Six Days for Us, Only One for God

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.... Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Exodus 20:8-11, NKJV.

At the very beginning of the fourth precept, God said, “Remember,” knowing that men and women, in the multitude of their cares and perplexities, would be tempted to excuse themselves from meeting the full requirements of the law or, in the press of worldly business, would forget its sacred importance. “Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work,” the usual business of life, for worldly profit or pleasure. These words are very explicit; there can be no mistake.

Brother K, how dare you venture to transgress a commandment so solemn and important? Has the Lord made an exception by which you are absolved from the law He has given to the world? Are your transgressions omitted from the book of record? Has He agreed to excuse your disobedience when the nations come before Him for judgment? Do not for a moment deceive yourself with the thought that your sin will not bring its merited punishment. Your transgressions will be visited with the rod, because you have had the light, yet have walked directly contrary to it. “That servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.”

God has given us six days in which to do our own work and carry on the usual business of life; but He claims one day, which He has set apart and sanctified. He gives it to us as a day in which we may rest from labor and devote ourselves to worship and the improvement of our spiritual condition. What a flagrant outrage it is for us to steal the one sanctified day of Jehovah and appropriate it to our own selfish purposes!

It is the grossest presumption for mortal beings to venture upon a compromise with the Almighty in order to secure their own petty, temporal interests. It is as ruthless a violation of the law to occasionally use the Sabbath for secular business as to entirely reject it; for it is making the Lord’s commandments a matter of convenience.— Testimonies for the Church 4:249.