Keeping Sabbaths and Preparing for Ministry

Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).

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This episode answers three questions listeners have written in to ask: 

• From Matt about whether it’s right to say that Jesus ‘raised himself from the dead’; 
• From Barry about Sabbath-keeping in the New Testament, and whether Jesus really approved of it or not; 
• From Ethan about the steps and motivations and factors that play into the decision to go into ‘full-time ministry’.

(We’ve only summarized the second and third questions in the transcript below.)

The next episode is What is a Church? The previous episode is The Resurgence of Spiritual Discipline.

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KEEPING SABBATHS AND PREPARING FOR MINISTRY

Sabbath

TP: Barry wrote in to ask,

I wonder if you’d like to comment on the statements of Jesus about the Sabbath. That is—there are no references to him being worried about people not keeping the Sabbath, but a few references to people who do keep the Sabbath but in a way that Jesus rebuked. Is it true that of the Ten Commandments, nine are spoken of by Jesus in one way or another in terms of people not keeping them—but not the Sabbath? Also what do we make of the fact that there are no statements in the Epistles exhorting people to keep the Sabbath, and then Paul’s negative reference to observing sabbaths in Galatians?

So Barry’s question notices that Jesus rarely says anything positive about the Sabbath. And he’s quite right. Very often when Sabbath does come up in the Gospels, it’s in controversy with the Pharisees about Sabbath breaking and what Sabbath really is. And so most of Jesus’ interactions about Sabbath are negative and controversial. So what do we make of that, and of the fact that you can find the other nine Commandments kind of reinforced or spoken of in one manner or another, as being positive, but Sabbath, not so much. Where does Sabbath fit in?

PJ: Well, I’d start off by saying, when we worked together on this book on the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath chapter was the hardest, wasn’t it?

TP: Yes, we went back and forth on it several times, didn’t we?

PJ: You sent it back to me three times.

TP: Well, in any case, Barry has a point, there’s a lot of controversy about the Sabbath and the Gospels. But there are some positive statements from Jesus. He says that he’s Lord of the Sabbath, and he does ask at one point, whether is it better to do good and to heal on the Sabbath than to do evil (in response to the Pharisees)? But it’s interesting that when Jesus does apply the law and talk about the law, and I’m thinking especially in the Sermon on the Mount, he looks at the laws and sees them as something that shouldn’t pass away, that are of ongoing significance because they teach us about the nature of relationships and life and the world.

When he looks at what the law says about murder, he then says, well, it’s also about being angry and about contempt and about your relationships with one another and how you speak to each other. And so don’t think that you can just keep the very letter of the ‘Do not murder’ law without realizing it actually goes much further and bigger. The law is a shorthand way of talking about a much bigger moral reality, which is how we treat each other. 

And he goes on to do the same thing with a whole bunch of laws in Matthew 5. And even though he doesn’t do that with the Sabbath in Matthew 5, I can’t see why you would not apply the same principle to the Sabbath in the way that Jesus has taught us to think about the law. In other words, should we follow Jesus’ example and think about the Sabbath laws in the same kind of way as he taught about the other laws? That is, these are wonderful principles and teachings that we should think about and put into practice in our lives in a fulfilled way—given that he’s come to fulfill the law in a way that recognizes we’re not under the law in the same way as Israel, but that it does teach us something about the way that creation is and the way our lives should be, just like his example of murder and adultery and keeping oaths and everything else. So I think my instinctive reaction to Barry’s question is that I don’t think the Sabbath should be the one law we don’t think that way about. In other words, we should think about it not in a legalistic fashion that seeks to just drag it into the Christian life without taking it through Jesus, but rather we should still think about and apply its wisdom to our lives as God’s people. That’s my first reaction. Phillip, you want to throw in any other thoughts?

PJ: I think that’s the nub of the issue. But the first thought I want to say is Jesus says in that sermon that he doesn’t come to abolish the law, he comes to fulfill it. And if you set aside the least of them, then you’re least in the kingdom. And so my knee jerk reaction is to see how Jesus fulfills the law and how it’s taught, rather than start off with the assumption that if he doesn’t mention it, therefore he’s relaxing it. 

