The Temptation to Pollute (Break) the Sabbath

Blessed is the man that doeth this,

and the son of man that layeth hold on it;

     that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it,

     and keepeth his hand from doing any evil. 

(Isaiah 56:2)

     What’s ‘polluting’ the Sabbath?  Let’s think about this.  Pollution taints what should be pure.  If the Sabbath is supposed to be holy day, then sinning would definitely pollute it.  The Sabbath is supposed to be the Lord’s Day, so worldliness would pollute it.  The Sabbath is also supposed to be a day of rest, so working would pollute it.  (Works of charity, however, would be an exception; charity doesn’t pollute the Sabbath.)  Here’s what George Albert Smith said about breaking the Sabbath:

We lose the Spirit when we do not honor the Sabbath.  Those who do not honor the Sabbath and keep it holy displease [God].  Some people appear to think that if they have attended religious meetings, or performed some portion of the service required of them on Sunday, they are then at liberty to go to ball games, picture shows, or resorts of various kinds, and still continue to enjoy the favor of the Master.  I say to you that if they persist in doing things of that kind, members of the Church will lose their faith; and the Spirit of our Heavenly Father will withdraw from them.1

The Temptation to Think the Sabbath Is Boring Because You Can’t Do Anything You Want to Do

When I was looking through the Book of Isaiah for something that could be applied to the Sabbath, this scripture stuck out to me as a good metaphor for what happens when you think keeping the Sabbath holy is boring.  Now, be careful as you’re reading these next verses; the thing that I want you to notice in them is the metaphor about water.  6 Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in Rezin and Remaliah’s son;7 Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria, and all his glory: and he shall come up over all his channels, and go over all his banks:8 And he shall pass through Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel.(Isaiah 8:6-8)Not liking to keep the Sabbath and saying it is too boring is similar to disliking a little stream (“the waters of Shiloah that go softly”) flowing through your backyard because it is boring.  If we reject the quietness of the Sabbath, we start letting the noisy, busy stuff from our lives crowd in, and when that happens, it is like getting flooded by a big, violently churning river (“the waters of the river, strong and many”).  All those activities flood our lives and fill up our time until we start feeling like we’re just barely keeping our heads above water with all the things we have to do.  (“[it] shall come up over all [its] channels, and go over all [its] banks. . .[it] shall overflow and go over, [it] shall reach even to the neck”)From this river metaphor we can see that the self-imposed quietness of keeping the Sabbath holy actually helps us control the rest of our lives.  It sets limits on our time so that it is easier for us to choose the most important things to do.  It helps us use our time more wisely.  It also gives us a rest from our hard work.  And it shall come to pass in the day that the LORD shall give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve,(Isaiah 14:3)If all the wickedness you see around you makes you sad, if you are afraid you’ll never get your homework done, if you have to slave all day at school and then your boss constantly cracks the whip at work and you always feel tired, this scripture tells you the Sabbath is a day the Lord gives you as a rest from all of that.

