Overworked, stressed, riddled with anxiety and tension. It's not just an american thing. All over the world, people are finding themselves increasingly unable to accomplish everything they are expected to do, and it doesn't show signs of improving. Despite technological advances over the last century that increase productivity and multiply our effectiveness, we find ourselves working more hours at higher stress levels with ever increasing expectations. Every machine or computer program that promises to make life easier just opens up the need to add other work to get enough accomplished, and it is taking its toll on our personal health, our family bonds, and our effectiveness in sharing the gospel.

Jesus has the answer come unto me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Join us these next few weeks as we look at what the Sabbath is and why it is one of gods greatest gifts to, to us. So when I was 13, my grandmother, at Christmastime, gave me a pair of brown knitted mittens. They were nice. They were, you know, double walled, like, I don't know how you knit that where it was twice as thick.

They would have been really nice and warm, but if you were paying attention. I was 13 years old, so teenager, and I don't know about when some of you guys grew up, but I, when I was 13, if I had gone to my school wearing mittens, I would have been made fun of quite a bit. I didn't even probably have to leave the house, my neighborhood. Like, I could have gone to some of my friends and they would have said, oh, nice mittens, and then just proceeded with mocking me. I hated them.

I actually was a little upset with my grandmother for being so insensitive as to give me mittens because now I feel guilty for not wanting to wear them because I love my grandmother. And so I just kind of put them away. Like, I wasn't going to get rid of them or throw them away, but I just didn't use them, like, ever. Now, I probably wish that I had them, but those mittens would have been really warm. They would have been a whole lot better as a utility than as a fashion statement, for sure.

But I didn't utilize them, so I don't know how well they performed. It was also that same year. That year I was 13, my dad started a business, and that seems to have kind of, like, set my life on a course where I haven't gotten away from it for every year except one year. In that amount of time, I've done something to do with what we call the green industry, not what politicians call the green industry. That's just for them to make money off of us.

What I mean is green, as in, like, caring for anything green and growing. Like grass, trees, shrubs, things like that. I've done mowing, landscaping, tree care, tree removal, all this stuff at point or another, except for about one or two years during my life since then. But when I was 13, we changed from having this mower that I had grown up with that my dad had bought, I think, the year I was born, it was a john. I don't remember it.

I just think that's what the story was. It was a John Deere Lawn tractor. And I remember when I was five years old, I would follow him around as he's mowing because I wanted to learn how to cut grass and how this machine work. And he told me when I was old enough and heavy enough to hold the button down on the seat where it wouldn't shut off, that's when I would be old enough to ride the mower and cut grass. And so that's what we would do.

But when I was 13, the same year that I got those mittens, he bought a commercial lawn mower. It was a skag brand zero turn. Or, I mean, I walked behind it had the levers, the grips, and you'd walk behind it, and you could squeeze a lever, and it would turn. It was 48 inches wide, 14.5 hp Kawasaki single cylinder. It was one of the best machines.

I still wish I had one. I'm a nerd. I like lawn mowers. Well, so anyway, it was a great mower, and it would mow circles around that John Deere lawn tractor. So we got a trailer.

We put both of them on there, and we go cut grass. Well, then, a year or two later, we decided it was time to get with the pros, the real guys. And we got a Bunton brand, 60 inch, 25 turn, the one that you sit on. You got the two levers. Good stuff, man.

We thought we could cut so much grass. I mean, we could cut grass twice as fast as the machine that cut. Twice as fast as the old machine. We're in business now. For real.

Guess what we can do now? More work. We can get so much more done because we can do it so much faster, so we can take on additional clients, make additional income, work more, but do more, get more accomplished. All these time saving tools that we bought just helped us to accomplish more in the last 20 years. Here's a couple stats for you.

Just nothing too crazy, but in the last 20 years, and I don't know who compiled this, but like most statistics, I'm just going to say, yeah, that sounds good, because you never really know what the bias of the statistic person is. But in the last 20 years, apparently in this country, our workload is up 15% and our leisure time is down 30%. We're working 15% more and taking 30% less leisure time. Some of you might say, well, I retired in the last 20 years, so my leisure time went way up, you know, I don't know. I've also talked with retirees that are working more now than they were before.