Secondly, I agree with Barry in that most of Jesus’ Sabbath comments are negative. You’ve pointed to a couple of others, but most of the comments are about what’s wrong with the way they were keeping the law, rather than you must keep this law. That then makes me think of the historical context in the Bible. Within Israel, within Jerusalem, Sabbath keeping seemed to be a particular passion, and so it’s not one that he has to say, you should keep the Sabbath. They were keeping the Sabbath, but they weren’t keeping it, because they weren’t keeping it the right way.

TP: Because their righteousness was not adequate. And he critiques it constantly. His point in Matthew 5 is that unless your whole way of thinking about righteousness and practising righteousness is of a different order, of a different kind of righteousness than that very external, domesticated legalistic righteousness of the Pharisees, then you don’t even have a place in the kingdom of heaven.

PJ: Yes, but it’s more than just your righteousness; your law keeping is not right. You think you’re keeping the law, but you’re not at all. It reminds me of Isaiah 66 where God is in his heaven and he’s created everything and brought them into being. And he says in verses 2-3:

But this is the one to whom I will look:
    he who is humble and contrite in spirit
    and trembles at my word.

He who slaughters an ox is like one who kills a man;
    he who sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
he who presents a grain offering, like one who offers pig’s blood …

Hang on, you’re supposed to do a grain offering. You’re supposed to slaughter a lamb.

TP: These things are all in the law.

PJ: Yes, they’re all in the law. But Isaiah’s point is you can do the external conformity to the law and not keep the law at all, which I think is where Jesus is driving in the sermon on the mount. You’re all keeping the Sabbath. You’re all taking the day off. But your views of the Sabbath and how to be keeping it are ridiculous. Sabbath is the day to do good, and doing good is still work. So it didn’t fit in with the Pharisees’ view of the Sabbath. Jesus is attacking the way they keep the Sabbath, but I don’t want to therefore say he doesn’t teach the Sabbath. I think you’re right. I think he does teach the Sabbath. That’s the day especially to be doing good. I think he’s reinforcing it. 

The other point about the Sabbath is that it really is for the heads of houses and heads of government because the Sabbath is profoundly social. A lot of the other commandments are individual. I honour my father, my mother, but I can still keep this command even if you don’t honour your parents. But on the Sabbath, there’s no point telling me to keep the Sabbath if the society won’t let me.

TP: If I’m livestock or a slave in the household, for example. It’s quite socially revolutionary as an idea, because it creates an environment in which everybody rests, and everybody creates room and space for other people to rest, and doesn’t require them to work for me on this day, because it’s a day like God to rest.

PJ: And that’s one of the distinctives of this commandment compared to the others. So yes, it is slightly the odd commandment. I used to think coveting was odd because it’s the one internal one that you don’t know whether I’m doing it or not. But that’s not true, because honouring your parents is also an internal one that you don’t know whether I’m doing or not. But Sabbath has got to be social, or it doesn’t work at all, and that’s why there are so many directions about your animals and your livestock, your family, even your crops, the land. Everything needs to rest. It is different to the others in the teaching of Jesus.

TP: That doesn’t surprise me in this context. And for us today, it strikes me that the kind of problems that Jesus was addressing about getting caught up in special days and religious observance–which also cropped up in Galatians and Colossians– I’m not sure that’s our problem. I think our culture has squashed the idea that communal rest is a really important value and worth doing, and that it is part of the way God has made us: we work together and we rest together. I think the danger for Christians today is that we aren’t counter cultural in this sense, to yearn and practise regular weekly resting together, and creating room for others to rest together as well.

PJ: This last week, here in Australia, we’ve just changed the industrial laws so that the boss is not allowed to contact us about work outside of working hours on emails or phones and the rest of it—if you’re in a company over 15 people. 

TP: Oh, rats, does that mean you’re still going to keep calling me at two o’clock in the morning?

