“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”

(Exodus 20:8)

One of the supreme services of religion is to train people in the discipline of time. As early as the seventh century, according to the Principles of Church Union, the calendar of the church year was fairly well set with Christmas and Easter, Advent and Lent designated. “In all this [making of the calendar] what was most at stake was the discipline of time, an ordered pattern of the year which helped keep the church mindful of what the faith of Christians cost and how it happened, and of the church’s need to design a pattern of time which would reflect the wholeness of God’s relationship to us,” the Principles of Church Union states.

Historically, the Church’s fundamental exercise in schooling people in the discipline of time has been the keeping of one day in the week for worship. For the Hebrew people it was Sabbath observance, saving the seventh day for rest and worship, enshrined in the Fourth Commandment, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” For the Christian it became the first day of the week, Sunday, saved for God and soul because this was the weekly anniversary of God’s mighty act in raising his son from the dead.

I remember those stirring words of James Stewart of Scotland in his sermon “God’s Glory in the Morning” from The Strong Name: “When the Romans built their great walls across the north of England, they placed at intervals of a mile apart, towers rising above the ordinary level of the wall; and there the sentinels were set to stand and watch. And when God built the battlements of our human life He placed at every seventh day a tower, a day thrust up above life’s common levels, for the safeguarding of our souls.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of present-day American life is the loss of Christian conviction about the crucial importance of the discipline of time. Modern men and women have lost all sense of urgency about nearly every discipline, especially the discipline of time. Central to this is the slipping away of the staunch observance of Sunday as a day set apart.

Church attendance is sharply declining in all denominations all over America. A church member said to me: “We Christians don’t even attach the importance to attendance at worship that Rotarians do to their weekly meetings. If they miss they are under obligation to make up their attendance. We miss worship and think nothing of it.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by a Time magazine reporter at his home in Cavendish, Vermont. The famous Russian author, who spent many years in Soviet prisons and came at last to the United States in 1976 after being forcibly exiled from his native land on charges of treason, was far from uncritical of what he found in our American way of life. He discerned:

a loss of the serious moral basis of society … a sweeping away of duties and an expansion of rights. But we have two lungs. You can’t breathe with just one lung and not with the other. We must avail ourselves of rights and duties in equal measure. And if this is not established by the law … then we have to control ourselves. When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behavior. Everyone understood what he could do and what he could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, at the expense of duty.

What’s happening in America today is not any new, unusual departure. What is going on has been going on for a long time: the godless being ungodly, the faithful worshiping God and giving themselves to humanitarian service. What is distinctive about our time is that we have come to one of those continental divides in history when the descent is more rapid and precipitate, when the drift to godlessness is more general, when multitudes of people are being sucked into the maw of hell’s destruction, when the world’s accommodation to compromise spreads, not like ink on a blotter, but like a grassfire whipped by a fierce wind, when the rank and file of church members are following the god-despisers to perform all sorts of iniquities.

And the place for concerned Christians to peg this destructive drift, to break away from this collision course of contemporary culture, is at the point of keeping one day in the week for God and the soul, for as always, this is the fundamental point of beginning in the schooling of people in the discipline of time. People must be trained to accept the four fundamental principles of time: first, the origin of time; second, the divisions of time; third, the purpose of time; and fourth, the end of time.

First, then, see what saving Sunday for God does toward making people mindful of the origin of time. The account of the Fourth Commandment in the book of Exodus sets the origin of the observance of the Sabbath in the primeval event of creation. One way of saying that God made man is to say: It is God, the Creator, who gives man time — all the time he has — one day at a time.

People need to be reminded of this. If in the midst of time people never pause to remember their Creator in the days of their youth, they will soon cease to be aware of the divine origin of all their time, that all their days are reeled out to them by Another. To refuse to do this or to grow lax in maintaining this fundamental discipline of time is to fail to acknowledge God’s sovereignty over all of man’s time.

So we must be disciplined to pause one day in seven and say, “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

A second function of the strict observance of Sunday worship in the discipline of time is that it helps people accept the varying stages of time. All time is not the same. The unfolding mystery of life is in clearly definable ages or stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Only a disciplined use of time marks the march of the Sundays, focuses upon the characteristics of each age, cultivates the fruits of each age, and guards against the follies peculiar to that time of life.

