Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 6:1-11, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 10
- Date: Sunday, March 16, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Rest Buried Under Rules
Think for just a minute about a place where you could go and be totally relaxed. Or, for those of us who worry about not having enough things to worry about, as close to totally relaxed as you can get. Maybe it’s someplace you’ve been on vacation. Maybe it’s someplace that even now, when you get stressed, you go to.
Maybe it’s a childhood memory, like going back to your childhood home or your grandparents’ house. Just think about someplace where you could go and find rest for just a moment. Now, some of you may be on a beach somewhere. Some of you may just be at home in your recliner.
For me, when I think about that place where I would go and be completely relaxed, I think of going with Charla to the plaza in Santa Fe, sitting on a bench, watching people, and eating fajitas we bought from a cart. Nothing could possibly be wrong there. Think about wherever you are in that place where you can find total rest and total relaxation. You know what we’re all lacking in those places?
We’re lacking somebody to bring rules and make sure we’re relaxing correctly. Don’t you wish you had somebody to point out all the ways you’re relaxing incorrectly in that spot? You’re all looking at me like, no, we could never wish for such a thing. Exactly.
There was a day this week when, after putting in quite a few extra hours up here and taking care of some things, I came home exhausted, went upstairs to my room, sat down in my recliner, and put my feet up. One of my children came and said, “Why are you sitting there? Why are you sitting like that? You can’t sit there and relax with your shoes on.”
She was telling me all the ways I was relaxing incorrectly. Thank you. Please teach me how to relax properly and what all the rules are.
One of my children does that. But when you’re in that place looking for total rest and relaxation, the one thing you don’t need is somebody coming and saying, “You’re doing this wrong. You should be doing it this way.” And that’s exactly, though, what the Pharisees had done to the Sabbath when God had set it up to be a time of rest and recharging.
God had set it up to be that thing for his people. The Pharisees had come in and completely changed it into something else with their rules. And that’s what we’re going to look at today as we go to Luke chapter 6.
The Sabbath Conflict in Luke 6
As we continue our series of studies on the book of Luke, we come to Luke chapter 6, verses 1 through 11. Luke records: Now it happened that he was passing through some grain fields on a Sabbath. His disciples were picking the heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands, and eating the grain.
But some of the Pharisees said, why do you do what is not lawful on the Sabbath? And Jesus answering them said, have you not even read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and took and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for any to eat except the priests alone, and gave it to his companions. And he was saying to them, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered.
The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him closely to see if he healed on the Sabbath, so that they might find some reason to accuse him. But he knew what they were thinking, and he said to the man with the withered hand, get up and come forward. And he got up and came forward. And Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to destroy it?
And after looking around at them all, he said to him, stretch out your hand. And he did so, and his hand was restored. But they themselves were filled with rage and discussed together what they might do to Jesus. It’s clear at this point the Pharisees are already out to get Jesus.
It’s clear the Pharisees have an attitude problem at this point. Imagine somebody just gets healed, and it says they are filled with rage. That’s not a normal response to something good happening to somebody. But the Pharisees came into the Sabbath, and Luke puts these two stories together because they are dealing with the concept of the Sabbath, and it builds on what we looked at last week in chapter 5 about the Pharisees having conflict with Jesus over those that He spent time with.
He spent time with the tax collectors and the sinners. Why do you eat with the sinners? Well, because that’s all there is. And He also came to call sinners to repentance.
It’s a little hard to do ministry to sinners if you don’t spend time with sinners. So the Pharisees were very hung up on their standards of right and wrong, more so than they were on God’s standards of right and wrong. I think they started out well-intentioned hundreds of years earlier. They wanted to make sure that they followed God’s Law.
They wanted to make sure they did not even come close to breaking God’s Law, so they began to build rules around it. That was still not a great plan, but I think their motives may have been right in the beginning. But eventually those rules began to supersede God’s Law. They were no longer thinking about what God wanted. They were thinking about their standards and how everything had to be exactly right according to their rules. And they thought everything had to look just exactly right according to their rules and what they wanted, and it had nothing to do with what God wanted.
