Deuteronomy 5:14 “On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey, or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do.”

From time to time I run into people who seem to believe the Lord must have had the biblically ignorant in mind when he gave the command to rest on the Sabbath. To them, church going is for small children who need to learn morals, or those few people who find worship and Bible study interesting for some unknown reason. The Lord himself disagrees. He impresses upon us that giving God a day is for all.

Giving God a day is for you, whoever you are. You are at the very top of God’s list of the kind of person who needs to take time off to pay attention to God. So am I. No matter how old we get, no matter how much we know, no matter how much we believe that we have it all together, this will never change: we will always be the kind of people God has in mind when he tells us to get some rest and go to worship.

So is everyone else we know. This is command is for your son or daughter. Now, convincing them of the “no work” part may not be much of a problem, at least when it comes to work around home. But whether they are little toddlers who scream like you were torturing them when you try to get them into Sunday clothes, and flop around like a fish out of water when you try to get them to sit still in the pew; or whether they are teenagers who cross their arms, roll their eyes, and “humph” at you when you insist that they come to church with you, God wants them in church on Sunday, too. Don’t relent parents. Don’t resist, kids. I know of no biblical exemptions for being too little, too cool, or too ornery.

God even expresses a concern for our neighbor. Servants and foreigners were to observe this day just like everyone else. It’s possible some cold-hearted soul might have reasoned that he could keep the commandment personally by not working, but avoid losing a day’s revenue by forcing his servants to do his work for him instead. Maybe he could get some foreigner to keep things going while he was taking his day off and going to the synagogue.

But don’t servants need rest and time to worship God as much as anyone else? Don’t those who are foreigners to the true faith need all the encouragements possible to find God at church? What was good for the master was good for the servant. What is good for the employer is good for the employee.

Many of you are aware that the founder of Chik-Fil-A® restaurants had this principle in mind when he decided none of his establishments would be open on Sunday. Few of us may believe that we are in a position to have a similar influence on a world that never wants to take a day off. Maybe we don’t have the power of a CEO of a major corporation. But what is preventing us from talking to our employers about the importance of having time off for God? What keeps us from using our influence with other Christian parents to confront the practice of scheduling our children’s athletics on Sunday mornings (in competition with worship, a practice that has spread like a cancer in our culture today)?

Giving God the attention due him is not for a select few “super saints.” Giving God a day is for all.

Deuteronomy 5:12-14 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 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…”

Does it seem incredible that God would find it necessary to give us a commandment telling us to take a day off and get some rest? Who doesn’t want to do that? And yet, we struggle to keep our work in its proper place in life. Sometimes we forget that work itself is good. We get tired of doing the same old thing in our dead-end job. We look for ways to get out of as many responsibilities as we can. Get-rich-quick schemes with their promise that we can be independently wealthy and never work another day in our lives begin to sound good to us. God’s good gift of work seems like a drag.

On the other hand, sometimes we give work too large a role in our lives. We become blinded by our thirst for success. It steadily climbs our life’s priority list, past our friends, past our children, past our spouse, and finally, past our God. We worship at the altar of the Almighty Career. We become irritated by other things and other people who demand our time, or we simply ignore them.

At other times, work may be merely the slave-driving archangel in service to other false gods in our lives. We become slaves to our work because we worship a false god called “Higher Standard of Living.” We won’t take time off because we are haunted by a frightening demon named, “Don’t Trust God to Provide.” We sacrifice our time to appease these gods and demons, and in the process sacrifice our relationships, our health, and ultimately our souls.

This is why God must confront us with a commandment. “Stop it!” he says. “Stop rushing through life like I don’t even exist. Give me a day. Put your work aside. Take some time for some rest.”

