Making the Most of Your Sabbath Day

By Pastor Benjamin Glaser - Posted at Thoughts From Parson Farms:

Mercy and Necessity and the Spiritual Blessing of Getting Ready to Meet With Jesus

Good Morning,

For our last look at the section titled On the Sanctification of the Lord’s Day in the Directory of Public Worship we are going to talk a little bit more about getting ready for worship and also what keeping the Fourth Commandment looks like on the Sabbath outside of the morning and evening worship services. We are all pretty good at being there at 11am, but as we have noted elsewhere the Lord’s Day consists of more time than that hour. A lot of what is at stake here is how the whole of the Sunday is a preparatory mercy to ensure that our worship is well-attended and well-strengthened for the benefit of our soul and body. Christians consistently underrate what worship is for and why God has called us to praise and prayer and to the preaching. The more we comprehend its purpose the more we will gladly take on the whole of the Sabbath as our Savior has intended, for as we have repeated, the Sabbath is for us. Another way of thinking about it in a sort of slogan way is: A Whole Sabbath Makes a Whole Christian.

Here's this morning’s section:

That all the people meet so timely for publick worship, that the whole congregation may be present at the beginning, and with one heart solemnly join together in all parts of the publick worship, and not depart till after the blessing.

That what time is vacant, between or after the solemn meetings of the congregation in publick, be spent in reading, meditation, repetition of sermons; especially by calling their families to an account of what they have heard, and catechising of them, holy conferences, prayer for a blessing upon the publick ordinances, singing of psalms, visiting the sick, relieving the poor, and such like duties of piety, charity, and mercy, accounting the sabbath a delight.

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