Delight In The Sabbath

I was recently turned onto the Theology Simply Profound podcast. On one episode, they addressed the topic of worship, specifically why and when we worship. It was a very helpful episode and furthered my thoughts on something that has come up time and time again in my life: sabbatarianism.


Anyone who knows my theological journey knows that my views on the Lord's Day, or Christian Sabbath, have evolved over time. I have, for as long as I can remember, believed that Sunday is the Sabbath for the Christian, but my understanding of what that means has evolved a great deal over the last few years. My pastor (and his wife) have gotten a multitude of hypotheticals and questions about what is, or is not, keeping the Sabbath. I am convinced that I have inherited the Nazarene guilt complex from my parents, though I was never raised in the Nazarene church, and so I feel compelled to rush to the defense of why I am not as strict a sabbatarian as others. The fact that I have a conservative drift in the evolution of my sabbatarianism could be evidence of an overactive guilt complex, or a love for God's law and a desire to keep his commands (likely it is some combination of both). I have observed two principles that seem to be guiding my evolution.

The first principle is eschatological: the Sabbath is a day of rest. What is this rest? Hebrews teaches us that it is an eschatological rest won by Christ. As we gather together with the saints in worship, we draw near to God. We join Christ, our Great High Priest, in the holy of holies, the very throne room of God. When we enter the rest of God we are entering into the age to come as it breaks through into this world. We see in Revelation that the saints will worship the Lamb of God in the new heavens and new earth, and this is precisely what happens when his saints gather for worship now, the age to come intrudes into this age. Gathering with the saints to worship is, for the Christian, a homecoming. The more we grow in faith, the more we know Christ, the more we will desire to be with him and with his bride. We will not spend eternity doing our own thing with Jesus, we will spend eternity with our brothers and sisters worshiping Jesus.

The second principle is creational: God set apart one day in seven for himself. We are created to work, and this is a good thing, but we are not created to work all the time. As the first principle shows, we are created to enter rest, and until we enter it permanently, we have a pattern in creation of 6 days for work and 1 day for rest. As Christians we believe that everything belongs to Christ. Our entire lives belong to Lord Jesus, and this includes our time. The Sabbath is designed to be a day set aside unto the Lord. It is not for work, it is not for family, it is not for school, it is not even for "me time". Obviously things come up occasionally, emergencies happen, and occasionally there are works of necessity and mercy. Our Lord himself taught that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. There are a million different things that can pull at our time every day of the week, but God gave us one day where we can rest from the concerns of this world. It is a gift that our Father has given to us.

I am sure that my views on the Sabbath will continue to evolve over time, but these two principles have started to shape the way I think about the Sabbath. We live in a world that has dozens of things competing for our time. We are continually on the go. It is easy to view church as a duty that you have to get out of the way so that you can get other things done, but this is fundamentally wrong headed. This makes the Sabbath a work, but the Sabbath is rest. Developing habits that reinforce this is foreign to many of us, it was (and still in many ways is) to me, but it is tremendously beneficial to us. The Sabbath should be a delight to us, not a duty. The more you experience the rest of God, the more of a delight it becomes. If worship is seen as something that takes a couple hours from your day, it is not rest, and it is not pleasing to God or delightful for the worshiper. It is merely a religious duty, something to check off the list. When we understand that we are given a day to dwell in the age to come, to enter into the throne room of the Most High God, to set aside all the things that tie us to the kingdom of this world and enter into the kingdom of God, then we will find delight in the Sabbath and we will sing with the sons of Korah:

For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.