If we cannot claim the sabbath commandment as our reason, then why do we do go to church on Sunday?

The Bible doesn’t tell us when to eat, when to go to bed or when to get up.  Yet we know that we need to do all those things for the health of our physical body.  We should also know that our spiritual being needs food and refreshment.  The best time to eat is when the food is on the table.  The best time to feed our spiritual being is when spiritual food is being offered at the house of worship.

We can skip meals, snack all day long, or gorge on the wrong foods.  We know that isn’t healthy.  In the same way, it is not spiritually healthy to be absent when the people of God are gathering to be fed.

We need to feed ourselves at home, too.  Daily Bible reading and prayer are essential to our spiritual life.  But Christian life is meant to be lived in fellowship with fellow believers, and there is a special blessing in communal public worship.  The singing, the prayers of others, the spoken word, are all forms of spiritual food that we cannot provide for ourselves at home.

Just as there was no command in the Bible for the synagogue worship system, so there is no command for weekly worship services on the first day of the week.  But the Bible does give examples of it happening.  We are no longer under the law, needing a commandment to tell us when to worship.  We are in the era of the free leading of the Holy Spirit.  If the Spirit is not giving us a desire for fellowship with fellow believers, perhaps there is something amiss in our spiritual life.

Thus, it is our practice to set aside Sunday for worship and fellowship, not because we have to, but because we want to.

Some very sincere Christians seem to fear that such an interpretation opens the door to a complete neglect of Sunday worship and fellowship.  If the true Sabbath rest is rest for the soul through the blood of Jesus, why do these believers feel so much unrest about this?  Where is the rest?  Doesn’t it seem that a legalistic attempt to enforce Sunday observance on the basis of the Sabbath commandment is a violation of the true meaning of the commandment?

In Canada, the Lord’s Day Act was passed by Parliament in 1906 and became law on March 1, 1907.  It forbade most types of work on Sunday, including paid sports, newspaper work and excursions on any transportation system.  This was the work of activism by the Lord’s Day Society, made up largely of Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists and the Baptist Convention.  These were exactly the denominations that had enthusiastically embraced the social gospel.  Their concern was not to set aside a day of worship, but to provide labourers with a day of rest, probably a valid concern in those days.

Christians met for worship before the law was passed as well as after.  Some may have had to miss a worship service because of work commitments, but most found a way to be regularly present at a worship service on Sunday morning or evening.

The political activism used to bring about the Lord’s Day Act didn’t exactly honour the Lord.  There was conflict with other Canadians, other religions, other denominations.  For a time there was overzealous enforcement, then some exemptions to the law during war years.  Finally it was abandoned.

Did the Lord’s Day Act have any impact on the spiritual life of most Christians?  It would be a sad commentary on our faith if we needed the federal government to pass a law so we could live a genuine Christian life.

May we gather today with fellow believers and worship the Lord in spirit and in truth.