Jan 22 — Reverence of Keeping the Holy from Becoming Common

Isaiah 58:13 — “If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath,

From doing your pleasure on My holy day, And call the Sabbath a delight,

The holy day of the Lord honorable, And shall honor Him,
not doing your own ways,
 Nor finding your own pleasure, ...

It is God who establishes right from wrong, holy from unholy, order from disorder, honour from dishonour and righteousness from sin.  God set aside time for man to rest from labour and engage with Him.  When you’re invited to come to the King’s house for a day, it’s the King who decides how the day will be.  He may ask you to express your desires, but ultimately it is the King who decides what will be done.  We do not celebrate resting on the seventh day (literally the sabbath day of rest should be Saturday) but we do celebrate the Lord of the Sabbath’s resurrection on Sundays.  While we do not keep the Law, the principle of sabbath rest is something we should be aware of.  Jesus said the sabbath was created for man — God didn’t need rest, we did.  Doing God’s will by faith brings Him pleasure and ultimately leads to my pleasure, even if it doesn’t seem that way in the moment.  It’s pleasing my heavenly Father that should motivate my obedience to His will.

I dedicate myself, my children, my house, my stuff, my time to the Lord.  He receives those dedications … and then how do we treat what has been sanctified?  Are they still mine if I’ve dedicated them to God?  It’s one thing to dedicate something/someone to God; it’s many orders of magnitude greater when God sanctifies to Himself.  I must also not take what God has set aside as holy and trivialize it.  We are to honour/make weighty/bless what God has sanctified, otherwise we dishonour/make light/curse those things.  I may think that I dedicated myself to God but it is God who sanctifies.  I have not chosen God as much as God has chosen me … and He has chosen me to be holy even as He is holy.

“Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.  God will make this happen, for he who calls you is faithful.” (1 Thess 5:23-24, NLT)

[Also meditate on: Is. 43:10-13; Mk. 2:23-3:6; Jn. 15:9-17; Eph. 1:3-6; Phil. 2:5-13; 1 Thess. 4:1-12; 2 Tim. 2:20-26; 1 Pe. 1:13-21]