Why Christians meet for church on Sundays instead of a Saturday Sabbath

You may have had a conversation with a Seventh-Day Adventist or just opened up the Old Testament and wondered why Christians today meet for church on Sundays instead of Saturday. Or why Sunday is sometimes called the Sabbath and why Christians don’t observe a Saturday Sabbath, which was commanded in the Old Testament. Are Christians disobeying the Bible?

Let’s dive in…

This question is often phrased, “When did Christians switch from a Saturday Sabbath to a Sunday Sabbath?” That phrasing isn’t accurate to what transpired. Christians didn’t switch the Sabbath. The Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, has always been Saturday, and always will be Saturday. The early Christians started meeting for worship on Sundays, but many of the first Christians were Jews. Jews who still observed a Saturday Sabbath, including attending the synagogue on Saturdays. Then the Church met for worship on Sunday (as well as during the week!). So there’s a lot more at play here than a decision to “switch the Sabbath day.” The Sabbath day was never switched. The better question is how did the early Christians see and apply the Jewish (Old Testament) laws (i.e. about Sabbath in this case), especially as it related to Gentiles (non-Jews).

Keeping the Sabbath is one of the 10 Commandments, which spell out that it’s to be kept on the seventh day (Saturday):  Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor, and do all your work,  but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11 ESV)

We also see in Exodus 31:16 that it is to be kept forever: Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. (ESV)

Seems like an open and shut case to keep a Saturday Sabbath (forever), right? Well the Bible doesn’t end in Exodus and it’s important that we read and apply it as one unified narrative. And let me be clear at the start, there is much debate over how to interpret these commands within Christianity and we need to be loving and humble toward those who draw different conclusions than us, while each doing our best as individuals and in community to be true to Scripture.

Are you part of the people of Israel? If you look at Exodus 31:16, that’s who the command is addressed to. This of course is part of a larger covenant (think marital covenant) that God made with the Old Testament people of Israel (a.k.a. the Hebrews, the Jews, the Israelites). You can find that Covenant agreed to by the people of ancient Israel in Exodus 24:3-8. Its blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience are laid out in Deuteronomy 28:1-68 and Leviticus 26:1-46 (the curses are absolutely brutal). The general idea was if the people of Israel obeyed the laws within the covenant (like Sabbath), they’d keep the Promised Land. If they didn’t, they’d lose it. They’d be conquered by foreign powers and would be exiled to those foreign lands. That’s what happened. In the midst of said exile (see book of Lamentations for brutal details), Jeremiah the prophet (author of Jeremiah and likely of Lamentations) said some significant things:

1. God gave Israel a certificate of divorce because of her unfaithfulness (Jeremiah 3:8-11). Technically, this divorce was with the ten northern tribes of Israel, and not the two southern tribes of Judah (Israel had split into two kingdoms by this time: Israel & Judah). But in those three verses, God describes Judah as worse off than divorced Israel. Israel was already exiled to Assyria, hence the divorce papers, while Judah was just about to be exiled to Babylon (the divorce is about to happen, if the metaphor is applied consistently). So at this point, the covenant made back in Exodus 24 is shot.
2. They won’t be in exile forever. They’ll get to return to Jerusalem / Israel seventy years later. See Jeremiah 29:10.
3. God is going to make a NEW covenant with his people. In the midst of the mayhem of exile and divorce, Jeremiah tells the exiles that a new covenant is coming that “will not be like the covenant [God] made with their ancestors.” See Jeremiah 31:31-34.

The night before he died on the cross, Jesus took a glass of wine at the Last Supper, lifted it up and said, This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. (Luke 22:20 ESV)

The author of Hebrews (in the New Testament, after Jesus) quotes Jeremiah 31:31-34 in Hebrews 8:8-12. Hebrews 8:13 then says God made the first covenant “obsolete,” and that it is old and aging and will soon disappear.

