Sunday – A day for the Lord?

Can you remember the first time you went to church? I can’t. My parents took me to church when I was a baby. They took me and my older sister every week. And then when my younger brother came along, they took all three of us. Morning and evening.

Three became four. Four became five. In the end we were a family of eight children. Me, my older sister, five young brothers, and a second sister who was the baby of the family. My parents took us to church every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening. We often arrived late. But we got there.

It was simply part of the routine of life. I never questioned it. I never even thought about it. It was simply taken for granted. Churches held two services every Sunday, morning and evening. We went to both. And we saw the same people every Sunday at both services.

In the course of my childhood, up to the time I left home to go to university, I guess we attended half a dozen churches in all as we moved to different addresses across England and Wales. Those churches were different from one another in many ways. A couple were FIEC churches, one was a C of E congregation, one was an independent mission hall, one called itself a ‘Gospel Hall’, one was going through a process of transition into becoming a charismatic fellowship. But all of them had this in common. They had a morning service, starting either at 10.30 or 11 am. They had an evening service at 6 or 6.30 pm. And nearly all who attended came to both services.

Of course, I had the opportunity to visit other churches too. When we were away on holiday, we went on Sunday to whichever Bible-preaching church was nearest. If I was staying with Christian friends, I would go with them to the church they attended. When I went away to university I tried out several churches before I finally settled in one.

But I never came across a church that did not hold at least two services on Sundays. Many held other meetings too each Sunday – a prayer meeting maybe before one of the services, an adult Bible-class, a Sunday-school, or an after-church ‘fellowship meeting’ for young people. Those gatherings varied from church to church. But every church held two services as a minimum. And in every church it was assumed that if you were a Christian, you would attend both services.

How things have changed! I know of many churches now – churches of all denominations, churches that would call themselves Bible-believing churches – which hold only one service on a Sunday, normally on a Sunday morning. And of the churches that do hold two services, I know many where only a small number of the attenders are present in the evening. It’s not unusual for a church to have 70 or 80 people present in the morning, 15 or 20 in the evening.

And yet this church continues to hold two services each Sunday, one in the morning, one in the evening. And the members of the church still aim, if they possibly can, to be at both.

Sabbath and Lord’s Day

Have you ever wondered why we hold two services each Sunday? There’s no verse in the Bible that says we must. Is it just a tradition? And if it is, why do we stick with it when so many other churches seem to be perfectly happy with just a morning meeting?

Well, I’m going to give you quite a few reasons. But I want chiefly to focus on one. It’s this.

God has commanded us to set aside one day in seven completely for him. And we’ve found that having two services each Sunday helps us to keep that command.

The Sabbath: Adam and Israel

At the very beginning of the world, God showed us how life was to be structured. We read in the book of Genesis that God created and shaped the world in six days. And then:

“he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation”.

God had worked for six days. But then he rested.

That doesn’t mean that he needed to recover, and spent the seventh day in idleness. The Hebrew word that’s translated ‘rested’ (shabat) just means ceased – he ceased from the work he had been doing and took up other work. As Jesus pointed out, God, his Father, never stopped working even on that seventh day! (John 5:17). The work of creating the world was complete. But now came the work of upholding and governing it. That continued on the seventh day.

But then we’re told that God blessed and sanctified the seventh day. What does the word sanctify mean? It means to set something aside as holy, to be used for God alone. God declared that that day and each seventh day was to be treated as holy. He was reserving it for himself alone.

It’s important to note that Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day of creation. So the seventh day – God’s shabat day – his cessation day – was their first full day of life here on earth. Their very first day was a day set aside by God as holy – a day when they could focus their attention on him alone.

God had already appointed the work they were to do in the world. They had to subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28). They had to tend the garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15). But that work could wait. The seventh day of God’s creation week, the first day of Man’s life on earth, was to be a holy day, serving God and enjoying him.

We don’t know how well God’s command to sanctify the seventh day was remembered and kept in the centuries after the Fall. Godly men such as Noah and Joseph certainly seem to have been aware of the seven-day pattern that God had ordained for human life (Genesis 8:10,12, 50:10). And when the Lord came to the rescue of the Israelites in Egypt, he made it clear from the start how important that pattern was to be.

These were his instructions for the first Passover:

‘Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread… On the first day you shall hold a holy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy assembly. No work shall be done on those days…’ (Exodus 12:15-16). ‘Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the LORD’ (Exodus 13:6).

When they had left Egypt and were travelling through the wilderness, God told them that he would give them food, manna – from heaven – but only on six days out of seven. They would collect the manna each morning and each evening. But there would be none on the remaining day because that whole day was to be devoted to God himself. Instead of spending time each morning and night collecting food for themselves, they should spend it serving and worshipping him. The story is told in Exodus chapter 16.

