Sabbath as a Day of Delight w/Dr. Bill Davis | Episode 291

[00:00:01] In Ephesians 2.10, it says that there are good works that God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in. Sunday is the day to remind yourself that God has prepared works for you to walk in in the coming week. And then do that work, not frenetically wondering whether it's enough, but just with the joy of doing the work of the Lord.

[00:00:31] Hello and welcome to Candid, where we never settle for less than the truth. I'm your host, Jonathan Youssef. Each week, we'll tackle tough issues, answer your hard questions, and take a candid look at the Christian faith. Well, the book of Exodus in chapter 20, verse 8 says, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

[00:00:57] On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates. For six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Well, what does the Sabbath day look like for us today?

[00:01:24] And today I have one of my favorite guests, Dr. Bill Davis, joining us from Covenant College. And Dr. Davis, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and help us think about Sabbath rest. Well, it's a real pleasure to be with you, Jonathan. The teaching on the Sabbath, I've been doing some kind of teaching on it for over 30 years in one context or another.

[00:01:52] The beginning of teaching it coincided with having to make choices as a parent for what we would do with our children. So my wife and I, a long time ago now, we had a toddler. And so what did we want for the toddler? And one of the things... I think you probably wanted Sabbath rest. Well, we wanted Sabbath true. From your toddler.

[00:02:19] But it was for him because our oldest is a boy. So before we, when it was just him, we wanted him to grow up to look forward to Sunday being the best day of the week. And we weren't sure how you get there. But when he was two, we started what we thought would be a campaign to convince him to look forward to Sunday and not to see it as a day of dreariness.

[00:02:47] And so even at the age of two, he had very low level chores, like put your dirty clothes in the hamper kind of chores. So six days, he labored. And on the seventh day, he had no chores. He could leave his socks on the floor. And then six days, he could have Cheerios or Wheaties.

[00:03:10] But on the Lord's Day, he would be carried from bed to the breakfast table where there would be some disgusting chocolate frosted sugar bombs cereal. Mom would take delight. Disgusting to you. Fantastic to him. Right. Fantastic to him. He can't remember a day when Sunday wasn't structured as a day of delight.

[00:03:33] So it was a day when someone else did his chores and he had sugary food and no limits on things. And he got to go to church. Every once in a while, you have an event where you think, wait a minute, we got something right. And we were putting him to bed. We had a ritual for putting our children to bed. What was the worst thing about today? What was the best thing about today? Let's pray. So we pray.

[00:04:03] We'd sing Jesus Loves Me and we'd turn the light off and hope that was the end of it. Well, you know how parenting goes. But it was Saturday evening. We were putting him down and said, what was the worst thing about today? And I don't remember what it was. And I said, what was the best thing about today? He said, tomorrow's Sunday. He said, uh-huh. And so he said, well, tomorrow when I get up, I have sugar cereal. He was six. I'll have sugar cereal. We get to go to church. Yes.

[00:04:32] We get to go to church. When we get home, we'll have a big lunch. And then all afternoon, you won't be busy. You won't be on the pewter. Because the other thing we did with today was because we weren't doing other work, we devoted it to spending time with our children. We'd go for a walk. We'd play games together. When the children got older, the rule in our house, and this is controversial, you can argue with me about this.

[00:04:58] The rule in our house was during the week, no video games. On Sunday, you can play all the games you want as long as you're doing it together. We've done all the two-player Lego games, and we would spend a lot of time together, but they were playing video games with each other, with us. And they were watching us be terrible at the game, and they took delight in that.

[00:05:24] Because we wanted the day to be a day where we weren't distracted either. Because I wasn't having to prepare lectures or grade papers, I could give the time to my family. We would go to church together, and we would spend the day together. And so that started a little over 30 years ago. That started before I was teaching on the Fourth Commandment to seminary students.

[00:05:51] And it struck me that the law of God can be turned into a lot of rules that you have to keep in order to keep God from being angry. But that's certainly not the way the Sabbath commandment would have been heard by the Israelites. They've been working in Egypt for 400 years. They've had zero days off in 400 years. Everybody there had worked every day of their life until they died.

[00:06:20] They're delivered from Egypt. They go to the mountain of God, and they hear the voice of the Lord from the mountains say, six days shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath. On it you shall do no work. None of them said, okay, what exactly do you mean by work? Does that start at sunrise? Or does that start, they weren't asking any of those questions. They're saying, you've got to be kidding. I'm only working six days out of seven.