They just don't get an income from it because it's like helping a kid, helping a neighbor, helping a friend, you know, something like that. You know, driving up to Tennessee to move someone to New York like Jerry and Mary were doing, you know, stuff like that. But, you know, I even, I wrote this sermon while I was on an airplane doing what the kids today call a side hustle. You know, just like a little side work that you do to make ends meet. And the economy that we live in now and those things.

Summer vacation in a lot of states for the kids is only. School is only two months long. More than 50% of Americans leave some of their vacation time unused. That's just disgusting. I mean, seriously, like, you went to work when you didn't have to, you would have gotten the same amount of pay to just take that and stay home.

And we still don't do it because people are so tied into their job, into their work. Have you ever noticed how many time saving devices we have? How many things that you maybe buy a product that you saw advertised because it promised to save you time or effort, where you would get more done? Anybody ever bought one of those? Anything like that?

Bought into something like that? As a pastor, I get calls, maybe not all the time, but quite often, where somebody is talking, they know who they're talking to. They're talking to somebody in a church, they'll usually say, can I talk to the person in charge of this one particular thing? I say, well, you can talk to me. That's me.

And so it's like, talk to me. We can talk about that. What they want to do is schedule a 15 minutes online conversation to tell me about their product. And their product is usually something to do with a system or a computer program that's going to save me time and increase efficiency and effectiveness in maybe communicating with the parishioners, or maybe in writing sermons and lessons for classes, or maybe in some kind of our website or social media performance or something like that is going to be something that's supposed to save all this time. And this person called me and my, we know you're busy, and we just wanted to set up a time when maybe you would have 15 minutes.

We set up that time, and then it ends up being 45 minutes to an hour that I'm on the computer talking with this person. I had one of those just this week that promised to save me a lot of time and increase our effectiveness. The problem is, I don't have enough time to set all these things up, and each one want their monthly subscription fee, and I just don't have time to save all of this time. Have you ever gotten caught in one of those loops where they wanted to sell you something that promised to save you money and you have to only spend this much money to do it? And you realize, like, I can't afford to save all this money that they want me to save?

Everyone's vision of the future is automation. If you remember, like, if you've gone to Disney and you went to the thing, I don't remember what it's called, but it shows their vision of what the future would look like. And of course, you know, we're living in, in that time now. What is it? Carousel through time?

Yeah, that thing. It's really cool, but it's like, it's neat to go what people thought 50 or 80 or 70 or whatever years ago, what they thought the future would look like. Remember the tv show the Jetsons, you know, with, like, the car that would collapse into a briefcase that flies, you know, and just all these things. And Rosie, the robot servant, you know, we're actually really close to having servant robots now. And it scares the life out of me because they're way smarter than we ever planned on them being, and they could turn on us really easily.

But that's neither here nor there. You see, everyone's vision of the future is automation. Is everything working automatically? In fact, we already have versions of this that you might use right now. See, a lot of you might use a thing on your phone where you hit a button and you ask it something and it will tell you if you use an iPhone.

I don't want to say it out loud because they might start responding, but Siri, Siri, shoot, I just did it anyway. It's like saying beetlejuice three times, and he shows up. You know, you start saying. And it's also fun if you're talking to somebody, they have like one of those Alexas or Google smart homes or whatever it is in their house. And if you're talking to them, did it do it.

It did it to Kendall phone. That's awesome. You could get people in trouble with that. You can start having her to say stuff like ask something and have her repeat it out loud. It'd be great.

But it's fun. If you got somebody and you're talking to them and they have you on speakerphone and you know that you could say things like, to their home controlling system. You know, it can control the lights and the locks and the video doorbells and all these fun things that they can do. We have all these automations in our world, and these automations are supposed to save us time and make life easier, and yet we find ourselves continually busier and busier. We're able to accomplish a lot more because of these time saving things.

We bought the bigger mower when I was 13 or 14, and it did a lot more work, but we just picked up more jobs. We worked the same amount of hours, and now we've got more customers to deal with, more billing to send out, more fuel to purchase, more tires to replace on equipment, more bearings to grease up and replace when they go bad, more belts, all these things to take consideration of. And all this time saving stuff didn't really save us that much time. I had friends in the business that went from having multiple crews of lawn mowers down to just them and one helper, and they shrank down to only their best clients. And they found out they made more money in the same amount of time with less headaches because it was just them and one or two people working with them.

