Mark 3:1 “Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath.”

If you know anything about the Pharisees, you probably see the issue for them here already. Healing people is doctor’s work. The Sabbath law forbids people to work. From their point of view, it was better to let this man live another day with a crippled hand. That would be the obedient thing to do. That (they thought) would make God happy. It was better to do nothing, to let this man continue to suffer, than to do medical work on the Sabbath.

Jesus frames the question another way. “Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’ Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent.” Have you ever heard of a sin of omission? It’s a sin in which we “do nothing.” We fail to show love to our neighbor who needs it. Sometimes, even doing nothing is doing something. It is sinning against my neighbor, who needs me to reach out and love him. It is an evil work for which God may judge me.

If God were going to set aside a certain day a week for focusing on his grace, a day for nurturing our relationship with him, what kind of behavior do you suppose he would be expecting? What would he want his people to do? To use Jesus’ words, would he want us “to do good, or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” Would he want us to help our neighbor or neglect him? No one answered Jesus’ question, but there is only one way to answer it. The Lord of the Sabbath wants his day, and every day, to be a day for doing good, not for doing nothing.

So Jesus healed the man. “He looked around at them in anger, and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.”

The Sabbath laws don’t apply to us in quite the same way they did in Jesus’ day. We usually worship on a Sunday, not a Saturday, to honor Jesus’ resurrection. It is a matter of New Testament freedom. We are free to choose our day of worship, though not free to neglect worship altogether. Here are a few take-aways from Jesus’ teaching about the Sabbath.

One, God’s laws are never arbitrary rules. They never hurt us. They always bless us and benefit us in some way. If they ever involve pain, that is due to our sin-sickness, not to God’s law. What God said about “honor your father and mother” could apply to all his commands, “…that it may go well with you and you may enjoy a long life on the earth.” Any application of God’s laws that gets in the way of our genuine, spiritual well-being and love for our neighbor must have problems with it somewhere.

Two, we will always make applications of the Bible to our current lives, but we need to be careful not to lift our applications so high that we put them on the same level as God’s own commands. There are many ways to love your children, your spouse, or your neighbor, but they won’t be the same for everyone. Whatever we do, the important thing is that we love God and our neighbor.

Three, thinking God is pleased with us because we are so skilled at keeping his law always gets us into spiritual trouble. It turns us into legalists. It makes us more concerned about external correctness than love for others. It substitutes personal performance for trust and love as the heart of our relationship with God. It is the reason the Pharisees could obsess about living the right way and completely neglect people who needed their help or sympathy. An honest comparison of our lives with God’s law always exposes our sinful shortcomings. An honest comparison of our lives with God’s law always leads us to see that we need Jesus.

Four, Jesus is the Son of Man, the Lord of the Sabbath. He is the God who established a day of rest. But more than that, he is the God who invites us to come to him and find our rest. He has carried our sin-burden, taken responsibility for our guilt, as though he was the one who committed our sins. He has paid the penalty for our sins and set us free from the debt we owed. There is nothing more for us to do for God to love and forgive us. In Jesus, we find rest for our souls.

Rest for our souls: more than anything, that is what the Lord of the Sabbath wants.

Mark 2:23-26 “One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath? He answered, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for the priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’”

The Pharisees reaction may seem odd to us. It’s not that they believed the disciples were “stealing” this grain. The law of Moses allowed you to take a little meal’s worth of grain from the edges of the field next to the road. In 30 A.D. there weren’t truck stops at every exit along the road with overcooked hotdogs and bags of chips inside. Part of being a member of God’s nation was letting your neighbor get a bite to eat at the edge of your field. It was considered godly hospitality. The next time you were traveling, you might want to borrow a few bites of barley from someone’s else’s field.

The issue for the Pharisees was, “Aren’t the disciples sinning by working on the Sabbath?” You may know that the Pharisees had added 613 of their own laws to God’s commandments. We might call them “applications.” God had framed the Sabbath in simple terms in the Bible. Take a day of rest. Everybody gets a day off work, even mom in the kitchen. Use the time, at least some of it, to get together for worship. That was as much as the Lord had to say on the topic.

