Q.60. How do we keep the Sabbath holy?

A. We keep the Sabbath holy by resting the whole day from worldly affairs or recreations, even ones that are lawful on other days. Except for necessary works or acts of mercy we should spend all our time publicly and privately worshiping God.

The catechism has covered how the Sabbath principle is based on God’s creation, and is part of the moral law. Thus it is still in effect today. We have seen that the day of the observance was moved from Saturday to Sunday after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now we come to the question of how we are to observe the Sabbath.

Personally, I find this to be a very difficult question. Part of the difficulty is that the answer runs so counter to our modern culture. In my own lifetime, Sunday’s have changed dramatically. When I was young, it was difficult to find a store that was open on Sunday. Now, it is difficult to find a store that closes for Sundays. The world now treats Sunday as a day like any other day of the week. Even children’s sporting events are now regularly scheduled for Sunday mornings. It did not use to be like that.

Within Christian circles, Sunday is generally not treated any different than other days of the week. Most Christians accept that you go to church Sunday morning, but now many churches are scheduling Saturday evening services, and I have even seen some churches offer Friday and Thursday evening services for people who want to free up their Sunday morning for other purposes.

The concept of keeping the Sabbath holy is almost gone from our modern culture, and so when you try to observe the Sabbath, you are swimming upstream.

But what also makes this difficult is the desire to not be legalistic and pharasetical. In observing the Sabbath, it is possible to be so hung up on making rules of what is allowed and what is not allowed that you suck all the joy out of the day. The Sabbath is God’s gift to us, and it is not to be a burden. It is not a day to focus on what you can’t do, and pine for all the things you miss doing. Rather, it is to be a day of rest and worship.

I have found that trying to balance this is difficult. As a family, we try to avoid commerce on Sunday. We don’t go shopping or eat out at a restaurant if at all possible. When I was in college, I didn’t do school work on Sunday. I sometimes get pulled into things that I have to do for work on Sunday because of hardware upgrades or other things that must occur on the weekend, but otherwise, I do not do any business work on Sundays. We generally don’t watch TV or movies on Sunday, although we will sometimes turn on a major sporting event in the evening.

I don’t know that I’m perfectly observing the Sabbath. I suspect that I am not. It seems strange that this is so difficult an issue. But it is one of the ten commandments, and as such, we need to be concerned with how we should keep the Sabbath holy.

Amos 8:4-6

⁴ Hear this, you who trample on the needy
and bring the poor of the land to an end,
⁵ saying, “When will the new moon be over,
that we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath,
that we may offer wheat for sale,
that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great
and deal deceitfully with false balances,
⁶ that we may buy the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals
and sell the chaff of the wheat?”