We have all these automations, all these equipments, all these things that are supposed to help us out. But it seems like our levels of stress and anxiety and frustration only increase over time. The japanese people have this phenomenon in their culture. Of course, they live life a lot differently than we do in a lot of ways. Their phenomenon is called karoshi.

K a r o s h I. It translates to death by overwork. It's funny, like, it's a funny term when you think about it, but it's real. They're not just saying that metaphorically, like, oh, my boss worked me to death this week. They're literally working so long, so hard, continually without a break, that there's people that have met their physical end of life because they overworked themselves without quitting even people, one of the biggest professions, it turns out, in Japan, in their culture, that does this.

Would you like to take a guess. Good guess. I think there's a little personal experience there. I hear it. He says, no doctors, doctors that know better, that understand the health risks are working literally to death, not in their older years, but in their twenties, maybe working to make their place in the world or things like that.

In fact, the Japanese also have as part of their culture, you just don't quit. It's an honor thing. They're an honor culture, and they don't quit. They don't quit a task, they don't quit a person, and they don't quit their job. And so they've got people that are starting to realize that if they're working for a terrible company or a terrible boss, they don't want to do that and they want to go somewhere else.

But it's not in their culture to resign. And so when they maybe do try to tender a resignation paper or letter, it gets handed back to them or torn up and is not accepted. So they have a business that has sprung up in the last few years that is a resignation consultant company. It helps people to resign from their job. I picture it going like this, although in Japanese, which I don't know and I can't imitate, but it's like they pick up the phone and they call your boss and say, hey, I'm the official representative for Nick.

He's done, like, done with what you like, he's out. You know, what does that mean? Like, he's, he outside? No, he's not working for you anymore. You know, like, oh, did he get promoted?

No, I mean, he quit your company. Like, get it through your head. This is something that's happening now. And I think, wow, they literally have to have a thing called Kiroshi death by overwork to get to the point where they say, I'm not going to do that. Here's the problem.

In our society, we quit plenty of times only to pick something else up and go harder and harder and harder at that. We don't know when to actually slow down or when to stop. Politician and Congressman Bernie Sanders in this country has proposed a 32 hours workweek. He thinks that's the solution to some of our health crises and different things in our country. In this nation, the problem is a 32 hours workweek, if you ask me, would just mean that we have more time to pick up a second job, and a lot of people would probably do that as well.

So what's the antidote? What's our solution to this? We're looking at the idea of a Sabbath rest. This is something that God has given us as a gift. It's actually built into our existence as a human being.

It's something that God gifted to us and gave us. But not everybody observes that. And it's not just resting or stopping. Although the word Sabbath comes from the jewish or hebrew word Shabbat, and it means to stop. Like, they would put.

They would have Shabbat signs, stop signs in their language. But it's more than just stopping and resting. It is about a rest, but it's a specific kind of rest that God is giving us or calling us to. And this kind of rest is one that involves living life in a different way than the systems and rhythms of this world. It's literally a rhythm of rest that was built into the way that God calls us as humans to live.

And in the Old Testament laws that he gave to the Israelites, it was over and over in multiple ways, built into the way that they are called to live their life, not just on a weekly basis, but as the years tick by. And so we'll get into that in a couple minutes. There's a couple people, though, that have been influential in this, in our society, you see, over, like in the past, there used to be a whole lot of ways that people would observe the Sabbath day. Of course, technically, the Sabbath is Saturday, but we observe it on Sunday. We call it the Lord's day.

And we can talk about some of that a little later, or perhaps in our Sunday school class, which, by the way, we'll have Sunday school in this room after just kind of a few minutes to get up and move around when service is over. And we'll have class in here instead of going over to the other building. But Sabbath is about spending a day with God. And there's a couple business leaders, because, like, it used to be that most businesses, unless they really had to be open, most businesses were closed on Sundays. And we might have called them blue laws or something like that.

You couldn't purchase alcohol. You couldn't go shopping. You might not even find a restaurant open. But over time, that seems to have shifted. But there's a couple people that lived their life in the way they ran their businesses, a different way.

Of course. Very famously, we have chick fil A with estruet Cathy as the founder of that. And it was his conviction from the get go that they would be closed one day a week for people to be with their families, to rest and to observe a sabbath day, but also with the hobby lobby group, founder of that is David Green. And it's interesting. I either read a book or heard an interview.