Years later, the Pharisees added their official “applications” so that people would know how to keep God’s law. Since the Bible didn’t define “work,” the Pharisees defined it for you. If you carried a teaspoon full of grain back to your house from a field, that was small enough not to be considered work. But any more than that would be considered sinful harvesting on the Sabbath. You could eat a radish on the Sabbath, but you were warned against dipping it in salt, because if you left it in the salt too long that could be pickling the radish, and pickling was considered work. You could spit on a rock on the Sabbath, but you weren’t supposed to spit on the dirt, because that made mud, and mud was used as mortar for bricks, and making mortar for bricks was considered work. I’m not making this stuff up.

If you asked the Pharisees, “Why did the Lord give us the Sabbath?” they would answer, “So that we can keep God happy with us by what we do.” The more careful you were, the more you deprived yourself for him, the better they believed your relationship with God to be. As they saw it, after the first mouthful of grain or so, the disciples were over the line into sinful harvesting of that field. They were breaking the Sabbath.

Jesus saw things differently. He doesn’t argue about silly definitions of “work.” He doesn’t bring up the Sabbath at all. He objects to the Pharisees’ concept of how God’s law works. The law was not meant to make you hungry, or keep you away from life’s necessities. It wasn’t God’s method for inflicting pain.

When David and his fighting men showed up at God’s house without any food, the priest didn’t send them away hungry. He shared the special bread with them. This isn’t what the law said to do. And David and his men would not likely have starved in a single day. But the priest understood what the law was supposed to do: provide food for the priests. He also understood what it was not supposed to do: prevent other people from having food. So he was not condemned for giving David the bread.

This is why Jesus frames the issue this way: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath was intended to give tired bodies a day of much needed rest. More than that, it provided rest for the souls of God’s people and nurtured their relationship with him.

Even in the Old Testament, when God’s people gathered for worship and read Moses, they heard about the Lord, the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. They sang in the psalms about the God who does not treat us as our sins deserve. As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our sins from us. The word of the prophets pointed them to the coming Messiah, who would be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. By his wounds we are healed.

This is the same Jesus we gather to worship today. We do not go to church to try to impress him. We go to receive his forgiveness and grace. Sunday may be a different day on the weekly calendar than the Sabbath, but it is still a day when the Lord of the Sabbath supplies our soul’s true need.

John 17:17-18 “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

“Sanctify” is one of those five-dollar theological words that even Christians often don’t understand. “To make holy” is a basic definition, but “holy” means so much more than “moral” or “pure” or “lacking sin.”

When God makes something holy, he sets it apart for his special possession and use. We Christians are sanctified only because we are justified. By his perfect life and innocent death on the cross Jesus removed the sin that stood between us and God. He wiped our sin off our record so that God wouldn’t have reason to keep us away and condemn us. Jesus opened the way for us to belong to God once again by purchasing our forgiveness with the sacrifice of himself in our place.

God actually took possession of us personally when he called us to faith. Only one tool could make that happen, to turn us from unbelief to belief, to change us from people who were afraid of God, or resented him, or found him distasteful and unappealing, into people who trust him with our whole heart and soul. Logical arguments and the best of human science and research can’t do it. Great big entertainment spectacles and overwhelming emotional appeals can’t do it. Careful application of sociological principles and clever marketing can’t do it.

“Sanctify them by the truth,” Jesus says. “Your word is truth.” God’s words on a page, or preached from a pulpit, or wedded to water, wheat, and wine are the one thing that have the power to make us his own or keep us his own. When God has us, when our hearts belong to him, we are his personal possession because we have faith. Then we are not only justified, guilt-free, forgiven children of God. We are sanctified, holy children of God set apart from the world that does not believe what we believe or love the Savior that we love.

And God has set us apart for his possession and special use. “As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” Jesus prayer for you here, or God’s answer to it, give your life meaning and purpose. You have a mission, Christian. This is why Jesus said earlier, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world.” That would certainly make us safe, if God simply took us out of this world.

But then who would show your neighbors what living as a Christian really looks like–not sinless perfection or super-human niceness, but humble admission of our brokenness and genuine appreciation for God’s forgiving grace? Who would invite them to come and see what Jesus has done for them? Who would raise our children and pass the word on to the next generation? Who would pray for missionaries and bring the offerings that make it possible for us to send them? How could a lost world be found? How would we have ever been found?

Jesus prays for us to be set apart, to be sanctified, so that he can send us just as he was sent. That means that your faith and service is the answer to Jesus’ prayers.

John 17:14-15 “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.”

Hate is a strong word. Does the world really hate those who follow Jesus? Doesn’t it announce its respect for Jesus as a friend to the poor, and the outcast, and the morally questionable? Doesn’t it love to quote Jesus, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” or “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone?”

