work. They turned a gift into guilt. They turned redemption into slavery. You see, what the Pharisees are really saying when they accuse Jesus of breaking the law is this: it would be better for you to starve than to break our rules.

Or consider the second story in verses 6-11. Jesus is teaching on the Sabbath, and a man is there with a withered hand. As the divine Son of God, he had the power to heal this man. But the Pharisees had a rule that doctors can only break the Sabbath to heal someone whose life is in danger. This man only has a withered hand. He had it yesterday. He’ll have it again tomorrow, and you can heal him then, thank you very much.

They loved their rules more than life. They loved their rules more than mercy. And Jesus in both cases says that works of necessity and works of mercy always trump the ceremonial rules of the law. Commentator James Edwards put it like this:

Where good needs to be done, there can be no neutrality; and failure to do the good is to contribute to evil. It is thus not simply permissible to heal on Sabbath, it is right to do so, whether “lawful” or not.

The error of the Pharisees was to make God’s law burdensome to the point that it dehumanized others.

3. THE PROBLEM WITH OUR REST

Now, the culture we live in does not share that error. We do not live in a culture primarily of legalism about sabbath keeping. And yet our culture has just as big a problem with rest as the Pharisees.

They turned rest into work. But our culture never rests. We never Sabbath. Think about this for a moment:

In our culture, it’s totally unnatural to cease working once a week. Working without ceasing is the way to get ahead. Not only do we not Sabbath, we elevate and promote those who refuse to rest. We incentivize the refusal to Sabbath.

Not only that, because our culture has lost sight of God, we turn our work into our God. We look to our work for the worth and justification that only God can give us.

We’re like the Olympic runner, Harold Abrams, in Chariots of Fire, who says, “In one hour, I’ll be on the starting line, looking down the track; 4 feet wide with 10 lonely seconds to justify my existence, but will I?”

Listen, I’m not saying you shouldn’t work hard and be diligent. I’m saying that when a culture rejects belief in God, something must fill that void, and for many it’s our work. That’s where we tap meaning. That’s where we satisfy the nagging suspicion that we haven’t earned our keep. And that’s why we can’t Sabbath. That’s why we can’t stop working. The moment you stop, your worth vanishes.

Remember what Rocky said in Rocky I? “I wanna go the distance. Then I’ll know I’m not a bum.”

And listen, a refusal to rest… a refusal to Sabbath is just as dehumanizing as the Pharisees forcing rules on the Sabbath. A refusal to Sabbath basically says, “I’m God. I don’t get tired. I don’t need to rest. I can provide for all my own needs through my endless effort.”

Our refusal to rest leads to the neglect of our physical and mental health. It leads to the exploitation of workers. So many of you have experienced this since the world went remote in 2020. You’re always on call. Smartphones and video conferencing has intruded into your homelife. You always have to appear busy even when you aren’t.

And we take this over-emphasis on work and force it on our children. They have no time to rest between school, band practice, music lessons, sports, dance, chess club, and crating content for their YouTube account.

Our work is our life and our life is our work. We don’t know where one ends and the other begins. One pastor said our culture worships our work, works at our play, and plays at our worship. We don’t know how to rest.

3. THE PERSON WHO IS OUR REST

Lastly, this passage shows us that Jesus Christ is not only the Lord who commands us to rest, he actually becomes the deep rest that we need. Let me show you what I mean.

First, he’s the Lord who commands us to rest. In the first story, he turns to the Pharisees and says, “I’m the Lord of the Sabbath.” In calling himself the Lord of the Sabbath he’s making a divine claim. He’s saying, “I’m the one through whom the worlds were made and I’m the one who sanctified the Sabbath in the beginning.” He’s saying, “Who do you think delivered Israel from Egypt and gave them the Sabbath law on Mount Sinai? That was me.” He’s saying, “I’m the great law giver. I’m the law interpreter. I decide that it’s ok for my disciples to feed themselves on the Sabbath and I decide that it honors God to heal on the Sabbath.”

Listen, he’s the Lord who commands us to rest. But he does more than command us to rest. Through his death and resurrection, he himself becomes our rest. What do I mean?

At the end of his life, Jesus Christ was crucified, we’re told, in order to do what the Law could never do. Romans 8:3 says:

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴ in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us

Jesus came to do what the Law could never do. He came to give us what the Law could never give us.

In Creation God established the pattern of physical rest in the Sabbath.

In Deuteronomy, God told Israel, “Sabbath, because I’ve delivered you from your Egyptian slavery.”

But there is a deeper Sabbath rest that we all need that only Jesus Christ can give us… we don’t just need rest from the physical labor of our jobs, or deliverance from physical slavery… we need to be delivered from the slavery of trusting in our own work.

At the cross, after living the perfect life we should have lived, and dying the death for sin we should have died, what were the last words of Jesus? He didn’t say, “I tried my best.” He said, “It is finished.”

To be a Christian means saying, “I no longer rest on my own work, I rest on Jesus Christ and his finished work in my place. My own work is no longer the ultimate measure of my life, Christ’s work is.”

You’ll never find the deep soul rest you need by taking a nap, or a vacation, or even by attending church on Sunday. The deep soul rest that you need is supplied by Christ and Christ alone, who through his cross and resurrection, becomes the very rest of God for your soul.

Now here’s something amazing… Jesus Christ was not raised on a Saturday, but on Sunday, and the first converts to Christianity were Jews who instantly shifted from Sabbath on Saturday to Sabbath on Sunday, and they no longer called it Sabbath. They began calling it “the Lord’s Day.” From Creation to the coming of Christ, the Sabbath was on the last day of the week, symbolizing that we work in order to rest. And from Chris to the end of this age we sabbath on the first day of the week symbolizing that we rest in Christ and because we rest in him first, then we can enter the week of work and labor. (O. Palmer Robertson)