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).

A cultural argument for the Sunday Sabbath

It seems there are quite a few Christian leaders (Warren, Driscoll) and Pajama Pages commentators who are arguing that because we can’t be sure that the Sabbath is really supposed to be on Sunday, or even that it’s supposed to be celebrated weekly, that we can observe it on any old day of the week. While I think there’s a Biblical argument to be made for a Sunday Sabbath, let’s just look at the issue from a cultural perspective and ask whether it’s such a grand idea to be ditching Sundays.

An important goal of the modern church, especially the Turnstile Church, is to be culturally relevant. I assume the ultimate outcome of cultural relevance is to make culture more like the church, rather than make the church more like culture. Perhaps that assumption is mistaken, but where might you say the church has been most sucessful in shaping secular culture? I would say it is in defining and protecting the Sabbath.

Most people the world over understand that Sunday is a day for worship, rest and recreation. Even though not all use the day for worship, you could talk to most unsaved folk and they would tell you that Sunday is a special day for Christian worship. You can see elements of this understanding in efforts by parents to send their children to church on Sundays, even though they may not attend themselves.

The heavy emphasis on televised sports (especially NFL, MLB, and NASCAR) on Sunday afternoons reflects the day’s special status as a day of rest. Even though the day is not what it used to be and is now highly commercialized, there is still a strong cultural gravitation towards rest on Sundays. Reduced trading hours and blue laws are also artifacts of the culture’s special regard for Sunday.

I would argue that the church has established a very strong cultural beachhead when it comes to honoring the Sabbath as a day of rest. Even though many people stay home, most Americans know that Sunday is God’s day.

I think there’s tremendous ground to be lost when some neoCalvinists and Turnstilers throw up their hands and say that they don’t know if the Sabbath is  supposed to be exactly on Sunday, so let’s just do church whenever. For now, our culture continues to preserve and respect Sunday as a special day of worship. If Christians abandon it, we lose any claim on the day at all. We strip the day of whatever sacred cultural value it still has, as well as the church’s special cultural time, and clumsily plop the church down in the middle of all the other mundane cacophonous cultural forces competing for our attention and allegiance.

If you were trying to build a strong cultural movement, to abandon what you’ve already won seems rather illogical. The sacred Sabbath is one area of common ground where our culture understands and respects the church. We should embrace that and build on it.

Although it’s not a scriptural argument, it is an argument.

Is church a building?

This is an issue that’s been brewing in the comments to the Turnstile Church post, and it also matters when we start to think about the effectiveness of doing church online.

My basic position is that even though the church is not a building, it is usually found in a building. The fact that Christians function as a church only when they regularly meet in a building makes it a reasonable shorthand for people to refer to that building as the church.

1. The universal Church is organized into particular geographical churches. Although Paul’s advice applies universally to all churches, his epistles were addressed to city churches with particular problems and characteristics. We see a similar distinction in the seven churches of Revelation. These were specific churches with their own personalities and faith trajectories.
2. Church government requires face-to-face assembly. Paul’s instructions to Timothy about church welfare requires that church leaders have a high degree of familiarity with the people under their care (1 Timothy 5). Elders are told to correct a wayward brother first privately, but then, as a final resort, publicly (Matthew 18:17). The assumption is that the public announcement is about a person that the other members of the church know.
3. Christian worship requires physicality only found in a church. In worship we are to sing together. God blesses us through the laying on of hands. The sacraments require physical presence for their proper administration. We extend the right hand of fellowship and greet each other with a kiss. There are other examples that might be worth the attention of a future post.
4. Christian worship has a time and space dimension. Although eternal himself, God created a system of worship that was tied to a calendar through holy days, especially the Sabbath. Similarly, although omnipresent himself, God created a system of worship that was contained within at least four walls. Although we can worship God anywhere and at all times, he has clearly shown us that our highest form of worship is within sabbath (time) assemblies (space) of other believers.

Hebrews 10:25 recommends church attendance with these words:

Not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another; and so much the more, as ye see the day drawing nigh.

As I once pointed out here, the Greek word translated as assembling is episynagoge. It means that Christians are to physically assemble together in one place. The root is synagogue, which itself means a physical gathering point, usually a building.

Yes, church also can refer to all Christians, living and dead, but it most commonly references distinct gatherings of believers who meet each other face to face for regular, physical worship of God. I assume that is our starting point, against which we’ll later assess efforts to redefine the church in ways that take it out of those chronological and physical constraints.

The tragedy of market testing the 10 Commandments

Rick Warren is well known as one of the founding fathers of the modern seeker-sensitive church movement. His philosophy is responsible for changing many preaching and worship styles. Many of his changes are controversial, but most of the problems stem from one of his very first decisions–to ask his future congregants when they wanted to have church.

In his book, Purpose Driven Church, Warren explains why he put his Christian service on Wednesday and his seeker service on Sunday.

When I started Saddleback, I asked unchurched people when they would be most likely to visit a church. Every single one said, “If I ever did, it would be a Sunday morning.” I also asked our members when they were most likely to bring unchurched friends. Again, they said Sunday morning. Even in today’s culture, people still think of Sunday morning as “the time you go to church.” So that’s why we decided to use Sunday morning for evangelism and Wednesday night for edification. [emphasis added] (pp. 245-246)

It is not Rick Warren’s place to decide when church should be held. Here are some problems with thinking you can poll test the fourth commandment.

1. It cancels the Commandments. The first commandment tells us who we must worship, the second and third tell us how, and the fourth tells us when.
   

   Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

   Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.

   For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)

   The Sabbath is a big deal to God.

2. It contradicts consecration. God tells us to keep it holy, meaning set apart and sacred. It really doesn’t matter what Warren’s neighbors think about the day; God has marked it for himself. We just had Mothers Day. How many of you tried telling your mother that you thought it was a bit overdone, but that you’d love to see her a couple of days later to celebrate it then? No, the day was your mother’s holiday. Sunday is God’s holy day. He made it for himself, so who are we to think we can take it away from him?
3. It conceals convention. The Apostles understood the point of the Sabbath and made it their habit to worship God with other believers every Sabbath day. See Acts 13:14-15, for example. They also knew it was the pinnacle of our worship, and expected that hungry followers would wait until the next Sabbath to hear the Word of God preached in its proper context.
   

   As Paul and Barnabas were going out, the people kept begging that these things might be spoken to them the next Sabbath….

   The next Sabbath nearly the whole city assembled to hear the word of the Lord. (Acts 13:42, 44)

4. It confuses the center of worship. The point of the Sabbath is to worship God, which means it is for believers, who alone are able to worship God. The purpose of the Sabbath and of the church is to bring God pleasure through worship.
   

   You shall keep My sabbaths and reverence My sanctuary; I am the LORD. (Leviticus 26:2)

   The Sabbath and the church go together. Why? Because “I am the LORD.” God is the center of the Sabbath and the center of the sanctuary. When Warrenesque churches make the unsaved their primary focus, they miss the whole point.

5. It cleaves congregations. Warren has split his church into the spiritual haves and the spiritual have-nots. What is particularly interesting is that both sides don’t get equal attention. I couldn’t find more than a couple of paragraphs in Warren’s book that talked about the Wednesday church. When people talk about Warren, they don’t usually think of his Wednesday evening ministry. It would seem that when Warren thinks of Warren, he doesn’t think of the Wednesday night folks much either. In his long-term goals, he 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.
6. It cheats Christians. Sabbath worship is a unique opportunity and blessing that God extends only to his children.
   

   I gave them My sabbaths to be a sign between Me and them, that they might know that I am the LORD who sanctifies them. But the house of Israel rebelled against Me in the wilderness. They did not walk in My statutes and they rejected My ordinances, by which, if a man observes them, he will live; and My sabbaths they greatly profaned. (Ezekiel 20:12-13)

   Chasing believers away from Sundays is akin to a shepherd kicking his sheep out of the best pasture to invite the goats to take over. There’s a place and time for goats, but the shepherd’s primary responsibility is to feed the sheep. Sabbath worship is God’s gift for our spiritual sustenance, and it shouldn’t be denied to believers by their know-better pastors.

7. It chases culture. What might have happened if Warren’s respondents had said they only wanted to meet once a month? At the beach? At Hooters? On what basis might he have turned them down? Culture should bend to God’s Word, not vice versa. When we ask permission of our neighbors to worship God, we don’t have a faith worth inviting anyone to join.
8. It condemns the church. If the time of worship isn’t important, neither, perhaps, is the place of worship or the method of worship. If the fourth commandment is negotiable, surely all the others are as well, including the first. In the next few weeks I plan to explain where I see Warren-type churches ending up. I am not hopeful, but for all the problems I see, I think they all have their genesis in the church’s negotiating away the Sabbath and losing its spiritual perspective and authority.

Dissing Jesus and Paul’s church takes real guts

It’s fairly routine for Perry Noble to use his pulpit to rant against other churches. I’ve always assumed that the implicit assumption was that we should all just get back to a New Testament kind of church and we’d all be living in the ecclesiastical Promised Land.

Until Sunday that is, when Noble showed his distaste for the churches of Jesus, Paul, and the Apostles.

His pre-service Twitter offered this wisdom:

Keep seeing in the book of Acts that Paul would always go to the synagogue every time he went to a new place…why…BECAUSE religious people NEED JESUS!!! Not a program…OR a process…but a relationship with a PERSON!

The context was Noble’s sermon about how Jesus saves us from our churches and our religious programs. Problem is, the accounts in the Acts show that the Apostles liked religious programs and processes to the point of insisting on them.

Paul went to the synagogue wherever he went because it was the Sabbath and he wanted to worship with God’s people.

As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures. (Acts 17:2)

Again, from Acts 14:1:

At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue.

It’s also in the synagogues that Paul meets the commendable Bereans (who insisted on “going deeper”).

As for religious programs, Paul was quite convinced that they provided the best context for meeting Jesus.

As Paul and Barnabas were leaving the synagogue, the people invited them to speak further about these things on the next Sabbath. When the congregation was dismissed, many of the Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who talked with them and urged them to continue in the grace of God.

On the next Sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. (Acts 13:42-44)

Paul and Barnabas apparently believed that church was the best place to hear Jesus preached and invited the city to join them the next week for their weekly religious program. Yes, they spoke to the people outside the synagogue, but they recognized that the sabbath and the synagogue were God’s special time and place for preaching and hearing the Word.

Noble treats Paul’s sabbath synagogue trips as rescue missions into hostile territory, when it would be more accurate to say that the Apostles were eagerly and regularly obeying Jesus’ command to meet on the sabbath to worship with the saints.

So Noble doesn’t like most existing churches. He doesn’t like Jesus’ church. He doesn’t like Paul’s church.

Is there any church that existed before the age of Hybels and Warren that he does like?