Don’t be fooled. When the Washington Post asked a Harvard professor if faith groups were too absent in the war on poverty, he stated that organized religion has been using all their resources on issues regarding sexual morality. “This is the most obvious point in the world.” It’s true, Christians are concerned about sexual morals. But what Christian institutions spend on fighting poverty dwarfs what is spent on morality. If just one Christian charity, World Vision, were a country (not a charity but a country), its spending on poverty would rank it twelfth in the world. What that one charity spends fighting poverty is about 10 times all the donations to all the pro-life or pro-family organizations in the country.

When this was pointed out in a response to the Washington Post, one commenter replied, “Yes, but evangelical Christians often expect the people they help to listen to their message.” The nerve of those Christians–telling the people they help that God loves them and sent Jesus to pay for all their sins! The world hates us for the word Jesus has given us, whether his word defining right and wrong, or the word that asks us to believe we are sinners saved by God’s grace.

So Jesus prays for our safety, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” Sometimes being a Christian can be physically dangerous. You know how Jesus’ 12 disciples ended up. Only one died a natural death. I know a Christian woman who had a husband so jealous of our faith that he mocked her as “Mrs. Jesus” for years. He eventually became violent because she spent an hour or two in church each week.

But Jesus’ prayer is really more for the safety of our souls. “Protect them from the evil one.” If the devil can’t lure us to his side with his bribes; if he can’t entice us with promises of pleasure; then he wants to intimidate us with his threats. He is the prince of this world, after all. He has more people on his side than on Christ’s. Christianity may be the biggest world religion, but it is still embraced by less than a third of the world’s inhabitants. The number of Christians in the land where we live grows steadily smaller every year.

So being a Christian is going to cost you. To part of the world you appear stupid and naive, believing the nonsense about morals, and an all-powerful Spirit in the sky whom atheist Richard Dawkins ridicules as “the flying spaghetti monster.” To an ever growing part of the world you are a hater, a bigot, for believing what you do about good behavior, or believing that Jesus is the only way to heaven.

So Jesus prays for you. He prays for your safety, to protect you from the evil one. He is praying for your faith, your salvation, your eternity, your relationship with him.

About 30 years ago a young pastor came to his first wedding rehearsal blissfully ignorant of what awaited him. He had poured himself all week into crafting the best sermon for the couple he could manage. Then the wedding party arrived. In a few minutes it became clear that mothers on both sides had their own agenda. The order of things in the ceremony was all wrong. The positioning of the bridesmaids and groomsmen was all wrong. The bridesmaids should pause after each step. No, the bridesmaids should pick up the pace. On it went. It was exhausting.

Criticisms about the service and the sermon found their way back to the pastor even before the reception was over. Feeling weary and defeated, he dragged back into his office about 9 p.m. Saturday night knowing he still had a long night ahead of him. He still had to write a sermon. On his desk was a card with some Bible passages and a note from the soloist: “Pastor, last night at the rehearsal I realized how hard it must be to be the new kid on the block. I just want you to know that I appreciate all your work and that I’m praying for you.” Someone cared and was praying for him. It was like a long, cool drink of water in a dry and parched desert.

Do people ever tell you they are praying for you? It’s always appreciated, but sometimes their words may not strike us as a deeply moving, desperately needed message. All the same, there may be few greater ways to express genuine love for each other.

The greatest expression of Jesus’ love comes from the cross and the empty tomb. But in Jesus’ prayers for us we find another little gospel gem. We know he loves you and me, because Jesus prays for us. He prays for our protection from the haters set on destroying our souls.

Acts 4:34-35 “There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”

These early Christians were certainly unselfish. They shared what they had with each other. These words take that a step further. They took what they had and they gave.

Giving is a prickly topic around church for some people. They think churches talk about it too much. A man who attended my last congregation told me that when he and his wife were shopping for a church over 60 years ago, the message was always the same no matter where they went. “Be good and give money.” Then they heard the pastor at my church preach, and the message was about Jesus. They thought that maybe it was just an accident, so they came back to hear him preach again, and the message was still about Jesus. So he and his wife joined the church.

Still, sometimes we have to say something about giving, and the church in Jerusalem gives us a great example. You often hear Christian people talk about tithing. The Old Testament standard of 10 percent can serve as a good guideline for Christian giving. But it can also limit people in their giving unnecessarily. And if people are merely keeping a rule, it can make their giving stagnant and replace the joy and excitement of participating in God’s mission.