Of course, you and I don’t literally keep the Sabbath like God asked the Old Testament people to do. The Sabbath day was Saturday. After Jesus came, the Apostle Paul tells us the Sabbath days were like Jesus’ shadow, a long shadow when the sun is low in the sky, stretching way out ahead of him, telling us that Jesus was coming. Now that we can see Jesus himself, we don’t concentrate on his shadow anymore.  We are free to worship him on the day of our choosing, and the vast majority of Christians have chosen to make that day Sunday. If circumstances warranted, we could even choose a different day if we wanted.

But though the day has changed, God’s intent for us behind the Sabbath has not. We need time for rest. Your body takes quite a beating out there, with all the long hours of work it puts in, all the long years of stress and strain it has endured both on the job and at home. It needs some time to recover.

More importantly, our souls need a rest. We can pile up a large load of guilt in the course of a week. Every day your faith is put to the test in some way or another. Maybe one little frustration doesn’t shake your trust in God’s promises too severely, but the steady grind of bad news, failed plans, and painful losses wears on our trust in God. It strains the limits of our faith. We need Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

And so, while giving God a day is a commandment, something we do, at the end of this commandment God has hidden his gospel promise. We will always need forgiveness for our attitudes about giving God the time he deserves and we need, but God intends to use that time to give us just that forgiveness, and make this a day of rest for our souls.

Isaiah 42:3-4 “In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope.”

Why should Jesus be our only Savior? Simply put, he never fails. His brand of justice isn’t just a dream. It’s here. He has brought it forth. He has established it. Forgiveness of sins is real. God’s gracious acquittal of guilt has been secured by Jesus’ perfect life, innocent death, and glorious resurrection. It has all been accomplished with a certainty and finality that gives us confidence in all his other promises as well.

We even find ourselves mentioned in the words of this prophecy, “In his law the islands will put their hope.” The islands refer to those distant locations on earth which had no knowledge of God or his word in Isaiah’s day. Unless you have Jewish background, they refer to places where our ancestors lived–without hope, and without faith in God.

But the words of Jesus came to them, and they have come to us. They give us hope. Even when our life is at its worst, and the most miserable, they give us hope. Some people say that it does no good to preach to people about forgiveness and life while they suffer from hunger, or earthly injustice, or illness. But if we understand the gospel correctly, we know that it is just these people for whom it is intended. It gives us hope and sets us free in the midst of our hunger, and disease, and pain.

Just like his promises, Jesus’ justice never fails.

Isaiah 42:1-3 “I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”

If Jesus has come to bring justice to the nations, that might leave us a little bit concerned. You know as well as I do what a messed up world we live in. It seems as though the Middle East, the part of the world Jesus called home, will never experience peace. We consider our own system of government the best available, and yet lately it seems that even American democracy has become a hopeless mess.

The context of Isaiah helps us to understand that Jesus did not come to establish the kind of justice maintained by earthly governments. He did not come to give us better laws or enforce them more consistently.

Rather, Jesus came to bring the gracious rule of God’s kingdom to earth. He came to bring God’s brand of justice to all nations, justice in which every human being is condemned to death as a sinner, but then pardoned and set free because Jesus himself has served their death sentence with his own death on the cross. He has come to establish the kind of rule and order in the hearts of those who believe this. It doesn’t work by scaring them into obedience. It changes them from within, and sets them free, so that they want to do what is right. This is not the way any earthly justice system operates.

Jesus did all this, he does all this, without making himself a celebrity in the crude sense of the word. “He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets.” This is not to say that he did not teach or preach in public. But he refrained from making a public spectacle of himself. Though he performed miracles, so often he worked in private and asked others not to tell anyone. Instead of attending rallies and getting involved in protests and marches, he went to church and taught. He walked along the seashore and taught. He sat down on the hillside and taught.

You see, his message, and our message, is not about hype and show and making political statements. It’s not bullying others into behaving themselves. It’s about patiently teaching people the self-sacrificing love that Jesus has demonstrated for them. That can win their hearts to faith and make a lasting change in their lives.

Jesus’ gentle approach is highlighted in the verse which follows. “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” It is not hard for us to understand who the bruised reed or who the smoldering wick is. These are the people whose faith is fading fast. Morally, their life is becoming a mess. Spiritually, they are almost gone.

