Sunday--(program 2005)

Since recording the "Simple Church Minute" programs, I have realized that it is easier to repost the transcripts on the day of broadcast, so what is below is the same as the date stated at the end of the program.

===============================================================

2005--Sunday

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute.  Today, I wish to speak about the way we who are believers treat Sunday, as opposed to what the Bible teaches us about Sunday.  In Genesis 1, we are told that God rested on the seventh day.  We know that days, months, and years have an astronomical basis; weeks do not.  When God established the Old Covenant Law, there was a Sabbath day.  While it is now celebrated among the modern Jews from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, back then, the festival days were not counted among the days of the week, so relative to our calendar, the Sabbath floated through the week. 

            When Jesus came to earth and ministered to the people and taught his disciples, there was a continual clash between Him and the religious leaders over various aspects of the Law, including how to honor the Sabbath, to keep it holy.  The Roman Empire, which controlled Israel at the time, had the worship of the sun god, Mithras, on Sunday.  That’s where the word Sunday comes from.  When Jesus died on the cross, He fulfilled the Old Covenant and the Law.  Now, God knew that, and the few hundred people who came to believe on Jesus while he was on earth knew that, but the Jewish religious leaders didn’t know it, and Jesus’ death wasn’t even a blip on the news to the Romans, just one more person put to death on a disorderly edge of the Empire.

            When the Holy Spirit was sent on the 120 persons in the upper room in Jerusalem that we read about in Acts chapter 2, the God’s New and better Covenant began.  By the power of the Holy Spirit the people came from that room and spoke about Jesus in the street.  The church grew rapidly, and we are told that they met daily.  They didn’t all meet together daily*.  It tells us they met from house to house.  They may have met a little by the side of the Jewish temple, but that went away after a while.  Almost all of them were poor.  Some foreigners who heard about Jesus and believed dropped what they were doing and attached themselves to the believers.  Because they were poor, most of the believers assuredly worked long and odd hours.   They had no building, no ritual, but were connected by having seen Jesus in their spirits, and from that, desiring to live to honor Him.  Because of Roman Mithras worship, Sunday probably became a convenient time to meet, especially outside of Israel where Jews and Jewish worship was a minority belief. 

The Jews were unhappy under Roman rule, and between attacks in 70 and 130 A.D., the people of Jerusalem were dispersed, which would have made the Sabbath as a holy day of even less effect on surrounding society.

            After the legalization of Christianity in the 4^th century, many pagan ways got forced into the now legal, no longer underground church, and Sunday became entrenched as the day of worship.  The Reformation came, formal, ritualized worship changed, but the use of Sunday as the day of the services was not affected. 

            This is not the case everywhere.  I know of a man who is a leader of a small group of believers in a Buddhist dominated country.  The tradition in that land is that most of the people meet at sunup on Thursday mornings to give a ceremonial bowl of rice to the Buddhist monks.  In that area, it is only reasonable for the small group of Christians to meet at that same time, as the social tradition of the area will make it easiest for everyone to meet then.  This will be the case wherever a religion or dominant social organization has ruled that a certain regular time is an off time, whether for religious ritual, political indoctrination, or whatever.

            Why is this important?  Because, even though scripture doesn’t command a special off day, tradition can make it feel that way.  A couple of years ago, I had a job where I worked all day Saturday and Sunday, and I mean all day as in 16 hours on Saturday followed by 10 on Sunday,  what little I had to do the rest of the week was easily scheduled to my convenience.  It was impossible to “plug in” to what we in this culture see as a traditional church, as almost all are set up to revolve around a Sunday morning meeting.  In 1 Corinthians 11 verses 20 to 22, when Paul is warning persons in this city about their behavior about food during a shared meal among the believers, the underlying situation is that some believers got to the assembly at different times due to their work.  Is it because most of the believers there were poor and some were slaves that this church was expected by Paul to be flexible to lives of the various persons among the saved, but today, because churches are big business, with real estate, well paid officials, and neighborhood marketing plans, that they don’t have to be flexible to real needs in their midst?  Jesus told us that the poor we would always have with us, but never commanded buildings, salaries, or marketing plans.

            Every day is the Lord’s Day.  Church is where one gets spiritually fed, but that doesn’t have to be, and oftentimes isn’t, an intellectual thing, when the Holy Spirit is directing us.  He has commanded us to build up each other in faith, and serve those around us.  Almost all of what, in this society, looks like Christian ritual really doesn’t have a basis upon what Jesus taught the disciples, who taught the early believers. 

 I can be reached at simplechurchminute@yahoo.com or 757-735-3639.  To see what I just said written down, where you can read it at your own pace, visit my blog tevyebird.blogspot.com, where this is the entry for September 16, 2011.  For more information about simple church, visit www.hrscn.org.