Here’s an example. There were times at college when I felt like I was an absolute slave to my homework.  I was taking engineering classes in which I was doing assignments late into the night on weekdays.  Friday after school was not free time.  It was homework time in hopes that my Saturdays could be free, but there was no guarantee that it would be done by then.  A few times Saturday ended and homework was not finished, even though I had worked on it straight through the day.  That was when I badly needed the Sabbath.  The Sabbath was the day for me to be able to completely forget about my homework and be free from my bondage.  It was the day school and homework and grades didn’t exist.         The Temptation to Think You Can’t Find Ways to Enjoy the Sabbath More13 If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words:14 Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.  (Isaiah 58:13-14)If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath - This is a peculiar expression.  You probably sense what it means in the same way that I do... that it means to not do something on the Sabbath, but what that is in particular we don’t know.   Isaiah is nice enough to clue us in at the very end of the very same verse that “turn away thy foot from the sabbath” means “not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words”.  It’s the Lord’s day, so you do the Lord’s ways, you find the Lord’s pleasure, and you speak the Lord’s words instead of your own.  OR... even better, you can change yourself so that the things the Lord loves, you love, the things the Lord likes to do, you like to do, and the things the Lord likes to say, you like to say.  That would definitely make the Sabbath more fun.  In fact, it would make the Sabbath into your favorite day![C]all the sabbath a delight - Isaiah advises us to start by calling the Sabbath a “delight”.  One of the strange, yet cool things about this is that it actually works!  (I know because I tried it.)  If you say, “Yippeee!  Tomorrow’s the Sabbath!  I get to rest!” in an enthusiastic, excited way, somehow you will start to actually feel enthusiastic and excited about the Sabbath.  Try it on Saturday night; see what happens. But why should we call the Sabbath a delight?  I can think of several reasons.  1) The Lord enjoys the Sabbath.  I know this by the Spirit.  If the Lord enjoys something, then that should tell us that we need to enjoy it too in order to become like Him.  2) The Sabbath is made for man.  It’s a gift!  If we didn’t have God’s permission to rest one day out of every seven, think how overworked we would be!Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD - This is the real purpose of the Sabbath, to delight in the Lord and to worship Him.  Just how do we best worship the Lord?  First, by taking the sacrament, because that helps us remember Him and the Atonement He worked out for us.  Secondly, by imitating Him as best we can.  Imitation is the sincerest form of worship.  (It’s also the kind of worship of God that we should not confine to just the Sabbath.)  [A]nd I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father - I’m not sure what it means to “ride the high places of the earth”, but every time I hear the phrase, I visualize an eagle riding a thermal pocket of air around the sky without having to flap its wings even once.  Oh... wait a second.  This could be one of those verses where each of the things Isaiah lists means essentially the same thing.  Delighting thyself in the Lord, sounds pretty similar to feeding with the heritage of Jacob, because of course Jacob would be also delighting himself in the Lord.  And in connection with that, riding upon the high places kind of conveys a sense of having one’s thoughts centered upon the things of heaven and the hope of attaining a place in the celestial kingdom.  Kind of like walking around with our heads in the clouds, if you want to put it in terms of a modern cliché.   A few months ago, I decided I had not been keeping the Sabbath as well as I had been taught when I lived with my parents.  At my parents’ house, there were plenty of church movies to watch and church books to read, but my husband and I had not yet started to build ourselves a library of church books, and because I thought I didn’t have anything to read on Sunday afternoons I had fallen into the habit of reading my other books.  So I made a decision right there and then to change my ways and read only church books on Sunday.  The next Sunday, I read through my relief society manual.  The Sunday after that I read the Brigham Young manual through.  The Sunday after that, I read another one of those manuals through.  I studied them carefully, and boy, did it work my brain!  I pulled out my Sunday school study guide and made sure to look over the material ahead of time so that I could be prepared to participate in the lesson.  I wrote in my journal some things I discovered in the scriptures.  I also decided to try to write poetry about different aspects of the gospel.  Some other things I like to do during the Sabbath are the following: go to choir practice, go to firesides, play church music, talk to my family, take a nap, and watch church movies. I found myself really enjoying the Sabbath, and discovered that the gospel was satisfying my soul more than it ever had before.  I wanted to pray more often for help with the things I intended to do, even with things that I thought I already knew how to do (like writing this book), because I had a new conviction of my own ignorance and nothingness in comparison with the Lord.  I felt the influence of the Spirit more strongly.   If recommitting to keep the Sabbath helped me, it will help you too. Keeping the Sabbath Holy Qualifies and Prepares Us For Temple Blessings4 For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;5 Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.   6 Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD, to serve him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant;7 Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.    (Isaiah 56:4-7)Something that sticks out from this scripture is that no matter who we are or where we live, keeping the Sabbath holy is one of the specific things we can do to prepare to go to the temple. But why?  If you’ll be patient for just a little bit, we can find the answer indirectly by some gospel-based reasoning.  The world doesn’t think “time” can be holy.  They think one slice of time is just the same as another slice of time.  We know differently.  