Why Sunday Is My Day of Rest
by Stephen Ferguson | 10 May 2024 |
Thank goodness for Sunday. As a Seventh-day Adventist, Sunday is my day of rest.
We all know the fourth commandment of the Decalogue by heart, because as Adventists it is our special thing:
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it orderly.
Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy ordinary paid work.
But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: on it, ye shall organize a Sabbath-school class, a worship item, a song service, a drama, a potluck lunch, a communion service, a Pathfinder club camp, a nomination committee meeting, or a sermon.
Ye shall spend the Friday-night evening researching, cooking. or rehearsing. 11pm or midnight shall be your allotted time for sleep.
Everyone in your entire family shall participate in this holy work: thy son, thy daughter, thy manservant and thy maidservant, even thy cattle or the stranger who happens to reside within your gate. If ye are a pastor’s spouse or pastor’s child, thou shall be guilt-tripped into this Lord’s work threefold.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Therefore, as the Lord sits back and relaxes, work yourself ragged in church-related activities.
That’s Exodus 20:8-11—with some modern reapplication, just as the apostle Paul used to do. (see Eph. 6:2-3 cf. Ex. 20:12.)
Thank God it’s Sunday
Thank God for Sunday. I say that genuinely, not in vain. It is the one day most Adventists—at least we supposedly “good Adventists”—get a break.
Last week was especially brutal. I worked till midnight almost every night in my day job as a government lawyer, to ensure certain officers didn’t face dramatic legal penalties in an upcoming court case. I think I did about 20 extra hours of overtime, and while I am grateful for the money, I would honestly have rather had the time off.
Did I have to work so hard? Not strictly – no. I guess if I didn’t care about people facing potential ruin, I could have taken it easy. Otherwise, yes, I did.
This week also required me to assume the role of sole parent for two elementary-school children, ages 7 and 5, while my wife was traveling on business. After an exhausting week, when Friday evening finally came round, I faced the opening of Sabbath with dread. I realized that tomorrow I had to help run a Primary Sabbath School class in the morning, followed by an Adventurer’s class in the afternoon. I also had to try and find someone to take an adult Sabbath School class, which usually has a dearth of volunteers.
Did I need to help with these church-related activities? Not strictly – no. If I didn’t care about leaving the children’s ministry leader in the lurch, or about my own children who participate in these activities, or about our church’s Adsafe requirement that two adults be present in these children’s classes. Otherwise, yes, I did.
The only thing that saved me that terrible week, both mentally and physically, was Sunday—that most glorious day!
Bring on a Sunday law!
I admit Sunday isn’t always perfect. Sometimes I awake on this special eighth day only to have my dreams of a quiet time shattered by my lovely wife, who hands me a list. As I usually have such a busy work week, and spend Sabbath doing church stuff, that often leaves only Sunday for chores.
Nonetheless, all things being equal, Sunday is my best chance for getting some rest.
It is for this reason I have no fear of an impending Sunday law. In fact, I welcome it. I can only dream of a guaranteed day of complete rest. I long for a time when mowing the lawn, cleaning the pool, putting out laundry, or washing the car on a Sunday will be illegal.
Plucking grain on the Sabbath
Work friends who know about my religious beliefs can’t help but be amazed that I sacrifice half my weekend like this. To them, the Adventist Sabbath seems less like a taste of heaven than some level in Dante’s hell. I confess I am probably not doing a great job at selling the Sabbath ideal in my Christian witnessing.
Perhaps some of you feel the same. Is it any wonder so many Adventists never returned to their local churches after Covid-19? Maybe it’s different where you live, but my anecdotal estimate is that 20-25% of Adventists never came back to regular church worship after the pandemic.
Maybe some of us learned, perhaps for the first time, what it felt like to sleep in on a Saturday morning after a stressful working week—and sound it truly wonderful.
If you are in Adventist church employment, no doubt these sentiments are only amplified. For an Adventist pastor, the Sabbath is not a day of rest, but one’s heaviest day of work. Many pastors’ spouses and pastors’ kids come to see the Sabbath in very negative terms.
Sunday is even more precious to our pastors.
The best Sabbath-keeper I ever met
Could I learn to live the Sabbath ideal better? Of course, I could. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, I often end up doing what I don’t want to do, and don’t do what I know I should do.
I am embarrassed to say the best Sabbath-keeper I ever met was a Sunday-keeping pastor. He believed in the Sabbath as a one-in-seven command, which I admit was not entirely theologically correct. Nevertheless, because he ran a large church on a Sunday, his personal day of rest was Saturday. And how he kept Saturday was truly impressive.
He made each Saturday a true delight. He certainly did not approach the day with a legalistic, Pharisaic attitude. He drove a car, cooked food, visited family and friends, went to the shops, went to the beach, and did a bunch of other things most Orthodox Jews and many Adventists might not do, for fear of being labelled “work.”