So it’s clear from Jesus, the author of Hebrews, and of Paul’s instructions in 2 Corinthians 3:6 that we are under a new marriage covenant with God, not the old one he made with Israel: who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:6 ESV)

The ultimate fulfillment of the new covenant, our marriage with Jesus, will happen when Jesus returns, when the new heaven and new earth are ushered in (these are the biblical descriptions of what we often summarize as “heaven”). See Revelation 21:1-7. But it’s clear that this is our covenant relationship with God now, similar to an engagement or betrothal period before a marriage.

I believe this is our marriage covenant with God (not of the letter but of the Spirit, 2 Corinthians 3:6). And I believe that the trajectory of Scripture that I’ve mentioned thus far indicates that the marriage covenant God made with ancient Israel is not ours. So what do we do with all the commands within it?

Jesus said if we love him, we’ll obey his commands. (John 14:15)

Jesus said he didn’t come to abolish the Law (Torah) or the Prophets. He said not the smallest letter or least stroke of pen will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. He also said anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands will be called least in the kingdom of heaven and those who practice them will be called great (Matthew 5:17-19).

That sure sounds like we should be keeping a Saturday Sabbath! (And not wearing mixed fibers, and not eating shellfish or pork, and not trimming the sides of our beards, etc.)

So what do we do at this point? We follow Jesus and Paul’s lead. For starters, let’s look at the rest of Matthew 5. Jesus is actually demonstrating exactly what he wants us to do with the Old Testament law. How he wants us to obey all of it, but in a way that our righteousness is to surpass that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law (Matthew 5:20). These were the all-stars at obeying the law as a legal code and Jesus says he expects our obedience to surpass theirs! What follows is Jesus showing us what he meant. That our surpassing was to obey and apply the spirit or deeper meaning of the Old Testament law, rather than applying it as a forever-binding legal code. We’ll then look at how Paul also did this, and how the early Christians taught and modeled this, particularly in relation to the Sabbath.

Remember, we are still in Matthew 5 here. What Jesus just said about the law (literally Torah, which means instruction and is referring to all of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, not just the ~613 commands) is his intro. He says he came to fulfill the Torah not abolish it. The whole Torah points to him, he is the fulfillment of it, and now he is going to tell us, under his new covenant, how to apply the commands within it. Our application had to be different than the Jewish literal application of all of these commands. It had to surpass the literal application and find the true meaning God had always intended for a Jew+Gentile new covenant world. The first covenant was only made with Jews and much of it had to do with how to be set apart as a Jewish nation, which is how they were a light to other nations. There was no more Jewish nation in Jesus’ day. Soon there wouldn’t even be a temple or sacrificial system (which many of the commands required). Jesus shows how the new world of Jews & Gentiles are to apply the law under his new covenant, a covenant with Jews & Gentiles who have faith in Jesus. Not a covenant made with a nation-state on how to be set apart from other nation-states.

So let’s look at the rest of Matthew 5, where Jesus demonstrates how to do what he laid out in Matthew 5:17-19. I’m going to be as brief as possible here. Please look up the texts for more details (just hover over the hyperlinks).

Matthew 5:21-22. The law said don’t murder (Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 5:17) or you’re subject to judgment. But Jesus says if you get angry at someone, you’re subject to judgment.

Matthew 5:27-28. The law said don’t commit adultery (have sex with a married person) (Exodus 20:14, Deuteronomy 5:18). Jesus says if you lust (look with desire) over a person (married or not), you’ve committed adultery in your heart.

Matthew 5:38-42. The law says “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth” (Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21). Jesus says don’t resist an evil person. If you get slapped, instead of slapping back (law), turn your other cheek to be slapped a second time (Jesus’ application of the spirit of the law). If you get sued for a shirt, give your coat as well.

Hopefully you see a trend here. Jesus was drastically changing the way the law was to be applied. One could argue he wasn’t changing the law, as he just said none of the Torah would disappear until everything is accomplished and that anyone who set aside even the least of these commands would be called least in the kingdom of heaven. The Torah wasn’t changing, how the Torah was obeyed was. How it was applied. The Torah hadn’t changed, but the context the Torah now found itself in had.

Jesus was showing us a pattern of finding the spirit of a command, its true meaning, and applying it. God didn’t want you to just not kill people, he wants you to not get angry at them. And then to love them! To show them undeserved kindness.