And I may use the term legalism throughout this message. I know I’ve said this previously in talking about the Pharisees, but it bears repeating because the way that term Pharisee gets thrown around, and if somebody is dedicated to following God’s Word, sometimes they get called a Pharisee. A lot of people think the problem with the Pharisees was that they followed God’s Word too closely. That was the opposite of the problem with the Pharisees.
Okay, if today you are endeavoring to learn and live God’s Word, and if you’re following that as the standard of right and wrong, if you’re following that as the explanation of what it is God wants for you and from you, that does not make you a Pharisee. The issue with the Pharisees was that they had taken their own standards and put them in place of God’s standards. And I’ll tell you that where a more progressive church might look at a church like ours and say, well, you’re Pharisees because you’re sticking to the letter of God’s Word. Which viewpoint substitutes man’s standards for God’s?
Following God’s Word does not make you a Pharisee. It’s putting your own standards in place of God’s Word. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning as the Pharisees took these standards they had come up with and tried to put them in the place of God’s. But we see from Jesus’ reaction to this that our standards are not a substitute for God’s, and they cannot be. So in this portion of the text, what he’s dealing with is the Sabbath as an example of this, and what God’s Word teaches about the Sabbath versus what the Sabbath had become.
The Gift God Gave in the Sabbath
And the roots of this practice of the Sabbath go all the way back to the earliest chapters in Scripture when God in Genesis 1 and 2 is creating the universe. And it says that He created everything that was created in six days, and on the seventh day He rested. And that, even though it wasn’t commanded at that point for there to be a Sabbath, that sort of set the precedent. I don’t think God later said, “I hadn’t really thought about that, but it worked out well.”
God knows everything. He knew what was coming and did that to set a precedent so the people would understand. And by the time you get to Exodus chapter 20, He spends several verses talking to them about the Sabbath, commanding them to observe the Sabbath, and to keep it holy by resting instead of working. Throughout the Old Testament, where God gives instructions about the Sabbath, it was usually very vague and usually dealt with a few broad guidelines, such as a few things that you were and were not supposed to do. In general, you could not work, you could not do anything that resembled work or made the Sabbath just like any other day.
And that’s where the practice came from, that from sundown on Friday night until sundown on Saturday night, the time of the Sabbath was observed, and there would not be work done. Now, part of the reason for that, God gave the Sabbath for a very specific purpose. When you think about what happened in the time leading up to Exodus 20, and what Israel had just come out of, they had been in slavery for over 400 years as a nation. And generally speaking, I think slaves don’t get days off.
At least in Egypt, they weren’t getting days off. And so part of them coming out of Egypt was for God to very graciously provide them with this rest that they had been lacking for centuries. It was a time for them to rest and refresh themselves so they could serve Him more faithfully during the other six days. Sometimes we need to put the work down and focus on things that matter even more than the work. And so He gave them this.
I will say the Sabbath is the one command of the Ten Commandments that is not repeated in the New Testament as a command. There’s nothing wrong with having a Sabbath, but we don’t seem to be bound to that rule in the same way that they were. But over the roughly 1,400 years between Moses and Jesus, they developed extensive rules around the Sabbath. Because it’s not simple enough to say, well, we’re just going to take a day off.
We’re just going to rest. They had to make rules to make sure we rest properly. They had to be that person on the beach saying, you’re not having fun, right? And a lot of those rules are written down in a text we still have today.
It was not yet compiled in its final written form during the time of Jesus, but its traditions had developed over hundreds of years and were eventually written down afterward. This work, called the Mishnah, contains twenty-four chapters dealing with Sabbath rules. A whole section of the Mishnah called the Tractate Shabbat deals with 24 chapters of rules of what they could and couldn’t do. Now, we’ve talked about this a little bit recently in Sunday night and Wednesday night classes, but I did a little research, and I’m not going to try to read 24 chapters worth of stuff to you this morning.