I can't remember, but I learned from about him. He didn't start out hobby lobby to be closed on one day a week. They didn't start that way until later on when he felt God calling him to do this. Now, their company had already grown quite successfully and had many different locations around the country, but they weren't ready to make that leap yet. And so God led him to do this and said, I've got you.

Test me in this. I'll prove to you that your business and your employees will flourish if you are obedient in this area. So they began closing on Sundays, and so many people throughout the business community were shocked by this. They were like, you're going to lose everything. You're going to close your business and everything that you've worked for instead.

I wish I had stats on it. It's really amazing how many locations they open all the time. I mean, they're opening locations all over the place. Very often. They can't stop growing.

They're doing so well, and yet you can't go buy anything there today, and you can't go to chick fil A for lunch today because they don't force Christianity on their employees. But they do say, we want you to have a day off. They recognize that Sabbath rest is something that we need. I remember talking to a man when I used to volunteer at meals on wheels, and I had this guy that I would deliver to who he was, I think, 94 years old. And he said, see, I'm proof that if you work seven days a week for twelve or 14 hours a day, it doesn't kill you.

And he was a farmer type back in the day. And I thought, apparently it didn't. And yet, that's not what we are created to do. We weren't created to work that long and that hard. And so we get into the scripture here today in Mark, chapter one or two.

I mean, mark, chapter two. This is Jesus talking. And this is found in the other Matthew and Luke. It's found in those gospels, too. But Jesus speaks these words in mark two, starting in verse 23.

Well, he doesn't speak all this. Some of it's a little bit of story. It says Jesus was going through the grain fields on a Sabbath. Now, I want to pause right there for just a second. On a Sabbath.

What that's kind of code words for is to say that they had gone to a service in a synagogue, in a synagogue of a town that they were in. It doesn't say, where? But they went into this synagogue, and they would have been participating in jewish prayers, in reading of the scriptures, especially the Torah. And then there would be somebody who would get up and speak to them, much like a pastor, like I'm doing right now. And so they would have been to all of that.

But they didn't pack a lunch. Now, you wouldn't have even gotten up that day to pack a lunch because that would constitute work. So they would have had to have packed it the night before, because Sabbath in the jewish mindset begins, and the evening of the day before, that's when their day started. Their day starts in the evening, not in the morning. So, like, you know, if the sun goes down at seven or 08:00 p.m.

or whatever time of year it is, that's when Sabbath day starts, and it goes until the same time the next day. And so you would have had to have done all your preparations before that. If we were doing something similar, it would be like, well, make sure I have enough fuel in the tank and the car so that if I have to go somewhere, like to church or something, I want to make sure that I don't need to stop at the gas station, make sure that I have food already set out. Or maybe you could prepare a meal at home, but you have to make sure that you didn't have to go and acquire any of the ingredients or do any labor to make that food in such a way. And so there was a lot of preparations for the Sabbath, but now they've gone to this service at the synagogue, and they didn't eat beforehand.

It seems like they were hungry. I did eat this morning, and I'm still hungry now. That's just kind of how it is. But I've never looked at some wheat growing in a field and said, mmmdh, that's what I'm having for lunch. You know, like, I've just never been, like, I'm going to have some of that wheat.

That's where my hunger right now is. You know, I've never had a craving for raw, just wheat, but apparently it means this was the season when it was ripe and it was ready to eat. And of course, there's the chaff on the outside of the kernels of wheat, and so that would have to be separated. And so not having a whole bunch of it, they were just kind of grabbing it as they walked past, rubbing it, probably not even thinking about it much, because simply they were hungry. This is a human thing that we all go through, hunger.

And so they probably rubbed them, blew off the chaff, popped the kernels of wheat in their mouth. Easy little snack. Doesn't really take much effort, does it? Doesn't take much thinking about it. If you've done it before, you know what you're doing.

So this is what's going on. Jesus was going through the grain fields on a sabbath, and his disciples began to pick some heads of Wheatley as they made their way. So the Pharisees said to him, now, these Pharisees, you got to love these guys. These are the guys that wore funny outfits. Because it was just what their tradition was.

They followed a few specific laws, like where God had told them to bind the scriptures on their heads and on their wrists or on their forearms. So they would take these little leather boxes with these straps, and they would wrap them around their. They would literally wear scriptures written and slip to paper on their foreheads and on their hands. And they would have the scriptures with them. Because they were that serious about obeying the word of God or the law of God.

