What is the Lord's Day?

(This first appeared in The Wheaton Record on October 27th, 2020.)

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. This is the day which the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it”. (Psalm 118:22-24)

My first few years as a born-again Christian, I did a massive amount of work on Sundays. It was as if I was pretty lazy throughout the week and then worked my hardest on the day of rest! More recently, I’ve cut that out and sought to set aside Sunday as the Lord’s Day, a day for the public and private worship of God and rest from all work except for instances of necessity or mercy. 

Here’s why.

Keeping the Lord’s day is a command from God that Christians should obey. Christ argued that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath, in other words, should not be a burden. I want to show you that God cares so much about his people that he has commanded us to rest and spend time doing what he created  us to do: worshipping Him.

In heaven, you might be interested in riding around on a T-Rex or hanging out with Charles Spurgeon, but the best thing about heaven will be that we will worship the living God in his presence. Worshipping God forever almost feels like an insufficient amount of time due to how much love he has lavished on his church. When we come together with the people of God on Sunday to worship the King, we are getting a taste of heaven, not just in the experience of worshipping God, but in worshipping Him with each other. Because of the love God has shown us, we should respond in gratitude and set the Lord’s Day apart for him. 

Some might argue that this practice was just for the Jews under the Old Covenant. But then why would John, writing in the first chapter of Revelation at the end of the first century AD, write that he was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”? (Revelation 1:11) Ignatius, who was killed near when Revelation was written, writes that "Those who have come to the possession of new hope, no longer observing [the seventh day], but living in observance of the Lord's day, on which also our life has sprung up again, by him and by his death." Justin Martyr, who die about fifty years later, wrote that "on the day called Sunday is an assembly... because Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead upon it."

On the other hand, a Seventh-Day Adventist might agree that we should keep the Lord’s Day, while insisting that the Lord’s Day is Saturday, given that this was the pattern in the Old Covenant. They’re right about the pattern in the Old Covenant, but we see in the New Covenant that God is worshipped corporately by his people on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7). A.A. Hodge (1823-1886) wrote that "It appears evident... that an institution having unchanged purposes and relations, enacted at creation, re-enacted with added sacredness on Sinai, and re-enacted with added associations and obligations by the apostles, must be the same institution, in spite of the mere change of day."

The early church understood the first day of the week to be the Lord's Day, the day Christ rose from the dead. That indeed is the day in which we are to rest, "not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another". (Hebrews 10:25) Pentecost, a word that means fiftieth day, took place fifty days, and seven Sundays, after Easter Sunday. On that day, Christ’s followers, Acts 2:1 tells us, “were all together in one place.” Paul, who was converted after Pentecost, instructed the church at Corinth “to put something aside and store it up” (1 Corinthians 16:1-2) on the first day of the week, Sunday, which is the Lord's Day, which as Hodge says, "has been incorporated into the confessions, catechisms and liturgies of every historical Church in Christendom."

I would argue that being able to meet together in one place to worship God is so valuable, that if you had to choose between your in-person church back home and going to an in-person college that forbids in-person church, you would probably be spiritually better off staying home. Worshipping the King in the midst of his people is more important than anything else you are doing during the week, whether that is attending a football game or finishing up your homework instead of waking up early on Monday.

When we keep the Lord’s Day, we are proclaiming to the world that we, like those first disciples, believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that he is who he claimed to be, the eternal Son of God! Only in Christ can we find true rest for our souls. John Piper writes that "setting apart [the Lord's Day] testifies to a self-reliant world that our work does not save or define us."

I want to conclude with an encouragement for us all to repent of our breaking of the fourth commandment. We should not set this day apart for God as just a moralistic burden, but as we see God command his people who had defiled the Sabbath in the Old Testament, we should rather consider it “a delight and the holy day of the LORD honourable” and “honor it, not going your own ways” (Isaiah 58:13).