When Rest Became a Rulebook
Aren’t you glad? But I did kind of summarize some of the rules that they had come up with about the Sabbath. Now, there was no plowing or planting or harvesting. That pretty well fits with what God’s Word says.
So far, so good. But you couldn’t drag or scoot a chair across the floor because you might gouge the floor a little bit, which would be a little too close to plowing. There’s no baking or cooking, which again, seems to fit fairly well with what God’s Word had said. Food had to be prepared ahead of time, but there was a debate over whether pre-cooked food could be left warming.
You know, you cook it and then you put it on to warm before the Sabbath and let it warm. Could you do that or not? And they would argue over that. But under no circumstances could you adjust the heat during the Sabbath.
There was no weaving or sewing. Okay, that’s not unreasonable. But you could not write two or more letters. And I don’t mean like a letter to your mom and a letter to your sister.
I mean like two letters. Because once you write that second letter, it’s considered work. You could not kindle fires or light candles. Now, candles that were lit before the Sabbath could remain lit if the wicks were made out of the right kind of material.
Where do we find a list of those materials? God did not give one. That’s something they came up with later, the Pharisees. No extinguishing fires.
So if you had a fire that started before the Sabbath, you could let it keep going. You couldn’t add to it. And if it got out of control, you could not fight that fire unless somebody’s life was threatened. But if it’s just, oh, your house is going to burn down and you can get everybody out, you can’t put the fire out because that would be work.
No carrying of any object that weighs more than a dried fig. No carrying objects at all outside of your dwelling. Now, this is where we’ve talked about it a little bit on Sunday night and Wednesday night. I’m not 100% sure about the pronunciation, but I looked it up again to try to remember the name of the wire that stretches most of the way around Manhattan, and I believe it’s called an eruv, E-R-U-V, if you want to look it up.
You could not carry objects outside of your dwelling, but you could put a symbolic boundary marker, called an eruv, in place to extend your dwelling into public areas so that you could carry things outside your house. This is why that wire goes around a large part of Manhattan: everything within the eruv is symbolically treated as your dwelling place, so you can carry things on the Sabbath because it is all considered part of your home. You could not travel beyond six-tenths of a mile outside of your dwelling. In this case, too, you could expand that by putting the eruv in place.
Or sometimes they would plant a small plot of food six-tenths of a mile away from their house. And then that’s considered part of your house because you store your food there. And you can go another six-tenths of a mile beyond that. There were no medical treatments unless a woman was in labor or a condition posed an immediate threat to life.
But even then, you could only do what was necessary to stabilize the person who was ill until after the Sabbath. So it’s like we can stop the bleeding, but then you have to just lay there in anguish, and then we’ll deal with the surgery tomorrow. So only minimum intervention was permissible. You couldn’t do anything more than was absolutely necessary.
No touching tools, money, or unprepared food. No stacking objects. No excessively heavy clothing or jewelry. If your shoes were too heavy, it was considered work.
No tying of complex knots. You could tie simple ones. And then I’m sure there were debates over which ones are simple and which ones are complex. No cutting your nails.
No cutting or plucking your hair. I thought this one was interesting. No bathing. You could wash your face, but no full-on bathing, because when you get out, you might get water on the floor, which would be considered cleaning the floor.
And I thought this one was hysterical. No spitting. Well, I guess it depends on where you spit. No spitting in the dirt, because you might accidentally make mud, which is one of the steps you need in construction.
The issue is that none of this is in God’s Word. I mean, except for the few things that I spelled out that are pretty consistent with what it said. These are examples of going beyond what God’s Word says and putting our standards in its place. And this is the kind of thing the Pharisees did.
These are the kinds of rules that people were made to live under during the Sabbath. So eventually they treated their Sabbath rules as the markers of holiness. It didn’t matter how your heart was before God. It didn’t matter what kind of person you were like.