He wants you to not have sex with people who are married, but he also doesn’t want you to visualize the act in your head (with a married or unmarried person). Doing so dehumanizes them and it cheapens the marital bond sex is meant to create.

He initially said “tooth for tooth, life for life,” now he says “don’t take anything, just love them!” These first commands were given within a barbaric Iron Age time period and were what the people of Israel could handle given their culture. It’s clear that Jesus thinks we can handle more now, and that God’s intent was always that we would handle more.

Paul follows Jesus’ lead in the way he handles the Old Testament law. In 1 Timothy 5:17-18, he quotes two Old Testament laws to say that pastors should be paid, laws that had nothing to do with pastors being paid. For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” (citing Deuteronomy 25:5) and “The laborer deserves his wages” (citing Leviticus 19:13).

The law is used by both Paul and Jesus as wisdom, not as a legal code. God gives a wise, eternal truth, and we apply that wisdom to our situation. Paul says you obey God’s command in Deuteronomy 25:5 and Leviticus 19:13 by paying pastors. He’s not removing the law, but he’s showing some of the eternal truth behind it, and how it is to be applied in the new context of the Church. At the very least, he’s showing that the law isn’t applied in a legal code / literal way.

One more application-rubric that Paul and Jesus both give (which you see them following in the above examples) is that the entire Old Testament law is summed up or fulfilled in one command: love your neighbor. Paul lays this out clearly in Galatians 5:13-14, as he is explaining we have freedom from the burden of the law, but we are not to use that freedom to sin, but to love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Galatians 5:14 ESV) This is an incredibly authoritative statement made by Paul. If you love your neighbor as yourself, you are fulfilling every single command in the Old Testamant. Wowza! Jesus says something similar in Matthew 22:34-40, saying that all the Law and Prophets depend (ESV) on loving God and neighbor and prior to that in Matthew 7:12 says: So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. One way of figuring out the deeper meaning or spirit of an Old Testament law is to ask, “How did this law help Israel love God and/or neighbor? How can I love God and/or neighbor in a way that fits my context (and new covenant with God as a Gentile) today?”

A related example of this transition from old covenant to new, from Jew-only to Jew+Gentile, is in Acts 10:9-16. Gentiles were considered unclean / defiled in the Old Testament law and thus the early Jews were hesitant to share the gospel with them and fully include them in the life of the early church. There were also many foods deemed unclean by the Old Testament law: pork and shellfish as prominent examples. In a dream, God commands Peter to eat pork, shellfish, and other animals that were previously deemed unclean. God said he has now made them clean. This had a dual meaning that within the new covenant, these foods were now permissible and no longer necessary as a way of setting apart the Jewish nation-state from their neighbors. It was also a sign that this was now true of the actual Gentiles themselves; God had made them clean. Immediately after this, God led Peter to share the gospel with Cornelius, the second recorded Gentile convert to Christianity in Scripture, and the first for Peter. And then they went and ate some bacon (sorry, kidding :).

God had a specific intention of keeping Israel as a nation set apart from other nations (Deuteronomy 14:2) in the Old Testament. Many of his commands involve external ways of being visually set apart from other nations, such as circumcision, dietary laws, facial hair laws, and many more. These laws, along with the many ritual cleanliness laws, represented holiness, which means both righteousness/perfection, as well as “set apart.” These were reminders that 1.) God is holy, 2.) the people needed to be forgiven by God because they weren’t holy, and 3.) they were to be a light to the nations by showing them how different God (Yahweh) was from the gods of other nations. All of the external differentiations helped show and remind Israel and their neighbors of this truth. There were also strict commands forbidding marriage with those from other nations. But what does holiness and being set apart look like when you aren’t a nation anymore and when your communal identity is no longer centered on one people group, one nation, but on all people groups, all nations? Many of the applications of these Old Testament commands had to do with being a Jewish person culturally and ethnically. Would a new convert to Christianity have to first become Jewish, living out the application of the law in a set apart Jewish-nation way?

