I believe that taking a day of rest every week on the Sabbath is something just as applicable for Christians today as it was in the Old Testament! This is on a Saturday, the seventh day of the week, without an assumed change to Sunday, as per the pattern of modern churches and Christianity now (or assumed to be done away with altogether).
There’s a detailed post here explaining why I believe this after a long time of study, which basically identifies three reasons: it was created by God in the beginning to last forever, it was blessed for our benefit, and it was commanded to help us continue experiencing a new life in Christ as believers.
However, the reality of the Sabbath came to me on Saturday, 26 August 2017, when I believed God expressed this to me through circumstances and confirmed it 48 hours later. After living in the UK all my life, where Sunday is taken more seriously as a day of rest, I’d loosely appreciated the principle over the years but in reality it wasn't really taken seriously and more focused on church life then.
On this particular August bank holiday, I was due to attend the annual One Event (now called Awake) – a Christian summer event in Lincoln, something I had done every year since 2004 with the churches I was involved with. I would then usually take the following week off as a holiday and a restful marker between summer and autumn.
However, no one from my Church at the time was going except one family. I couldn’t even find anyone available to go on a day trip with me on either Saturday or Monday, as I’d done in previous years.
Therefore, I planned to go on the Bank Holiday Monday myself and stay in the West Midlands for the weekend to attend Church as usual on Sunday. This meant I could have a relaxed day on Saturday and prepare for the following week’s holiday.
Going back earlier in the month, I’d attended a local Seventh-day Adventist church where I lived at the start of August, which still observes the original Sabbath day and therefore meets on a Saturday, not a Sunday. This visit was actually linked to what they still believe about Eschatology (what will happen leading up to Christ’s Second Coming), as I was studying the 500th year celebration of the Reformation that year and realised that they still took this position.
I hadn’t really taken the rest of that day that seriously really; it was more about checking out a different church experience. But when I was planning this Bank Holiday weekend at the end of the month, I almost thought quite flippantly, hey, why don’t I try out this official Sabbath day’s rest thing, as I have a spare Saturday now anyway.
Therefore, I rested after work on Friday night to take the official evening-to-evening time slot to Saturday night. I didn’t do any work, emails, or shopping, and took time to rest and spend quality time with God in prayer and reading His Word. In the morning, I reattended the local Seventh-day Adventist church I’d visited a few weeks earlier, which included a shared lunch afterwards.
In terms of how this first proper Sabbath day went from Friday evening to Saturday evening, it felt both strange and very good at the same time. I had a sense of peace, and almost an emptiness and reflectiveness of life in general, particularly in the afternoon, when the distractions of daily life were absent, allowing for a leisurely afternoon nap and simply ‘being’.
After a long time of serving in local churches, Saturdays were often a day of relaxation anyway, before a hectic Sunday; therefore, this actually felt like a natural rhythm of rest, from Friday evening at the end of the working week until Saturday evening, to then be fully refreshed.
I then attended my local Church as usual on Sunday and went to Lincoln on the Bank Holiday Monday to attend this One Event. I remember being late and rushing to the Monday morning’s session in the big marquee as the worship time was finishing, and the morning main-stage speaker—Jake Clifford from Tearfund — was about to preach.
I expected a talk on something like Social Action or Evangelism and Mission; however, I was stunned when he began to reveal how God had been making it “abundantly and painfully clear” for the last six months to him personally about a subject now dear to his heart—taking a weekly day’s Sabbath rest (you can see the full recording of it here and below on Youtube and transcript of this post).
There are two things to note here. Firstly, in my forty-odd years of Christianity, I had never heard any speaker or preacher give a whole sermon on a weekly day of rest, and certainly not at a large Christian festival in front of thousands who would be expecting a more topical subject.
And secondly, this was just 48 hours after I had personally taken my first day of Sabbath rest seriously!
This was one of the most God-timed incidents in my life. I remember it being a hot day, one of the hottest bank holiday Mondays in August in the UK, and simply walking around the festival afterwards, almost in a daze, realising how this Sabbath was far more profound than first impressions.
Even Jake's talk was one of genuine appreciation and enjoyment of this special day of rest and trust in the Lord, rather than just trying to make a theoretical and doctrinal point—a day blessed by God and made for man.
Therefore, from that day onward, I’ve always taken a Sabbath rest every Saturday, the seventh day of the week. This hasn’t always been perfect, but it’s been a blessing and something I’m personally convinced about and has increased in importance to me.
As mentioned earlier, you can read a full explanation of the subject here, which I've since studied and concluded. There’s also a great testimony here from Charlie Kirk, the famous young Christian who had a massive influence in the States, but was assassinated in September 2025. He has also had a powerful and authentic experience of the weekly Sabbath rest, and even wrote a book on the subject called 'Stop, in the name of God: Why honoring the Sabbath will transform your life' you can read about here.