If you kept these rules, that was the marker of whether you were a godly person or not. And they were the standard of how you could be right with God. And that’s why they reacted with so much outrage at the disciples plucking grain and Jesus healing a man, and why in verse 2 they called these things unlawful. And I guess from their perspective they were unlawful, but they were violating the Pharisees’ laws, not God’s.
God didn’t say you couldn’t heal somebody, that was them saying, oh you can only do what’s absolutely necessary to save a life. God never said that. They were the ones that, when God’s Word said a poor person could walk through your field and whatever they could pluck and eat, that they could do it. God never said not on the Sabbath. That was their rule. They considered that harvesting.
Human Standards Cannot Replace God’s Word
God was talking about harvesting as part of your work to meet long-term needs, not a hungry person picking enough grain to eat. Jesus and the disciples contradicted the Pharisees’ laws, the things that were contained in those 24 chapters. They did not contradict God’s. The Pharisees lived by their standards and expected others to do the same.
But the thing is, when they put their standards in place of God’s standards, what they were doing was calling people to set God’s standards aside as though they did not matter and live according to the Pharisees’ principles. And so they were not only disobeying and dishonoring God’s Word, but they were inviting other people to do so. This is why we have to be careful about legalism, because it is not neutral. It’s not, oh, well, that’s a harmless rule.
That’s a harmless standard. Whenever we take something we have devised and put it in the place of what God says, we step into dangerous territory. Human rules may have a place, but when we judge people by what we think they ought to be, how we think they ought to live, or what we think things ought to look like, we assume authority that belongs to God’s Word. And our standards will never be a substitute for God’s standard. Part of the reason for that is that our standards blind us to God’s. When we put our standards in place, we start to focus on what we want and what we think and how we think things ought to be.
Standards That Blind Us
And the more we focus on that, the more that pushes God’s standards out of our focus and away from our minds. Chapter 6 shows us a couple of things that happen when we make our standards most important. First, we become hypocritical. If you go to verses 3 and 4, Jesus points out a story here. He says, have you not even read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and took and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for any to eat except the priests alone, and he gave it to his companions.
The Old Testament records David and his men fleeing from King Saul and becoming desperately hungry in the wilderness. And so they arrive at the tabernacle, and they’re looking for food. They are desperate for food. There’s nothing for them to eat there except for the consecrated bread, the showbread that was put on the altar every Sabbath day and was left there, and only the priests could eat that.
God’s Word said that. And yet the priest prayed about it and gave David and his men the bread. And Jesus points out that story. Now, the issue was not, was that okay?
Because people debate whether it was okay or not. Some people tend to think that they prayed about it and God gave special permission in this case, or that there’s a bigger principle here that God says, yes, this is how you’re supposed to do things, but God also makes allowance in the preservation of life. We’re not 100% sure what the right answer was, why this was okay. The bigger issue, the bigger point Jesus is making is that the Pharisees had no problem at all with what David did.
So we have something that God’s Word says, nobody eats the showbread except the priests. David ate the showbread even though he wasn’t a priest, and the Pharisees thought that’s fine. They considered this apparent violation of God’s Law entirely acceptable—and perhaps it was. Then Jesus’ disciples did something that did not violate God’s Law at all, but only the Pharisees’ rules, and the Pharisees responded with outrage.
This is the epitome of what he said, that they were straining at gnats and swallowing camels, that they would look at a clear violation of God’s Word, which again, God may have given special permission for. We don’t see anything where God condemns what David did, but something that was clearly against the letter of the law, and they’re fine with that being broken. They would never criticize King David, but Jesus does something, his disciples do something that doesn’t even violate God’s Law, and suddenly they are horrendous, ungodly people who have to be confronted. They were willing to overlook David’s actions, but just looking for a reason to nail Jesus and the disciples.
