00:00:00 Welcome to episode 757 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Travis Rosser, the author of you Inc. The step-by-step guide for finding the business within you. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling, having the ability to really find your gifts and calling is a key.
00:00:28 And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast by my friend, Scott Mader, You don't go in and say, did it work perfectly? Did the sermon touch me? Was there a good performance? You go in with the spirit of what is God teaching me through this? I come to be filled and I come to be taught,
00:01:03 not by the people that are conducting the service. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.
00:01:39 And today's spiritual foundation episode about investing in yourself. I talk with you about the history of why there's a Sabbath and why it's on Sunday. I also talk about why Sunday worship is about more than just a Sunday thing and how you can make your worship more meaningful all week. So back in the old Testament, there's a scripture in the, in the 10 commandments about keeping the Sabbath Holy about setting it aside.
00:02:08 This idea of setting aside a day at the end of the week, the seventh day of the week, and the Jewish tradition, which was Saturday for worship. And now in the Christian churches, you often see instead as worshiping on Sunday, there's a long history. There's a lot of reasons about why it's on Sunday instead of Saturday, and I'll touch on a few of them,
00:02:31 but I really want to focus a lot about why it really, from some points of view, it doesn't matter in terms of not. We're just going to do whatever we want, but in terms of what I see as the idea behind worship and why it doesn't really make it a Sunday thing or a Saturday thing or an any other thing, it makes it an all day,
00:02:55 every day thing in some ways. So the truth is back in the day, the Sabbath celebration was on Saturday. That's still true during for most Jewish cultures. And it transitioned to Sunday worship for the early church. Some reasons is because the Christian Church wanted to set it as a self aside as different than the Jewish tradition. Sometimes they did it because it was Sunday was the first day of the week.
00:03:24 And that's where traditionally G Jesus Rose from the dead on the first day of the week. If you look at the timing of when things happened in three days later, there's this tradition of setting it aside as the Lord's day, sometime during the week, but not necessarily on Saturday, there were Roman traditions at the time about Sunday being a day of worship in many of the Roman cultures.
00:03:49 And so because so much of the early Christian Church was born in Rome, that became part of the reason. And you can go online and you can find articles about why we should be worshiping on Saturday. We should be worth appreciating on Sunday. What the differences between the two, you know, is the old Testament command of setting the Sabbath aside. Is it explicitly a command of setting aside Saturday as the day that we do it?
00:04:15 And what does this look like for us? But a lot of what I think is interesting is so many folks don't actually end up going to church on Sunday or Saturday or any other day and worship at the end of the day is about more than just going to church on Sunday. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying going to church and worshiping is not important.
00:04:37 There is an importance to plugging into a community of believers. What I'm saying is it's about more than that. If you're just going to church on Sunday, Saturday, or any other day, Wednesday night or whatever, because that's the day that you suppose to do it, then you're not really making worship a priority because worship should be part of something we do all day.
00:05:01 Every day. It becomes part of this central focus of us. The word worship means to ascribe the highest worth to something. So the whole point of worship is that you're saying, God, you're number one in my life. You come before anyone. And any thing else, you get the highest or honor in my life. You get the highest position in my life.
00:05:27 But the truth is, if you think about it, if you don't go to church on Sunday, they Saturday, Wednesday night, whatever it is because something else comes up it's in the way, then are you truly making it the highest priority? You know, there was a company nearby that for years, they used to run a contest. You never missed a day of work.
00:05:50 They would put your name and a hat for a drawing. And they gave away 15 brand new cars at the end of the year. But only if you had perfect attendance, could you get that? What's interesting is 65% of their workers never missed a day of work and yet stop and think about it. Have you had a day where you missed Sunday worship?
00:06:15 Maybe it was because, you know, something else came up that pulls you towards it. And right now in this time of COVID-19, I'm not necessarily talking about worshiping physically in the building, even committing some time to go and watch the worship service and participate with the community of believers in that way. It's about making it a priority. You know, if we gave away a new car to everyone who went to church on Sunday and never missed it,
00:06:42 I think maybe a church attendance would be a little better. But the interesting thing is that means people are valuing that new car more than they're valuing worship. If I gave you $10 million to never worship again, would you take it? And if the answer is yes, then you value that money more than you value worship. But the whole point of worship is to put God before everything else.
00:07:10 When you start looking at it with that frame of reference, it starts changing how you look at worship. Worship should be a priority. It doesn't matter whether it's on Sunday or Saturday or Wednesday. The point is that it should be a priority. It's, it's a day that you're setting aside for rest. It's a day that you're setting aside for God.
00:07:31 It's a day that you're setting aside to say, this is important. This is a priority. You know, I'm part of a, a business networking group. And we've been meeting online since the pandemic started and used to. We used to meet in person and people will tell me, well, you know, because we're meeting online, people are more distracted during the meetings,
00:07:52 but the truth is I used to go to the in-person meetings and see people checking email and text messaging underneath the table all day long. It's not an all online or offline thing. It's a commitment to the meeting. Are you committed to paying attention during the activity? Are you eager for God to open your eyes during worship? Have you put it at a preeminent place?
00:08:18 You need to go with an open heart, a teachable heart. This is why worship is so important. You don't go in and say, did it work perfectly? Did the sermon touch me? Was there a good performance? You go in with the spirit of what is God teaching me through this? I come to be filled and I come to be taught,
00:08:44 not by the people that are conducting the service, but by God in those moments. And what's interesting is when you look at it that way, you begin to recognize why this idea of making work Worship and putting worship into every day of your life can happen because it's not just about going to the community and gathering together. It's also about literally asking God,
00:09:06 what am I supposed to be doing? Putting God in that preeminent position is what worship truly is. And that's not a Sunday thing or a Saturday thing or a Monday or a Tuesday thing. It's a heart thing. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen,
00:09:38 but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, go over to facebook.com/inspired stewardship and like our Facebook page and market that you'd like to get notifications from us so that we can connect with you on Facebook and make sure that we're serving you to the best of our abilities with time and tips there until next time,
00:10:12 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world..