And so the pharisees, though, they're the ones that think that they're the police to make sure everybody else is just as religious as they are. They're the ones that think that it's their job to say, well, this is how we're supposed to live, so you better be living it out. And Jesus did say to his followers, he says, you must do everything they tell you to do, but don't live like they do. They're hypocrites. They don't live like they preach.

What they're preaching is right. What they're living is not. So don't just look at the way they live and say, well, because they're a hypocrite. I'm not going to live that way. That's not the right answer.

That's not the right approach. The right approach is to say what they are teaching is true and it's scriptural. What they're living is antithetical to what they're teaching. Don't do what they do. Do what they say.

How many times as a parent, did anybody ever say, do what I say, not what I do. It's that. It's really that. The rest of it, though, is okay. But you do what you say, too, like, live out what you're telling your kids to live out.

And also, if you did have a past, some things that you did wrong, be honest with your kids about that and be like, hey, listen, I did do these things, and I know now why I shouldn't have. And I'm trying to tell you not to do that. I'm not doing those things anymore. I don't want you to do those things because it's damaging to your life. So this is the Pharisees, though.

They knew the right thing. They just figured that it was beneath them, that they were above that, that they could do what they wanted. But the pharisees see the disciples getting these grains of wheat and they're like, violation. You're breaking the Sabbath law. Here's what they said.

Why are they doing what is against the law on the Sabbath? And I love that Jesus had some restraint here because he could have launched into them, because, like, there's one point where he says, like, your mom slept with Satan, like your dad's Satan. So that's, you know, that's how dirty your mama is. Like, that's what he said. That's the best mama joke ever, probably, if you don't know what a mama joke is.

They're disrespectful and rude. But it's really not about mamas. It's just about guys, like being guys. And Jesus got into a mama joke war with them. It's great.

If you don't know that part in scripture, we can talk about it later, but I promise you, it's in there. And so he says to them, he's like, he holds back on this one. He doesn't launch out at him, but he says, haven't you guys read the Bible? Remember the part where David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry? How he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and he ate the sacred bread, which is against the law for anyone but the priest to eat.

And he also gave it to his companions. By the way, you know who David's companions were at this time? They were scoundrels. These were the guys that says anyone who was a fugitive of justice, who was wanted by the law, or who was just simply a malcontent. In other words, somebody that looked at the way the country was going under the current king that they had and said, I don't like this.

I don't like where this country's going. I don't like the leadership in this country, and I can't do anything about it. So I'm just going to go live in the wilderness and find some like minded people, and we're just going to go have a good time. We're going to hang out. We're going to protect each other.

We're going to provide for each other's needs and we're just going to live outside of the normal culture and society. I think I understand that because sometimes I say I just want to move up to a mountain somewhere. I've been saying it a lot lately, like, I just want to move to a mountain somewhere. And like if there's some good people around, I'll hang out with them. And if not, I'll have my family.

And I want a stream to be there because I just want flowing water all the time. I don't know what it is about it. I just want that. It'd be great. And it's like, I understand these guys.

I'm not wanted like as a fugitive from justice. But whatever, you know, they keep changing laws or changing the way they apply them. And someday, because we're here right now, we might be considered a fugitive because we broke the law and met to worship Christ. And if that's what it takes to become a fugitive, so be it, I'll do it. But at that point, these were the guys that were off on the run.

These were the guys that David was hanging out with. And he said to the priest, and he went into the house of God, he says, I need some bread, we're hungry. And the priest is like, sure. Well, all we have really is this show bread, this stuff that was only for the priest to eat. It goes out literally on a table before the Lord for a few days.

And then when it's time to put new bread out, the priests are able to eat this bread. It's their provision. But you know what, David? As long as you guys haven't been intimate with women and a few other rules, we're good. And he's like, oh yeah, we don't even have any women with us, so we're good on that.

He didn't say like all the guys had like a holy life before that point. He's just like, for the last little while, we've been pretty good. The priest gives him the bread. And so here's what Jesus says. When David entered the house, when Abiathar was high priest, he ate the sacred bread, which is against the law for anyone but the priest to eat.