When these people in Jerusalem sold a field, or sold a house, and then they brought the entire proceeds of the sale and gave it to the apostles to distribute, you don’t get the idea that they were worried about “10 percent,” do you? They were blowing “10 percent” away!

In the gospel they had found a cause, a purpose, a mission. That gospel then filled their hearts with love for each other. They had a ministry to support and a message to get out. They had missionaries to send. They had less fortunate members of their family of faith who needed help. These “needs” were an opportunity to love, a way to serve, a chance to be part of God’s own work. What drove their giving wasn’t a rule. It was a generous response to God’s love.

Could you be a generous Christian giver like that, one whose gifts blow far past 10 percent of your income? If we believe Jesus gave it all for us, it will simply excite us to think that he would let us do his work and love his people with our gifts.

Acts 4:33 “With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.”

What message would you like your church to be known for? In their quest to be “relevant” many churches today focus on practical living. Their pulpits regularly dish out good advice for family life, successful careers, or happy relationships. Some churches want to be the guardians of moral behavior and preach a steady stream of warnings about the moral decline of our country. Some churches want to be socially conscious and promote one cause for justice or the environment or humanitarian aid and relief after another.

The Bible has something to say about all those topics. But the apostles’ preaching in the church of Jerusalem could pretty much be summed up as testifying “to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” And the result was that “much grace was upon them all.” Here’s an interesting fact: the word “resurrection” appears more in the book of Acts than any other book of the Bible–ten times in all. It is often a kind of shorthand to summarize the content of the apostles’ preaching as they carried the gospel around the world.

Of course, to preach Jesus’ resurrection, you had to preach Jesus’ death. He had to die before he could rise again. To preach Jesus’ death and resurrection, you had to explain the meaning of it all. It’s more than a curiosity of history or an entertaining myth. It is the payment for every sin and the promise of life that never ends. It is God’s way of freeing us from hell and filling us with new life and heavenly hope. It is the great rescue of all time.

The Apostles preached this message “with great power,” because it is this event, the telling of this rescue story, that has the power to turn people from doubt and skepticism to faith, from enemies of God to his friends and children, from spiritual death to life. It is the reason that this church grew by the thousands, the heart and soul and bedrock of all their evangelistic efforts.

There will be times you hear practical advice, moral exhortations, and social concerns coming from the pulpit and classrooms where you worship. But is that what we want to be known for? Could we share the evangelistic zeal and evangelistic method of the believers in Jerusalem, and trust the power of preaching Jesus’ death and resurrection? It has already worked on each of us! It’s why we are Christians, and it will mean as much to others as it has to us.

Acts 4:32b “No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.”

Some have said these Christians were practicing an early form of communism. But they had not abolished the concept of personal property. This is not John Lennon singing, “Imagine no possessions.” They didn’t collectively abandon their property. They shared it.

It all hinges on “no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own.” These people were living out the implications of Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” Everything we have is a trust we have received from God. It is a gift. He has not given us things to use any way we please. He has purposes for what he gives us, and it is a higher purpose than “making ourselves happy.”

Generally, God has given us possessions so that we can love each other. We love our families by feeding and housing, clothing and educating them. We love the souls of our neighbors near and far by supporting mission work around the world and our own church’s worship and Bible classes locally. Even paying our taxes is an act of love Biblically understood, because it provides security and protection to our neighbors through the government it supports.

Of course, central to the arrangement–that we regard and use our possessions so unselfishly– would have to be the conviction that God would continue to take care of our own needs. What could convince these members of the Jerusalem church of such a thing? Certainly they lived at time when they had less than we do.

Doesn’t this take us back to the cross and the gift that God has given there? Paul would ask the Romans years later, “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?” If God loves us so much that he would deliver his own Son to torture and death to save us from our own sin–and he does, and he did–we have every reason to believe he will take care of every other true need as well. The cross gave these people the confidence to be unselfish.

Wouldn’t it be a pleasure and a privilege to live among a people so unselfish in our own church, and doesn’t this make the Jerusalem church a church worth imitating?

Acts 4:32 ““All the believers were one in heart and mind.”

People at First Christian Church of Jerusalem could get along and work together because they were truly united in their faith. We, by contrast, are divided into many different denominations–over 30,000 of them! Among Lutherans alone there are more than 25 different flavors.  Each attempt to get them together only seem to create more divisions.