And then, when the Israelites came to Mount Sinai, that pattern became a law for the nation – the fourth of the ten commandments that were written into the covenant between God and Israel. What God had given at creation to Adam and Eve was written into the covenant he made with the Israelites:

‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and 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).

Six days were to be spent by the Israelites in their own work but every seventh day was to be a Sabbath – a cessation day – set aside for God himself. On that day, the Israelites had to cease from all other tasks and use the day in the service of God. No-one was even to light a fire on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:3). The day was to be spent in the holy work of worshipping God.

How were the Israelites to do that? Answer:

‘The seventh day is a Sabbath or rest, a day of sacred assembly. You are not to do any work wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the LORD’ (Leviticus 23:3 NIV).

God’s people gathered and worshipped God together on the cessation day. Sacrifices were offered morning and evening, but beyond that, the whole day was a day of sacred assembly.

In the centuries that followed, godly Israelites rejoiced in the opportunity the Sabbath gave them to worship God without distraction. Psalm 92 is headed ‘A song, a psalm for the Sabbath’. The psalmist took delight in offering praise to the Lord morning and evening on the Sabbath, not only in private but with others, playing lute and harp:

‘It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre’ (v 1-2).

The Lord’s Day

The Old Testament commandment was that every seventh day – i.e. one day in seven – should be set aside as a Sabbath – the day of sacred assembly. And Jesus obeyed that commandment. Yes, he used every day to serve his Father, but he still treated one day in seven as special – a day of sacred assembly.

‘…he came to Nazareth… And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read’ (Luke 4:16).

Jesus knew that ‘the Sabbath was made for man’– one of God’s most precious gifts to human beings – and he declared himself ‘Lord of the Sabbath’ (Mark 2:27-28).

What about the apostles and the churches they founded after Jesus returned to heaven? They were conscious that they were now under a new covenant, in which every believer was indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So did the Spirit now lead them to abandon the pattern established at creation and then written into the law of Israel?

Far from it. The churches of the New Testament still kept one day in seven as holy. Churches whose members were mostly Jewish may well have continued to use the seventh day of the week as their sabbath. But as new churches were established in Gentile towns and cities, they talked of the first day of the week as ‘the Lord’s Day’. They remembered that Jesus their Lord rose from the dead on the first day of the week and they were glad to think of the whole day as his.

Jesus’s first appearances after he rose from the dead were on the morning of the first day of the week (Matthew 28:1-9). And then in the evening he came to the whole company of his disciples gathered together (Luke 24:13-49). So it’s no wonder that Christians thought of the whole day as the Lord’s Day, met on that day, and used it to the full. We’re told in Acts of an occasion when Paul and the church in Troas gathered together to break bread on the first day of the week, and Paul was still speaking to them at midnight! (Acts 20:7 -12).

Morning, evening, and everything in between!

Why was it that for hundreds of years churches in this country were eager to hold at least two services on the Lord’s Day? Why does this church still hold morning and evening services on Sundays? The chief reason is this. We want the day to be our Sabbath, a day of sacred assembly, a day given to the Lord. And by meeting at the start and close of the day, we remind ourselves that the whole day is his. The meetings are the bookends that remind us that everything in between must be given to him too.

Some of us spend the day between the services enjoying fellowship with one another informally in our homes, eating and talking together. Some of us may spend the time in reading helpful Christian books or in thinking through what we heard in the morning service. Some may go for a walk in a quiet spot and give thanks as we glimpse the beauty of his world. All of these are good and right ways to use our Sabbath days. But it’s a special privilege for the whole family of the church to meet together at the beginning and end of the day.

And we remember that all over the world churches are keeping the day special too. As we meet together at the start of the Lord’s Day, churches far to the east of us are coming to the close of their holy day. As we meet again at the end of the Lord’s Day, we know that churches to the west of us are beginning their sabbath. Our worship is a fulfilment of the Lord’s promise through Malachi:

‘… from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering. For my name will be great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts’ (Malachi 1:11).

Eusebius of Caesarea the greatest historian of the early church (circa 260-339 AD) rejoiced to think of churches everywhere maintaining morning and evening worship:

“..it is surely a sign of divine power that throughout the whole world in the churches of God, at the morning rising of the sun and in the evening hours, hymns, praises, and delights of a divine kind are offered to God… throughout the whole world of men, the same is done at the same hours.”

We sing gladly:

‘The sun that bids us rest is waking, Our brethren neath the western sky, And hour by hour fresh lips are making, Thy wondrous doings heard on high…’ (The day thou gavest, GH 74).