[00:06:48] There's a day that I don't have to work. That would have been mind-boggling. And I think it's all the more important for us now because while we're not slaves in Egypt, we are certainly in the thrall of a culture that thinks that if you're not currently producing something, you're a drag. You're a waste of oxygen if you're not being economically productive right now. You're awake.

[00:07:17] What are you doing? We need help to be reminded that six days is enough. And so we wanted our children to understand and then we had to live it like you've learned this yourself. If you want your children to believe something, you're going to have to live it first. You've got to do it. And so we were abstaining from all of the labor for which we were paid. My wife and I both, we're just not going to do that.

[00:07:46] And so the children saw that. Children picked up way more than we expected. One of the things they got was if you're going to take all of Sunday as a gift from the Lord, there isn't anything you need to do that couldn't have been done on the, so six days is going to be enough. But it's six days of diligent work. It's not six kind of days. So you work hard.

[00:08:13] And if there's something that's due on Monday morning, it's done on Saturday afternoon so that you're not thinking about it on Sunday because it's due on Monday. So, and they had to put that on because we were on Saturday at lunch, we'd say, so is your homework for school on Monday morning done? And they, oh, well, right. So you need to get that done today so that you're not working on it tomorrow. Sure.

[00:08:41] Having the one day of rest in seven, that is a rest from the servile labor. The theoreticians talk about the distinction between there's work that you do that is delightful in itself. And then there's servile toil. Well, I really love what I do as a college professor, but it's what I must do. I have a contract. It's expected of me. I couldn't decide not to do it and keep my job.

[00:09:10] And even though I don't find it miserable, it still counts as the labor that the Lord has given for me to do six days, but then not on the seventh. So on the Sabbath, I don't have to do those things. And I guarded jealously and my children do too. My children are all grown and live elsewhere. That's also a parenting success, by the way.

[00:09:37] Your children have finished college and they live somewhere else. They do even now. However, because for them, Sunday was the day that we did things together. We worshiped together. We ate together. We played together on Sundays. Even now, like yesterday, today's a Monday. Yesterday, we spent two hours in the Skype call. It's not Skype anymore. Skype has been retired.

[00:10:05] But for the last eight years, every Sunday afternoon, the children and their parents get together to talk about their lives on Zoom or Skype or Google Meet, whatever it is. So we have an electronic family meeting. Yesterday was two hours. That's fairly typical where we learned about their lives. Even though they live in other parts of the country, they look forward to this is every Sunday.

[00:10:32] They look forward to a chance for us to get together. And I think that the rhythm that was established when they were very small people was Sunday's the day that we worship together and then we spend time together. I don't think that they would make it a priority. And I don't know that I could make it a priority to have Sunday be a day for this kind of family delight if it hadn't been established early and been guarded.

[00:11:02] That's what I've been teaching about the Sabbath as a source of delight, of family delight, but then also for the church. I will say that one of the features of Sunday that my children remember is that you weren't allowed to criticize the sermon until three o'clock in the afternoon. And, you know, when your father's a college professor criticizing the sermon, that's a full context sport. It's natural.

[00:11:29] And so, but it's also how you impress your dad that you notice the theological mistake that was made or the ham-fisted exegesis that just happened. I feel for your pastors. That's right. However, the rule was as much for me as anybody, but the rule was you can't complain about the sermon until three o'clock in the afternoon because you need time to let the sermon affect you.

[00:11:54] You're supposed to be submitting to the word preached, which means instead of picking it apart, you're letting it dwell deeply in you. So I wanted my children to do that. But then I learned because I was requiring my children to do it. I couldn't do it either. I mean, I couldn't complain about the sermon until later in the day. And so then I had to let what the word of God was setting out to do in my heart, do some of it because I wasn't talking back to it yet.

[00:12:23] But there were days when at 2.59, all of my children were standing next to me looking at the clock. Here it comes. Three o'clock about the sermon. Now that it's three. Now that it's three o'clock. But it meant that the pastors didn't have to worry about one of my children walking up after the service and asking, like, did you forget this other part of scripture?

[00:12:50] So they could only say positive things about the sermon. So it's a ritual. Rituals are repeated, thick practices that we do together that tell us who we are. It's what the Sabbath always was. It was supposed to remind Israel who they belong to. So it was a ritual in that sense. But rituals aren't bad. Think about the rituals involved with a baseball team.

