Why we worship on Sunday

In my recent posts on the physical center of the Christian worship, a few commentators challenged the idea that the Christian church should assemble on Sundays. I promised them that I’d explain why, so here it is:

1. The Sabbath is as physical and natural as night and day. The origins of the Sabbath come from the seven-day cycle God established in the first week of creation, not from the Ten Commandments. God worked for six days and rested for one. Work six, rest one is built into the essence of creation, just as the cycles of night and day and winter and summer are. Although we should worship with our whole lives and pray without ceasing, there is a special day in seven created for us to focus on worship. In other words, we can’t just celebrate the Sabbath whenever we feel like it, just as we can’t turn night into day just because we want to get more work done.
2. The Sabbath provides us rest and worship. The creation account and Commandments tell us that the purpose of the Sabbath is to rest (for ourselves and our servants) and to worship. Neither purpose is made obsolete by the New Testament.
3. The Sabbath is a gift, not a law. A few earlier commentators have asked me to show where the New Testament “requires” observance of the Sabbath. Why are we looking for a law? The Sabbath can’t be understood without understanding grace; it is God’s special gift to us. If I tell my son that he has to be back from playing with his friends in time for dinner, I don’t expect him to ask me where in the family rule book it insists that we eat dinner. Because he’s a member of my family, I am delighted to offer him dinner, but he needs to be at home when we eat so we can enjoy it as a family. Similarly, God gives believers the Sabbath as our spiritual sustenance. To ask for specific rules dictate why and when we should benefit from it misses the whole point.
4. Jesus didn’t abolish the Sabbath, he embodies it. Some argue that because Jesus fulfills the Sabbath, it’s no longer on the books. Jesus describes himself as the Lord of the Sabbath, which is a designation he would be unlikely to use for something that had passed away. Exodus 31:16 tells us that God gave the Sabbath to his people for generations to come. The analogy is imperfect, but when we refer to the President of the United States, we don’t assume that the president has replaced the country. Instead, we see the president as a personal representative of the country. Jesus not only embodies the Sabbath, he is an essential part of it. The two central elements of the day can only be found through him. He is the source of our rest and the only reason we can worship. Rather than abolishing the Sabbath, Jesus was necessary to preserve the Sabbath.
5. The Sabbath publicly celebrates Jesus. Paul instructs the church or assemble an an orderly fashion. Although churches were sometimes assembled in believers’ homes, church worship was not a willy-nilly whenever and wherever proposition. The question, then, is when did the early church leaders decide was the best time to exploit the Sabbath and worship God. The early church re-calibrated the six-plus-one sequence from Genesis 1 and moved the day of rest and worship to the first day of the week, which became known as the Lord’s Day. In 1 Corinthians 16:1-2 Paul assumed that the most convenient time for the church to collect money was on the first day of the week, presumably because everyone had gathered then. John received his revelation on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10), and the term’s usage assumes that his readers would know what day that was. When we enjoy God’s Sabbath on Sunday, we proclaim Christ’s resurrection just as surely as we do on Easter. The great thing is that we only have to wait seven days to do it again, not a whole year.

I’m sure there’ll be objections and other observations in the comments, but let me try to replicate a quick Q&A here.

• Are you saying that we must observe the Sabbath? No, because Paul tells us in Colosians 2:16 that we are not to observe the Sabbath simply because it is the Sabbath. Our salvation is not found in works of observing Sabbaths and holy days. I’m saying that the Sabbath is a part of God’s grace to everyone. As an element of common grace, he gives all men rest, which is a point I made in the cultural argument for a Sunday Sabbath. It’s also part of God’s special grace to believers that we are privileged and able to worship him on a special day that he reserved for us. The Sabbath is best understood as a gift, not a law.
• Can we celebrate the Sabbath on Wednesday like Rick Warren does? I don’t think so. The reason is that the Sabbath offers two privileges: rest and worship. Although Warren’s Wednesday services are opportunities to worship, it’s unlikely that it really functions as a day of rest for most of the congregation because our culture treats Wednesday as a work day, even in Southern California. Worship becomes something that is tacked on to the end of the day, rather than being the main point of the day, as Sunday worship is, or should be. It’s interesting that although Warren says his Wednesday services are his church’s real Sabbath, they don’t get the attention that a rest/worship day would enable. To quote an observation from my test-marketing post,
  

  In his long-term goals, [Warren] dreams of having 15,000 members, though only 5,000 attending midweek (p. 363). This isn’t reality; it’s his dream. The Christian service is really just an optional extra.

