Cultivating the Sabbath Today: Christian Insights on Rest, Work, and Worship

When people find out parts of my research focus on the Sabbath in the Dutch Reformed tradition, the conversation often goes one of two ways. Either people have stories about the strict, comically arbitrary rules they had to follow as children, or they have questions about what faithful Sabbath observance should look like today. Can I shop on Sunday? What if I have to work on Sunday? And so on.

For millennia, much of the life of the Christian Church has been focused on the weekly gathering of believers for corporate worship. Though the exact origins are difficult to pin-point, early in the life of the Church, likely in the apostolic age, the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, on Saturday, shifted to the observance of the Lord’s Day, often still referred to as the Sabbath, on Sunday. The idea of a weekly Sabbath is still central to the life of the Church, but what observance of the Sabbath means for Christians has been the subject of significant theological debate—debates with numerous practical consequences. This debate has raged within Reformed Christianity, too, and brief entrée into some of the theological issues can help us attend to weekly Sabbath in ways that can be glorifying to God, spiritually fruitful for individuals, and strengthening for the church communities.

The first and most obvious theological issue regarding Sabbath observance is the particular day designated. The rationale for the shift from Saturday to Sunday is not obvious in the Bible, so the justification for such a move required explanation. Here Christians, including Reformed Christians, give different answers. Some Reformed Christians say the shift to Sunday was ordained by Christ and his apostles and, thus, observing the Sabbath on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, is a divinely ordained requirement. Others, including John Calvin, argue the move to Sunday was a far more practical decision the Church made and, thus, the Sabbath could actually be observed any day of the week as long as the requirements of the Sabbath commandment are still be fulfilled.

A second issue, then, is what precisely is required in observing the commandment. The Reformed tradition is generally clear that observing the Sabbath requires two main things: rest and worship. Beyond those general guidelines, though, there is significant debate and disagreement. Note, for example, that the Heidelberg Catechism ties the Sabbath commandment to worship (“that I diligently attend the assembly of God’s people”) and spiritual rest (“I rest from my evil ways”). However, the Westminster Catechism, even in its “shorter” form, requires a resting from physical work and even recreation and spending “the whole time in the public and private exercises of God’s worship.”

Thus, a final theological issue relates to defining terms such as “work” and “rest.” As already hinted at in the contrast between the Heidelberg and Westminster Catechisms, what “rest” and “work” meant were subject to disagreement. A significant strain with the Reformed tradition, including theologians such as Calvin and Zacharias Ursinus, did not emphasize physical rest and, instead, defined rest as “spiritual rest.” Spiritual rest referred primarily to resting from sinful ways and allowing God’s Spirit to work newness in oneself. In these strands of the Reformed tradition, the cessation from work is not a primary aspect of the commandment. Other Reformed traditions, emphasized in pietist traditions such as the Dutch “Further Reformation,” put more emphasis on physical rest and, thus, a complete cessation from all physical work.

As we seek to faithfully follow the fourth commandment and continue to observe the Sabbath, these theological questions and practical issues are still relevant. Most obviously, in an increasingly post-Christian society many Christians find themselves “forced” to work on Sundays, an obligation not new to preachers, farmers, stay-at-home parents, and a host of others. Children and young adults and their parents find sports activities to increasingly occupy entire weekends, including Sunday. These conversations go beyond Reformed and even Christians circles. Obvious examples relate to businesses being closed on Sunday, the importance of time off for employee wellness, and the physical benefits of rest. So how might Reformed Christians navigate Sunday observance in ways that are theologically informed, spiritually fulfilling, and culturally relevant?

First, if the Sabbath commandment is no longer tied to a particular day, then Reformed Christians can, with theological justification, pursue opportunities for rest on another day of the week. Here lies both an opportunity and challenge. If someone is required to work on Sunday, then the opportunity to rest from that work on another day is a promising potential. Of course, many Christians will find it difficult to resist the temptation to engage in their work for days and weeks on end, but the Sabbath commandment challenges us to reorient and reprioritize our lives, including to set aside times free from work. Whether that day is Sunday or another day of the week is, perhaps, not essential.

The same principle can then, secondly, apply to worship. If obligations for work, travel, or family make gathering for worship on Sunday impossible, then Christians are free to worship on another day of the week. Because in the Reformed tradition worship is tied closely to the Sabbath, foregoing worship altogether is an unwise and spiritually debilitating move. In addition, the Reformed tradition’s emphasis on corporate, embodied worship means much is lost in simply substituting a “normal” Sunday service with watching an online serve in bed on Thursday night.

Here lies a potential opportunity or challenge for churches. What would it look like for a church or a collection of churches to ensure worship services were available at various times throughout the week? This was something Calvin ensured in sixteenth-century Geneva, for example, and it may be an area of service churches have been too quick to ignore. Hosting worship services at various times allows Christians opportunities for corporate worship and fellowship even if circumstances keep them from those things on Sunday.

Finally, the challenge of embodying rest, physical and spiritual, is one that Reformed Christians should see permeating the whole of our lives. This may be the most theologically surprising, meaningful, and least attended to aspect of the Reformed tradition’s understanding of Sabbath. In this way, the opening question about what is allowed or not allowed on Sunday may be the wrong question. For Reformed Christians, the Sabbath is practice for the whole of life. It is one day a week modeling worship, physical rest, and opening ourselves to the work of God in us that can permeate more and more the whole of our lives.