When encountering the sabbath commandment many people rebuff the order by exclaiming that they worship on Sunday or that they are free to worship their Creator any day of the week, but this response is based on a confusion. The order was not to relegate our “worship” to a specific day of the week but to “rest” on the one specific day of the week set aside by the Creator for that express purpose.
It is true that this rest is a form of worship, yes. But so also is our work the other six days.
Therefore it is a mistake to think of the Sabbath as a day of worship. Infact it is a distraction.
If we think of Sabbath in the manner of the commandment, we will find rest, but if we think of it in terms of worship, we may very well work through much of the day in an effort to do things to aid our worship…things which detract from the purpose of the day which is to rest from our labors.
How many congregations started out as Sunday services and shifted the service over to the day they call “Saturday”? They do “church” on Sabbath, with much set up and planning and coordination and routine and regiment etc. So that by the end of the Day they need to rest from their Sabbath worship.
It is an easy first step to shift from Sunday services over to the celebration of the Sabbath Day our Savior gave us in creation, but we must move on from that attitude soon after or we will certainly spend all our Sabbath Day doing a great deal of things we think of as worship and miss out on so much rest and refreshment.
Rhy Bezuidenhout 8 w
I have this personal struggle between looking at the instruction to rest on the Shabbat, but then looking at how Yeshua and His disciples tough on the Shabbat; sometimes for the entire day. I can only explain it in the sense that Shabbat was the only day that people had time to meet and study Torah. They didn't have their own copies of the Bible either, so had to go to the synagogue to learn on their one free day.