Culture Clash | Sunday, September 28, 2025

Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first that Jesus went through the grain fields. And his disciples plucked the heads of grain and ate them, rubbing them in their hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them, "Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?" But Jesus answering them said, "Have you not even read this, what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he went into the house of God, took and ate the showbread, and also gave some to those with him, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat?" And He said to them, "The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath." (Luke 6:1–5)

Two cultures, two opposite errors about rest—and a Savior who calls weary souls to Himself.

A Topic We Rarely Discuss

We're continuing our study in the Gospel of Luke, and today we come to the subject of the Sabbath—everything you never knew you needed to know about it. All jokes aside, the Sabbath is genuinely important, and one we don't talk about frequently enough in Protestant churches like ours. It's also a challenging topic, because we live in a culture that doesn't value rest. Especially over the last ten years or so, our culture has adopted the idea of a "hustle culture," and it's hard to value rest when we're surrounded by people who don't.

A Culture Clash in Germany

In my early twenties I had the privilege of living for a time in northwest Germany, in a town called Siegen between Cologne and Frankfurt, teaching at a small international Bible school. Anytime you enter another culture you experience a clash. Even though Western Europe is similar to the US in many respects, there are real differences. We often tell those who go on short-term mission trips to expect culture shock—and interestingly, the shock is sometimes strongest when you come back home. Many Americans don't think we have a culture until it gets stepped on by another one.

One difference I noticed quickly was the German rhythm of life. They have something called Sonntagsruhe—Sunday rest. We used to have something like it here, called blue laws; some of you remember stores being closed on Sunday, as Chick-fil-A still is. By four o'clock on Saturday almost everything in Germany was closed, and it didn't open again until Monday morning. At first that bothered me, coming from Southern California where life just goes and goes. But it didn't take long before I liked it. Sundays were really just for church, and the slower pace was refreshing. Then I came back to the United States and was shocked all over again by how hectic everything is.

Workaholics and "Feierabend"

Not long after I moved there, a German friend said, "You Americans, you're all workaholics." I'd never thought of us that way, but that was the stereotype. The Germans have another word with no perfect English equivalent—Feierabend, literally "celebration evening." The idea is that when the workday ends, you're done. You don't think about work, you don't look at emails, especially on a Friday. They're strict about their forty-hour work week, and when it's over, it's over.

We know almost nothing of that. With instant access all the time, we now expect immediate responses. A pastor friend who was a lawyer for twenty-five years tells his staff that if they don't answer an email within twenty-four hours, they'll hear from him—and he says if your lawyer doesn't answer within twenty-four hours, get a new lawyer. We're on the call all the time.

The Rise of Hustle Culture

Years ago, the seventy- or eighty-hour work week became a big thing in Silicon Valley, and it spread. We had a brief pause during remote work five years ago, but now the big corporations want everyone back on the clock. In China the legal work week is forty-four hours, but many large firms pressure employees into "996"—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Not to be outdone, some American firms now push "997"—9 to 9, seven days a week, eighty-four hours.

The motto from Silicon Valley was "move fast and break things." Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired two-thirds of the staff because they believed they could do more with less. The great driver in our culture right now is entrepreneurialism—drive, drive, drive, work 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., because you want the big exit. But what people don't recognize is that the thing you might break is yourself, your marriage, or your family. On the way to the top, your family may exit before you do.

The Kingdom of Christ Clashes With the Cultures of Man

Point number one: the kingdom and way of Christ will always clash with the kingdoms and cultures of man. What's fascinating in this text is that Jesus's way clashed with a culture that was the opposite extreme of ours. Our 21st-century extreme is "move fast and break things, eighty-four hours a week." Steve Jobs used to give his team a "90-hour" shirt when they hit ninety hours in a week.

But the extreme Jesus confronted in the first century was a rigid religious rest—a forced rest that ended up being no rest at all. It became such a burden it was no longer rest. So we have two extremes: hustle until you die, and a forced rest that crushes people. Jesus speaks into both.

When Jesus shows up, He exposes error in order to right wrongs. The more you get to know Christ, the more He exposes the error in your own mindset and heart—not to beat you down, but to build you up and show you a better way. When we meet Jesus, we're confronted with an either-or decision: follow Him in His way, or oppose His authority. There's no third way. Jesus later asks, "Why do you call me Lord and do not do the things I say?" There's a lot of talk now about "Jesus is King," but a better hat might read "Jesus is Lord." The question is whether He is Lord of my life.

The First Sabbath and the Second

Luke says this happened "on the second Sabbath after the first," which begs the question—what was the first? We have to go back to Luke 4. On the Sabbath in His hometown of Nazareth, Jesus went to the synagogue as was the custom. They handed Him the scroll of Isaiah, and He read what we now call Isaiah 61—"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me"—a passage everyone in first-century Israel knew to be messianic. He closed the scroll, sat down, and said, "Today this is fulfilled in your hearing."