[00:13:17] All of the things they do over and over again that reminds them that they're a team. And some of them are things that you do even though you're not thinking them. You say encouraging things after they strike out. Or your teammate commits an error and you say, well, get the next one. These are rituals. But they're really important for establishing who we are as a community. And the rituals that go with worship are certainly important.

[00:13:46] And you can only do those when you're physically in the place with those other people. So you can't build a church with digital bricks. I just learned this from you. You also can't learn the rituals of the life of Christ together if you're not physically next to each other.

[00:14:07] And I think the Sabbath also, I mean, the Sabbath observance, the gathering together for worship that Hebrews 10 encourages about that. It says, look, don't set that aside. It's utterly crucial to the formation of the community. Your soul is significantly shaped by the community around you shaping you. So the words of encouragement that they give are one thing. The words of gentle rebuke that they give.

[00:14:37] And they're usually gentle. But it's like, we're curious about this. I've been trying to convince my philosophy students that we don't critique things. We do appreciation and wonder. I appreciate this. I wonder. The compliment sandwich. Right. But I think you get a lot of appreciation and wonder from people at church. You know, before the service, after the service, they notice something they like. They have a question about something they don't understand.

[00:15:06] These are all extremely important character forming rituals in our life. And Sabbath observance, observing the Lord's day as a day set apart for the worship of God and for rest. That ritual part has been important to me. It's been really important in what my family has been. And I think that having this shared understanding of what Sunday is for,

[00:15:35] a day to remember that we don't work until we die, that our value is not found in what we produce. Those are weekly reminders that that's not who we are. And we get to work. We don't have to work. Some people have commented that the move from the Sabbath being the seventh day of the week to the Lord's day being the first is that you work, work, work, work,

[00:16:03] and then enjoy a Sabbath rest, as opposed to the Sabbath rest reminds you that you get to work for six more days. And I like that. The first day of the week being the day that is set apart unto the Lord, has the advantage of saying, I am now recharged and Jesus is sending me out into the world in order to accomplish his things. I got six days. Not five. The world's pattern is five in two.

[00:16:32] And first of all, it hasn't been going on for terribly long. Well, it's actually later than that. It was a depression era legislation. In order to increase employment, they started the 40 hour work week. So if you have to pay people time and a half, instead of working them 60 hours a week, it will save you money to hire more people and work them all 40. And that's how we went from six days of labor and one day for Sunday to five and two.

[00:16:59] But in America, we've turned that into five days of work, one day of playing really hard, and one day of recovering from playing really hard. Yes, you're absolutely right. Or we've turned it into five days of work and two days of playing pretty hard. And then Sunday night being utterly miserable because you played pretty hard and now you've got to go back to work.

[00:17:25] Having the day that is for worship and the family is a really healthy antidote to thinking that your life is mostly about being entertained or doing things that will build your brand or something. It's a drawing back into your families of reference, your church and your nuclear family or your extended family drawing back.

[00:17:52] It's a reset on a weekly basis to say, where's my home? Who are my people? What is my mission? That's your identity. Where's my home? Who are my people? And what is my mission? And setting apart the Lord's Day for those reset purposes every week makes it much harder to drift off

[00:18:17] and defining yourself entirely in terms of your work or in terms of other worldly projects. The ritual part I've been teaching for 30 years. Just in the last three years, Patrick Miller's The Ten Commandments, which I've started using as the textbook for my ethics class. His discussion of the fourth commandment on the Sabbath emphasizes that it's not just about you. There's a pattern.

[00:18:46] And when you look at the commandment, it says, you will not work. Neither you nor your son or your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, or the alien within your gates. And the emphasis there is no one's going to work. The principle is that the vulnerable who could be required to work, your servants, your animals, the strangers who are dependent upon you,

[00:19:12] the Sabbath principle is also released for the weak. And that shows up in other places. In particular, it shows up in Deuteronomy 5, when Moses gives the law again in Deuteronomy 5. This time, the reason for not doing any work on the Lord's Day, it's not because in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. In Deuteronomy 5, it's because you were slaves in Egypt.

[00:19:39] Remember, there was a time when you were exploited for your labor. Don't be like that with the people who are dependent on you. And that struck me because I have thought about the Sabbath largely in individual personal terms. It has been such a blessing to me to know that I'm going to work six days and then have a day that is not about trying to keep up with the tasks that I have.

