Is Sunday Still the First Day of the Week?
We’re Christians. We follow King Jesus. We mark out one day a week—the first, not the last—to worship the risen Lord. We sing of his goodness and grace and trust his promise to return and blast away death forever. Sunday is his day. And he comes first.
Maybe you’ve noticed it too. On various apps and sites, the calendar has shifted to Monday as the first day of the week. If you want to keep Sunday as Day 1, you can sometimes tailor the calendar to your preference, but the default has changed.
This comes as no surprise. Most people look at Saturday and Sunday as a pair—two days at the end of the week. “What is a weekend?” asked the elderly Lady Grantham in Downton Abbey, delightfully clueless as to how the working class a century ago conceived of time. Since regular business hours are Monday to Friday, it makes sense when people assume Monday is the best candidate for Day 1. It’s the start of the workweek.
But that’s just it. Collapsing the week into the workweek is what troubles me.
Week and Workweek
The way we orient ourselves in time—how we think of our days—makes a difference in how we conceive of our life and purpose. Our choices in how we order time contain moral instruction.
Starting the week with Monday indicates we see our lives primarily in terms of work. Productivity matters most. Contrast a Monday-first mindset with a Sunday-first outlook. When the week begins with worship and rest, everything that follows gets cast in the light of grace and gratitude. Work becomes a subset of worship. We begin not with what we do but with who we are in Christ.
Are Sundays Special?
But Trevin, you say. Sundays aren’t that different anymore. So the calendar shift doesn’t matter that much. True, unfortunately. Even for many Christians, aside from an hour or so spent in church, the rest of the day slips into the same leisure activities as Saturday—or for some, becomes just another day of work at one of the countless places open all week long.
But the way we treat Sunday puts us out of step with our forefathers and mothers in the faith. The original consensus statement adopted by Southern Baptists nearly a century ago, The Baptist Faith and Message, not only devoted an entire article to the Lord’s Day but also specified what proper stewardship of Sunday looked like:
The first day of the week is the Lord’s day. It is a Christian institution for regular observance. It commemorates the resurrection of Christ from the dead and should be employed in exercises of worship and spiritual devotion, both public and private, and by refraining from worldly amusements, and resting from secular employments, works of necessity and mercy only excepted.
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Listen, Don’t Critique
Written by J. V. Fesko |
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
We should realize that we have come to listen to the word so that it would critique us, not so that we could criticize the preaching of it. Such is the difference between listening to the sermon and critiquing it—it’s humility vs. pride. We should also realize that God has established his church in such a way that there are people whom he has assigned to critique the preaching of the word—the elders of the church. The elders have the Christ-given responsibility to guard the purity of the preaching of the word of God.One of the biggest problems in Reformed churches, I believe, is that people come to church to critique the sermon rather than listen to it. How so? In Reformed churches there are always a number of theological commandos, people who love to study the Bible, read serious theological works, and encourage and spur others on to improve their own knowledge. These are all good things, however, knowledge apart from humility and love is a dangerous thing as Paul warns us (1 Cor. 8:1). What begins as a thirst and hunger to know God becomes a case of pride and the person no longer comes to eat the meal prepared by the chef but instead comes as the food critic.
Some people will sit down and listen to the preaching of the word, but find problems with the way a text is preached, the illustrations used, the inflection of the pastor’s voice, or the application that the pastor presses. The person will then approach the pastor and raise his or her concerns regarding the “flaws” in the sermon. I can completely understand why pastors find such “counsel” annoying. It doesn’t matter how long he studied in college, seminary, how many hours he invested in exegeting the text, praying over his preparation, or how many hundreds or even thousands of sermons he’s preached over the years. All of this is for naught. In this day and age where expertise has been democratized, all you need is twenty bucks and a website and a person can anoint himself as an “expert” on any subject. I think such a trend is especially true for seminarians—they take one or two classes, have preached maybe three sermons in their whole life, and all of a sudden, they’re a preaching expert.
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It’s “Very Good” to be a Man
Men, masculinity is defined by God in Scripture. When that is the kind of man you are learning to become, or striving to become, then you have aligned yourself with God’s “very good” vision. Care nothing for what the haters and critics say. Do not apologize for your masculinity, do not be ashamed of it, and do not run from it. Instead, embrace your manly call in Christ and live it out with strength and conviction to the glory of God.