This was a HUGE debate in the New Testament church, and there’s lots of Scripture that show us where they landed.

Read Acts 15:1-35. It’s a fascinating account of this very debate happening in real time. In short, some were saying new Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians had to be circumcised, meaning they had to physically become Jewish (see Genesis 17:1-14). So the message they were preaching was Jesus + circumcision = salvation. Or Jesus + Judaism = salvation. This is very different than the message of grace for salvation! (See Acts 15:1) Even more fascinating to our question at hand, not only did they say circumcision was essential for salvation, but new Christians are also required to keep the law of Moses (Acts 15:5). Means of salvation by circumcision; means of discipleship by keeping the ~613 laws of the Old Testament.

Peter gets up and says God made no distinction between Jews and Gentiles, and that God purified the Gentiles’ hearts by faith (Acts 15:9). Then Peter starts to get agitated. He says these Christian Pharisees (they were actual Pharisees who became Christians) are testing God, and he says they are putting a yoke on the necks of these Gentile Christians that neither Peter and his contemporary Jews or the ancient Jews were able to bear (Acts 5:10). Acts 15:11 gives an emphatic “No!” to the Christian Pharisee argument that Gentiles must be required to be circumcised and to keep the law of Moses.

You can imagine how confusing this would have been for everyone. Are there parts of the law that are still to be obeyed verbatim? What about the Sabbath? The apostles answer that question in Acts 15:19-20, saying they should not make it difficult for Gentiles who have turned to God. Again, these Gentiles are already saved by their faith, and the apostles have determined they should not make it difficult on them by requiring they keep the ~613 Jewish laws of the Old Testament in the way they are presented to the ancient Israelite nation. Verse 20 lists four things that they are to obey from the law. These four things weren’t to save them. Acts 15:11 already emphatically said that it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that they are saved. These four things were the parts of the law the apostles deemed needed to be followed verbatim for Christian disciples.

The early church was formed around the apostles’ teaching and interpretation of the Scriptures, which we see spelled out in Acts 2:42. This may just be conjecture, but it’s interesting to note that this verse does not say that the early church was devoted to the Torah. It says they were devoted to the apostles’ teaching (of the Torah and Jesus).

You’ll notice the keeping of the Saturday Sabbath was not in the list the apostles made in Acts 15:20. Let’s look at why, as well as how to still obey the Sabbath commands of the Old Testament in the pattern Jesus shows us. The pattern of finding the spirit or deeper truth of a legal code law and obeying that, as well as the application-rubric of loving God and neighbor.

Why and when did Christians start worshipping on Sundays?

I want to repeat something I said at the very beginning of this article. I don’t think the early Christians changed or moved the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. All of the very first Christians were Jews, and even as Gentiles began to be incorporated in, the church (particularly in Jerusalem and the apostles in authority) was still dominated by Jews. A Jew would have still observed the Saturday Sabbath. They would have still attended the synagogue on Saturday. When you look at all of the activity of the New Testament church, they really had no choice but to meet on another day. Most of the Christians would have attended their Sabbath service at the synagogue on Saturday, then had their house church gathering on Sunday where we see them worshiping, listening to teaching, preaching, and prophecy, and eating the Lord’s Supper, which was an actual feast in the early church. And again, Acts 2:46 tells us they met together in some capacity every day, which minimizes some of this controversy of Saturday vs. Sunday.

Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2 demonstrate the early church meeting together on the first day of the week (Sunday). What’s confusing even to me is that the Jewish day begins at 6pm, so it’s hard to keep up with all this. Acts 20:7 particularly seems to indicate a late night church service, so this was likely on our Saturday night, though it’s unlikely the words “Saturday” and “Sunday” would have been used in that setting since they were pagan labels. The Sabbath would be over at 6pm on Saturday, the seventh day of the week, so the church meeting in Acts 20:7 was taking place on the first day of the week, not on the seventh or Sabbath. This church service went into the daylight hours so they’ve got Saturday night and Sunday morning covered in one service! The point is, these first Christians weren’t meeting for worship on the Sabbath.