If you pay any attention to the news, you also know that inside each church body heated debates about teachings and morals often take place. They go to their national conventions and fight about what the Bible really says about human sexuality or how the church should be governed.

Some individual congregations claim to be non-denominational and try to stay above the fray. But isn’t that a way of saying, “We can’t get close to anyone but ourselves?”

If you have been part of a local congregation, you know that they have issues, too. Some will divide over disagreements ranging from key Bible teachings to what color to paint the Sunday school classrooms.

Not the church in Jerusalem. “All the believers were one in heart and in mind.” Notice the key to their unity: one in heart, one in mind. This wasn’t an oversized club where everyone shared a common hobby. They were one in heart. They had the same heart, because they had the same faith. Each of them trusted in Jesus as Savior from sin. When trust in Jesus as your Savior from sin fills your heart, you don’t live with delusions of greatness and superiority. You are a sinner who has been rescued from the death and hell you deserved by Jesus’ forgiving grace and supreme sacrifice at the cross. What do we have to be proud of in this?

Being so humbled, believing that you have been so loved by God that you owe him everything, has a very desirable effect on those who believe it is true. Love begins to grow. Love has been called “the great commandment,” but love isn’t just a rule we keep. Taking a picture Jesus uses in the gospels (John 15), it is like a fruit that grows out of us because we are attached to him by faith. It is spontaneous. It just happens. Together, faith and love made this congregation in Jerusalem “one in heart.”

There was still more to the secret of their unity. They were also “one in mind.” They had more than a nice feeling about each other. They believed the same things. Go back two chapters in Acts and we see that they put a high priority on learning the truths of the Christian faith. “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching.” “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.” When people share the same set of beliefs, what is there to disagree about? Everyone was on the same page.

Hearts and minds made one by faith, love, and good teaching gave this congregation a genuine peace and unity. It made them a pleasant community attractive to outsiders and able to work together to get God’s work done.

Can we be a church like that? Can we repent of our bad priorities? Can we let hearing and learning God’s word rise to the top of the list, so that it can grow our faith, and form our hearts into one heart? Can we set aside phrases like, “Well, I think…,” or “Everybody knows…,” and let the truths of the Bible form our opinions for us? Can we share the mind of Christ, so that our way of thinking is united in him?

People on the outside will probably think we are crazy if we do. This church in Jerusalem received its share of grief from the main religious leaders and general culture around them. Like Jesus, they were rowing upstream, swimming against the tide.

But the greater blessings of their unity make this a church worth imitating.

Matthew 10:2-4 “These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”

If it weren’t for Jesus, none of these men would have been anything more than a footnote on the pages of history. As it is, some of them are little more than a footnote on the pages of the Bible. How many Bible stories do you know about Thaddaeus? Zero. How many Bible stories do you know about the other James, James the Son of Alphaeus? Zero. How many Bible stories do you know about Simon the Zealot? None at all. They simply show up in lists of the twelve apostles.

But Jesus sought them all and called them to be his very own. He came to redeem them by his blood, as he has come to redeem us all. Their sins went to the cross together with all the rest. They were saved not because they were good, not because they were men of outstanding character or unusual leadership, not because they stood out in love or good works. They were saved by God’s grace, saved because the blood of Jesus Christ his Son purifies us from every sin.

And then they were called to faith. Though there was nothing to distinguish this bunch of fishermen and social outcasts, Jesus sought them and made them his own. He guided the course of history to bring them to that moment where he met them face to face, and he could look them in their eye and tell them, “Follow me.” 

Not many of us will ever be anything more than a footnote on the pages of history. A few of you may have had your 5 minutes of fame on television after you accidentally became part of some local news story. That is not the kind of thing that makes us somehow more attractive to Jesus. Jesus doesn’t have a special thing for people who are in the right (or the wrong) place at the right time.

Yet you find yourselves among Jesus’ apostles as people the world hardly knows or cares about. You are the people Jesus gave up his throne to rescue, and gave up his life to forgive. More than that he came and sought us out of the billions of this world. In the voice of a pastor, parent, or friend, maybe even a complete stranger, he whispered in your ear, “Follow me.” And in that voice you heard the voice of your Savior sharing all his gifts and claiming you as his own.

Maybe you will never even be as famous as Thaddaeus, or James the son of Alphaeus, or Simon the anti-government terrorist. But you are no less saved than they are, no less dear to Jesus, who knows and loves every one of us by name.