I don’t believe I am speaking only for myself when I say that we are tempted to think of such people as irritants. Maybe we would even like to get rid of them. Sometimes we would like to just get rid of We have no time for all the half-committed and fake Christians, those who don’t seem to care about God’s Kingdom or his word, who have wrapped their lives up in worldly things.

But Jesus doesn’t want to get rid of them. He wants to win them. That doesn’t mean he will let them live in their sins. But once their sin is confronted and they repent, he will share the promise of forgiveness. That heals the bruised reed and turns the smoldering wick into a blazing light once again. And that is a comfort for each one of us personally, because our own lights aren’t always shining so brightly, either.

Isaiah 42:1 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight.”

Do you know who is really speaking here? Isaiah wrote the words, but he was writing for God the Father in heaven. If you were a servant, you couldn’t ask for a better reference. And the servant to whom he is referring is Jesus.

That Jesus is a servant may not sound impressive to our modern ears. Servants are at the low end of the scale in both pay and prestige. In our culture not many people have the title “Servant,” but we may think of people in the “service” economy: the people who wait on us at restaurants or bag our groceries, the people who make minimum wage. Many regard such people as being at the lower end of society. For some, the idea of being someone else’s servant or slave even sounds belittling.

We are also inclined to skepticism about others serving us. When someone suddenly does something especially kind for you or me, we become suspicious. What do they want? What are they expecting in return? We have trouble believing that they don’t have some ulterior motive for doing us a favor.

But in the mouth of God the Father, the title “Servant” is both the highest compliment and an absolute certainty. One does not please God by trying to impress him with what an important and powerful person I am. God values humble submission. And Jesus came to do just that, not just to God the Father, but even to you and me. There were no ulterior motives. He genuinely loved us so much that made himself our servant, and he has served all of us in the humblest of ways—trading heavenly home for a corrupt creation, heavenly glory for earthly humanity, and heavenly throne for an uncomfortable cross.

For his service, no one has ever gained God’s approval the way Jesus has. The Lord describes him as “my chosen one in whom I delight.” You know that God the

Father has impossibly high standards when it comes to gaining his approval. Nothing less than sheer perfection qualifies. A single mistake, a single misstep, a single sin, and all is lost. As he says in the book of James, “Whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles at just one point, is guilty of breaking all of it.”

Yet God the Father finds nothing but delight in his Son Jesus Christ. We hear him repeat it at Jesus’ baptism, and later at his transfiguration, “This is my Son, whom I love, in whom I am well pleased.” This goes far beyond toleration or acceptance. You know the difference between those gifts you merely accepted this holiday season, and those that really got you excited and filled you with delight. God the Father looks at Jesus’ life of service, and it tickles him.  He is filled with delight by the pure, perfect love of Jesus’ ministry.

A more powerful reference cannot be requested by those who are looking for someone to fulfill the task of Savior.

Luke 2:21 “On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived.”

In the second commandment, God warns us to be careful about our use of his name. He intends to do more than prevent us from using it flippantly, for jokes or entertainment; or hurtfully, to vent our anger or frustration. He is also urging us to use his name in a way which pleases him and blesses us.

So it is that the Lord wanted the priests to use his name to bless the people in the Old Testament. In doing so they “put his name” upon them. So it is that Jesus sent his disciples into the world to make disciples by baptizing them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” So it is that Jesus invited us to bring our prayers to the Father “in Jesus’ name.”

The name Jesus means “The Lord saves.” What if we lived the entire coming year cognizant that Jesus is my Savior? What if we were ever conscious of who he is and what he has done? How would it change our lives?

On the one hand, we might go through this coming year truly aware of our sins, the reason we need saving. Why is it still so hard to admit them? Why don’t we take them seriously? We try to hide them, deny them, or pass the blame. It is still so painful to face the truth about ourselves.

