Hey, Bridgetown Church and to all of you listening online, welcome to the Bridgetown Daily for Friday, March 12th.

John Mark Comer here in Portland, Oregon.

A few things. One, this coming Sunday, we are regathering as a church in person, or I should say starting to regather,

just kind of one inch at a time, sign up on our website, you do have to register in order to come because we can only fit so many people in with social distancing and all of that.

And also just a reminder Sunday is daylight savings time for any of my fellow letites who don't sleep next to their phone as an alarm,

I have an old school alarm clock that I actually have to with my digits with my fingers, I have to set the time on this coming Saturday night.

Secondly, you know, we said many months ago that our intention was to run the daily from January 1st when we kind of restarted it after last summer to when we regather.

So I am sad to say today, this Friday is our last daily, at least for this season of time.

And I know that this has been a gift to a lot of you, just a few minutes with a few words and space to come home to God and let God come home to you.

And it has been our honor as a pastoral team and our many guests to serve you in that way. Thank you for listening.

Third, today is Friday as well, which means it is the lead up to the Sabbath, the kind of ancient Sabbath is sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday.

The Christian Sabbath is often all day on Sunday either way, whether you are a few hours away or 24 hours away or whatever, we're in that pre Sabbath rush, what the New Testament writers call the preparation day, meaning the day before the Sabbath where you do all of your prep in the Comer House, I have Friday Saturday off.

So Fridays kind of day off and we run errands and we clean the house and we grocery shop and I go for a long run and we answer phone calls and emails and all of that get ready to power off all of our devices for a full 24 hours and it's kind of this frenetic afternoon, which is all a lead up to Sabbath dinner when the sun goes down and we sit around the table.

We take a few deep breaths and we light the candles of Sabbath and we pour a bottle of wine and we break bread which my lovely wife will make fresh sourdough bread every single week what a gift and then with our family and with close friends we have an open table on Sabbath where there's a number of us who just come together break bread rest laugh give thanks celebrate sleep and just relax together into gods.

Goodness and so I just want to give you a very short Sabbath meditation as we move forward to the Sabbath whether again whether for you that's tonight or Saturday night or Sunday or another day in the week.

Genesis 2 of course the prototype passage in all of the library of scripture on Sabbath thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array by the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing.

So on the seventh day he rested from all his work then God blessed the seventh day and he made it wholly because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

Have you ever had a long work day or work week and you get done maybe and maybe it's manual labor maybe you do manual labor for your work or maybe you own a home and there was a long weekend where you put in a new lawn or you built a deck or whatever it is we've done a couple of remodel projects but think of that feeling where your body itself is tired and you feel an ache or a pain.

And you're ready to just sleep but you finish the work the deck is built off the back of your house or you finish framing that house if you work in construction or whatever it is and you sit down and in my mind it's just a summer day in my mind maybe that's just in faith because we're still in winter here in Portland but you sit down outside to take a deep breath and there's just that great feeling of I finished the work.

And it's beautiful that's kind of the imagery in Genesis chapter two after six quote days of God's creation of the heavens and the earth meaning just everything in the cosmos that's God's kind of pull up a chair sit down smile.

Breathe gift thanks and say man this is really in his own language very good but there's a deeper theological meaning here that God's work of the creation of all that is it was done and now we live in his finished work and idea that's picked up by the writer of Hebrews and other new testament theologians about kind of the overtones between Genesis and finished work and Sabbath and Jesus and his.

Finished work on the cross as he said it is finished and now we live in a kind of emotional and spiritual rest on the other side of Jesus not earning anything from God but just living under the compassion and love of God and participation in the inner life of God himself but there's also a practical level to the Sabbath for six days of the week are focus and a healthy you know the Sabbath command and the 10 commandments is actually a dual.

...