As we approach a new year we need to ponder afresh what it means - to worship God rightly in spirit and in truth. What it means - to gather together for corporate worship. What it means - to honor God as God and to be constantly thanking Him for all good things. Etc… One of the good gifts of God is the Sabbath. In the O.T. under the covenant of works with Adam it was the last day of the week, Saturday. Which all men were and still are accountable before God to obey a day of rest. This God re-declared afresh to Israel (see Exodus 20) and was legally binding upon them in a way that had more (not less) Sabbath day regulations.
So how do we seek to rightly understand the Sabbath day as believers in the covenant of grace (which by God’s design is now Sunday, not Saturday, for believers in the covenant of grace, because our Lord and Savior rose from the dead on the first day of the week)? What does the Sabbath day have to do with Christians? So how do we seek to honor God as God on the Sabbath day? How do we seek to praise and thank God on the Sabbath day? How do we seek to prepare our hearts for worship each time we gather together? Does anything else in our lives, any other events, or scheduling have a greater value than worshiping God corporately on the Sabbath? Should we skip/replace corporate worship for a day, week, month, or year - to work, to play sports, to attend other gatherings, to take a personal day to do as we wish, or any other thing? These and many more questions could be proposed to help us ponder once again the beauty of the Sabbath day.
The church where I pastor, Providence Baptist Church, holds that the church’s expression of faith is best summarized in the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. We join with many other congregations in holding that the Bible is the Word of God, and that only the Bible is to be our source of God’s revealed Word to us as His people. But certainly, we praise God as fellow believers do the work of exposition, so as to help us rightly understand what God said and what God meant by what He said. Also, as a way of reminder since the world hates God, it also hates His Laws and His Sabbath, therefore the world seeks to lead us away from God, His Laws, and the Sabbath, OR to twist these things so that they no longer look as God intended. I urge you to spend some time studying chapter 22 of the 1689 to ponder the questions listed above and others that might help us walk by faith together, in such a way, that God would be honored as God, as we praise Him and thank Him as we gather together each Sabbath day.
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