So what changed?

I’ve pointed out that over the last half century or so, many evangelical churches in the UK have stopped holding two services on the Lord’s Day. In fact this church is quite unusual in holding meeting morning and evening. But what brought about the change?

Well, the big shift, I believe, was this. Many Christians stopped believing in the importance of the Sabbath Day. In fact, it became fashionable for Christians to say that we shouldn’t be bound by rules at all. As Christians we should only do things that we feel moved by the Holy Spirit to do; things that we find fulfilling and helpful. They said that following rules was ‘legalism’. They said that it was all very well for Old Testament Israelites to follow commandments and rules – they were ‘under the law’ but as New Testament Christians we are ‘free from the law’.

And one immediate application of that was that now they could feel free to use all the seven days of the week in whatever way they might find most enjoyable. Yes, it was a rule for Old Testament Israelites to set aside one day in seven as a day of worship, but New Testament Christians don’t have to follow suit. If Christians choose to go meetings on Sundays that’s fine; if they choose to stay in bed all day to rest up after six days work, that’s fine too.

Of course these Christians were being very selective in their reading of the New Testament. Yes, Paul does talk about being ‘free from the law’ (Romans 7:2) but the law from which he says we’re free is ‘the law of sin and death’ (Romans 8:3).

What did Jesus have to say about God’s law? He insisted that his disciples must keep the same laws that Old Testament Israelites kept. Those laws must be fulfilled – transformed, brought to their full scope – and that means taking them more seriously than anyone in Old Testament times ever did.

‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:17-20).

Paul insists that the purpose for which Christ saved us was:

‘in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk… according to the Spirit.’ (Romans 8: 4).

The Holy Spirit enables New Testament believers to do the righteous things that God’s law requires – more fully than any Old Testament saint ever could. God writes his law on the hearts of his new covenant people (Jeremiah 31:33/Hebrews 9:16).

James speaks of the ‘royal law’ – the command given to Israel to ‘love your neighbour’ – but now restated and applied with new rigour by King Jesus to the citizens of God’s kingdom (James 2:8/Matthew 5:43-48).

Neither Jesus nor his apostles ever suggested that the commands we find in the Old Testament have no application to New Testament believers.

Christians who dismissed the idea of keeping one day ‘holy to the Lord’ pointed again and again to a handful of favourite verses – Romans 14:6, Galatians 4:10, Colossians 2:16, quoted without reference to their contexts in Paul’s letters. But they closed their eyes to all the passages in the New Testament that assert plainly the continuing importance of God’s law for Christ’s people.

A changing world and changing churches

Why did so many churches stop holding Sunday evening services?

I’ve given you what I believe to be the crucial answer. The decline in Sunday evening worship sprang ultimately from a reluctance to think of Christian life as involving submission to a code of commandments. Many Christians no longer saw the need to keep the command God gave at the start of human history – the command that became the fourth of the ten commandments. It wasn’t just Sunday evening worship that fell out of favour. It was the very idea of a holy day – one day in seven set aside for God.

But there were other things that pushed along the change. Over the course of the years, Christians have found more and more things to distract them from church services – and especially Sunday evening worship.

Changes in working patterns affected the whole of society. From the Second World War onwards it became more and more common for workers to enjoy two days off work – usually Saturday and Sunday. People started using the term ‘weekend’ for those two days and thought of them as a block of time devoted to leisure. Sadly, Christians were not immune from that mindset.

The coming of 24 hour TV made a huge difference. Until 1972, there were strict limits on Sunday evening broadcasting. When those restrictions were lifted, millions of people spent their Sunday evenings watching such TV shows as Last of the Summer Wine or All Creatures Great and Small. And many Christians followed suit. They stayed in to watch their favourite programmes.

The increase in car ownership was another key factor. Between 1958 – the year I was born – and 1979 – the year I came back to Stockport from university – the proportion of households with a car rose from 20% to 60%.  Lots of Christian folk decided that the most relaxing and useful way of spending Sunday was an outing to the countryside or a trip to see grandma. They drove to church for the morning service, got back in the car, and headed off, returning only in the late evening.

More and more entertainments became available on Sundays. I’ve mentioned TV already. The first professional Sunday football matches came in 1974. But 1994 was the year the floodgates opened. Up until then most businesses and public services were shut on Sundays. Banks, building-societies, post offices, public libraries, museums, most shops and supermarkets, theatres and concert halls.

The 1994 Sunday Trading Act lifted many of those restrictions from shops and businesses. Non- church-goers were quick to take advantage of the new ‘freedoms’ – and sadly, many Christians found no problem in doing likewise.