• Can we celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday like Piper does? This is an improvement over Warren’s plan because Saturday worshippers are more likely to be able to combine rest with their worship. The weakness is that it misses the resurrection proclamation and celebration of Lord’s Day (Sunday) worship.
• Aren’t you relying on church tradition rather than the Bible? A little, but no more than anyone who uses a Greek lexicon to study the New Testament. Although the New Testament does not specifically say the church worshipped on Sunday, we can look at how the term Lord’s Day was interpreted by contemporaries of Paul and John. We see that they understood it to be Sunday. I don’t think that looking at how contemporaries understood a term is much different than consulting the works of Greek scholars to see how various NT words were understood in their time (something I did, for example, in the scatology post).

Prettying up people who are far from life

I ran into an old friend today and asked what he’s doing for a job.

“I help people who are far from life look their best,” he said.

“Oh, so you sell makeup,” I replied.

“No, not really. But I do apply it.”

“You’re one of those beauty consultants at the mall?”

“No, I said I do it for people who are far from life.”

“You mean, you’re a mortician?”

“Yes.”

“And your clients are dead?”

“No! That’s cold. I prefer to think of them as just being far from life.”

The conversation is ridiculous and fictional. Much less fictional is a theology that seems to guide a growing number of churches who tell us that they are reaching people far from God.

Or, more accurately and bluntly, people who are dead.

Before we go further, perhaps it’s worth explaining why semantics matter. When you have an action-oriented theology that ditches creeds for deeds, the best way to know what some of these innovative churches believe is by looking at what they do and say. The new church movement (emergent, seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven, etc.) is quite deliberate and generally successful in trying to change the speech patterns of its adherents. Speech influences and reveals thinking, so I think it’s important to flag and challenge the thinking and the doctrines (creeds, if you will) that are behind the words being used in so many modern churches. Important words mean important things.

Saying that someone is far from God is about as useful as describing a corpse as being far from life; it’s just an attempt obscure the awful reality that the corpse is dead.

What does God think about our “far from life” status?

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins (Colossians 2:13)

There’s nothing a dead man can do to get closer to life. It’s a fundamental element of our faith that Christ alone saves us and that there is nothing we can do to initiate or reject it. If Christ decides not to save us, nothing we can do can change his mind. If Christ does mercifully decide to save us, there’s nothing we can do to resist him.

Describing sinners as being far from God is a fiction that, while trying to preserve the dignity of the sinner, ignores the absolute wretched position that he finds himself in. It’s a fiction that incubates thinking that if we could only change the way the unsaved think about Jesus, Christians or the church, that they would start to close the distance between themselves and a God who wishes they’d come closer.

Mark 12:34 does tell of a particular Pharisee whom Jesus describes as being “not far from the kingdom of God.” It’s a curious account because we don’t know whether the man did eventually enter the kingdom, though I suspect that Jesus was telling him that by God’s grace he was being drawn. The Pharisee had affirmed Jesus and demonstrated a clear understanding of Scripture, which is something that’s impossible to do without God’s help. One thing we do know about the Pharisee, he was not seeking God before his encounter with Jesus; he came to challenge and test Jesus with the intent of tripping him up. Although he sought God with evil intent, it appears that God demonstrated his mercy and gave the man a new heart. By his actions and intent, the Pharisee was living and running far from God, but by Jesus’ love and power he was brought close to God.

After this, no one dared asked Jesus any more questions. Why not? A hostile sinner asked Jesus a question and it probably appeared to all observers that he had been converted. When Jesus speaks to you, you change.

Look at Romans 3.

There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.

All have turned away, they have together become worthless.

The most moral sinner is just as far from God as the most murderous tyrant. Just as the distance between life and death for a dead man is infinite, so the distance between my unregenerate self and a holy and just God is infinite and terrifying. I am either so far from God that distance is irrelevant, or I am an integral and valued part of his body by virtue of his saving grace.

Once a part of his body, although I can be far from sanctified maturity, I can never be far from God.

This is the wonderful miracle, security and beauty of grace.

Are you a Christ follower or mainly just a label avoider?

