About Sunday Traditions (Part 1)

11/1987

He stayed way past midnight. They broke bread and the guy fell out of the window and died. Paul raised him from the dead. The people that decided that the work the next day was more important than the work of God missed the excitement of a man being raised from the dead. They just missed the whole thing and probably never would have even believed it. Ya know, all these fanatics what do they know?

But it actually happened and it says Paul went on until dawn, until daybreak. They hung on his every word because it was their life. That’s what they had given their life to - a covenant with the living God that they were hearing about.

So it wasn’t an imposition for them anymore than it was an imposition for those people to follow Jesus around for three days and not have any food. They still stayed with Him. And God’s response to that kind of commitment was that He multiplied the loaves and fishes and did a miracle. God’s response to their commitment and hanging in there until daybreak, because their life was to hear the word of the Lord, was that he rose a man from the dead and increased their faith in seeing that.

So again, if we said Jesus or Paul and Silas threw a Frisbee on Tuesday night, we wouldn’t say this is a necessary inference for throwing a Frisbee every Tuesday night. We would say historically that’s what happened. And when Paul gathered on the first day of the week with the disciples to break bread - first of all we’re not sure he broke bread on Sunday, it looks more like he did it on Monday - but the other thing is, it’s a historical record that that’s what they did.

It doesn’t mean and there is no commandment anywhere in there that says, “Here’s what y’all need to do is come together every first day of the week and break bread.” Jesus gave us the frequency of the breaking of bread and He said, “As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of Me.” And He didn’t do it on Sunday, by the way. He did it probably on Friday night. So there’s the institution, and Christ didn’t do it in the way we’d like to make Him do it in. He just did it out of the context of life.

So what I’m really doing more than anything is just throwing up some jump balls as if to say we really don’t have all the answers. It is a little bit silly to create a doctrinal framework that says this is the way you’re supposed to do things. We know they did things and you can point at that and say, “See they did it a certain way.” But you look at it the next time and they didn’t do it that way.

It’s a response to life rather than simply a legal system that we’re trying to emulate. If it’s not flowing out of the heart and out of life, God’s not impressed with it. In Isaiah 1, God said that your prayers, your Sabbaths, and your sacrifices are a stench in my nostrils and I don’t want to hear about it anymore. Now we’d like to think that is crazy because God instituted prayer, sacrificial systems, Sabbaths, and festivals. Those were all things God said to do, but because of the external way they were doing it rather than the internal overflow of the heart - God said they’re a stench in my nostrils.

About Sundays—I would like to say it is a special day in that Jesus rose from the dead on that day and the day of Pentecost was that day. We also know that the disciples probably didn’t work on that day, and it was a really free day to gather. Excellent, go for it! But I know this one thing - that if we esteem one day more highly than another, then Paul would say to us that he thinks he’s wasting his time on us. The reasoning he gives is that these things are a shadow of the reality that is in Christ. The Sabbath was a shadow of Jesus as our Sabbath rest, it says in Hebrew 4. Jesus is our Sabbath rest. Come to me you who are weak, weary and heavy-laden and I will give you Sabbath. I will give you life.

What you did in not working on the Sabbath day - so also in Christ. You do not work in Christ. The work of God is to believe on the One whom He sent. The work of God is to believe on the One whom He sent - is the way Jesus put it. So in Christ, we don’t work. We cease from works as it says in the middle of Hebrews 10, where one sacrifice has been made for all time, no more sacrifice is allowable and necessary. And so that ceasing from work was a shadow of the reality of the cease of work in Jesus Christ, and it’s really an exciting thing.

It doesn’t diminish Sunday; it elevates every other day to an incredible magnitude. And we’ve been saying doctrinally there is so no such thing as Christmas, there’s no such thing as Easter. We’ve been saying that doctrinally for a long time, but now to understand the reality of no special days is really an exciting thing. It makes Tuesday morning with folks that are homemakers or work nights just as exciting as Sunday morning and there’s no “services” anymore. No more “services.” Now our life is a living sacrifice, which is our spiritual worship.