He also gave some to his companions. Then he said, jesus says the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. For this reason, the son of man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. Okay, first of all, I love the phrase where Jesus says, because this is a good reminder for us that the Sabbath was made for you. The Sabbath was a gift to you.

It wasn't that you were created to make sure that the Sabbath was kept or observed or enforced properly. God didn't just say, well, here's this thing called the Sabbath, and if you screw it up, then you're the one that's in trouble. If you mess it up, if you don't follow it, then you're going to be a sinner. At that point, he never said it like that. He did give it to them as one of the commandments.

In fact, it's the commandment with the most words in it. In the ten Commandments, there's more words spoken about how to properly observe or follow the Sabbath and what that means to rest on the Sabbath. In fact, it's really interesting. It understood, or God understood when he gave this law to them, that they were going to be a people who had just come from being slaves in Egypt. Now, mind you, the idea of being enslaved means you do what you're told, or there's consequences.

And one of the things that they were told was work, and work and work and work. You have a quota to fill. And if you don't fill that quota, you didn't work hard enough, and it's going to hurt because the whip's going to hit the back and you're going to have to go to work harder. And now with those stripes on your back, now they're free. God brought them out of Egypt and out of slavery.

And now he says, you get a day off. Now. Now, that wasn't the first time he talked about the Sabbath. The first time was actually at the start of creation, where God created for six days and rested on the 7th, and thus made that day holy or sanctified. That day, the 7th day.

So now the Israelites, he tells them, even if you end up conquering some peoples and they become your servants, your servants have to have a day off as well. You rest on the Sabbath day. Your animals rest on the Sabbath day. Like, you can't put your oxen on autopilot and have them plow the field, you know, and just hope that they get it done right. And they had to work.

Even your animals get arrest on the 7th day. Your servants get a rest on the 7th day. Everybody in your household doesn't do work on the Sabbath. He put this into their life, and he provided for them when they were hungry, when they traveled in the wilderness for 40 years, in the book of Exodus, they were looking for food. And so God literally rained this bread like substance down from the sky.

And they said, what is it? And that literally became the name. Manna means what is it? And that's what they called it. For four years.

They didn't come up with a real name for it. They just kept calling it, what is it? What is it? Bread. Like, we might buy a loaf of wonder bread.

They bought a loaf of what is it? Well, they didn't buy it, but I mean, it was on the ground every morning except for on the 7th day, the Sabbath day, no bread. Now, he had told them, on days one through five, if you try to get more than what you need, it'll go bad overnight. It'll spoil, it'll have maggots in it. But on the 6th day, collect enough for the 7th day and I'll show you that I will provide for you on the Sabbath day so that you don't have to go out and work.

You don't have to go out and collect it. In fact, that was a law that would continue in the way they lived in the promised land. When they moved into the land of Israel to this promised land, they were supposed to sow the land and reap the harvest for six years. But on the 7th year, the fields lay fallow and they didn't plant them. Now, that meant that on the 6th year, they had to.

The harvest needed to be blessed by God big enough that they could harvest what was there that would last them through that 6th year after the harvest, the 7th year when they didn't plant anything and into the 8th year until that year's crops that they had planted came to maturity and were harvested. So for three years, you're eating from that one. 6th year of planting. The 7th year was a Sabbath rest for the land, also for the animals, for the people. It's like every so often you just kind of have all this building up in you.

And God gave them a rest from that. Now, the idea of Sabbath is built into. Is supposed to be. Is built into their law but is supposed to therefore become part of them, is built into their hearts and their lives. Now, the Israelites, unless you want to think that they were really good at this, they were terrible at following this.

They were supposed to. After a series of seven year cycles, after seven sevens, they were supposed to, that's 40 years. The 50th year then would become a year of Jubilee where all debts were forgiveness. Any land that had transferred out of the family's name and into maybe somebody that had bought it from them because they fell into debt, that would all get reset and returned. So after seven sevens, that was all renewed again.

God built it into their life and into their story, and yet they were pretty bad at following that. However, we see that by the time of Jesus with the Pharisees and some other groups, they had gotten so good at returning to a Sabbath regulation or way of life that they started becoming quite well. I mean, we already talked about their hypocrisy, but they got so legalistic about how they observed the Sabbath that they said, what does it mean to stop working? What is work? Kind of like when Bill Clinton was questioned about some of those interns and he's like, well, what does is mean?

