Devotional 111: The Lord's Day: The Christian Sabbath

The Confession Read

Neither prayer, nor any other part of religious worship, is now, under the gospel, either tied unto, or made more acceptable by any place in which it is performed, or towards which it is directed: but God is to be worshipped everywhere, in spirit and truth; as, in private families daily, and in secret, each one by himself; so, more solemnly in the public assemblies, which are not carelessly or wilfully to be neglected, or forsaken, when God, by his Word or providence, calleth thereunto.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 6

Introduction

Where is God to be found? Men have climbed mountains to answer that question. They have crossed seas, descended into caves, and raised towers toward the sky, all in the hope of standing in some place where the presence of the Almighty might be met more nearly. And yet the whole burden of this sixth section of our chapter is a quiet, revolutionary declaration: God is not to be sought in any one place, because He is to be worshipped in every place. We have already learned in this chapter that God alone institutes His own worship, that worship is offered to God alone through Christ alone, that prayer is a chief part of that worship, and that the ordinary parts of worship are the reading and preaching of the Word, the singing of psalms, and the sacraments. Now the Divines turn to a question that every worshipper must answer sooner or later: where, and in what manner, is this worship to be offered? Is there holy ground? A sacred mountain? A consecrated building? A particular direction toward which the believing face must turn? The answer is a truth that frees the conscience of the worshipper, and it would have astonished the ancient world. The gospel has abolished holy places. Under the old covenant, worship had a local habitation: first the tabernacle, then the temple, and toward that temple the devout Israelite turned his face when he prayed. But with the coming of Christ, that whole economy of sacred space has been dissolved. God is now to be worshipped everywhere, in spirit and in truth. Yet here is the surprise: this very liberty comes wrapped in a duty. The God who is not confined to any one place has appointed three places in which He will be found, if we seek Him aright: the household, the closet, and the assembly. We are not set free from a single place that we might wander; we are set free from a single place that we might fill every place with His worship. Let us trace this truth through the Scriptures, and then let it search our homes, our closets, and our Lord's Days. For there are few doctrines that touch the shape of a Christian's ordinary week more directly than this one.

