The only thing more sacred than our steeples, are our stadiums. Actually, we will skip Church for just about any old reason, but sports are our favorite.
This never used to bother me; it didn’t bother my parents; it didn’t even bother my preacher. If I missed a Sunday or two, he might inquire where I was, but when told him that I had a sports competition, he’d smile approvingly and ask how it went. So long as I wasn’t out shopping for a new Church or forgetting to tithe, it seemed there was no harm ignoring the Sabbath from time to time.
Things began to change when I started teaching Sunday school. Being the teacher forced me to make the Lord’s day the priority each week, whether I wanted to or not. It was then that I finally saw the spiritual necessity of the Sabbath.
It is so easy to get lost in life’s endless details. God knew this from the beginning, and that is why He set apart the final day of Creation, making it a holy day of rest and reflection. God didn’t need to rest or reflect, but we do.
Jesus says, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). So, when you skip the Lord’s Day, you aren’t just blowing God off; you are starving yourself spiritually. When we allow our children to skip the Sabbath, we are starving them as well.
Children from good Christian families are disappearing for several months at a time during certain sport seasons. It isn’t healthy; our youth’s spiritual malnutrition is leading to spiritual death. Roughly a third of Americans under 30 are now atheist or agnostic.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Church will continue to lose this war, precisely because Christians value the company of cheering fans, to the fellowship of Communion. The only question is whether or not your children will be among those lost.
Keeping the Sabbath
Now, please don’t think that I am suggesting bringing your kids to Church is a spiritual cure-all. It isn’t even close. But I will say, that in the few years that I was a Christian Education Director, I could see a huge difference between the spiritual maturity of Sabbath-keeping kids versus Sabbath-breaking kids.
It seems that in our desire to not be “legalistic” like the Pharisees, we’ve allowed ourselves to pick and choose which of God’s laws we are willing to obey. And that is just what the Sabbath is, God’s law.
Now someone is going to say that the Sabbath is Old Testament Law and we no longer have to obey it. Really, then why did the early Church feel the need to honor the Sabbath? Why did God set apart the Sabbath at Creation, if he only intended ancient Hebrews to honor it? And are we to disregard the entire Ten Commandments, or just the Sabbath?
These were all questions I had to ask myself. Even though I knew the answers, it took my family several years to truly fall into the habit of honoring the Lord’s Day above all else. And to be honest, we still fail from time to time. However, honoring the Sabbath has been a life changing experience.
Tips for Keeping the Sabbath with Kids
If you would like to do a better job obeying the 4th Commandment, here are some tips and suggestions that really helped our family.
1. A Full Day: The Sabbath was meant to be a full day of rest and reflect. It wasn’t something you squeezed in before work, or after the football game. We decided to start our Sabbath at 12 A.M. Sunday morning and end it 11:59 P.M. Sunday night.
2. No Work: We have decided not to conduct any business on the Sabbath, (if we can help). This involves a lot of planning. Since we have a home business, it is really tempting to do catch up work on the Sabbath.
Eventually we managed to put all our business dealing, even urgent ones, aside until Monday. But then we did something even worse.
My wife and I began to subconsciously save regular housework, like laundry and mowing the lawn for Sunday. This allowed us to give more time to the business during the workweek, and then catch up on the housework on the Lord’s Day. This might have been even more disrespectful to God, because now instead of letting our important business ruin our Sabbath, we were letting petty chores consume the day.
So, the new rule is that we do NO work, period, on the Sabbath, except cooking and cleaning up after ourselves (dishes, sweeping after meals, cooking). This has made it a true day of rest.
Now, if you work for a company that requires you to work on Sunday, this may not be as easy. I believe that professions that involve Emergency Care (Nurses, Doctors, Police, Soldiers) are probably fine working.
If you don’t work in those fields and your employer won’t give you the Sabbath off, then you might try finding another job that will. If no other jobs are available, then you have to provide for your family. I believe the Sabbath-breaking will then fall at your employers feet, not your own.
Also, I do believe that work for the Church and mission work is permissible on Sunday. Jesus himself implied that it was permissible to do good on the Sabbath. So, urgent charitable work is fine.
3. No Buying: We do all that we can not to buy anything on Sunday. We do not want to support businesses that have employees breaking the Sabbath. We do shop at those businesses, but not on Sundays.
4: Family Time: Keeping our family together is something that we feel is important on Sunday. We don’t usually allow our children to go to friends on the Sabbath.
5: Activities: On Sunday, we try to keep the focus on God in all of our activities. We have our kids read the Bible or Christian books. If they watch a movie, it has to be a Bible show. Sometimes we take the time to make cards for a orphan that we support, or encouraging cards for friends and family members. They are lots of possibilities, we just try to keep it Christ-centered.
6: No Sports: We do not play or watch (organised) sports on Sunday. I am not saying that you can’t; I’m just saying we don’t. Remember we try to keep our activities God-centered. Since our kids are young (our oldest is 7), this isn’t too hard. I realize as they get older the pressure to compromise will be intense, but the greater the sacrifice the greater the meaningfulness.
