Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the amazing John Bytheway. Hi, John.

John Bytheway: 00:10 Hi, Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:11 We’re going to take a question from this week’s Come Follow Me lesson and analyze it. The question I want to answer this week, John, is, what’s the big deal about the Sabbath day? It seems that Jesus is always doing things on the Sabbath day. They seem to add it. He’ll do this big thing and then they’ll just add it at the end, “Oh, by the way, it was the Sabbath day.” So as we’re reading through the New Testament this year, what would you say you’ve learned? What are you seeing about the Sabbath day?

John Bytheway: 00:37 Oh, that’s such a great question. Jesus helped us so much to see that they had overdone things and made the Sabbath its own object of worship sort of a thing. And that statement that Jesus makes that, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”, is just such an, oh, okay, the Sabbath is important, but people are important and we can love them and serve them and heal them on the Sabbath. And Jesus would say things like, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath? Well, of course.” I think that helps us a lot to watch how Jesus, who honored the law of Moses, but how Jesus kept the Sabbath and tells us, “People are important too, not just the day that it is.”

Hank Smith: 01:20 Yeah. I’ve read that the Jews of Jesus’ Day had a rule that if an animal had fallen into the mud or had gotten into trouble and it was going to die if you didn’t save it, that you could save it on the Sabbath day. You could go save that animal. And Jesus seems to use that sometimes. When he heals people and someone gets upset that he healed them on the Sabbath day like he did work and now they’re carrying their bed on the Sabbath, he’ll seem to use that saying, “Isn’t it lawful for us to save an animal on the Sabbath day? What about people?”

John Bytheway: 01:56 What about people?

Hank Smith: 01:58 Can we help people on the Sabbath day? Can we heal them on the Sabbath day? There’s a woman with kyphosis who’s bent over, you probably know this story in Luke, where Jesus heals her on the Sabbath and people are frustrated. And just a couple of chapters later, he heals a man with edema. He’s got swelling in one of his limbs. Jesus, there’s this moment where he seems to look at the Pharisees and look at the guy who’s in so much pain and says, “I don’t know. What do you guys think? Should we heal him?” I mean, it is the Sabbath in this moment, and they don’t know what to say. They don’t want to say no because the guy’s standing right there and he’s probably thinking, “Yeah, could you help me out?” They still don’t say yes. They can’t do it. They held their peace because the rules had become more important than outcomes.

John Bytheway: 02:45 And it seems that if you just saw the man at the pool of Bethesda, 38 years, if you just saw that, wouldn’t you at least go, “Wow, this is great. I’m so happy for him.” But we don’t see any of that. Or the woman bent over, she was a daughter of Abraham, Jesus says. How can you forget that? It helps us to, instead of one way or the other, try to balance things and see what’s most important. I’m so glad Jesus said that the way he did, “Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Hank Smith: 03:17 And it seems to me that one rule is, if it’s healing people, if it’s healing relationships, if it’s healing loneliness, I think the Lord would say, “That’s good Sabbath day work.”

John Bytheway: 03:28 That’s doing good on the Sabbath.

Hank Smith: 03:30 We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. We’re with Dr. John Hilton this week. Our podcast is called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. And then join us next week, we’ll be here for another followHIM Favorites.