[00:20:09] It's a day to reflect on God's goodness to me but I've always thought about it mostly in personal or family or church terms. But I didn't think about it in terms of all the people that I was forcing to work or could be forcing to work and the people who were kind of at my mercy as an economic player. You know, I don't have employees. I don't manage a large portfolio of anything.

[00:20:38] And yet, there are people who are affected by my choices. Because of that, I'm more careful not to require other people to work on Sunday to make it possible for me to go out to eat. If other people invite me, I'm not going to say, well, no, that will offend God if we go out. No, it's going to be what can we do together that isn't making it more attractive for other people to work.

[00:21:04] So I don't have a problem with people earning money on Sunday. I don't have a problem with that. I think it's too bad. And I think for people like you, pastors, you're going to do a lot of work for which you are paid on Sunday. And I think the challenge for people who find themselves in situations where they must work on Sunday, and there are a lot of people in those where it's not really an option.

[00:21:33] It's important, one, to make sure that you're there for worship. Like some shifting of your work schedule may be necessary, but you want to be there for worship. But then you also want to carve out another time where your family can take delight in each other. And that's fairly hard to do when you have children who are in school. Like you as a pastor might take Tuesday off-ish, but your children are at school.

[00:22:03] And so finding a time, and everything about American society militates against you taking Saturday as the day that you invest in your family because it's piled all of the fun, and your children would certainly recognize, hey, wait a minute, I'm being deprived of fun in order to spend time with you. Yay. Birthday parties are all gone. Right. So I'm not recommending that.

[00:22:30] But some kind of routine where your children understand that time is arranged for the purpose of having these periods of reset. It'll help them understand the importance of the family in their own life, help them understand the place of the church in the family's life. But parents have to do this. This is part of the joy of parenting, is you get to structure time for your family.

[00:22:59] And by that structuring, teach them how reality works. And I think the gift that God gives us in the command to set the Lord's day aside is not for the purpose of diminishing our fun at all. And I don't even think it's a test to find out whether you're serious about following the will of the Lord. I think it's straightforwardly just given as an enormous piece of cake. Here, eat this. It will be delightful in itself.

[00:23:29] You will be glad that you ate it. And then there are people who say, no, I don't want the cake. Well, okay. So I'm not inclined to think that it's a sin to squander the Sabbath. Yeah. I think it's just... A missed opportunity. It's a missed opportunity. And so, for example, I wouldn't think that it would be a role of one of the leaders in the church to take someone aside and say,

[00:23:59] I'm calling you to repent for the way you're using the Lord's day. So I think people that are habitually absenting themselves from worship, you might take them aside and say, this is a discouraging sign about your relationship with the Lord. But it's still not the same thing as a sin. I don't think it's breaking God's command. I think it's a case of refusing to take the gift that God is giving you.

[00:24:28] And then the person who wants you to think again about the habits you're establishing with regards to worship and rest, that person is not asking you to weep and wail and fear hell. They're just worried about you. It's like you have a friend, the only food they really like is Pop-Tarts and Red Bull, three meals a day. I'm concerned about your health. And so you're worried about their health. And you also know that they're going to have more energy and be happier people

[00:24:58] if they would eat a balanced diet. But you don't take them aside and say, you're a sinner, repent for... Okay, there might be a stewardship problem there. But suppose that's all they know. They don't know any better. I think that a steady diet of worldly entertainment in the absence of worship and rest is like a diet of Red Bull and Pop-Tarts. Yeah. Well, you know, to that point, I remember in college,

[00:25:27] we had some friends who had a business and it was struggling. And so they felt like we've just got to exert more energy into this. And so they would run to church, leave church, straight back into the office, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. And it was the Red Bull and Pop-Tarts illustration. And finally, I think someone came along and said, this is not going to end well. You're going to burn yourself out. You're going to burn your employees out. And finally, I think the owner of the company or whatever it was finally said,

[00:25:57] this isn't working anymore. We're going to take Sunday. We're going to rest. We're not going to do the work stuff. And you would think, oh, you've lost a whole day of productivity. Well, the business ended up getting blessed because of that. Your employees are now recovered and rested. You know, there's more mental capacity and space. And to your point, this is, you know, it's what Jesus says. Man was created for the Sabbath, not the Sabbath for man. Did I get that right