Scripture Foundation

The great text of this section, the very hinge upon which the whole matter turns, is our Lord's conversation with the woman of Samaria at Jacob's well. The woman, perceiving Jesus to be a prophet, raised the one question that divided her people from the Jews: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship" (John 4:20). It is the question of sacred space in its rawest form. The Samaritans had their holy mountain, Gerizim; the Jews had their holy city, Jerusalem. Each claimed that God would be met in this place and not in that one. The woman wanted to know which shrine was the right one. Our Lord's answer abolishes the question rather than settling it. "Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father" (John 4:21). Neither mountain nor city; neither shrine nor sanctuary. The hour is coming, He says, and in fact now is, "when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (John 4:23-24). The Greek phrase that governs everything here is en pneumati kai alētheia, "in spirit and in truth." Worship "in spirit" is worship that is not tied to material place, material form, or material gesture, but rises from the inward man, the renewed spirit, in living communion with God. Worship "in truth" is worship offered according to the revelation God has given, not according to the imaginations of men. Mark it well: God is a Spirit, and a Spirit has no local habitation, no shrine where His fullness may be contained more than elsewhere. Therefore the worshipper who would meet Him must meet Him on the ground of spirit and truth, not on the ground of geography. This is not, as some imagine, a novel New Testament idea, as though Christ were overturning what the prophets had always taught. The Old Testament itself strained against the notion that God could be housed in a building. When Solomon dedicated the temple, the very sanctuary that was to be God's dwelling place, his prayer confessed the impossibility of it: "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?" (1 Kings 8:27). Solomon built the temple and yet, in the same breath, admitted that it could not hold the God for whom it was built. And the prophet Isaiah spoke even more plainly to a people who trusted in the temple stones: "Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made... but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word" (Isaiah 66:1-2). God's throne is heaven and His footstool the earth; what then is a house of cedar and stone to Him? The place He regards is not a building but a broken, humble heart. Stephen, standing before the Sanhedrin with his face shining like an angel's, pressed this very truth upon the men who venerated the temple: "Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?" (Acts 7:48-49). For that testimony they stopped their ears and stoned him, so deeply was the love of the holy place rooted in the human heart. But Stephen spoke the truth, and the temple he refused to idolize fell within a generation, never to be rebuilt. God does not dwell in temples made with hands. Instead, the New Testament boldly extends worship to every place under heaven. Paul writes to Timothy, "I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting" (1 Timothy 2:8). The Greek is panti topō, "in every place": not in Jerusalem only, not in the synagogue only, not at some consecrated spot, but wherever believing hands are lifted, there prayer may rise and be accepted. And this universalizing of worship was itself no afterthought but the very promise of the prophets. Malachi looked down the ages and saw a day when the narrow worship of one nation and one temple would give way to a worship that filled the world: "For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the LORD of hosts" (Malachi 1:11). From the rising of the sun to its going down, in every place, incense and a pure offering: no longer the smoke of the Levitical altar but the prayers and praises of a worshipping people, scattered through every land, gathering under every sky. But if God is to be worshipped everywhere, the Confession is careful to show us where that everywhere is to be found in practice. It names three spheres, and Scripture grounds each of them. The first is the family, and the worship of it is to be daily. The command of Moses is unmistakable: "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up" (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). Here is family worship woven into the very rhythm of the day: sitting in the house, walking by the way, lying down, rising up, the Word of God saturating every domestic hour. The promise given to Abraham anticipated this household piety, for God said of him, "I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment" (Genesis 18:19). And Joshua's resolution has rung down the centuries as the charter of the godly home: "as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD" (Joshua 24:15). In the New Testament, Cornelius the centurion is described as "a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway" (Acts 10:2), a whole household given to the fear of God, the Gentile home already become a little church before ever an apostle darkened its door. The second sphere is the secret place, "each one by himself." Here Scripture presents us with a pattern in Daniel, that man greatly beloved. When a decree forbade prayer to any god save the king, "he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime" (Daniel 6:10). Secret worship is not the exception but the settled habit; three times a day Daniel met with God alone, and no king's decree could touch that inner sanctuary. Above all, our Lord Himself, who surely needed no aid, nevertheless kept the secret place: "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed" (Mark 1:35). If the sinless Son of God withdrew to pray in solitude before the day began, what manner of persons ought we to be, who are dust and sin, and cannot keep one hour with the Lord without His strengthening? The third sphere is the public assembly, and it is here that the Confession grows most pointed. "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching" (Hebrews 10:25). The Greek word episynagōgē means a gathering together, a solemn assembling, and the writer warns that some had already made a habit of absenting themselves from it. The first church gave us the pattern of faithful assembly: "And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42). And the psalmist's joy before the sanctuary has never been surpassed: "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD" (Psalm 122:1). Our Lord Himself, though He was Lord of the Sabbath, made it His custom to attend the synagogue on that day (Luke 4:16). If the Head of the church did not neglect the assembly, what excuse remains to the members of His body?

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines composed this section, they were correcting an error that had grown up over many centuries, and they did so with the two poles of the whole chapter firmly in view: first, the regulative principle, that God alone may appoint His worship; and second, the freedom of the gospel, that the believer is delivered from the bondage of men's commandments. The error they opposed was the notion of sacred space: the belief that one place, because it had been consecrated, dedicated, or hallowed by man, rendered worship more acceptable to God when performed there, or directed toward it. This was the spirit of the medieval church, with its consecrated altars and shrines, its pilgrimage to distant relics, its burning of incense toward the east, its belief that prayer offered in a certain chapel or before a certain image carried a peculiar efficacy. The Reformation, and the Puritans after it, saw in all this a return to the very shadow from which Christ had set His people free. The Divines therefore insist, first, that no part of worship is tied to any place, and second, that no part of worship is made more acceptable by any place. The preposition is worth our close attention: worship is neither confined to a place nor improved by a place. The man who prays in a cathedral has no more audience with God than the man who prays in a field; the woman who kneels in her kitchen is as near to the throne as the priest at his altar. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. Spirit and truth are not the property of any geography. But observe how the Divines build the positive truth upon this negative foundation. They do not leave us with a vague spirituality that floats above all place and therefore nowhere touches down. They name three appointed spheres of worship, and the naming is itself an act of the regulative principle. The first is the family, and its worship is daily: the household is to be a sanctuary, the father a priest, the morning and evening a time of prayer and the Word. The second is the secret place, each believer alone before God: the closet is a sanctuary, the solitary soul a priest, and the secret hour a time when the Father who seeth in secret rewards openly. The third is the public assembly, and its worship is more solemn: the gathered church is a sanctuary, the called minister a priest in the only gospel sense, one who leads a priesthood of believers, and the Lord's Day a time of common worship before the world. Here is the genius of the section: it demolishes the idol of one holy place only to erect three holy places in its stead, places which God Himself has appointed, and in which He has promised to meet His people. The final clause is a guard against the natural misuse of all this liberty. Because the public assembly is not a holy place in the superstitious sense, some might reason that it is therefore nothing at all, and may be neglected at pleasure. The Divines close that door: the public assemblies "are not carelessly or wilfully to be neglected, or forsaken, when God, by his Word or providence, calleth thereunto." Two words deserve our lingering. Carelessly condemns the man who stays away through mere sloth, who values his ease or his sleep or his pleasures above the gathering of the saints. Wilfully condemns the man who stays away on principle, who has persuaded himself that the assembly is unnecessary because the Spirit is everywhere, or because he can worship God in the woods as well as in the church. Both are here marked as sin. And note the last clause, which anticipates the very providence we have all now lived through: the assemblies may be forsaken, but only "when God, by his Word or providence, calleth thereunto": when persecution scatters them, or sickness, or the shutting of doors by an enemy. To stay away when God calls us to come is disobedience; to come together when providence forbids is presumption. The Divines hold both edges of the sword.

