Keeping The Sabbath Holy

Keeping the Sabbath Holy

Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the LORD our maker.

Psalm 95:6

A friend of ours told us a funny story about two guys who were fishing fanatics. On a recent Sunday morning they arose at 4 a.m. and drove more than a hundred miles into the mountains, expecting to catch trout in their favorite secluded stream. They kept its location secret for years. After they’d hiked two miles in from the road, they saw that rains farther upstream had produced silt that muddied the waters and made fishing impractical. Their enthusiasm was dampened, and they aborted the expedition. In their disgust one said to the other, “You might as well have stayed home and gone to church.”

His companion retorted with a straight face, “Oh, I can’t go to church anyhow; my wife is sick.”

The church where we worship is a place of support and spiritual refueling. Singing hymns, learning from Scripture, worshipping God, and meeting with friends who share our spiritual quest is comforting and inspiring. Worshipping together buoys our relationship and makes the week ahead more meaningful.

How we choose to incorporate the church into our marriage is critically important to our relationship. Paul recognized the idea of the church as being God’s family when he said we are “members of God’s family” (Ephesians 2:19). When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he did not say, “My Father”; he said, “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9). We cannot live the Christian life in isolation. Even a couple needs a community of worship.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

—C. S. Lewis