Churches of Christ -- Sermons; Sermons, American -- 20th century
Seventh Day Adventists teach that the Catholic Church changed the
sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and challenge the public to cite the
Scripture which says that the first day of the week is the sabbath.
_There is no such scripture. The first day of the week is not the
sabbath! It is the day on which Christians ought to eat the Lord’s
supper._ It is a day of _worship_, not necessarily a day of _rest_.
Neither _rest_ nor _work_ should be allowed to interfere with a
Christian’s _worship_ on the first day of the week. We have met today to
eat the Lord’s supper by the authority of the Scriptures cited above and
not by the authority of any church. Christians were eating the Lord’s
supper on the first day of the week several hundred years before the
Roman Catholic Church came into existence. I hereby challenge the
Sabbatarians to furnish even one word of Bible authority for eating the
Lord’s supper on Saturday.
VIII
The Will of Christ
Christians are living under the reign of Christ. They are expected to
obey the word that God hath spoken unto us by his Son (Heb. 1:2). This
word is called the will, or testament, of Christ. As in the case of
human wills, it became of force when he died on the cross. “For where a
testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator.
For a testament is of force after men are dead; otherwise it is of no
strength at all while the testator liveth” (Heb. 6:16, 17). The will of
Christ teaches Christians to worship on the first day of the week, but
it does not teach them to rest on the seventh day. The will of Christ
forbids murder, stealing, lying, and such like (Rom. 13:9), but it does
not forbid working on Saturday. “For the law was given by Moses, but
grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). This grace teaches
righteous living (Titus 2:11, 12), but it does not teach that Saturday
should be observed as a sabbath.
When the will of Christ was established by his death on the cross, the
law which God had given to the Jews through Moses at Sinai came to an
end. This the Bible abundantly teaches. “He taketh away the first, that
he may establish the second” (Heb. 10:9). “But we have been discharged
from the law, having died to that wherein we were held; so that we serve
in newness of the Spirit, and not in oldness of the letter” (Rom. 7:6
ARV). In 2 Corinthians 3:6-18 we have a contrast between the law given
at Sinai, including the sabbath commandments (see verse), and the will
of Christ. The former was glorious; the latter much more glorious. The
former was done away; the latter remaineth. “For if that which is done
away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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