Ever wonder why most churches worship on Sunday? This sermon presents the historical evidence of how Christian worship shifted from the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week.

<p>Ever wonder why most churches worship on Sunday? This sermon presents the historical evidence of how Christian worship shifted from the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

From Sabbath to Sunday

About 350 BC, the great Greek philosopher Aristotle classified the spider as having 6 legs.

For the next 20 centuries, 2, 000 years, It was accepted as fact.

No 1 bothered to count and learn that in actuality spiders have 8 legs.

Now, you might say, well, what difference does it make?

It doesn't change our world a lot whether spiders have 8 legs or whether they have 6 legs.

But other myths have been a little bit more consequential.

Consider, for example, that the end of the 18th century, many doctors believed that sickness could be treated by balancing the humors, the body's fluids.

And they thought that if someone had a fever, they had too much of 1 of the fluids and that was blood.

And so bloodletting was a common procedure that doctors practiced to try to help people get well.

George Washington, the first president of the United States, died after nearly 2 liters of blood, 2 quarts of blood, had been drawn from his veins because he had a sore throat.

Probably strep throat, but nevertheless, he really died from his blood being drained from his body.

Now that's a pretty, pretty important consequence to come from a myth, isn't it?

Could it be that other myths slipped into the Christian faith, into the Christian church?

Could it be that there are myths that are much more important than 6 or eight-legged spiders or even whether or not healing came from letting humors be balanced.

Now we have been talking in our church history series about how a change took place in the Christian church.

And you remember with me that there was a time when the church quit focusing so much upon the Bible, it quit focusing so much on the Scriptures as the source of truth and began to respect tradition much more highly than it had during the times of the Apostles.

And the Apostles had even predicted that there would come a falling away.

And so today we're going to be looking at 1 of the myths, 1 of the shifts away from Bible truth that took place in the early Christian church.

And we're going to be discovering how it happened.

Now, I believe that God has a special day for us to worship on.

And I think we wouldn't be here today if it weren't that we believe this.

We believe that God wants to meet with His people.

In fact, I think all Christians believe that God wants to meet with His people.

But we believe that God has made a special day, the Sabbath day, on which we worship and remember Him as our Creator.

It's foretold to continue until the very eternity with Jesus.

All throughout the Bible we see this Sabbath from beginning to end.

And nowhere in the Bible does the Bible indicate that the Sabbath was changed.

It's not something that we read about in the New Testament.

It's not something that we hear from the teachings of Jesus or from the teachings of the apostles.

In fact, it's something that came all the way from creation, from a memorial of creation, and it is found in His Word throughout history.

When Jesus, or when God was leading His people through the wilderness to the Promised Land, He put the Sabbath commandment at the very heart of His law, the fourth commandment.

Now some have even suggested that the Sabbath was not existing before the law, but no, the Sabbath existed long before that.

God had rested the seventh day on creation week and he was simply revealing what his people already knew when he gave the 10 Commandments, when he gave the 10 Commandment Law.

Deuteronomy chapter 4 and verse 2, do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, God said, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I give you.

Jesus himself showed the same determination to exalt the Sabbath law, or the law that he'd given on Mount Sinai.

He told the people in the Sermon on the Mount that he did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.

He said in Matthew 5, verse 17, do not think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets.

Now, you might say, well, fulfilling the law does away with it.

How many of you have ever kept the speed limit?

And when you kept the speed limit, did that do away with the speed limit?

When you fulfill the law, when you obey the law, when you fulfill the requirements of the law, it doesn't do away with the law.

In fact, if anything, it elevates its importance.

The fact that God himself, Jesus himself, would fulfill and obey the law simply indicates to us that it was something that was honorable for even him to do.

He did not come to destroy but to fulfill.

He goes on, he says in verse 18, "'For assuredly I say to you, "'till heaven and earth pass away, "'one jot or 1 tittle will by no means "'pass from the law till all is fulfilled.

"'Whoever therefore breaks 1 of the least "'of these commandments and teaches men so "'shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.'" So Jesus demonstrated by his example that he wanted to honor the day that God had made holy in the first week of this world's history.

And the Bible records in Luke chapter 4 and verse 16, and so he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read.

So here God is giving us an example, Jesus gives an example of honoring the Sabbath day.

His custom, his habit was to go to church on the Sabbath day.

Now I often, I often wonder, you know, I hear people saying, well, I would go to church.

I believe in Jesus, but I don't want to go to church because I don't get much from the sermon.

Or I hear them say, I don't want to go to church because there's a bunch of hypocrites there.

The scribes and the Pharisees, the priests were teaching things that were meaningless, their own inventions, And Jesus, the Son of God, the author of the Scriptures, the 1 who understood and explained them, how much do you think he got from most of the sermons?

I don't think that he got a whole lot out of the scribes and the Pharisees' platitudes, but he went.

He was there as his custom was, Luke tells us, on the Sabbath day.

And so when the religious leaders accused Jesus' disciples of violating the Sabbath, Jesus said He's the Lord of that day.

Not only did Jesus honor the Sabbath day, but he asked his disciples to pray that they could keep his day holy far down into the future.

And you'll remember he gave in his sermon on Matthew chapter 24, He gave them instructions, Matthew 24 and verse 20, and pray that your flight may not be in winter or on the Sabbath.

Why would He pray, have them pray that their flight would not be on Sabbath?

If He thought that the Sabbath was not going to be kept after his death or after his resurrection, this wouldn't have even been a concern.

70 AD, more than 35 years after he died, he expected his followers to still be honoring the Sabbath day, to still be keeping it holy.

And so Jerusalem was destroyed 70 AD, the event that Jesus was talking about long after the resurrection.

Now even if the Bible were our only source of information, it would not be hard for us to discover which day of the week is the Sabbath.

If we turn to the account of the crucifixion in the Gospel according to Luke, he sort of summarizes the events of that weekend.

It says, that day was the preparation and the Sabbath drew near.

So Jesus died on the preparation day, the Sabbath was soon to come.

Now, how many of us as Christians know which day Jesus died on?

All of Christianity has agreed that Jesus died on Friday.

Good Friday is the day of His crucifixion.

So that day was the preparation, the Sabbath drew near, verse 55 says, the women who had come with him from Galilee followed after and they observed the tomb and how the body was laid.

Then they returned and prepared spices and fragrant oils and they rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment.

So he dies on Friday, they see where he's buried, they go and they get the herbs and oils ready to embalm his body and then they go and they rest according to the commandment, according to the Gospel of Luke.

Chapter 24 and verse 1, Now on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they and certain other women with them came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared.

So he dies on Friday, they rest on the Sabbath according to the commandment, it says, and on the first day of the week they bring spices and come to the tomb.

Now we remember now, if he dies on Good Friday, if that's what we believe, how many Christians question what day of the week Jesus rose on?

And so most of the Christian world celebrates Easter Sunday in memory of Christ's resurrection.

Isn't it interesting that we can be confident about which day He died on and we can be confident about which day He rose on, But there's all big ambiguity over which day was between.

The day between Good Friday and the day between, and Easter Sunday, in our common vernacular, what we call the, is the Sabbath according to the commandment.

The day in between is the Sabbath according to the commandment.

Now even though Luke wrote these words many years after the cross, Luke would have been 1 of the later gospel writers, he still referred to Sunday as the first day of the week.

He still called the seventh day the Sabbath day.

In fact, he called it the Sabbath according to the commandment.

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From Sabbath to Sunday

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