Theological Depth

Calvin, commenting on our Lord's words to the Samaritan woman, draws out the great consequence of God's spirituality with characteristic force. Because God is a Spirit, he observes, the worship which pleases Him is inward, and the place in which it is offered is a matter of complete indifference under the gospel. The elaborate apparatus of the temple, its courts, its altars, its censers, was a shadow, a schoolmaster for the childish age of the church; now that the substance has come, the shadows are retired, and the soul that is reconciled to God carries its temple with it wherever it goes. Calvin would not have us mistake this for a license to despise public worship, for he himself was relentless in urging the duties of the assembly. But he insists that the reason we gather in a building at all is not that the building has any sacredness, but that order, edification, and the public confession of the faith require a common place. The building is a convenience and a witness; it is not a shrine. Jonathan Edwards, that piercing analyst of the religious affections, took up the same theme from a different angle, and pressed it upon the conscience in a way that still wounds and heals. He taught that God is everywhere present, not present by a bare influence, but truly and personally, sustaining all things by the word of His power, and that therefore the nearness of God to the soul is not a matter of geography at all, but of grace. A man may sit in the most splendid temple and be farther from God than the penitent in a hovel, because the one has a proud and carnal heart and the other a broken and contrite one. The soul that has found God in Christ has found Him in every place; the soul that has not found Him in Christ will not find Him in any place, though it travel the whole world over. Edwards reduces the whole matter to a searching test: do you meet God where you are, or do you suppose that a change of place will change your heart? For the unconverted, no place is holy enough; for the believer, every place is holy enough, because Christ is with him. For the first of the three spheres, the family, no Puritan wrote with more authority than William Gouge, whose Domestical Duties is a full-bodied treatise on the household as a church in miniature. Gouge taught that the father of a family is a kind of priest and prophet in his own house, bound to instruct his children and servants in the faith and to gather them daily for the reading of the Word and for prayer, that the house may be what he called a "little church." The man who will not pray with his household, Gouge argued, may as well profess that he has no household to serve the Lord; for the promise of Abraham's covenant blessing is bound up with the command to teach his house after him. Family worship is not an ornament of godliness but its foundation stone, and the neglect of it is one of the surest causes of the decay of religion in a land, for it is in the home that souls are first taught to fear God and first trained to meet with Him. The threefold division of this section, family, secret, public, was made memorable for generations of English-speaking Christians by the Westminster catechisms themselves. Thomas Vincent, whose exposition of the Shorter Catechism was in the hands of more families than almost any other book of its kind, explained the matter with a plainness that has not dated. Answering the question where we are to worship, Vincent distinguished the worship that is more secret, which a man performs in his closet between God and his own soul; the worship that is more private, which is performed by a family in their own house; and the worship that is more public, which is performed in the assembly before the congregation. Each has its season, each its duty, and each its danger: the secret, to be neglected through sloth; the private, to be crowded out by the cares of the world; the public, to be forsaken through pride or worldliness. Vincent's counsel is simply the confession worked out into a rule of daily life: let the closet be kept, and the family altar, and the Lord's Day assembly, and God will be met in all three. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, helpfully fixes our attention on the qualifying phrase that closes the section. The assemblies are not to be forsaken, Shaw notes, "when God, by his Word or providence, calleth thereunto": for God does at times so shut up His people that they cannot assemble, whether by the hand of persecution or the finger of sickness, and in such a case the neglect of the assembly is no sin but a cross. Yet Shaw is careful to add that the Word of God itself calls us to the assembly, and that a man who has it in his power to attend and stays away, when no providence forbids, despises not the church but God, and sins against a plain commandment. The distinction is the confession's own: the assembly is not a holy place that we must seek for its own sake, but it is a holy duty that we must not forsake for our own ease.

