September 11, 2011

Which is the Best Day for the Christians to meet for worship? Is it Sunday or Saturday?


Some religious organizations (Seventh-Day Adventists, Seventh-Day Baptists, and certain others) claim that Christians must not worship on Sunday but on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

They claim that, at some unnamed time after the apostolic age, the Church "changed" the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. However, passages of Scripture such as Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:2, Colossians 2:16-17, and Revelation 1:10 indicate that, even during New Testament times, the Sabbath is no longer binding and that Christians are to worship on the Lord’s day, Sunday, instead.

The Sabbatists who nowadays want to observe the Jewish holiday, forget that Jesus and the apostles had authority to interpret and to reform the laws of Moses.The early Church Fathers compared the observance of the Sabbath to the observance of the rite of circumcision, and from that they demonstrated that if the apostles abolished circumcision (Gal. 5:1-6), so also the observance of the Sabbath must have been abolished.

The following quotations show that the first Christians understood this principle and gathered for worship on Sunday.

The Didache
"But every Lord’s day . . . gather yourselves together and break bread, and give thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure. But let no one that is at variance with his fellow come together with you, until they be reconciled, that your sacrifice may not be profaned" (Didache 14 [A.D. 70]).

The Letter of Barnabas
"We keep the eighth day [Sunday] with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead" (Letter of Barnabas 15:6–8 [A.D. 74]).
Peace and every blessing!

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