Yet, he seemed to get the Sabbath far better than most professed Sabbath-keepers—me included. I would describe his attitude to the day of rest as “a day of chill.”
When he went for a Sabbath walk on the beach, he would go at a slow pace. When he drove, he would deliberately drive in the slow lane and happily let angry and impatient drivers pass him, immune to their road-raged honking horns. When he went to the shops, he would focus on casually browsing, not buying.
Clocks were banned. Screens were banned. Any sort of scheduling or timetabling was banned.
I confess, for all my commitments to church-sponsored activities, which at times nearly kill me, my own Sabbath-keeping was a failure compared to this man’s. You might ask: who in God’s eyes was really the better Seventh-day Adventist? It was him – not me.
Should we abandon Sabbath-work for Sunday-services?
There must be a better way for me, and for you, to do Sabbath.
Does this mean just quitting all my church-related roles? I think saying “no” to church requests is legitimate, but only to a point. The Sabbath is as much about others as ourselves. I don’t think acting selfishly is the answer. The fourth commandment explicitly states it applies as much to the foreigner, the servant, and even our domesticated animals, as it applies to me.
One of the greater ironies of the Adventist church is that many Adventists are tired from Sabbath-related activities precisely because so few are willing to take on church roles. If everyone did their fair share, then the burden wouldn’t be so great. I am sorry to say I am currently doing far less church stuff these days than I have done in the past, and even this load is almost too much for me.
Perhaps instead this means we shouldn’t do the Lord’s work on Sabbath? Just make it a day of doing actually nothing? I don’t think that is the answer either. I have no theological issue with doing church-related activities from Friday night to Saturday-night. This is the whole point of Jesus’ teaching about the disciples’ plucking grain on the Sabbath (Luke 6:1-5). Jesus was not repudiating the Sabbath as a principle, as many Christians wrongly think, but rather affirming that doing the Lord’s work on Sabbath isn’t work forbidden by the fourth commandment.
Perhaps the answer then is to start going to church on Sunday? That idea isn’t as horrible as we might think, although I fear for its practical implications.
Note that the Bible attests Jesus and the apostles all regularly attended their assemblies on Sabbath, which is to say on Saturday (Luke 4:16; Acts 14:1). Both scripture (Acts 20:7) and early church history suggest that communion services were usually Sabbath afternoons or evenings, not Sundays.[1]
Nonetheless, both Adventists and Sunday-keepers are equally in error of equating “doing church” with keeping the Sabbath, when they are not in fact the same thing. Adventists have traditionally had a Bible study or prayer meeting on Wednesday nights, but this hardly made us Fourth-day Adventists. Theologically speaking, I see no reason why an Adventist church could not hold a church-related activity – even a worship service – on a Sunday. We do it all the time for weeks of prayer, summer camps, church camps, and other special programs.
The idea of replacing the Saturday service with the Sunday service would freak most Adventists out, me included—although I can see no biblical prohibition against it. I think the bigger practical problem of holding church services on Sunday, rather than Saturday, is we would soon start to forget Saturday was the Sabbath at all. This, of course, is what happened historically, where in the first few centuries of Christianity, Saturday remained a special day for quite some time, often as a day of fasting, even though worship occurred on a Sunday. The problem was, out-of-sight became out-of-mind, and after a while, Sunday went from a day of worship in addition to the Sabbath to a day that replaced the Sabbath.
Can lunch be church rather than what we do after church?
So what’s the answer then? To be honest, I am not entirely sure. I am open to ideas.
Maybe church services don’t have to be a major Broadway production? Maybe we should have more unstructured, unprepared services, as is the case in some Christian traditions?
Maybe church administration could be streamlined, so people are not so exhausted from keeping the lights on and the bills paid that they have some energy left for God? Maybe cut short the unnecessarily long and cumbersome board, deacon, and elder meetings?
Maybe church should be on a Friday night, or Saturday afternoon? Maybe Sabbath School shouldn’t start at 9:30am? Maybe we shouldn’t even meet every week?
Maybe we should sit on couches rather than pews? Maybe sometimes the luncheon and fellowship should be the church service, rather than something we do after the service, as was often the case in the Early Church.[2]
I know many local Adventist churches have experimented with various ideas—and I hope they keep trying new things. All I know is that what we are currently doing doesn’t always work well in a 21st-century context, and I think these challenges are only getting harder.
I think we need to be willing to slaughter some sacred cows—which may actually be just golden calves after all.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
Stephen Ferguson is a lawyer from Perth, Western Australia, with expertise in planning, environment, immigration, and administrative-government law. He is married to Amy and has two children, William and Eloise. Stephen is a member of the Livingston Adventist Church.