Puritan Application

First, then, tear down the idol of sacred space in your own heart. Ask yourself honestly whether there lingers in you a secret superstition that prayer in a certain building, or in a certain posture, or toward a certain direction, is somehow more effectual, more likely to be heard, more nearly acceptable to God than prayer offered in your own kitchen. The gospel has abolished that way of thinking, and to return to it is to rebuild the shadow that Christ dismantled. At the same time, beware the opposite error, the careless contempt of all place, as though because God is everywhere it matters nothing where or how we worship. Both are forms of unbelief: the one trusts too much to place, the other trusts too little to the God who has promised to meet us in the place He appoints. Rest your worship upon the spiritual ground alone, and you will find every place holy, because Christ is in every place with you. Second, raise the family altar, and keep it daily. If you are a husband and father, or a wife and mother with the charge of children, consider whether your house is a little church or a mere lodging. The Confession speaks of worship in private families daily, and the Word commands you to talk of the things of God when you sit in your house and when you rise up. A few verses read, a psalm, a short prayer, morning and evening: these are not great feats, and yet upon them the godliness of the next generation in large measure depends. If you have let this duty lapse, let this very day be the day of its revival. Do not wait for eloquence or leisure; the Lord asks not for fine words but for a faithful heart, and the humblest prayer in the humblest home ascends to the same throne as the prayers of heaven. Third, keep the secret place, each one by himself. There is a worship that no man can perform for you, a meeting with God that no congregation can supply. Daniel prayed three times a day with his windows open; our Lord rose before the day to meet His Father alone. Has your closet become a stranger to you? Has the secret prayer been crowded out by the public, so that you are religious before men and cold before God? Search it out. The strength of all your public worship is laid up in the secret place, and a soul that never meets God alone will starve even in the midst of the fullest assemblies. Set a time, guard it, and let nothing but necessity rob you of it, for there the Father who seeth in secret will reward you openly. Fourth, do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together. The same section that frees you from the superstition of holy places binds you to the duty of the holy assembly, and the writer to the Hebrews warns that the manner of some, even then, was to forsake it. Let not your work, your recreations, your weariness, or your contempt of the church keep you from the Lord's Day gathering. Come not carelessly, as though it were a thing indifferent; come not wilfully, as though you had outgrown the need of it. If providence shuts the doors, by sickness, by persecution, by the restraints of a hostile age, then bear it as a cross and redeem the time in secret and at home. But when the doors stand open and God calls, let the psalmist's joy be yours: "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD" (Psalm 122:1). Fifth, fill every place with the worship of God, since every place is now His sanctuary. Here is the glory of this doctrine, and its sweetest comfort. Because God is to be worshipped everywhere, there is no corner of your life that is secular in the sense of being godless; the shop and the field, the nursery and the study, the sickbed and the graveside, may all become places of worship as you lift your heart to God in the midst of them. "A day in thy courts is better than a thousand," the psalmist cried (Psalm 84:10); but under the gospel the court of God has been carried out into all the world, and the believer who walks with Christ makes every day a day in His courts. The hour is come, and now is, when the true worshippers worship the Father in spirit and in truth. Are you such a worshipper? Then go and worship Him, in your home, in your closet, and in the assembly, and know that in every one of these the living God has promised to meet with you, and will not disappoint a seeking soul.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who fillest heaven and earth, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain: we bless Thee that Thou hast not tied Thy worship to any mountain or any city, but hast opened the way for Thy people to worship Thee everywhere, in spirit and in truth. We thank Thee for the sanctuary of the home, for the secret place of the closet, and for the solemn assembly of Thy church, and we own that in each of these Thou hast promised to meet with them that seek Thee. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, the superstitious trust we have too often placed in places and forms, as though a building or a posture could make our prayers more acceptable in Thy sight. Forgive us, likewise, the careless contempt of Thy holy ordinances, by which we have neglected the family altar, abandoned the closet, and forsaken the assembling of ourselves together. O Lord, raise up in our houses a daily worship, that our children may learn to fear Thee from their earliest days. Restore unto us the secret hour, in which our souls may meet with Thee alone. And bind us to the public assembly, that with one heart and one mouth we may confess Thy name before the world, and be fed by Thy Word and sacraments. Grant that, being delivered from the bondage of sacred places, we may make every place a sanctuary by walking with Christ in it. Give us the spirit and the truth which Thy Son hath required, that in our homes, in our closets, and in the assembly, we may worship the Father in spirit and in truth, until faith is swallowed up in sight, and we stand before Thy throne in the heavenly Jerusalem, where there is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it, and worship Thee without place and without end, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.