In part, we are scared. We know what God thinks of sinners. In Psalm 5 David says, “You hate all who do wrong.” Paul reminds us in Galatians, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.” We still want to be thought of as good people on our own terms. It scares us to think we might be accepted any other way.

Then there is the matter of trust. We cling to certain sins because we deeply want them. We rationalize them. We deny they even qualify as sin. They make me feel good. By contrast, I’m not so sure how God feels about me. I’m not so sure I trust him when he tells me he has something better in mind.

But if we live this year in Jesus’ name, we can draw on its comfort. We can live each day aware that Jesus has lived as my Savior. We see this beginning at his circumcision.

Circumcision was part of God’s Old Testament law. Circumcision was a vivid reminder that God had made a covenant, a promise, to his people. He claimed them as his own. Circumcision was also a vivid reminder that sin begins at the very source of our life: it is passed from parent to child from the very time of our conception. Thus it must be cut away at its source. Even this original, inherited sin must be removed before we are acceptable to God.

Jesus had no personal need for circumcision. He was already chosen by God in a way which far surpassed that of any other human being. He needed no reminders of our sinful flesh and the need for its removal. He was sinless, because God was his only Father and he was born of a virgin.

But Jesus came to be our Savior. With his circumcision, he was saving us. He was keeping this law for us. Here he began to offer his heavenly Father the perfect obedience we owed. He did so in our place–as our substitute.

Live your year in Jesus’ name, and draw on this comfort: Jesus lived as your substitute. He lived as our Savior not only at his circumcision, but every single day he spent on earth. He still does. Everything he did–every breath he took, every movement he made–he did as our substitute. As you listen to the gospel lesson at church, or read it for yourself at home, take comfort! Jesus is doing all these things to save you. He is teaching the pure word of God, performing miracles of mercy, and loving people to make up for our failures.

Do you understand what peace will be yours this year if you begin, if you live your year in Jesus’ name–always aware that he is your Savior? We need not try to hide our sin in fear (though sincere sorrow is still in place). Jesus’ blood washes every sin away. Jesus’ holy life replaces our disobedient and rebellious lives. His holy life and innocent death is all the Father sees when he looks at you or me.

Doesn’t this also assure us we can trust God? We can conclude with Paul, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Everything our Savior tells us–whether identifying sins, giving us promises, or instructing us how to live–he tells us only because he loves us. Every hardship we endure happens for our good, because he is Jesus, the Savior, and this is our comfort.

It is all promised in the name he has been given.

Isaiah 51:4-5 “Listen to me, my people; hear me, my nation. The law will go out from me; my justice will become a light to the nations. My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation is on the way, and my arm will bring justice to the nations.”

God’s salvation comes from his system of justice, a system of justice unlike anything else the world has ever known. That is why he can say, “My justice will become a light to the nations.” In God’s justice system the judge is the one who serves the very sentence which he has passed on the criminal. The lawbreaker goes free. The judge is sentenced to death in his place. Poor lawbreakers like ourselves find a never ending source of pardon because our Judge became our Savior.

Jesus will be the one who returns someday to judge all people, but he first came to save them when he paid for our sins with his life. The fact that you and I will sin this coming year is more certain than death and taxes. The fact that all those sins will be forgiven, and all their guilt erased, is just as certain. Our only Judge has also become our Savior, and that promise gives us confidence for the new year.

But we don’t have to wait. We can enjoy the salvation God promises immediately. He continues, “My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation is on the way, and my arm will bring justice to the nations.” God forgave the children of Israel for their sins. He declared them not guilty, pure and spotless, though they had been nasty, guilty, and filthy with their sins.

God’s forgiveness for them was real, but the historical events that formed the foundation for that forgiveness were still waiting in the future. The time for the Savior was drawing near. It was on the way. But it had not yet arrived in time. In a sense, Old Testament Israel’s forgiveness was on credit. God’s promises to them were like his credit card, assuring them he would pay for all the forgiveness they were receiving now. The Lord repeats those promises here. He wants them to be sure that when he promises something, it is as good as done.