It’s been kind of funny…We’ve almost been making fun of ourselves; there are times when we’ll be walking between the buildings in the apartment complex and someone will say, “Hey, let’s talk about thus and such.” And a couple other people will be walking by in the other direction and we all just sit down in the grass. This happened several times recently.

And we just break the bread of life together. We celebrate it. We pray about it and we sing about it. It’s a dynamic thing that just flows and there are no nooks and crannies. There are no hidden corners. There are no after “service” times. It doesn’t go from hearing another wonderful message in the Word of God and “Guide, guard and direct us until the next appointed hour” and then BANG, we’re talking about the twins. It doesn’t happen that way when your life is hidden in Christ - where you just jump from one thing to another, from one thing to another. Like you’re watching the movie Love Story and then you click it to Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune. That’s an annoyance- it doesn’t feel right.

And that is what happens when we have “worship services”—we end up with a real annoyance of clicking channels back and forth. When it is God’s will that we hide our life in Christ and that our worship is a living sacrifice to Him, and therefore we’re going to celebrate together anytime two or three are gathered in His name. There is going to be a celebration of life over death, of resurrection life, every single time two or three are gathered in His name. It’s going to be a celebration.

Sundays are special primarily because most people don’t work on Sundays, and we have a chance to really invest in each other that we may not have as much ability to do (on other days). But there is no less craving in our heart to be with the people of God and with Jesus who is in the midst of the two or three. There is no less craving in our hearts Tuesday night or Wednesday morning at 6:00 A.M. There is no less craving in our heart any other time, and we’re not looking forward to a Sunday morning worship service to have two songs, a prayer and a sermon because there is a life that we’re investing in.

It’s our all in all. As it’s God’s all in all, it’s also our all in all as it says in Colossians. So “in Him we live and move and have our being,” doesn’t sound like worship services to me. It sounds like the air I breathe that is a celebration of Jesus Christ, the Alpha and the Omega. And I celebrate that any time I can find two more or one more so we can gather in His name and celebrate Him. I enjoy Sundays as much as the next person, but I am done departmentalizing my life. We miss a lot when we do that.

Question: You’ve already answered most of it, I think…

Beyond our control our society is set up to allow Sunday as a day of worship. It appears more convenient to meet then and especially when we get into the area of bringing others to meet with us. About the bringing others to meet with us…The last thing I want to do is to bring somebody, an unbeliever, with me to Sunday morning service. That is the last thing I want to do, because automatically I’ve taught them to compromise and departmentalize their life.

I’d rather bring them Tuesday to hang out in my living room with people that love God and to talk about things that are important. I would even avoid bringing them on Sunday morning, if at all possible, because I don’t want them to get into the mentality of God gets my Sunday mornings, I feel guilty if I’m sick, and I love it if they cancel Wednesday night services.

See, I don’t want to train people to think in those terms. I want that all their heart, all their soul, all their mind and all their strength is God and Jesus is their Sabbath rest. I fear I’ve wasted my time on them if all they do is show up Sunday and Wednesday - because they’ve missed something about the magnitude of what the universe…

If the stones along the road are just rumbling waiting to burst into praise as Jesus said, then what in the world are we doing departmentalizing things into two- and three-hour segments? So I really don’t want to bring people into Sunday morning. If somebody says to me, “I’d really like to join you on some Sunday morning.” I’d say, “Well, if you’d like to, but come on over now.” I try to break down those things because God wants their life not their two-hour Sunday mornings instead of comics. He wants their life. And nothing less than that is acceptable to Him anyway. I want to break that stain-glass bubble that says ‘Sunday morning services.’

Now as far as having more time to be with one another on Sunday, that’s great. Go for it! But if you would rather do this thing Sunday morning for two hours and then it’s your time Tuesday night, Thursday night and Saturday morning, then the problem is really with us more than anything else, because we really haven’t seen that we are not our own, we were brought for a price.