Reasons to Love the Lord's Day--M'Cheyne, mostly.

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"I commend for your consideration the following reasons for loving the Lord’s day:

Because it is the Lord’s Day.—“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice, and be glad in it.” (Ps. 118:24). “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Rev. 1:10).

It is His, by example. It is the day on which He rested from His amazing work of redemption. Just as God rested on the seventh day from all His works, wherefore God blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it; so the Lord Jesus rested on this day from all His agony, and pain, and humiliation. “There remaineth therefore the keeping of a Sabbath to the people of God” (Heb. 4:9). The Lord’s Day is His property, just as the Lord’s Supper is the supper belonging to Christ. It is His table. He is the bread. He is the wine. He invites the guests. He fills them with joy and with the Holy Ghost. So it is with the Lord’s Day. All days of the year are Christ’s, but He hath out one in seven as peculiarly His own. “He hath made it” or marked it out. Just as He planted a garden in Eden, so He hath fenced about this day and made it His own.

This is the reason we love it, and would keep it entire. We love everything that is Christ’s. We love His Word. It is better to us than thousands of gold and silver. “O how we love His law! it is our study all the day.” We love His house. It is our trysting–place with Christ, where He meets with us and communes with us from off the mercy seat. We love His table. It is His banqueting–house, where His banner over us is love—where He looses our bonds, and anoints our eyes, and makes our hearts burn with holy joy. We love His people, because they are His, members of His body, washed in His blood, filled with His Spirit, our brothers and sisters for eternity. And we love the Lord’s Day, because it is His. Every hour of it is dear to us—sweeter than honey, more precious than gold. It is the day He rose for our justification. It reminds us of His love, and His finished work, and His rest.

And we may boldly say that that man does not love the Lord Jesus Christ who does not love the entire Lord’s Day."

- Robert Murray M'Cheyne, "I Love the Lord’s Day" HT https://www.facebook.com/andrewjwebb/posts/10159253609030038

Thy commandment is exceeding broad. Psalm 119:96.

We don't define the fourth commandment's requirements of us by our inability to keep it any more than the other nine. "Lastly, though no man can perfectly keep this commandment, either in thought, word or deed, no more than he can any other; yet this is that perfection that we must aim at; and wherein, if we fail, we must repent us, and crave pardon for Christ’s sake. For as the whole law is our schoolmaster to lead us to Christ (Gal. 3:24); so is every particular commandment, and namely this of the Sabbath. And therefore we are not to measure the length and breadth of it by the over-scant rule of our own inability, but by the perfect reed of the Temple (Ezek. 40:3); that is, by the absolute righteousness of God himself, which only can give us the full measure of it." [Nicholas Bownd, Sabbathum Veteris Et Novi Testamenti: or, The True Doctrine of the Sabbath (1606; Naphtali Press and Reformation Heritage Books, 2015), 8-9.
 
Thank you.

As one who struggles to love the Lord's Day, may I ask for some practical help to foster this love? Particularly, amidst the trials of having a young family.
 
Think of the Lord's day as the conduit, the great means of the means of grace as the puritans thought of it—the market day of the soul to take advantage of word, sacrament, prayer, etc., by setting aside to the best we are able the distractions of the week. Others with young families can chime in with practical advice, but the focus has to begin with thankfulness, rejoicing as the psalm cited, for being able to take a day to draw near to the Lord in this way.
 
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