That same salvation and righteousness is near to us in the sense that it is already here.  This past Christmas we saw again how the Lord did send the Savior. He did pay the bill. We can confess with Simeon, “My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all people.” We not only have the confidence of God’s promise that he forgives our sins. We have the confidence of knowing how he did it. We see the promise fulfilled, and we can live in the confidence that Jesus is our living, present Savior every day.

God’s salvation lasts forever. His righteousness never fails. That is our greatest confidence for the year to come. Forgiveness of sins isn’t going to run out by spring. Grace won’t break down from years of too much use. Every time we go back and ask the Lord to take our sins away, he will do it. Every time. Every day we live, eternal life and a piece of real estate in heaven is our present possession. Every day. We have a promise, signed and sealed in Jesus’ blood, guaranteeing us it is so.

This is a good place to start celebrating the new year. These are really the only good things guaranteed in the year ahead. God still cares so much for his people. His salvation doesn’t change. Looks like a promising year.

Colossians 3:15“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.”

The peace of Christ is one of the more popular Christmas themes. “Peace on earth” the angels sang. But this is not the popular idea of peace. It’s not about getting our soldiers out of harm’s way overseas or getting our politicians to get along. In writing about “Peace on earth,” columnist Austin Bay recently told about a U.S. Marine Colonel serving in East Africa in 2005. He described his mission this way: “We’re involved in waging peace.” Conflict still troubles the region.

Fifteen years earlier, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a hippie retread challenged this same columnist on a college campus, “You write about wars, don’t you? With the end of the Cold War and so many people waging peace, you will have to write about something else, eh?” But her optimism for an end to war was short-lived. Within six months the Persian Gulf War began. The U.S. Marines’ approach to waging peace is still needed. We might share the hippie activist’s disappointment over the war and bloodshed, but it is not peace from such things the angels were singing about Christmas Eve.

It’s not what Paul was writing about in his letter to the Colossians, either. This is peace for the heart. This is peace between God and man. This is peace in knowing God loves me, he doesn’t hate me. This is peace in knowing God forgives me, he doesn’t condemn me. This peace is the relief of knowing that with God on my side, nothing can truly harm me, even if I am stuck in the middle of a war, or in the grip of poverty, or in the clutches of death itself.

When God’s grace in Christ has made our hearts so new, and given us such peace, then we are enabled to live at peace with others who share that peace, “since as members of one body you were called to peace.” Once this peace lives in our hearts, it rules them. The word Paul uses for “rules” is a sports term. It is the work of an umpire or a referee. Such officials keep the game from getting out of control, and God’s peace in our hearts has the same effect on us. It settles us and calms us and in a gentle way. It keeps us under control so that we can live at peace with others.

God’s love and peace naturally lead us to the next of Paul’s encouragements: “And be thankful.” Regardless of how many gifts were under your tree, or how plump your Christmas goose was, you and I have countless reasons to be thankful. The spiritual and eternal blessings of the Savior born in Bethlehem defy enumeration. Their value can’t be measured. Even an honest inventory of our earthly blessings reveals that the good things God has given us in our bodies, our possessions, and our world, far outweigh the bad. All the Lord’s goodness makes it possible for us to be thankful.

And doesn’t such a thankful attitude change our lives for the better? Isn’t hard to feel sorry for yourself when you are praising God for his gifts and graces? Isn’t it hard to be depressed when the Lord has opened our eyes to all the ways in which he has blessed us? Doesn’t he fill us with contentment when we take time to thank him for the many good things we enjoy? In yet another way we see God’s peace ruling our hearts by transforming the lives of those who have discovered his grace.

Jesus came to wage God’s peace on earth. Let his peace with you rule your heart.

Isaiah 9:6 – “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Perhaps when you were growing up you had a friend you called the “King” of something. He was the “King of homers” on your sandlot team, or the “King of climbing” in the trees in your neighborhood, or the “King of catching frogs, or bugs, or salamanders,” or whatever else the local wildlife offered. He wasn’t literally royalty, but he was the best at what he did.