All these things combined to change the way lots of Christians thought of Sunday. Many moved from thinking of it as a day of worship and sacred assembly. Rather, they started talking of it as ‘a day of rest’ or ‘a day for the family’. Other days were busy. But on Sunday they could relax and the family could enjoy ‘doing things together’ – whether that meant watching TV, going out for a meal, or attending a football match.

It became more and more difficult for Christians to resist the trend. No doubt there were Christians who would have wanted to keep Sunday as the Lord’s Day and get to both services. But they found themselves under pressure from other church members and from their own children. Patterns of family life were changing along with everything else. In the world I grew up in, it was taken for granted that parents made decisions for the whole family. If they said, ‘we’re going to church’ it never occurred to children that they could opt out. But increasingly children – at least once they were in their teens – were encouraged to think of themselves as free to make their own decisions. Many youngsters from Christian homes decided that they had better things to do with their time than go out to church on Sunday evenings. And many Christian parents decided that they had to go along with that. In fact, if the children wanted to stay at home, it often finished up that the parents who fell into line and stayed at home with them.

And then there was covid… which was the final turning-point for many churches and Christians. When churches were ‘locked down’, many Christians followed services online. And they found that they enjoyed the freedom that that gave them. Instead of having to go out to services at inconvenient times, they could log on whenever it suited them. Instead of attending the same church every week, they could enjoy different celebrity preachers from all over the world. Instead of having to relate to fellow-believers face to face, they could have ‘church without commitment’.

When finally the covid crisis came to an end, many Christians never returned to the churches they had attended. Of those who did, many decided that one service each Sunday was more than enough – they would stay in on Sunday night and enjoy the online alternatives. Many churches decided that it was simply not worth holding a Sunday evening service for the handful who still turned up.

Here we stand… and why

And yet we still hold Sunday evening services. And I believe that our members try to get there if they possibly can. We know that some can’t. Their health makes it impossible. Or the jobs they do (for example in hospitals) involve Sunday shifts. Or they have young children who need an early bed-time. But as I look around on Sunday evenings, it’s rare for our members to miss without obvious cause.

So I’ll ask the questions again. Why? Why have we resisted the trend that is so widespread?  Why do the members of this church make a priority of coming out to a Sunday evening meeting?  I’ve given you the great reason. We believe that we need to keep one day each week holy to the Lord. The Sabbath command is for all generations. And holding those two bookend services helps us to keep that command.

But before I finish, let me give you three further reasons

The first is this. We really believe that the Lord Jesus meets with his people in a special way when they assemble in his name. He said, ‘…where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them…’ (Matthew 18:20). Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, ‘When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus…with the power of the Lord Jesus…’ (1 Corinthians 5:4). In the same letter he foresaw that even an unbeliever coming in when the ‘whole church comes together’ may find himself declaring that ‘God is really among you…’ (1 Corinthians 14: 23-25).

Why do we choose to be there on Sunday evenings? Because we know that Jesus will be there as he promised. God will be in our midst. If we had three or four meetings each Sunday, I would want to be there (in the churches I attended as a child it wasn’t unusual to have three services plus Sunday-school classes!) If Christians really believed that Jesus would be present in the various meetings we hold, would they ever willingly miss one?

Second reason. We love being together. The members of the church are my brothers and sisters, my closest friends, the people I depend on for encouragement and support. I wish I could spend the whole day with them (I will spend all eternity with them). That isn’t possible for all of us but at least I have those two opportunities to be with them on our Sabbath.

Third reason. We need a balanced diet. We need to hear different truths from God’s Word, preached in different ways, with different emphases. Having two services each Sunday means that at the end of the day, we have at least two different courses to enjoy. It may be that the preaching in one service will be topical, dealing with a particular doctrine, while the other will be expository, opening up a passage. It may be that one service will focus on an Old Testament passage, one on a New. It may be that the emphasis in one service will be evangelistic, driving home the central truths of the gospel, while the other will deal with some aspect of Christian living. Someone who misses one of the two services will be missing out on some of the nutrients from which others are benefiting.

Duty or Delight?

Christians from other churches are often surprised by the fact that we still hold Sunday evening meetings. Some are frankly baffled. ‘Why on earth would you want to do that? What are they for?’

Well, I’m so glad that that was the rhythm into which my life fell from my earliest childhood. Six days for our work. One day for the worship of God. It’s been the hem on the garment of my life ever since, keeping it from unravelling. Setting aside one day for God is not a painful duty. It’s a joyful privilege.

See you soon, I hope. On Sunday morning if not before. But why not on Sunday evening too?

All Bible quotations in this article are taken from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, published by HarperCollins Publishers © 2001.