That’s hypocrisy. And when we become wrapped up in our traditions and our standards to the point that they replace God’s Word as matters of importance, then we become hypocritical in the same way. We’re willing to overlook things that are clearly wrong and against God’s Word, we’re willing to overlook those things, but we get outraged when our standards are violated. Not only can we become hypocritical, but we miss God’s purpose.
Missing the Purpose of God’s Gifts
Look at the next response that Jesus gives them. By the way, I love that when we get to verse 8, verse 7, the Pharisees are sitting there watching to see what he’s going to do. Jesus is aware of this, and in verse 8, he doesn’t wait for the Pharisees to say anything. He sees the man with the withered hand, and Jesus says, all right, let’s go.
Let’s do this. He just calls the man right up. Jesus initiates the confrontation here. But he said to them, I ask you, is it lawful to do good or do harm on the Sabbath to save a life or destroy it?
There’s no record of them answering here in Luke. I don’t think they had an answer because I suspect if they tried to answer because, again, their 24 chapters say, oh, no, no, it can only be done in a life-threatening situation. I think Jesus would have asked them something like in our terminology, can you show me a chapter and verse on that? Not sure exactly how he would have said that, but where’s that in God’s Law?
That’s something you all made up. When clearly the point of the law is ultimately the benefit of mankind. Ultimately, the point of the law is showing us the holiness of God and pointing us to our need for Jesus. So he says, is it lawful to do good or do harm, to save a life or destroy it?
They missed it. It’s like they’re speaking different languages. They don’t even understand the world Jesus is living in because they’re wrapped up in their laws. They have missed the point of God’s Law.
Obviously, we look at this and obviously the answer is it’s lawful to do good. Obviously, the answer is it’s right to save life. Obviously, it’s right to do the things that are going to honor God, even if they don’t fit with our standards and our traditions and what we want and what we’re trying to build. The entire purpose of the Sabbath was to benefit God’s people.
Again, you go back to Exodus chapter 20. The reason why God gave them a Sabbath in the Ten Commandments was because the people were worn out after 400 years of slavery. And they just needed a time of rest. A time to regain their energy, a time to refocus their minds on God.
They just needed a rest. The Sabbath was given for the benefit of the people. The people of God. And the Pharisees had turned their backs on God’s gift and made it into a burden, a reason for harming people.
And we want to be very careful and be on our guard that we don’t miss God’s purpose in the things that he’s told us to do and misuse the gifts that God has given us in order to put burdens on other people. Say, how could we do that? I’ll give you one example, because I remember as a small child when people were shamed because they missed a church service and little passive-aggressive comments would be made to them. The opportunity to meet together as a body and be taught and fellowship together and praise together and be encouraged together, that is a gift that God has given us, that He has designed us not to operate in isolation, but He’s put us together.
It’s supposed to be a gift. One thing I have been determined never to do is shame people when they must miss for a legitimate reason. And I’m talking like they were shamed if they were sick or they were on vacation or something. You were supposed to be in church.
That may be more common than I realize, because when I tell people, “We missed you Sunday,” they often begin apologizing. I am never trying to shame you if you had to miss. If I tell you we missed you, it’s because we missed you, all right? Because we care about you, we noticed you weren’t here.
But that’s something we can do if we’re not careful. We can take this gift of being together as a body and we can make people feel shame and guilt if something intervenes where they’re not able to be here as often as we think they ought to be. I am not making an excuse for simply saying, “I don’t want to come, so I’m not going to.” But we’ve got to be careful that we don’t take the gifts that God has given us and make them burdens on other people. When we make everything about our standards and we measure everybody by our standards, we ignore God’s truth and we try to take His authority on ourselves. So we want to make sure that what we’re doing aligns and what we think and what we practice and what we emphasize aligns not with our standards and our desires, but with what the Word of God says and teaches when it’s taken together in proper context.
Preferences Under Christ’s Lordship
And I think this is the most important thing coming out of this. Our standards must yield to the Lordship of Christ. It’s okay to have standards. It’s okay to have preferences.