[00:26:26] or did I say it backwards? Anyway. The Sabbath was created for man. For man, yeah. It was for our good. Right. That's the point. So here's my question. When do the rituals and the things that do just create blessing, when do they cross over into a sense of legality where we see, you know, Jesus is pushing back on the Pharisees, you know, whereas for them, it's like ticking a box. It's almost lost its entire benefit at that point because now it's like

[00:26:55] I'm heaped with shame and guilt if I haven't done it and, you know, creates a whole different line of argumentation. Well, so this is a difficult question. I think I can be helpful. Think about the steps you've taken to care for your health. So I try to spend an hour on the treadmill or the elliptical machine every day. And that's good for me. Not Sunday. Another reason I love Sunday is six days thou shalt

[00:27:25] thou treadmill and the seventh is a Sabbath unto the Lord your God. But the Jews are walking the synagogue, you know. So when I don't, just with my own relationship with my workout routine, that can become dreary. I'm checking a box. And that's just with my relationship with myself. Now add the layer of you're a parent with children or you're a pastor

[00:27:54] with a congregation. When you add that power relationship, then when the people who are in a position to hold you accountable turn it into a rule and not about their relationship, then it has become oppressive. So if my children didn't want to go for a walk with me, and we did reach that, you know, when they were teens, they didn't want to go for a walk. So do I say, no, Sunday's the day

[00:28:24] we go for a walk or this happened. My children just forgot about a homework assignment until Sunday afternoon and it was due on Monday morning. And then, oh no, would it be a sin for me to do the homework assignment right now or should I just get an F on the assignment? Well, in that case, I said, I'm going to support you no matter what you do because the opportunity to rest on this day is a gift

[00:28:53] and it could be that the assignment that you're supposed to do is really important for your educational development and it could be that your grades are not an idol. You know, you need to stay eligible for sports or something. I'm going to leave it up to you. This is easily the most complicated and perplexing part of parenting is figuring out when you're going to leave it up to them to do things and live with the consequences. And so, I remember

[00:29:23] with one of my children when this happened and I said, here's what you need to know. I love you. I'm going to support you. If you want to work on the homework rather than going for a walk together, that's fine. It's your choice. If you decide you want to go for the walk and just get a zero on the assignment, I will support you in that as well. I won't be angry about your grades. I'll quietly be kind of happy that you thought time together was more important than your grades. And I told her that.

[00:29:53] I told her all those things. And then she decided that she just didn't want to be the kind of person who was worshipping her grades. So she didn't do the assignment. She went for the walk. She was sort of grumpy on the walk. But we did the thing together. And looking back on it years later, she was able to say the grade didn't matter very much. Maintaining the relationship and doing the things that we do together, that's what she valued.

[00:30:23] So I think when it's about the relationship and not about keeping the rule, I think it's not oppressive. I don't know exactly how to word this, but while you were saying all this, I was thinking, you know, where's the line for how much is too much in terms of playing, resting? I think everybody's always looking for the line. How far can I go before I cross up, you know, and maybe that's not even the right way

[00:30:52] to phrase that question. But, you know, is it's, this is like moderation? Is it your concept of rule versus relationship? That's a really helpful prism through which to look at certainly something like the Sabbath. But, you know, we are a culture of excess. There's going to be an excess of rest or an excess of play or, you know, even your point of the five and two days, you know, it's like, I got to get all my play in and I'll stay up

[00:31:22] all night of it, you know, to feel like I've had this sense. So, I mean, just, you know, in your own thinking and your own time with family, how do you sort of negotiate that, you know, and maybe it's a simple answer, but I just. You're right. We want to have lines. We want to have rules to follow because the nice thing about rules is once you tweak them and get them right, you can stop worrying about it. You run right up

[00:31:51] against the rail. That's the rule. I think you want to be asking, especially when you're a parent, but you might take the season of being a parent and recognize that because you're having to indwell what you're asking your children to live, you should be developing habits of asking yourself. When you have children, you say, are they finding this delightful? And they'll tell you. You'll be able to tell that

[00:32:20] even going for a walk, now they're 13 years old. going for a walk isn't nearly as much fun as it was when they were six. You're not cool anymore. you're not cool. So then you have to find other things that they want to do. What do you want to do? Well, we want to play video games. Okay, we'll play video games. I want you to look forward to this day as a day when we're going to spend time together. And now we don't play video games, we share YouTube clips. we play the game where you