We know the Sabbath is a holy day, because God hallowed it.  (To “hallow” something means to make it sacred.  You could say God made the Sabbath wholly holy.)Because the world doesn’t think a time can be holy, you can be sure they wouldn’t think a place could be holy either.  If they pollute a holy time that is accessible to everyone and do it without a second thought, you can be sure they would also pollute a holy place without a second thought.  So the temple is made inaccessible to them.  We, on the other hand, show by keeping the Sabbath holy that we are able to keep the temple holy too.  And really, if you can keep an entire day holy, keeping a place holy is a cinch!  One way we keep the Sabbath holy is by learning how to serve God and practicing what we learn.  If the Sabbath prepares us for the temple, can you guess what we do in the temple?  (I’ll give you a hint.  We don’t play “Pick-Up-Sticks”.)  We learn how to serve God and we practice what we learn!The world at large has a really hard time serving God, because they don’t know what work God considers most important.  At best they have a vague idea that God would want them to help people, but they find this so difficult to do that they simply bag it and serve themselves instead, because they understand perfectly how to do that.  We, on the other hand, know exactly how to serve God.  We know His work is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39), so we serve him when we teach the gospel and administer saving ordinances to people.  On the Sabbath, we do this by instructing and strengthening each other in the gospel.  We serve each other in church callings.  Guys are particularly of service when they use their priesthood authority to administer the sacrament.  If it becomes natural to us to serve during the Sabbath, it will become natural to serve in the temple.  The only difference is that in the temple you serve people whom the world thinks are “beyond help”.  Namely, the dead.  (If the world can’t serve God, who they think is “out-of-sight-out-of-mind”, they would have an equally hard time serving the “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” dead.)Another way we keep the Sabbath holy is by worshipping God.  If the Sabbath helps us prepare for the temple, you can probably guess what happens in the temple - the worship of God. The world has a hard time worshipping God. They think the character of God is an unknowable mystery, and of course it is difficult to worship someone who you are told you can never know.  (Naturally, they find our assertion “man can become like God” to be equally incomprehensible.)  They also think that nobody is perfect, so they believe this dooms to impossibility any prospect of achieving a perfectly holy state similar to that of God’s.  Because of this, they think God will excuse all kinds of bad behavior.  We, on the other hand, know exactly how to worship God.  We worship God best by trying to become like Him.  (I said it before and I’ll say it again; imitation is the sincerest form of worship.)  We do this by doing three things: 1) we use Christ’s atonement to have our sins taken away, 2) we resist temptation, and 3) we work to develop Christ-like attributes by depending upon God’s grace.The Sabbath is a special day to worship God, because we get the chance to worthily take the sacrament, which makes us holy, sanctified, just like Christ is holy.  Becoming and staying sanctified prepares us to further imitate Christ in the temple.  Just like Christ is our Savior, we can become saviors on Mount Zion (in the temple) by doing vicarious ordinance work that saves our dead from spirit prison.  And just like participating in the sacrament worthily sanctifies us as we remember Christ’s sacrifice, participating at the temple worthily will sanctify us as we remember Christ’s sacrifice.  Now we see how keeping the Sabbath holy gives us valuable experience and practice at keeping something holy, serving God by serving each other, and worshipping God, all of which is also done in the temple.  Now that we’ve figured all this stuff out, it’s time to go back to those verses of Isaiah and review the promises the Lord gives to those who keep the Sabbath holy.5 Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off. . . .   7 Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.    (Isaiah 56:5,7)[U]nto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off - Now I can see that these two things mean essentially the same thing, but it can be read in two different ways.  First, the name we’ll be given is that of Christ.  We take this name upon us at baptism, and we renew it when we take the sacrament.  In the temple, the name becomes even more important.  Being called a child of Christ is better than having sons or daughters that are called after us, according to Isaiah. If we’re called by that name, then we’ll be worthy of receiving eternal life, and as an immortal, exalted being, our name will truly never die.  We’ll be able to have our own spirit sons and daughters that will be called by our names.Second, in the temple we become sealed to our families for eternity, and that makes our family (with all its names) survive beyond the grave.  It becomes an eternal family “that shall not be cut off”.  Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer – If we practice serving and worshipping God on the Sabbath, we will be ready to do the same in the temple.  If we enjoy serving and worshipping God on the Sabbath, we will also enjoy serving and worshipping God in the temple.  [T]heir burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar - The modern version of this is that our broken hearts and contrite spirits will be offerings the Lord accepts.  If so, then we will know that our subsequent offerings of service in the temple will also be acceptable and pleasing to God.  So what have we learned from Isaiah about the Sabbath?  1) Sinning, working, or focussing on worldly things on the Sabbath pollutes the Sabbath.2) Keeping the Sabbath holy helps us keep control of our lives, and gives us a rest from all our sadness, fear, and slavery.3) The Lord wants us to delight in the Sabbath4) When we delight in the Sabbath, we will delight in the Lord5) Keeping the Sabbath holy prepares us to go to the temple.  If we delight in the Sabbath, we will delight in the temple.  If we serve the Lord acceptably on the Sabbath, we will serve the Lord acceptably in the temple.Notes1 The Teachings of George Albert Smith, edited by Robert and Susan McIntosh, Bookcraft Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996, pp. 108-09.