PJ: Why do you need to make laws about differentiating work and rest? Well, it’s because there’s a very human need to rest. And we’ve found with our electronic world that work is not just on the farm, and it’s not just in the office. It’s everywhere all the time, and people are sick of it. They don’t want it. And so I I think how you apply the commandment concerning rest requires a lot of thinking, but that it is there indicates we do need to think about it and apply it.

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Motivations for Ministry

TP: We also have a question from Ethan, who writes to us from New Zealand and writes that he “is greatly encouraged and humoured by the Aussie humour on your podcast”. He’s emailing us to ask whether we could talk about ministry, and in particular, motivations or reasons for going into full-time ministry, the struggles or encouragements in ministry, the best ways to prepare your heart for long-term ministry. Ethan’s a young man; he’s thinking about full-time ministry and ministry apprenticeship himself. And he’s asking us to think about what sort of motivations and what sort of struggles or encouragements we would recommend in terms of thinking about longer term full time ministry for your life. How would you approach that one, Phillip?

PJ: Well, I’d start off with word ‘ministry’, which I think is such a Christian technical term. Every now and then people ask me what I do. I say I’m a minister. And they say, which government? So what does the Word minister actually mean? It means service. As soon as you use that word ‘service’, it changes the nature or the feel of the question. What is your motivation for service? Well, the answer to that is relatively simple. It’s Jesus. Jesus came into the world not to be served, but to serve. He sets us the very example and commands us to that end, that we should serve. And his service, of course, is laying down his life for his people, for his sheep. And so, I cannot be like Jesus without going into all the world to save sinners. I mean, I can’t save them, but I am engaged in that activity. And so when he asks the crowd to become disciples, he says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross. Follow me. For whoever will save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” You can’t embrace Jesus without embracing his gospel message and his evangelistic work. So all Christians are to serve, like the old Salvation Army motto: Saved to serve. It’s a great motto. We haven’t been saved just to look after ourselves.

Galatians 5:2 talks about we now have this love in order to serve. We have the freedom now to serve. So what’s the motivation? Well, it’s just being Christian, that’s the basic motivation. But while all service is good and godly, and I don’t want to downplay any of it, there is a sense in which the service upon which all other service relies, is the gospel of Jesus, both in terms of what he has done for us and also in terms of its proclamation in the world. And so the Word gifts are the fundamentals of the church. And so yes, counting the money is a very important service that needs to be done the right way, but you can count the money all day, every day, and not see anybody saved because that that is not the proclamation of the gospel. I’m very thankful for people who do it and do it properly, but the fundamentals are evangelists, pastors, teachers, apostles, prophets – Word ministries.

TP: And those Word ministries cascade out into Word ministries that all Christians are involved in. That’s the kind of picture you see in Ephesians 4 where you start off with apostles and prophets in in the beginning of the chapter, and by the end of the chapter, every part of the body is speaking the truth in love to one another, the truth of Christ to build the body. It’s also bound up in the word ‘ministry’, in the sense that I don’t think ministry is completely equivalent to the word ‘serve’ in English. 

The Greek word for ‘ministry’, which is ‘diakonia’, has more of a sense of being commissioned to serve, of being given something to serve to other people, of being given a task to bring something to somebody else and to serve them with it. As you can see, it has a very strong connection with what you were saying earlier about the the kind of service Jesus has commissioned everybody to be involved in, to be to be caught up in his gospel—as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, to live a whole new life for the sake of him who died, to serve others with the love of Christ, and to become ambassadors who take that message to others and appeal to others to to turn back to Jesus. And so in that sense, ministry is a universal call for all Christians to take the Word of God that’s been given to us and to serve it to other people for their salvation and growth of life.

PJ: You’ve been helpful to me in recent times in pushing me on the technical meaning of the ‘deacon’ word, the ‘ministry’ word. Is that true of the verb as well as the noun?

TP: ‘To serve’ and ‘to minster’ is a similar concept I think. We’ll have to get Lionel Windsor to come in and school us properly on all of this. But I gather that it now broadly recognized that bland ‘service’, full stop, doesn’t really capture what is going on in the word ‘diakonia’. However, even from the context, we see that the kind of serving ministry that Jesus calls us to is a ministry to other people for their salvation through bringing the gospel to them—whether you’re sharing a Word with your child at the bedside, or whether you’re a pastor preaching from the pulpit.

