Welcome back to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast. And today's question comes from me. Yes, from me. Pastor John, this is a question I wrestle with. Of course, the biblical pattern for our week is set in creation. Work six days, rest one day. But here in the United States, we live on a five-day workweek with two days of non-work, which is, I think, a rhythm that apparently was invented by Henry Ford to encourage workers to work only 40 hours a week so that they could consume more.

So here's the question that I have. Should Christians work on Saturday, too? How should we reconcile the creation pattern of working six days with our American practice of working five days? Well, let me take this as an occasion to step back and say something about my understanding of the Sabbath, because that's part of what's going on here in that question.

And then I'll tell you what I think about six days of work. Sounds good. I'm not a strict Sabbatarian, which for me means two things. I think the New Testament shifts the Lord's Day from Saturday to Sunday because of the resurrection calls it the Lord's Day in Revelation 110 and says that they were meeting on the first day of the week in Acts 27 and so on.

Number two, I don't take the Old Testament command to keep the Sabbath as binding on the church today with the same strictness that it had in the Old Testament for several reasons. One is the way Jesus dealt with the accusations he received of his disciples breaking the Sabbath, like in Matthew 12, where they're plucking grain.

And instead of saying, "No, they're not really breaking the law," instead of saying that, he goes back to David's eating the showbread, which he says was not lawful, and the priests in the temple. And then he says, "I tell you something greater than the temple is here. If you'd known what it meant when it said, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you wouldn't have condemned the guiltiness.

The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." That seems to me Jesus' way of loosening the strictness of Sabbath-keeping, as long as people are replacing it with allegiance to him and his way, and he becomes their Sabbath. And the other reason that I say he's loosening things up is because of the way Paul deals with it in Romans 14, where he says, "One person esteems one day better than another, and another esteems all day alike.

Let everyone be fully convinced in his own mind." And Galatians 4, where he says, "You observe days and months and seasons and years, I'm afraid I've labored over you in vain." And Colossians 2:16, "Therefore let no one pass judgment on you with regard to a new moon, festival, or Sabbath," and so on.

These are shadows. So it looks to me, my take on this very controversial issue is that the Sabbath restrictions in the Old Testament are loosened, but I do think I'm impressed with the fact that the early church didn't do it away with it entirely, because they met on the first day of the week, they called it the Lord's Day.

It is rooted in six days of creation, as you pointed out. It's not rooted merely in ritualistic practices in Israel, it's rooted in the way God made the world and how he rested on the seventh day. So my view is, with a lot of flexibility, we should keep the Lord's Day for rest and for worship, for spiritual renewal and physical renewal.

What it implies, I think, and here I'm not going to make a law, just like I don't want to make a strict law out of Sabbath-keeping. I'm impressed with the way the Old Testament set up work six, rest one, and specifically Exodus 20, verse 8, "Six days shall you labor." We usually think of Sunday being the command, "Don't work," but really the command is, "Do work," six.

Exodus 34, "Six days shall you work," and on the seventh rest. Deuteronomy 5, 13, "Six days shall you labor and do all your work." So all my ministry, I've assumed I work six days. That's what I just assume. I work six days, I rest one. So I would take a day off, Monday or Thursday, as a pastor, and try to really take it off in a very restful way, since Sunday was a very stressed out and hard day.

Now having said that, that I'm a six-day kind of guy, here are seven qualifications that make that difficult to apply. One, house, car, computers, garden all require work, not just vocation. So to say that you go to work five days a week might mean your Saturday is fixing the car or fixing the door or the faucet or cutting the grass, I mean, just to make life work.

You've got to do lots of work besides what you do in your vocation. Number two, secular vocation may be one form of life ministry, and neighborhood and school or civic or church ministry might be another. So a person might only work four or five days on his so-called vocation and then have another day of work in his ministry, in his civic life.

Third, the ambiguity of what a workday is figures in here. Like if you work 10 or 12 hour days, it raises the question whether you have already worked six days in five days. Number four, for some of us, it's not easy to distinguish work and leisure. If I'm sitting on the couch reading a biography, am I working?

Well, it might depend whether I'm taking notes or what does it really depend on? I mean, I love my work and so it's hard for me to distinguish and that has to be taken into account. Fifth, there is real possibility that a person may work six days because he is in bondage to work.

He's into ego, he's into finance, he's into escaping home, and that would make working six days sin. Or it may be that a person wants to work as little as possible because he's lazy, hates his work, and so that would make him working five days a sin. Sixth, in Christ, work is sanctified so that aspects of the curse that came on work have been removed and it can be joyfully and satisfying as we do it in Christ's name, whether it's five or six.

It's not like there's big drudgery in six. There doesn't have to be at all. And lastly, the last qualification of my advocacy for six is in the new age that we've already entered into in measure, Christ has become our eternal rest. There is a soul rest, a Sabbath rest that we found in Christ, which means pervading all of our work.

Five, six, four days we are restful in Christ. So when all is said and done, Tony, here's my... The question is, have we found the rhythm of work and refreshment that points to the greatness of the risen Christ and that leads to strong faith and sustained joyful energy for fulfilling all the various callings, plural, that a person has to the glory of God?

Brilliant. Thank you, Pastor John. Those are very helpful categories in thinking through our work weeks. Well, tomorrow a listener wants you, Pastor John, to explain the watershed differences between Calvinism and Arminianism to a teenager. That should be very interesting. Well, for everything you need to know about this podcast and to send Pastor John your question, your carefully crafted, concise, and specific question, go to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

I'm your host, Tony Ranke. We'll see you tomorrow.