He caused such a stir that they laid hands on Him and took Him to a cliff outside the city to throw Him off, because He was claiming to be the Messiah. He walked through their midst and they couldn't kill Him. That was the first Sabbath. Now, on the second, He's causing a stir again—revealing that His way clashes with the culture of man. The culture Jesus ministered in was hyper-religious, fixated on the religiosity of rest. The Sabbath had become an essential litmus test for righteousness: if you don't follow the prescribed rules about rest, you're not righteous.

A Blessing Turned Into a Burden

Where did the Sabbath come from? From God through Moses in the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20:8 begins, "Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy"—a simple statement. But by the time of Christ, fourteen hundred years of religious interpretation had expanded that single sentence into an endless, burdensome litany of rules that became the test of righteousness.

This illustrates point number two: man tends to make into a burden what God intended to be a blessing. The Sabbath is a perfect example. So is marriage in our culture. So is having children. All these things God intends as blessings, and we turn them into burdens.

Jesus's view of the Sabbath, revealed in how He lived it, was clearly different from the religious teaching of His day, because He kept transgressing their traditions. Is there any question about Jesus's righteousness? No. So clearly His way was not out of step with God's law. God said, "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God."

How Far Can You Walk?

When the religious leaders saw the disciples plucking heads of wheat, rubbing them in their hands, separating wheat from chaff, and eating because they were hungry, they said, "You can't do that—you're harvesting, threshing, and preparing a meal. You're breaking law after law." They were deadly serious about this. I've been to Israel five times, and around Galilean villages you can still see "Sabbath day's journey" poles with a cord strung between them, marking how far an observant Orthodox Jew may walk on the Sabbath without committing sin.

Notice how serious they were. Mark 3:6 says, "Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him." Let me get this straight—the sixth commandment says you shall not kill, but apparently if you break the fourth commandment, they could kill you for it. These are the very people you would expect to understand God's law better than anyone. How could they lose the plot so completely? They had become so focused on the letter of the law that they missed the heart and spirit of it.

This is a warning for us. The more we study and comprehend Scripture, the more careful we must be to understand its purpose and point. We can get so fixated on some minor point of theology we think is the point that we miss Christ Himself. My friend Larry Osborne calls this becoming "accidental Pharisees." I could fall into it; so could you.

The Heart and Purpose of the Sabbath

So what was the purpose of the Sabbath? Exodus 20 explains: "In it you shall do no work—you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth... and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it."

That word "hallowed" is a challenge for us, because we hear it as "holy"—something mystical. But it also means set apart or consecrated. Think of property-tax money set apart from your common account for a specific purpose. God separated one day in seven and consecrated it—not to make you holy, but for a purpose: rest. We mistakenly think keeping it makes us holy. It doesn't. That was never its point.

What Makes the Bible Different

When Moses references Genesis 1, something amazing emerges. If you read the creation stories of the ancient Near East—the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Akkadians, Hittites, Greeks, Egyptians—they agree on a striking point: the gods created man to be their slaves so the gods wouldn't have to work. The biblical story is utterly different. God made everything, including man, then made a day of rest and invited man to rest with Him.

That difference points to the gospel. The whole narrative arc of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation points to the gospel, and what is the gospel? It is rest in Christ from slavery to sin and death. From page one, God invites man into His rest. Point number three: only in the Bible does God bless man with rest from the burdens of his labors.

The religious leaders took a law that prescribed a blessing—God commanding His people to be blessed—and turned it into a legalistic burden nobody could bear, not even themselves.

Have You Not Read the Bible?

So striking is Jesus's commitment to rest that He challenges their religious sensibilities with a story. To the Pharisees who boasted of their knowledge of Scripture, He says—essentially—"Have you not read the Bible? You missed the story of your favorite king, David."

In 1 Samuel 21, David has been anointed king but is not yet on the throne; Saul, rejected by God, is chasing him to kill him. On the run with his men, hungry and tired, David comes to the tabernacle and asks the priest for provisions. The only food is the showbread—twelve loaves set before the Lord, lawful only for the priests to eat. Yet the priest gave it to David and his men, and they ate it. They broke the letter of the law, and yet Jesus says David received a pass, because the spirit and heart of the law differed from the letter. He was hungry, and God allowed him to eat.

Then Jesus says, "The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath." The point of the Sabbath was rest, not ritualistic righteousness. Mark 2 adds Jesus's interpretation: "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." The God-Man says, "I made the Sabbath for you. I didn't make you to conform to the Sabbath." It was never meant to be a burden or a test for religious righteousness.