PJ: And I don’t think elders are ordained people. I think they’re the local heads of houses in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and one of the things they must be able to do is to teach. They must be able to teach and to refute error. So it’s built into the nature of our relationships that we speak the truth to one another in love. 

Now some of us are really good at teaching and speaking, and some of us are much more inarticulate, but anybody can say “Jesus is my Lord”, and anybody can point to him in that regard. So from that, we then come to the issue of full time ministry that Ethan has asked about.

I want to emphasize that part-time ministry and full-time ministry are different in terms of part and full, not in terms of ministry. There are three categories of Christians in ministry: the layperson, the tent maker and the full-time person. All laypeople are tent makers—that is, out of their labour they are paying their own way in order to teach Sunday school, or youth group, or to run the Bible study at night at home, or whatever it might be wherever they’re doing it. So the difference really is between part and full, or to be even cruder and crasser, it’s between being paid to do it and not being paid to do it, because that’s really where the difference lies. And so the question then comes as to whom should we pay to do this task? 

So what I would say to Ethan is: Are you the person whose gifts are being demonstrated so that others are willing to pay for you? Are you the person whose life is so busy teaching the Bible that you can’t hold down a part-time job anymore, and you need to be paid and freed up from employment to do it? If that’s the case, then you need to get into tertiary theological education. 

Our primary theological education is the family. That’s the place you learn about God. Sadly, some come from non-Christian families. They don’t learn much. Secondary theological education is the church. Tertiary theological education is specialized. It’s specialized for those who are going to be paid to teach God’s Word full-time. At that point, you need to get the best tertiary education you can, which is given to you by people who know what they’re talking about, who will teach you in fellowship and not just online, not just remotely. You need to learn from the person as much as from the book, and you need to go as far as you can, because as a professional Bible teacher, you need to self-educate for the rest of your life. And the further you go in education, the more you’ll be able to self-educate. But once the teacher stops learning, his teaching goes off. If you know everything, then you reach the stage that arrogance has taken over, and your teaching is not worth having. Now, there’s a whole other issue.

TP: Ethan, the best preparation for ministry is ministry. Get in and do it, practise it. Be involved in it. Let other people see your gifts, and if they’re recognizing that you have gifts to do this and should do this more and more, then getting as much training and education and schooling for a lifetime of doing that is extremely important. So those are the first two things you’ve said. Now every sermon has a third point—do you have a third point?

PJ: No, but there’s another topic that hangs on the side, which has got to do with the alternatives. The kinds of people that we would most likely want to have being full-time Bible teachers are also the kinds of people whom the world wants to have to do their jobs. And I want to help Christians to stop being job snobs.

TP: What do you mean by that?

PJ: There’s a decided pecking order of jobs, right? Street sweepers and garbage collectors are down the bottom. And then you’ve got the labourer, the tradies, and then above that, you’ve got the managerial class, and above that you’ve got the educated professional class. That kind of snobbery about work is anti-Christian. You do not find your identity in your work. You do not treat other people differently because of their work. Honest labour with your hands is what the Scripture speaks of, and that was against Greek culture, because working with your hands was considered low class.

TP: The aim was to avoid working with your hands at all costs, if you could.

PJ: Yes, so the Bible is explicitly saying that that is not what work is about. We are all tempted to fall into the world’s way of thinking that my career is some kind of upwardly mobile professional status, which therefore means I am doing something equivalent to, if not more important than, teaching my Sunday school class. Whereas I think teaching the children about the Lord Jesus Christ is about the most important thing you can do in a week. And the reason why you have a job is to free you up to teach the children or the adults or the young people or whoever it is. And so, by all means, earn a lot of money because that gives you more time to be able to do Christian ministry. But there’s no job to be snobby about, and there’s no higher calling of a job that would lead you away from teaching the Word of God. 

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