Isaiah describes our Savior as the “Prince of Peace.” Jesus is not merely a prince in a metaphorical sense, like the “kings” just mentioned. If anyone can be called royalty it is Jesus Christ: a real life Son of King David according to his human nature, and the ruler and master of all the universe in his divinity.

Prince of Peace describes him like it describes no one else. Jesus epitomizes peace. Look at how he carried out his work. When he comes into our world, he comes into what C.S. Lewis once described as enemy occupied territory. Our sin and Satan’s dirty work make this a harsh and hostile place even for us. For the Son of God, coming to reclaim what is rightfully his from a world in rebellion, it is a downright hateful and dangerous place. John said of his coming, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”

How, then, does he come? With an army of gun-toting secret service agents? Protected by an armored personnel carrier? Preceded by an extended air strike and barrage of artillery to take out the enemy’s front lines? No, he comes as a weak, helpless little baby. He becomes the child of a rather ordinary Jewish family. We sense no hostility toward this world in his birth. For his part, everything about it speaks of peace.

And we who know the other end of this life–what do we see there? When our Prince is battling death and defeating hell for us, does he look like he is fighting? Do we sense him lashing out at his enemies through his trial, his sufferings, and his crucifixion? Isn’t he rather astoundingly passive, even forgiving the soldiers who nail him to the cross? He is the Prince of Peace even when the last battle to free us from our sins is being fought, especially when the last battle to free us from our sins is being fought. He peacefully surrenders his life and dies.

We know this peace from yet another of his conquests, one much closer to you and me. He has also won the battle for our hearts. How did he do it? We weren’t converted to faith in Jesus at gunpoint. Someone may have shared very convincing, very persuasive arguments in favor of the Christian faith along the way, but our faith doesn’t rest on logical arguments alone. How did the Prince of Peace win the battle that battle?

Have we not been overwhelmed by his love and grace, like the love and grace at the center of the sweet story of Jesus’ birth? The wonder of Jesus’ birth is not so much found in the miraculous elements that surround it, true as they are, but that the Lord of all the universe should care enough about us mortals to take our flesh and share our woes. Here, as one theologian put it, “I find a beautiful thing I want to believe, not just something I am told I must fight to defend.” True to his nature, the Prince of Peace has overcome our unbelief, not so much with an act of raw power or a violent assault on our resistance. Rather, this self-emptying of God to save us so consoled us and comforted us that we quite literally can’t help ourselves. We fall into God’s loving arms in faith. It is by the preaching of peace that he has made us his own.

That same peace pervades the kingdom into which he has led us. There is only one place on earth where real peace can be found. It isn’t a destination on any major airline or port of call for any cruise ship. It is the kingdom of the Son God loves. It crosses every border and transcends every division. Within this kingdom people of the most dissimilar cultures separated by the most ancient hatreds or prejudices are united as one. There is nothing else like it on earth. The Apostle Paul describes the peace Jew and Gentile once found under our Prince like this. “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.”

Such peace is not a faded phenomenon of the First Century A.D. Especially at Christmas one hears incredible stories of Union and Confederate soldiers worshiping together on Christmas Eve during the Civil War, or French and German soldiers worshiping together at Christmas during WW I. Men who were sworn enemies and bound to kill as many of each other as they possibly could by day were drawn together by a higher government and a peace which transcended their wars. Their peace was, for the most part, an invisible one, coming as it did from the invisible kingdom to which they belonged, but it was far more real and powerful than any brokered peace this world has ever known. This is because it flowed from peace with God in the forgiveness of sins, a peace which still unites God’s people today, though often they cannot recognize each other across the more visible divides.

Many other words could describe the nature of our Savior and his work: joy, righteousness, grace, or love. But none is more clearly proclaimed to us in the Christmas Gospel than this one we have from Isaiah’s inspired pen: Jesus is the Prince of Peace.