The great American heresy of attempting to live in a state of perpetual youth, the foolish refusal to accept the states of time, leaves one living in the pitiful illusion that time may be made to stand still and one may live out his days forever pegged at any given age — thirty, thirty-five, forty. This is so often the foolish fiction of one who has cut himself off from the weekly discipline of time.

In the third place, see what the keeping of one day holy unto God will do for clarifying our understanding of the purpose of all time, in all its stages.

As the Exodus account of the Fourth Commandment sets the origin of the observance of a day of rest and worship in the creation, so the Deuteronomy account links it with the historic event of Israel’s deliverance from her Egyptian bondage. The people of God are to remember to keep one day sacrosanct for rest and worship, not only for themselves and their God, but also for the sake of all people, especially those who are their servants, remembering that their God delivered them from the inhumane and unjust treatment of unscrupulous tyrants.

So the revelation of the divine purpose in the giving of time to man is that man may use all of his life, seven days a week of it, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Did you see the cartoon of the two barflies leaning over their beers with the caption, “I’ve found my niche in life — third stool from the end”? Such is the nature of man’s use of time, that if he spends enough of his days anywhere — child of God though he is, fashioned in the image of God — that becomes his niche in life. Dean William Ralph Inge of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral affirmed, “Our souls are dyed in the color of our leisure thoughts.”

That Scottish saint Samuel Rutherford, out of the rock-ribbed discipline of his pious Presbyterian heritage, could cry: “What do we have our time and our life for, but to pour them out unto the Lord? What is a candle for but to be burnt?”

It is only out of a disciplined use of time devoted to God’s glory in the service of others after the example of Christ that people can learn to use time for its supreme purpose — to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

In Thornton Wilder’s play The Angel That Troubled the Waters, a scene is laid at the pool of Siloam, where at a certain hour of the day, the gospel story tells us, an angel ruffles the surface of the water and whoever at that moment is lowered into the pool is healed of his infirmity. In the throng of sufferers gathered expectantly around the pool one day, a physician is discovered. He suffers from a “heart in pain,” a heavy feeling of sinfulness, and like the others, he is seeking a miraculous restoration of wholeness and health. But as he pushes forward he hears the angel of healing speak to him.

“Draw back, physician…. Healing is not for you…. Without your wound where would your power be?” the angel asks in Wilder’s play. “It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve. Draw back.”

And so the physician learns the truth of what the Epistle to the Hebrews says of the Great Physician, “In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

The supreme purposes of time are understood and grasped only by those so disciplined in the use of time that they have learned to accept what God has done to us in the midst of time, even our crippling and our suffering, as part of equipping us for his service to others in the world.

But the ultimate service the Christian discipline of time renders God’s man or his woman is girding one up for the ultimate adventure of this life — the end of earthly time.

As the faithful Christian keeps every Sunday for a day to praise his God, he is reminded of the mighty deed of his Heavenly Father in raising his son from the dead on the first day of the week and of that son’s promise to his faithful disciples that they, through the amazing grace of God, would also be raised, for death could not hold the victory over them.

One day as I made my way up to a hospital room to see an elderly parishioner, I was wondering how I would find her. Her medical diagnosis was arteriosclerosis of the brain. She had been ill a long time, and I was afraid she would be so far gone as not to be able to converse.

On entering the room I saw how frail and thin she was, like a piece of wrinkled parchment on the bed. But her conversation was bright, crisp, and to the point. She talked of her concern for her husband, who was also ill in the same hospital. She asked me to go see him and to tell him that she sent her love and had enjoyed a good dinner. She talked of the visit of the youth group from the church to their home some weeks before to sing Christmas carols, recalling her conversation with some of the children, calling them by name, and linking them with other generations of their families she had known and respected in the congregation.

On leaving I asked if we might have prayer together. When I had finished my prayer, she began immediately to pray and said:

O God, grant that I may

“So live, that when [my] summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To the mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

[I] go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach [my] grave

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”

Whence came these great words? What was the source of such calm courage in darkness and distress? The words, of course, came from William Cullen Bryant, but they were hers now only because an early discipline of the mind in memorization had made them hers. And the courage and the confidence behind the words and laying hold of them then was not a chance occurrence, but the result of the discipline of the years.

All things come from the Eternal God himself, but he has so ordered our lives in time that even he will not furnish his children such sinews of the spirit, such armor of the soul, without discipline of mind and body and spirit in the words of the faith and the chaste emotions of the faith and the noble deeds of the faith week by week, Sunday by Sunday.