7: Special Day: Janine and I do what we can to make Sunday a special day. We usually cook a special breakfast and wear our best clothing the entire day (when it makes sense to). We don’t want our children dreading the Lord’s Day; we want them to look forward to it.
8: No Substitutes: The Sabbath is about making God our chief priority in life, so it kind of defeats the purpose when something comes up and we “reschedule” our Sabbath. God’s time shouldn’t get bumped to another time, or another day, because we have a soccer game to attend. God is the priority, period.
There are hundreds of tempting ways to get around the Sabbath. You can do work that you call “relaxing.” You can point to God when you score a touchdown, and pretend that you are breaking His commandment, for His sake. You can squeeze in a quick Bible reading at halftime, and pretend it is the same as communing in Church with other believers.
There are many ways to “cheat” yourself out of your Sabbath, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Breaking the Sabbath will hurt you more than it hurts God.
And if you won’t keep the Sabbath for your spiritual well-being, do it for your children’s. They need to see your faith and commitment. The world will offer them a million God-substitutes. Show them, by your example, that nothing can replace God!
Outstanding article! Thanks so much for sharing. I grew up this way, and it has been a great blessing to me.
If you ever get a chance to watch the movie, “Chariots of Fire” you will find its message on this topic most uplifting – it is one of my all time favorites!
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This is pretty much exactly what we try to do as Mormons. 🙂 I was raised to respect the Sabbath day and to keep it holy and still try to do so now with my own family. Great post! I will be sharing for sure.
And, as a youth, I found that many employers were willing to work with my desire to not work on Sundays, as I said I didn’t want to work on Sundays for religious reasons. Not all employers will be sympathetic, but I found it helpful to be firm and stand up for your convictions. So, beside a Sunday morning paper route I had for years, and the occasional Sunday working in retail/fast food, I have always managed to find work or employers flexible enough to allow me to keep the day sacred.
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Excellent article! We are striving to do all of these things as well. We have started the habit of gathering as extended family for sunday lunch, making easy, everyone brings something. These gatherings make Sunday special for all of us, as we visit and cousins play.
That is great! We do something similar with another family from our Church.
Great post. Voddie Baucham says some really great things about the sabbath in his book ‘Family Driven Faith’ 🙂
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Just curious, do you attend a church service with a local body on Saturday or Sunday? Or do you home church on Sunday? We have Messianic friends who observe the sabbath and it’s really neat. They believe in observing it on Saturday though.
We attend a local church on Sunday, though I really like the idea of a home church.
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do you ever struggle with the Saturday/Sunday controversy. I have a friend who is an Adventist and she has convinced me that our moving the Sabbath to sunday is a shift by man. I have discussed the implications of that ‘shift’ with her. I have to agree I think it is one of those things we tend to make excuses for… I guess it gives us something to pray about.
Well, the best way to solve these sort of issues is to go to the Holy Bible. Does the Bible support a change of Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday? Jesus went to church on Saturday. The 4th commandment begins with the word remember, yet lots of pastors will tell you that it is the commandment to forget.
Research 7th Day Advevtists. It’s a cult started by a woman. Sunday is the Lords day and Sabbath according to scripture. Sabbath means “rest”. As a Christian, my eternal rest is in Christ. Jesus us Lord of the Sabbath. If you are not studying Church history, you will be lead astray. Every heresy going on today was already addressed over 1,000 years ago in the councils, creeds, and confessions. We aren’t smart enough today to reinvent the wheel! We live in a dumbed down socialist culture!
I absolutely love this article because I’m one of the dying breed who believe in keeping the Sabbath holy! I really appreciate the tips for helping kids keep the Sabbath. That’s really hard for me because my daughter likes to go and do things, especially if her friends are. The idea to do a few “special” things will really help her look forward to it!
You all are very similar to us, although we observe the seventh day Sabbath (Saturday). No unneeded work, no buying things, no extra curricular activities (sports team events etc), no TV or video games. Just church and family!
Great article and advice. Just don’t forget to keep the “seventh” day holy-which would be Saturday.
Great ideas, except for the fact that you are keeping the sabbath on Sunday. Sunday is man made. Gods law is to keep sabbath (Saturday) holy. No where in the Bible does it say that Sunday is a day of worship. Sabbath is mentioned more than a hundred times though. We must not submit to the flesh, but submit to the Holy Spirt and follow the laws that God has intended for us. We are not allowed to pick and choose which commandments to follow but to follow them all. So let’s keep the true sabbath holy.
This is a great article with several nuggets of wisdom. I kept getting confused, though, as there was a reference to the Sabbath being God’s final day of creation…only to switch back and forth between referring to God’s Sabbath as “Sabbath” and “Sunday”. I just wasn’t sure which day you meant – the Biblical Sabbath or the 1st day of the week.
It sounds like you all did a lot of study before making this great commitment for your family. I’d just encourage you to study & pray further, observing the truth found in God’s Word about Him blessing the seventh day as His holy day.