It’s okay to have, this is the way I think things ought to be, but ultimately those things ought to yield to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Ever since Kristie stepped back from the music ministry and I took a more involved role in planning, I have had more conversations about music than I ever expected. And one of the things that’s come up repeatedly is just discussions of styles. And I’ve been in churches that had the worship wars from a generation ago.
We’re still fighting those worship wars. I’m not aware of that going on here. We have talked about music, and I have very definite preferences when it comes to songs and worship styles. I have told Kristie and others that I have never been a member of a church that fully matches my personal preference.
If you ever used to listen to the Moody Bible Church out of Chicago, I used to listen to them when Erwin Lutzer was the pastor. I loved their organ, just as I appreciate what Miss Cleta does here.
I loved the full choir and orchestra. I loved the classical hymns. I loved that. And I could get real bent out of shape because I can’t find a church that duplicates that.
But I realized many, many years ago that the important thing is not that my preferences are met, but that Jesus is being praised and glorified. And that’s an area. And when I say that, I’m not complaining about the music here, especially those of you who are working in the music ministry. I want you to know I appreciate you.
I’m not complaining about the job you do. I am simply saying that I have preferences in this area. I can become frustrated that no church—not merely this one—matches them exactly, or I can recognize that preferences are secondary to the lordship of Jesus Christ and to whether He is being glorified and praised. And I take that from his simple assertion in verse 5, that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. He’s talking about himself and saying this thing that you’ve built all these rules about and these traditions about and you’re making into something that it was never meant to be.
He says, yeah, I’m in charge of that. So when it comes to your preferences, Mr. Pharisee, thanks for the input. Thanks for the feedback, but I got this. And there’s a lot of times that he could say the same thing to me.
Yeah, I understand you’ve got your preferences. I know you’ve got the way you wish things were, but I’m in charge of this. And I don’t mean me, I mean Jesus. He’s in charge of this.
He’s the Lord of the Sabbath. Again, it’s okay to have our standards, our traditions, our preferences, all those things, as long as they yield to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, as long as we recognize that the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. When we look back at the story of David, a common understanding is that the priest sought guidance from God and that God granted special permission. And Jesus is saying, if God gave special permission once, God can give special permission again, speaking of himself.
He was claiming the same authority to grant that approval. When he healed the man’s withered hand, he said that his purposes, doing good and saving life, were the purposes of God. Those are the things that are lawful. In all of this, Jesus is saying, I am in charge.
The Only Standard That Can Save
I am the one who sets the standard. And Jesus has set a standard. If we believe that Jesus is God the Son, and if we believe that the Holy Spirit of God inspired this book, then whether it’s written in red or in black, it speaks with Jesus’ authority. He sets the standards for us.
Jesus determines what’s acceptable and what’s not. Jesus determines right and wrong. And He looked at the Pharisees and said, with all of your standards of right, you’re still not right. In Matthew 5:20, He said, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
He says their standards were never going to be enough. All of our good will never be enough. And that’s why he said his blood was poured out for us for the forgiveness of sins. That is why He said in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”
Jesus in his authority has set up standards of right and wrong that we’re all held accountable to. As believers, we’re held accountable to his standards. As non-believers, we’re held accountable to his standards. By His standards, not one of us is good enough to enter the kingdom.
And that’s why Jesus came and took our sins on himself and was crucified and shed his blood and died in our place and rose again to prove it. So that, in spite of falling short again and again, we could be forgiven. We could be set free. We could have eternal life with him.
And it begins by simply acknowledging that he is who he claimed to be and that he purchased our forgiveness just like he claimed to and rose again to prove it. If you understand that your sin separates you from God, that even your best efforts fall short of His standard, and that Jesus died in your place to pay for those sins and rose again to prove it, you can turn to Him. You can ask Him for that forgiveness, and He will grant it because He has already paid for it.