*I mean, as in, all of the now thousands of believers in Jerusalem

2021--on work

    

            This is another expansion of one of the two minute (speaking time) commentaries I posted in December, 2010 into a five minute (speaking time) format.  This is an expansion of #21—supporting Christian workers.

2021—on work

            My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute.  When God sent the Holy Spirit upon the people in the upper room in Acts chapter 2, they were a group of people desiring to be obedient to Jesus, whose lives had changed in a way that, although obvious to anyone who knew them, was not easily able to be described, and was not even a blip on the overall society’s radar.  There was no organization, no money, no one of any renown; even Jesus’ own death was notable to unbelievers only long after it happened.  We see in Acts 2 that when the Holy Spirit came upon them, they went out into the streets, spoke, and many that day and in the days following sensed the spirit of God in the words and the actions of the believers, repented of their sins, and attached themselves to this growing group of people.  There was no human organization, no human plan.  As the weeks and years passed, the apostles taught the new believers what Jesus taught them. The church cared about those around them, both those who believed and their neighbors who did not. Some of those who were not believers came to faith in Jesus, and even those who didn’t respected how they cared for others unlike anything they had seen.

            Apostle was not just a term for the 11 who had followed Jesus and taught the early believers.  It came to be a term for a believer gifted to go and communicate the message of Jesus to others in other geographical areas, direct persons to become followers, and teach these early groups of new believers how to be the church.  People were part of the church as groups.  We see the New Testament church spent money on only two things—helping the poor, both within and outside the church, and to help persons called apostles go to other areas to spread the message of Jesus.  The word “apostle” then meant virtually the same as the modern English word “missionary” does today.  Even then, the apostle we are told the most about in the Bible is Paul.  Being a former Pharisee, he received training in a trade, so that when he went on his travels, he didn’t have to depend on financial help from the church in Antioch, just north of Jerusalem, which he was part of between the time of his coming to faith in Jesus and years later when he began to travel to non-Jewish areas of the world.  A couple who we are told also moved to help spread the message of Jesus, Priscilla and Aquila, also had the same skill as Paul.  There was no place in the early church for a trained, salaried religious professional, unlike all the other beliefs in the society around them.  We see a church meeting at the home of Lydia, who sold fabrics to the royal class.  As a result of coming to faith in Jesus, some who were formerly illiterate desired to learn to read so that they could read scripture, which gave them a skill useful to the Roman government.  In 250 AD, when Diocletian’s last general persecution happened, so many believers held government positions and fled for the hills, the government could not function. Diocletian had to relent, and that was one of the events that led to the eventual legalization of faith in Jesus in the Roman Empire.

            Today, one of our society’s problems is that in too many businesses and other organizations, the people they want to hire and promote are neither the best trained nor the best workers, but those most easily corrupted.  It is a natural, but difficult part of a believer’s living for Jesus to desire to do work that is honest and ethical by God’s standards.  How do we give out best to honor Jesus in work? 

1. Work as unto God, not as unto man.
2. Get a skill.  One in six in our society with a college degree is not using it in his or her job, so our world’s idea of counseling is sending a lot of people down dead ends.  In every culture, we, the church, are directed to be salt and light.
3. Many godly people chase employment in the organizational church, but that wasn’t God’s plan.  I know what I am saying about leadership and every member ministry can be felt to be threatening to persons in the status quo system, but it has no basis in scripture. It is only as a copy of the religions of the world, even when a position is held by a person seeking to honor Jesus.
4. Each of us needs to desire to work for an ethical employer.  The believers in the early church who were slaves had no choice, and there may be times today where, for a time, we may have no choice, as our society is overrun with employers whose only honest jobs are the bottom line ones, but we should favor honest work with a passion.
5. We have a responsibility to follow the teaching of the apostles, that helping the poor is important.  A problem today is that there are organizations created to help the poor, but whom use the money to support the organization and the people employed by the organization first.
6. We have a responsibility to support our brothers and sisters who desire to go where the message of Jesus’ love for mankind still hasn’t been heard, even though those places, in this day, are the most dangerous places to go.

I can be reached at simplechurchminute@yahoo.com or by phone at 757-735-3639.  If you would like to re-examine what I just said at your own pace, a transcript of what I just said is posted on my blog, tevyebird.blogspot.com, on the entry dated August 27, 2011.  You can find out more about non-corporation structure of people desiring to be the church at www.hrscn.org. 

As with many of these posts, various information in this was obtained from George Barna and Frank Viola’s Pagan Christianity, which has, in turn, copious historical footnotes.  Some of what I have said here about employment in this society comes from my life, none of which has been spent on the payroll of any church organization, for which I feel grateful for the Holy Spirit’s guidance, even though I have many friends who have had the opposite experience.

An excellent work on the role of work in the Christian life is R. Paul Stevens’ The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Carlisle, UK: Pasternoster, 1999, and printed in North America jointly by Eerdmans and Regent College).