4th Comm. question - Sabbath travel

[Ploutos]

My wife and I have immediate family in-state, roughly an hour and a half away (though her family and mine are in different directions). With my M-F job, our main chance to visit with them is on weekends, and we do so maybe once a month as a very rough average.

Both sides are believing and worship at Reformed churches that we are comfortable attending. When we have overnight lodging options, we will go down on Saturday; other times, we'll go down and come back on Sunday. We will generally worship with them, followed by a family meal and social time.

These are the particular implications of this arrangement that I wrestle with regarding such journeys:
1) We are not in attendance at the church wherein our membership resides.
2) We generally do not attend evening worship (one church doesn't have it; the other does, but we have little ones and are usually on the way back at that time).
3) We are driving a substantial distance on the Sabbath. That said, we live 25-30 minutes away from our home church and still spend nearly 2 hours on the road each Sunday.
4) It makes our weekends less restful, especially from a childcare perspective; of course, it's not as if managing young children is magically easy in one's default environment.

How can I apply my desire to be faithful to the 4th Commandment (and, secondarily, to my church membership vows) to this situation?

 

[De Jager]

Good questions. Having a similar situation with my wife's family, here is my take:

I don't see anything wrong with visiting family on the Lord's Day, especially if they are believers and you can minister to one another with profitable conversations.

If at all possible, drive there on Saturday night and sleep over. It will make the morning much more restful, and it shows that you value every hour of the Sabbath.

If their church doesn't have a second service, then do some bible study together at home. Or, visit a different church. On the way home, try to have God centred conversations in the car.

Remember that the Sabbath was made for man...not man for the Sabbath. We don't want to get into a situation where we say that you can drive x miles but not y. That's called legalism. Try in all things to do what edifies both you and your family.

When it comes to the issue of being in your home church, think of it this way: do you have anything against another family in your church occasionally visiting relatives and being away? If not, then don't worry about doing it occasionally yourself. Even ministers take holidays. If you're worried that it's happening too often, then perhaps dial it back to once every 6 weeks or so. Again there is no hard and fast rule. Just don't get bogged down by legalism.

 

[Ploutos]

Thank you, @De Jager. I appreciate your thoughts.

 

[JD]

Our families are much further away (~300mi each in different directions), but of course weekends are still the best time to visit. We make decisions about traveling and the Lord's Day on a case by case basis, but as a guiding principle I've settled on "If someone has to sacrifice it should be us." If we leave Saturday in order to worship with our home congregation, our family is the one sacrificing. If we leave after church and drive all day Sunday, the Lord is deprived of His due. On many occasions we travel late Sunday night after the kids are asleep or early Monday morning. On at least one occasion we've left at like 3am Monday morning and my wife has brought me straight to work.

 

[Jake]

My parents live about 2 hours away and we visit them about once a month. When we are there over a Lord's Day we have a place to worship (an OPC congregation). Our typical pattern is to either take off a day of work and travel up Thursday after work to Saturday evening to be back at our church on Sunday morning or to stay through the whole Lord's Day and worship there, heading back early Monday.

Here are some general ideas I think are relevant in helping me make these decisions:

• Don't be absent unnecessarily from your home church too often. This is not an absolute, and of course the most important is to be worshipping each Lord's Day unless hindered. You have a good blessing of a faithful church in all places.
• Make sure you can focus on the Lord's Day as a day focused on spiritual rest and worship. You can redeem the time driving by listening to sermons, practicing catechism questions, singing, praying, etc. but you will be more distracted doing these driving and traveling than in a home.
• Minimize travel on the Lord's Day. There are not absolutes, but I think there are certain "barriers" naturally introduced. For example, I think buying gas on the Lord's Day is an unneeded act of commerce so I make sure to be gassed up the day before the day begins and that I have enough to go where I need to. Don't make long journeys that would be pushing what you can do without needing to stop at businesses to eat, gas up, get supplies, etc. I think 1.5 hours in one direction is a reasonable drive to not run into this, but it's pushing at the edge of it for some families.
• Prioritize morning and evening worship. Travelling on the Lord's Day can make this difficult. I think morning and evening worship is a biblical pattern that is important to follow, but of course many churches do not have evening worship so this is not always possible.

I don't have as much direct wisdom with the topic of how children are included in this, but I think spending a large part of the day travelling will make it harder to train your children in keeping the Sabbath in a Biblical way, so I would also be cautious in this regard. It feels very different to have 4, 30 minute periods of driving than it does to have 1.5 hours of continuous driving, especially for a child.

 

[Request-Deleted member 11775]

A Sabbath keeping rule of thumb that's been passed down from the godly in Scotland over the years has been that you stay in the same place overnight on Sabbath where you stayed on Saturday night, to avoid any unnecessary change of residence on the Sabbath. One should avoid going somewhere on Saturday night if it is not possible to stay there over Sabbath night as well.