[00:32:50] share a YouTube clip and nobody criticizes it. They just say, oh, I like that about it. Here, here's one that just occurred to me. So you learn about each other's life by watching YouTube together. And it's really fun. I think it could become stale if you develop something that worked with a seven-year-old. Right. And maintain it all the way. Right. If it's about the relationship, not the rule, and if the gift is

[00:33:20] rest, the gift is worship and rest. Because the Sabbath, when it comes to the Israelites, it wasn't just go sleep all day. It was gather in solemn assembly, remind yourself what matters. You are my people. You've gathered together to hear the word of the Lord. That's what we get to do. That's what you get to do. You get to bring the word of the Lord to us. But we gather together to sing praise to the Lord, to confess our sins, to hear the word preached and applied to our lives,

[00:33:50] to celebrate the sacrament. So we're reminded about what matters most in the world. God promises you're not going to need to spend the rest of the day being productive. You get to spend the rest of the day resting. Resting in my provision for you. Resting in the community of believers and resting in your family. And that should be delightful. So you want to be watching, do your children find

[00:34:20] this delightful? And if they aren't, then you might start thinking about what you're doing on Saturday. Because it could be that there's an imbalance. So yeah, if you're going to rest, of all things, you might find the worship of God together with his people a burden. But it's probably a burden because you went to bed at two

[00:34:50] o'clock in the morning. yeah. I do see a few people yawning in morning. I think there's no way to be excessive in resting when the Lord has provided rest. But then take steps to make sure that you can drain that cup of rest completely, which means getting a good night's sleep before going to worship the next morning. And then probably you'll go to bed at a sensible time on Sunday evening. Or maybe you'll take a nap. In the Dutch tradition,

[00:35:20] they are very serious Sunday afternoon nappers. That's part of the continental observance of the Sabbath is making sure you get a nap on Sunday afternoon. It was my dad's favorite thing about being in the Christian Reformed church is we were going to take naps on Sunday afternoon. That was when I was growing up. When my dad was setting the rituals for us, we took naps on Sunday afternoon. I think as you are structuring time for your children, notice what

[00:35:49] you are finding delightful. And then when you're no longer structuring time for your children, and then that's where I am now, I'm not structuring time, it's just my wife and I structuring our life. Ask yourself, am I taking steps to make this a day of delight? God's offered us this tremendous gift that the world does not know. The world does not know rest, not only because they don't know what full Sabbath rest in heaven will be,

[00:36:19] they don't have that to look forward to, they also don't know the tremendous peace that comes from knowing that we're not working in order to please God. Like, God is not waiting to see if we do enough for him to let us into his heaven. He has accomplished everything for us, and then he says, leave it to me. So, I get to spend one day in seven reminding myself that

[00:36:49] God has provided everything I need, and then I get to work six other days. Ephesians 2.10 says that there are good works that God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in. Sunday is today to remind yourself that God has prepared works for you to walk in in the coming week, and then do that work, not frenetically wondering whether it's enough, but just with the joy of doing the work of the Lord.

[00:37:19] Yeah. Well, in that Sabbath rest, I think of the writer of Hebrews, there's a sense in which it is that it's a picture of the eternal rest that we're going to have, the joy, the satisfaction, the finding light at all times. That's a little window of that and a great reminder to us. Right, and it's what we get on Sundays, is we get a foretaste of that perfect and complete and unending rest. And so you might also be

[00:37:49] looking to see, do your children get that? your worship team does to make that kind of like it's going to be in heaven. I don't really know, but it's extremely well prepared and thoughtful. And it's not hard to imagine that time around the throne of God will be kind of

[00:38:19] like that, kind of loud, but all of us singing together, singing praises to the Lord. Yes, I think it'll be like that. So we're getting a foretaste of heaven in the worship service, but then in the rest of the day, if we would but take it. Well, these are important things for us to be thinking about, certainly as we consider rules versus relationships, as we think about what does it look like to love God, to love neighbor, as you've highlighted for us in the passages from Exodus and

[00:38:49] Deuteronomy. And, you know, if we're raising little ones, what are they finding delight in? What are we finding delight in? And are we taking part in the great blessing that the Lord has provided for us so graciously? Dr. Bill Davis, can't thank you enough for taking the time to share your wisdom and insights with us on Candid Conversations. Thanks. This was fun, Jonathan. Thank you for joining us. Before we close, I'm going to share that Candid Conversations

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