Blessings!
Thank you very much my brother and sister for resolving to keep the Sabbath holy and observe it. However, I am concerned that you are referring to Sunday the first day of the week as the Sabbath. Sunday is NOT the Sabbath, the Bible Sabbath is the Seventh day, SATURDAY. Continue studying the Bible. We are praying for you. May the Holy Spirit revile to you the truth about this issue.
Everything you said makes a lot of sense and I have been making changes in my life as well as I continue to understand God’s word more and more. I’ve really begun to notice more recently how the world’s view seems so subtly different than what the Bible says you may never realize where you are not following Jesus unless you really look hard. With that said I noticed you call Sunday the sabbath. Per the Bible the Sabbath would be Saturday. So is moving it to Sunday not following the commandment? I ask because I believed myself any day for the Lord was good enough. But I now believe a specific day in the 10 commandments may be important as a sign to the world of who you belong to.
I believe that Sunday is the day that we are called to keep the Sabbath because of the early church. In New Testament times the Sabbath day was called the “Lord’s day” (Rev. 1:10) and was observed on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7), honoring the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb.
This is not true. The disciples continued as well as Paul to keep the sabbath day on a Saturday. God never changed the sabbath to Sunday for the sabbath is the day he rested… that day will never change. However man changed to sabbath from Saturday to Sunday – which will never make it right regardless of what the early church did in the name of Christ, it’s Gods word that He will forever exault above all his name.
The Sabbath is Friday evening to Saturday evening. Genesis 1:5 …and the evening and morning were the first day. Also all throughout the OT God will say something like hold the sabbath from moon to moon. In Jerusalem they used to blow a shofar to signify the beginning and end of the sabbath, Friday evening then again on Saturday evening at sundown. There are three kinds of sabbaths. We have the weekly sabbath then the yearly sabbath (every seventh year) and feast sabbaths which is what is being talked about in Acts 20:7. It is the day of the feast of firsts fruits. The words first day of the week are translated from the Greek word Sabbaton which is the first day of the week after the feast of unleavened bread which God says to keep as a sabbath and it starts off the seven weeks leading up to Shavuot aka Pentecost. Check Leviticus 23 it talks about the feasts. Then Revelation 1:10 has nothing to do with either the sabbath or Sunday it has to do with Gods day of judgment. The word Lord translated from Greek is Jevohah which is the Greek name of God the creator. This is not talking about Jesus. Plus if we read in context God is showing John what his judgment will be. But this is the only place in the NT where the Lords day is used so in the Old Testament everywhere it talks about the Lords day or Yehovahs day (which Yehovah is Gods name that he tells Moses to tell us to call him) but anyways ALWAYS in the Old Testament the day of Yehovah is the day or a day of judgement whether it is judgment for the Israelites or their enemies at that time or if it is a prophecy to the end times. Check out Isaiah 13:9, Isaiah 2:12, Ezekiel 30:3, Joel 2:32-32, and Amos 5:18-20. Part of understanding scripture (beyond the Holy Spirit) is understanding the context in what you are reading. that is why it is soooo important to keep reading!! Don’t just take one verse and pluck it out to form it to what you want. Read the context!! And the other part is understanding history and culture. During the time of Constantine is when the Day was switched to Sunday He wanted religious and political unity and most people at that time worshiped the sun god on Sunday so he moved it to then. Search it out for yourself. Sunday is a Pagan day of worship. The seventh day of the week is when God rested and commands us to rest and keep holy HIS Sabbath. Even Jesus rested on the Sabbath (among all the other places he held the Sabbath) when he was in the tomb he new not to raise on God Almighty’s sabbath, the sabbath He made for us. May God Almighty, creator of the universe, bless you and guide you to His truth.
Thank you so much for speaking the Truth of His Word!!! I used to Worship on Sunday bc that was the day I was brought up to attend church. But I did a study on the verses in the Bible of the “Sabbath” and since then I have been observing it on the day the LORD says is His Sabbath. Especially after learning about how Constitine changed the day to Sunday and having to do with the pagan worship of the Sun god. I want to Honor what the LORD says and not honor a pagan worship of a false god!!!
Sabbath is Saturday not sunday.
Our Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. On my own several months ago, I decided to take a social media break during those hours.
Thank you for sharing this message. The only thing I do differently is my Sabbath is on Saturday. Yes I believe in following the Torah and that Yashua is my messiah. If you do a deep study in the Old Testament you will find Yashua quoted Lev. And Deu. All the time. He asked “ How do you know the father? His answer is keep my commandments.” A deep study in Paul and you will find everything he did and taught was to keep the commandments. Please remember God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. I say this in love. May YAHUA bless you.
This is some really good information about keeping the sabbath. I liked that you pointed out that it would be smart to try to not do any housework or other work on the sabbath. It does seem like a good idea to do your best to show your kids how to make Sunday a different day. Personally, I would want to make sure that my kids know that the sabbath is a day for rest and family.
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Great point, Emily. Thanks for reading!