If you listen to emergent preachers and boosters for any length of time, you can’t help but notice the studied avoidance of Christian and its replacement with Christ follower. A couple of weeks ago I offered a critique of how the church tries to make Jesus famous, but Christ follower is the term that gives me the willies more than anything else the new church says.

Important words mean important things, and the sheer repetition and deliberate care with which emergents use Christ follower suggest that they understand that there’s an important battle of ideas they can win if they can place the term into widespread circulation.

It needs to be resisted. Here’s why.

1. It rejects Christianity. Although this is a simple and indisputable point, it is by no means unimportant. Where most believers would use the term Christian, emergents insert the term Christ follower. No matter the arguments in favor of using CF, you are ditching a profoundly important term. Emergents will counter that Christian isn’t really important because it’s only used twice in the KJV Bible. Sure, but how many times does God need to say something for it to be important? When parents tell you their child’s name, do you make a habit of arguing with them?
2. It rejects tradition. God’s redemptive story doesn’t end in the last chapter of Revelation, although his revealed Word does. The Holy Spirit continues to act in human affairs through the institution of the church. To ignore all that wise men of God have left us (the creeds, the reformers, the traditions, etc) is to ignore God’s work over the last 2,000 years. The early apostles assumed that the Bible was understood within the context of the church that Jesus left us. When a church tries to untether itself from church history, it rejects godly wisdom and leaves itself susceptible to error.
3. It rejects God’s family. God refers to the church in familial terms. We are all adopted. We are Christ’s bride. We are brothers and sisters. You might not like it, but when Christ saved you, you joined the family. When my wife married me, she married into my parents and siblings as well. Just because she’s embarrassed by my brother (I jest, bro, because I care) was not enough of a reason for her to suggest that we change our last name to McSnickenmeister so no-one could connect the dots between her and the rest of my family. When Jesus chooses you, his family comes with him. It’s a package deal. It’s a good deal.
4. It rejects grace. Christian denotes a state of being and belief; we are part of Christ’s church. Christ follower denotes a state of action and effort. Being a Christ follower is always a secondary state compared to our status as Christians. I am a Christian because of what Christ did, not anything I did. To be a Christ follower I must do something. In terms of how both terms explain the essential quality of God’s grace in our salvation, Christ follower couldn’t really be more wrong. The consequence of being a Christian is that one follows Christ, but one can never follow Christ before, or without, being a Christian.
5. It embraces paganism. Although I argue that you must be a Christian before you can be a Christ follower, and that the first term should take precedence, that’s not necessarily the meaning that emergents convey. Following Christ is about living like Christ and doing things he would like. When you boil Christianity down into terms that suggest that it merely means living well, you remove the offense of the cross and let anyone claim they’re Christ followers if they’re living good lives. There are many pagans who live honorable lives and perhaps demonstrate the values of the Sermon on the Mount better than some believers. How does Christ follower communicate the message of the Gospel to a good-living sinner?
6. It welcomes heresy. Rejecting Christianity as a term puts you on the road to rejecting the beliefs that are part and parcel of it. It at least puts you in the company of people who are further down that road than you ever expect you might go. The value of the creeds and of the great traditions of faith is that they act as speed bumps for believers who so easily can lapse into heresies. By rejecting Christians and Christianity, you’re ignoring the speed bumps. We all hope you have skilled drivers.
7. It embraces cowardice. For two thousand years believers have been persecuted and killed for declaring that they are Christians. Now, because a bunch of ignorant MTV types think we’re silly, we get our knickers in a knot and flee the term. What fools the martyrs were. All they needed to do was change their label and catch the next bus home.
8. It embraces culture. The common reason for adopting the Christ follower moniker is that Christian has too much baggage and makes people think of the church more like Brussels sprouts than pop tarts. The world thinks the church is all about creeds (see #2), is full of old people (#3) and makes you study silly stuff like theology and doctrine (see #4). Tell me when the church or Christianity has ever been embraced by culture. The nature of the cross is at cross purposes with our sinful nature. We will never be loved and accepted. That’s the point of grace. Only with the Holy Spirit’s enabling can I ever hope to love Christ and his church. Besides, changing your terms to chase culture is a fool’s errand. In 20 years you’ll have to change Christ follower to something else more acceptable, perhaps to nice person.

If you’re a Christian, simply say so.