As stated, the Jewish Christians worshiped on the Sabbath in the synagogue right alongside their Jewish brethren who weren’t Christian at all. So what changed this? The Jewish Synod of Jamnia (mid-80s of the 1st century) excommunicated Christians from mainstream Judaism. The divinity of Christ had come to a more explicit expression for these Christians (as opposed to the divinity of Yahweh alone) and as previously noted, these Christians weren’t following Torah dietary laws and circumcision, which had come with their embrace of Gentiles. The Synod of Jamnia made official what really was a process that happened over time.

In his First Apology, church leader Justin Martyr (AD 100-165) wrote: We all make our assembly in common on Sunday, since it is the first day, on which God changed the darkness and matter and made the world, and Jesus Christ our Savior arose from the dead on the same day. 

Martyr represents the next generation after the first apostles. His rationale for assembling for worship on Sunday is because that was the first day of God’s creating the world, and was the day Jesus rose from the dead. And while Christian Jews had been formally kicked out of the synagogue by this time, it’s safe to say they were still very much Jewish and many would have still been keeping a Saturday Sabbath prior to worshiping with their Christian family on Sunday.

Justin Martyr’s church would have followed the Didache (Greek for “teaching”), which was a manual for church order (held on a Sunday, “the Lord’s day”) and reached its present form near the end of the 1st century, but contained earlier material. It’s likely the Apostle John among others would have had influence on this content, as his date of death was AD 99. See more on the Didache here.

The “Spirit of the Law” method of interpreting the Old Testament Sabbath commands

Jesus kept the Sabbath, though the Pharisees accused him of breaking their interpretation of it where they heaped on extra rules and restrictions (Mark 2:23-24). Within this context, Jesus declared that he is “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28), meaning he is greater than the law and has authority even over laws that govern the Sabbath day (though again, he hadn’t broken any). But this declaration of “Jesus authority 1st, Sabbath law authority 2nd” is still quite significant to our discussion. He also declared, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). This meant that the Sabbath is a gift made to serve humans, not the other way around with humans being made to serve or even be enslaved by the Sabbath. Both of these statements lay a profound foundation on how Rabbi Jesus is interpreting the Old Testament Sabbath commands for future Gentile Christians.

Let’s take the Sabbath commands and run them through the interpretation rubric set by Jesus and the apostles that was described above, and see if we can find the new covenant spirit of these commands, so that we can be sure to obey them. I also want to point out I can’t say I am 100% correct in my interpretation here. But I am striving to stick to the interpretive rubric modeled by Jesus and the apostles. You might end up with a different interpretation application. My hope is that we’ve both stuck to the rubric the best we could.

Before jumping into the rubric, it’s first worth noting that the Old Testament never commands corporate worship on the Sabbath (Saturdays) and we don’t have biblical evidence of Old Testament Israelites gathering to worship on the Sabbath. What made the Sabbath holy was physical rest and the cessation of labor. Most Israelites would have lived too far away from the tabernacle or temple to attend a worship service every Sabbath (and traveling that far would have certainly been work). The Sabbath was kept at home, by resting. That reflection sheds a lot of light on the controversy of “moving” the day of assembled worship from Saturday to Sunday, when it was never commanded to be on Saturday in the first place. Paul Kroll gives a helpful expansion of this here, including how and why synagogues were built and Saturday worship began there after the Old Testament was completed. This really is a spoiler to this whole question if you think about it. Let’s still jump into what we are to do with the Sabbath commands though, because even if the Old Testament never commanded worship (“church”) on the Saturday Sabbath, it did command rest, which most of us probably don’t do.

Interpretive rubric for Sabbath commands:

1. How do the Sabbath commands lead us to love God and neighbor?

We are not to work seven days a week, nor make others work seven days a week. There is a rhythm of rest that God modeled to us and built into us. Making money is not our highest priority. We love God by obeying his command to rest and reflecting on his love for us on this day of rest. We rest in the completed work Jesus did on the cross for us. We trust that God will provide for us on a day when we aren’t attempting to provide for ourselves. We love others by allowing them to rest (if we are in charge of employees), by not compelling others to live and work at breakneck speeds, and by presenting our rested selves to them rather than a frazzled, stressed out, burnt out version of us who has a short fuse and doesn’t exhibit the fruits of the Spirit.