Men, This is Why They Hate You
As society stumbles ever closer toward the cliffs of insanity, speaking the truth has become all the more offensive. But, on the other hand, if you suppress common sense and genetics, dutifully bow the knee like a good boy, and virtue signals the rankest perversions, then you will be perceived as a reasonable man. All you have to do is toe the party line, walk in lockstep with the kind of people who think twelve-year-old boys should be chemically castrated and that men can expose themselves to young girls in lockerrooms, embracing the queerification of America, and then maybe you will go places.
But, if you think Dylan Mulvaney is a groomer, homosexuality and transgenderism are abominations (Biblically defined), that Bud Light wasn’t a real beer in the first place, and that Target should stop selling girls bathing suits with penis pockets, well, then you are a bigot of the highest order. Similarly, if you think education should not be secular indoctrination, that children’s programming should not have lesbian kisses included within it, that pronouns are based upon God’s design of biological sex, and that it should be illegal for drag queens to twerk in front of children in libraries, then you are precisely the kind of rational man, steeped in objective reality, that the rainbow railroad is reeling to run over. They hate you because you love truth and reason, plain and simple.
If that is you, then I want to encourage you with this blog. And I want to equip you for the battle of our lifetimes. Men were made to fight. Not with activism or finger-pointing vitriol that combats hatred with more hatred. No. But also not with a spineless winsomeness popular in the evangelical world that pretends to care about everything but takes a stand for nothing. No, no, no. I want to equip you to fight. Not by wasting your time calling out all of the lies, which at this point are legion. Not in getting angry and going to war with every ideology we, as Christian men, are rightly opposed to.
Today, however, I want to equip you to begin fighting for what you are FOR instead of fighting what you are AGAINST. We should remember that the only way to spot the counterfeit is by knowing exactly what the authentic actually is. With that in mind, I want us to understand Biblical manhood and unapologetically celebrate it. I want us to hold our heads high that God made us men and that being a man is very good!
In the weeks ahead, we will look at how Biblical womanhood is “very good,” how Biblical sexuality alone is “very good,” and how covenant marriage brings all of these “very goods” together into one home. But today, we will be focused on the men. And to do that, we will go back into the pages of Genesis, where we left off last week, speaking about God’s good design of masculinity.
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The Living God
King Darius, after being tricked into casting Daniel into the den of lions, calls Daniel the “servant of the living God” (Daniel 6:20). When he sees that God has preserved Daniel, he decrees that all peoples “tremble and fear before the God of Daniel, for he is the living God, enduring forever; his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end” (Daniel 6:26).
Christians confess that God is. Indeed, his name is “I am” (Exodus 3:14). According to Hebrews 11, a fundamental aspect of pleasing him is believing that he exists: “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). But unless we are philosophers, words like existence and being and is are fairly bland. They don’t awe us (though they should).
Perhaps that’s why the Bible regularly stresses that God doesn’t merely exist, but that he lives. “The Lord lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation” (Psalm 18:46).
A common oath throughout the Old Testament is “as the Lord lives.” What’s more, references to “the living God” are highlighted in some key biblical stories. Reflecting on the biblical witness to the living God may stir our affections more than simple statements about his existence.
Not Like the Idols
The Bible often refers to Yahweh as the living God in order to set him apart from the idols of the nations. In Jeremiah 10, the prophet exhorts Israel to avoid the vain customs of the people. He looks with disdain on the making of an idol:
A tree from the forest is cut downand worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.They decorate it with silver and gold;they fasten it with hammer and nailsso that it cannot move. (Jeremiah 10:3–4)
The idols of the nations are “like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak.” What’s more, “they have to be carried, for they cannot walk.” There’s no reason to fear them, since they can do neither evil nor good (Jeremiah 10:5).
Isaiah echoes the same truth in chapter 45 of his oracle. The nations “carry about their wooden idols, and keep on praying to a god that cannot save” (45:20). Isaiah 46 elaborates:
Bel bows down; Nebo stoops;their idols are on beasts and livestock;these things you carry are borneas burdens on weary beasts.They stoop; they bow down together;they cannot save the burden,but themselves go into captivity.“Listen to me, O house of Jacob,all the remnant of the house of Israel,who have been borne by me from before your birth,carried from the womb;even to your old age I am he,and to gray hairs I will carry you.I have made, and I will bear;I will carry and will save.” (Isaiah 46:1–4)
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. Donkeys carry the idols of the nations; Yahweh carries his people. Idols can’t even save themselves; the Lord saves his people.
According to Jeremiah 10:6–7, this is why Yahweh is unique.
There is none like you, O Lord;you are great, and your name is great in might.Who would not fear you, O King of the nations?For this is your due;for among all the wise ones of the nationsand in all their kingdomsthere is none like you.
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