 

[Polanus1561]

A Sabbath keeping rule of thumb that's been passed down from the godly in Scotland over the years has been that you stay in the same place overnight on Sabbath where you stayed on Saturday night, to avoid any unnecessary change of residence on the Sabbath. One should avoid going somewhere on Saturday night if it is not possible to stay there over Sabbath night as well.

What is the issue which this addresses? Fatigue or change of residence?

 

[Ploutos]

My parents live about 2 hours away and we visit them about once a month. When we are there over a Lord's Day we have a place to worship (an OPC congregation). Our typical pattern is to either take off a day of work and travel up Thursday after work to Saturday evening to be back at our church on Sunday morning or to stay through the whole Lord's Day and worship there, heading back early Monday.

Here are some general ideas I think are relevant in helping me make these decisions:

• Don't be absent unnecessarily from your home church too often. This is not an absolute, and of course the most important is to be worshipping each Lord's Day unless hindered. You have a good blessing of a faithful church in all places.
• Make sure you can focus on the Lord's Day as a day focused on spiritual rest and worship. You can redeem the time driving by listening to sermons, practicing catechism questions, singing, praying, etc. but you will be more distracted doing these driving and traveling than in a home.
• Minimize travel on the Lord's Day. There are not absolutes, but I think there are certain "barriers" naturally introduced. For example, I think buying gas on the Lord's Day is an unneeded act of commerce so I make sure to be gassed up the day before the day begins and that I have enough to go where I need to. Don't make long journeys that would be pushing what you can do without needing to stop at businesses to eat, gas up, get supplies, etc. I think 1.5 hours in one direction is a reasonable drive to not run into this, but it's pushing at the edge of it for some families.
• Prioritize morning and evening worship. Travelling on the Lord's Day can make this difficult. I think morning and evening worship is a biblical pattern that is important to follow, but of course many churches do not have evening worship so this is not always possible.

I don't have as much direct wisdom with the topic of how children are included in this, but I think spending a large part of the day travelling will make it harder to train your children in keeping the Sabbath in a Biblical way, so I would also be cautious in this regard. It feels very different to have 4, 30 minute periods of driving than it does to have 1.5 hours of continuous driving, especially for a child.

I appreciate these thoughts. You brought up another challenging topic for me in discussing Sabbath-keeping as a family. I am still struggling to keep the Sabbath well on my own; I'm also a somewhat new parent, still learning how to relate to young children while also trying to find my footing spiritually. As an adult, I don't generally think in terms of "fun" - I tend to think more in terms of discipline, productivity, intellectual engagement, etc. Training my children to keep the Sabbath in a way that's relatable and accessible to small children, when I as an adult am still trying to figure this out - seems like a daunting task!

 

[Ploutos]

So to recap some of the thoughts I've read here and gathered from other recent Sabbath threads; nobody is saying not to visit family, or that weekend visits away from one's home church are intrinsically forbidden. But I do see that where these things happen, the Sabbath must still be held in high regard as befits a Christian who joyfully embraces both the duty and gift which we have from the Lord concerning that day of the week.

Fair enough as a brief synopsis?

 

[De Jager]

I appreciate these thoughts. You brought up another challenging topic for me in discussing Sabbath-keeping as a family. I am still struggling to keep the Sabbath well on my own; I'm also a somewhat new parent, still learning how to relate to young children while also trying to find my footing spiritually. As an adult, I don't generally think in terms of "fun" - I tend to think more in terms of discipline, productivity, intellectual engagement, etc. Training my children to keep the Sabbath in a way that's relatable and accessible to small children, when I as an adult am still trying to figure this out - seems like a daunting task!

Some people essentially make a rule - no fun on the Sabbath. Thus if your little children are running around, laughing and playing at any point, that is forbidden. I don't see it that way. I would expect that little children need to run around, just like they need to eat. The point is, that they are trained toward the goal of seeing communing with God, worshipping Him, and talking about Him as they highest possible joys they could expect on the Lord's Day. So it's not about what you can't do, it's about what you can do. I myself need that training.

 

[Ploutos]

Some people essentially make a rule - no fun on the Sabbath. Thus if your little children are running around, laughing and playing at any point, that is forbidden. I don't see it that way. I would expect that little children need to run around, just like they need to eat. The point is, that they are trained toward the goal of seeing communing with God, worshipping Him, and talking about Him as they highest possible joys they could expect on the Lord's Day. So it's not about what you can't do, it's about what you can do. I myself need that training.

I realize that in asking this I'm veering somewhat from the original post - but - what are some of the things in your "can do" bucket? What are some of the ways you try to communicate the joy of the Sabbath to your children?