2. Does God care if our day of rest is exactly from 6pm on Friday until 6pm on Saturday? What if my boss schedules me to work during that time?

Imagine an entire country resting from 6pm on Friday until 6pm on Saturday, from the elite rulers to the lowest servants. This would be so powerful to the nations around them, as well as what it meant to be a citizen of that country centered on a God who commanded this. We simply don’t have that context anymore for modern day Christians scattered all over the world. Is it still powerful to those around you if you rest every Friday 6pm to Saturday 6pm? Yes, but on a personal level, not a macro level. People will see that you are refreshed. They will see that work doesn’t dictate your life. They will see a difference in you. Hopefully the time you spent with the Lord will make you shine brighter wherever you go. But I believe they will see this same difference if you take your Sabbath on a Sunday, or a Monday, or whatever day off your employer gives you this week. Did God create an eternal law to rest from 6pm Friday to 6pm Saturday? (Do we really think that was the exact schedule God kept on the 7th day of creation?) Or did he create an eternal law to rest at a minimum of one uninterrupted day of each week? To live at a pace that allows us to enjoy him and those around us without being frazzled and burnt out? To not live with money and production as our number one value, but to understand the value of being present before the Lord and those we love? Again, we can agree to disagree here, but I think the eternal meaning is not in one, exclusive fixed span of a clock that starts at 6pm on Friday. I think it is in the principles that that fixed time was pointing people toward, much like the previous examples from Jesus in Matthew 5.

Let’s extrapolate the Sabbath’s modern application further. You may have a day off of work each week, but are you rushing around like a madman? Are you hustling and bustling getting your errands done, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, and driving from one kids’ activity to another? These are all work. They are labor. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work. We need to apply the Sabbath command and have one day out of seven where we do no work. The Sabbath is a day of delight, rest, and presence. It is a gift from God. And it is a command, because he loves us. Obey it. Enjoy it!

3. Is there an “eternal meaning” for Sabbath that we find elsewhere in Scripture?

The book of Hebrews identifies key elements of the Old Testament law system like sacrifices, priests and the temple and calls them “shadows of the things to come” (Hebrews 10:1), and “copies of the heavenly things” (Hebrews 9:23), then points out how Jesus’ death on the cross was the real sacrifice that these copies pointed to. That he is the real high priest that all earthly high priests were shadows of. It’s fascinating! (read Hebrews 8-10) In a somewhat more subtle way, the author does the same thing with the Sabbath in Hebrews 4:1-11, equating the eternal meaning of Sabbath-rest with faith in Jesus for salvation:

“Now we who have believed enter that rest…” Hebrews 4:3

“For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.” Hebrews 4:9-10. The “works” he’s referring to here are the works to save ourselves apart from Jesus’ grace! (e.g. Ephesians 2:8-9) We can rest from those works, because Jesus’ work on the cross was sufficient.

Final Word

I have nothing but respect for my Christians brothers and sisters who decide to observe a Saturday Sabbath or who have decided not to eat pork. I think these are wonderful disciplines. But I humbly look at Scripture and feel comfortable concluding that these are no longer binding commands from God for Christian believers.

You may disagree with me here on Sabbath commands or eating pork or any number of items I’ve mentioned. You may even be judging me. This same thing was happening in the first century church, which we see in Scripture, giving even more evidence that these weren’t rigid laws for Gentile Christians to follow:

¹⁶ Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. ¹⁷ These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. 

Colossians 2:16-17

If there was a spot to mandate a to-the-letter application of Old Testament Sabbath or dietary laws, it would have been here. Instead, Paul says, “Don’t judge each other! Don’t let these things divide you! You have found the reality of all of these shadows…Christ!”

So whether you worship corporately on a Saturday or a Sunday (the Bible doesn’t command either one), may you worship Christ and be overwhelmed by his grace and love for you!

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