So much of what we spend our time with is at best just passing time. One of the things we will find when we make right use of the Lord’s Day is that we will be spending so much time spiritual feasting and resting in the works of mercy and grace we won’t have time for those things which can take us away from God’s blessed worship.

As noted last week for today’s prayer and worship help we are going to look at one of the modern criticisms given towards what our forefathers in the ARP understood about the Christian Sabbath. The primary issue is that there are those who teach that there is no, or only a conceptual continuing application of the Fourth Commandment in the life of the believer. The particular concern on the docket this morning is the question of whether or not some of the things we traditionally were told not to do on the Lord’s Day, in keeping with the moral law of God, are actually true to the word, or are they just legalistic Phariseeism run amok?

However, rather than spending time going through a litany of “am I allowed to do x on the Sabbath?” questions we instead will be talking through what a normal Sunday would (does) look like for a Sabbath-keeping Christian. The purpose of speaking through this in a positive way is so that instead of only having a negative association with the Sabbath we might see as believers the goodness of God’s commandments and the reasons why He would have us maintain their purpose in the new covenant church.

To do this let’s go back to the Bible and take a look at a set of verses that will help reason our way towards a workable liturgy of life on Sunday. Getting started we are going to head to the book of Exodus and bring forward Exodus 16:4-5, 22-26:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not. And it shall be on the sixth day that they shall prepare what they bring in, and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily.” . . . And so it was, on the sixth day that they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one. And all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses. Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Tomorrow is a Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake today, and boil what you will boil; and lay up for yourselves all that remains, to be kept until morning.’” So they laid it up till morning, as Moses commanded; and it did not stink, nor were there any worms in it. Then Moses said, “Eat that today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.”

One of the reasons why I chose to start with this portion of God’s word is that a critique of how us ARP folks traditionally understood the Fourth Commandment is centered around the idea that the Sabbath is a Mosaic institution.

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