What? You know, we're quibbling over some of these things, right? Oh, come on, you guys remember that? It's like, really? So he, you know, he starts quibbling over one little word to say, how can I get around it?

And so they started doing this with the Sabbath. What does work mean? Well, I mean work, you know, like, go to your job. Well, like, what if you like gardening and you've got flowers, and flowers give you joy, a sense of peace, sense of well being. But there's some weeds in there.

What if you like pulling weeds? And to pull the weeds makes the flowers grow better in your flower garden? Is that work? What do you guys think? Is that work?

What if you mow lawns for a living and that's work, but you like mowing your grass? What if that is restful to you? Is that work? What if you're a mechanic and you work on automobiles? I know they didn't have those then, but what if you're a mechanic and you work on automobiles, and so you, like, you don't like, go to the shop to work on it, but you want to work on your project car.

You know, if you're a car guy, if you've ever been a car guy, you know that car that you bought, that one day it's going to be finished, but it's not finished yet. You know, like, what if, what if you want to work on that project car? Because you can just be alone with it and think and feel just, this was a good day. Is that work? So they came up with 39 categories.

This is just the categories. There's not all the sub bullet points within the category. They came up with 39 categories. What constituted work? So they couldn't just say, well, God said, don't work on the Sabbath day.

That wasn't good enough. They had to explain it with 39 categories. And then after that, they had to define what was in each of those categories to say, here's what constitutes work. And apparently, if you're walking through the grain fields and just with two hands on the grain right beside each other side of the path, you just grab a head, a stalk of grain, pull all the heads of it off, rub it together in your hands, blow the chaff away, and pop it in your mouth like a handful of. Like you're eating peanuts or something like that.

Instead, you're eating heads of grain. And that apparently was considered work. And Jesus says, what about David? Now, that's never a good argument, right? Like, what about what somebody else did wrong?

That doesn't work. That's never a good defense in court, you know, like, hey, you got in an altered case from somebody. Yeah, well, this guy murdered someone, okay? Yeah, he's gonna get punished for that, too. But you did something wrong.

How is Jesus gonna go and say, it wasn't really about David? You see, what it was was he was saying, listen, in that time, what that priest understood was that it was more important to sustain love than it was to be enslaved to Sabbath day observance. Now, my grandparents, they had a cabin in the northern part of Michigan, and the town is called Atlanta. It's a lot smaller than the one in Georgia. Quite a bit smaller.

Very small town, fun little place. And they had this little cabin up there. It was really just a house that they had built and had an open loft upstairs, you know, with this, like, the narrowest of little stairways and people. We used to be a lot smaller. Like, I'd have a hard time squeezing up it now, you know, like, it was a little tiny stairway.

And so they had this cabin, and we would go up there at deer season for rifle hunting. It started on November 15. It was a holiday in the northern parts of Michigan. Literally, they canceled school for that week because they knew that everyone in high school would be out in the woods, like the girls, too, not just the guys. Everybody's going hunting.

So we would go up there, and we would go deer hunting in November just about every year. We were almost religious in our observance of deer season. We would go deer hunting, and we weren't very good at it. And maybe there weren't that many deer, or maybe our hunting clothes needed to be washed. I don't know.

But they either smelled us, hurt us or something, and we weren't too successful at it, but we still went, and we had a good time, because there's not much to do but sleep in the afternoon, sleep at night, wake up real early, walk out into the woods after you put all this gear on. Because, I mean, sometimes it would snow early up there, and I'd be sitting there getting snowed on. I'm like, perfect now. I'm camouflaged really well, you know? And wait a minute.

That means other hunters can't see me. Oh, shoot. You know, and so anyway, you see, you'd be sitting up there. You'd have all this time to think, to pray, to meditate, whatever it is you're doing, you'd have all this time. And I think that is about as relaxed and restful as it gets.

Jerry, you're a fisher, right? You could go out on the boat, you know? I mean, you probably want to catch some fish, but it's not really about that unless you're, like, in a competition or hungry. It's really about being out on the water. Something to do with just how relaxing and enjoyable that is.

It's time with God. You're out in the sunlight. It's just great times. But my grandparents wouldn't fish or hunt on the Sabbath day. I didn't agree with that.

I never understood it. I respected it. If we were around them, that rule applied to all of us.