The Man With the Withered Hand

To make it clear that His way differs from the religious leaders', Luke gives another story—a third Sabbath. In the synagogue at Capernaum, a man was there with a withered right hand, and the scribes and Pharisees watched closely to see whether Jesus would heal on the Sabbath, so they might accuse Him. The Sabbath was so important to them they had no qualms about being malicious enough to try to kill Him over it. The most religious people of the time, and the trap was set—perhaps they placed the man right up front.

But Jesus knew their thoughts. He told the man, "Arise, and stand here." You can imagine the Pharisees thinking, "We've got Him." Then Jesus asked them, "I will ask you one thing: Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy?" In other words, "Right now you want to do evil and destroy me—is that lawful in your heart?" Mark says Jesus looked around at them, angered and grieved, and said, "Stretch out your hand." The man did, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with rage and discussed what they might do to Him.

Let me clue you in: if your religion angers and grieves Jesus, you're doing it wrong.

Law as Blessing, Not Burden

Point number four: God's law is a blessing to make life better, not a burden to make it bitter. The religious leaders had made the lives of their followers bitter by their strict interpretation. Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 1:8 that "the law is good if one uses it lawfully." There is a proper and an improper use of God's law. If you use it to make a show of your own righteousness or someone else's unrighteousness, I suggest it angers and grieves God.

The lawful purpose of the Sabbath was to bring rest—rejuvenation, time to enjoy the fruits of labor. And it wasn't just one day. Every seventh day was a Sabbath; every year during Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, there was a Sabbath week; every seventh year a Sabbath year; and every seven-times-seven cycle, a Jubilee in the fiftieth year, when all debts were purged.

Interestingly, the research shows Israel was passionate about the seventh day but didn't take the seventh year or the fiftieth year very seriously. The weekly Sabbath is easy; releasing your debtors and trusting God for an entire Sabbath year is much harder. But can you see that at the heart of God's law is rest? And all of it was a shadow pointing forward to Christ. Yet the author of Hebrews said of Israel, "They did not enter into my rest."

Christ Our Ultimate Rest

Jesus is our rest. In one of my favorite passages, Matthew 11:28, He says, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Point number five: the Sabbath of the fourth commandment is the penultimate rest to the ultimate rest found in Christ by the gospel. Penultimate means second-best. The first, most ultimate rest is Christ Jesus. In Him we find rest from all our labors. So the author of Hebrews says, "Strive to enter into that rest"—which seems paradoxical, striving for rest, but it's the rest found in Christ.

Does that mean we shouldn't take one day in seven to rest? No. It makes that rest all the more glorious, because we are no longer slaves to sin. So yes, we ought to rest—and I'll be one of the first to confess that's hard for me, because I'm American, and so are many of you. We have a hard time with rest.

Rest the Right Way—and Work the Right Way

The Sabbath as the religious leaders enforced it was a distortion of what God originally intended—a corruption of His design, a perversion of His gift, just as we are apt to pervert the gifts of God, whether Sabbath or food or sex or anything else. So who was wrong—the One who inspired the Scriptures, or the ones who interpreted them? Their interpretation perverted the rest God had given.

But notice: the fourth commandment is not only about rest. It also says, "Six days you shall work." So resting all the time is itself a perversion and a breaking of the fourth commandment. We are called to work. Work preceded the fall—it became more difficult after the fall, but God called us to work for His glory and His kingdom before sin ever entered the world. We are not God's slaves; we work for His kingdom, and He calls us into rest. The fourth commandment commands both—rest the right way and work the right way—and on either extreme the way of Christ challenges us.

Our culture says forty hours is part-time: move fast, break things, 996, 997, "while you're sleeping, somebody else is working." There's a satirical video making the rounds mocking it—a man who supposedly wakes at 3 a.m. for his first run, does an ice bath, makes a hundred thousand trading crypto, an hour of affirmations, builds an empire by 10 a.m., "births three children," dies by 8 p.m., and resurrects at 9 p.m. They're mocking it, but that is the hustle culture.

The way of Christ is different, and it's hard for me. Honestly, fasting comes easier to me than Sabbath, and my wife challenges me to shut off and disconnect. But Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Our souls need rest. We live in a culture of weary souls, and Jesus is the answer—not only for us, but for everyone outside this building who is weary in soul. Would to God they would see in us that we truly understand: His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.

Closing Prayer

God, thank You for the simplicity of Your word. Help us by Your Spirit to apply these things, to follow You into Your rest. Your people who were given the law about rest never entered in. And so You say to us, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden. I will give you rest." Lord, help us to find that, to live that, and to share it with others. There are so many weary souls desperately desiring rest. God, do a work in us. We ask this in Jesus' name, and all those that agreed said, Amen.