Discipleship

Details:

Our Lord’s Day afternoon gatherings are a church-wide opportunity for our adults, teens, and children to connect and grow as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Our Current Study For Adults:

Each for the Other

By Bryan Chapell

Led by Our Teaching Pastor Rev. Tom Brown

Our Current Study For CovenantYouth:

Communicant’s Class

Led by Our Youth & Family Pastor Rev. Mack Strawbridge
(Serving Middle & High School Students )

Our Current Study For

Covenant Elementary:

Kids’ Quest Catechism Club

Led by Kelly Shay & Our Team of Volunteers
(Serving 1st through 5th Grade)

Our Current Study For

Covenant Kids:

My ABC Bible Verses

(Serving Kindergarten and under)

Important Note:
*Lord’s Day Disicpleship is presently a seasonal ministry which meets weekly during the Winter, Spring, and Fall.
Be sure to check out our Events page to confirm our current meeting schedule. During off-season times we encourage our members to gather with one another to fellowship in each other’s homes during Lord’s Day afternoons/evenings.

Why Gather Twice On Sunday?

Below is an article written by our Pastor providing a little more explanation on the important place of the Sabbath/Lord’s Day in the life of God’s people.

There are no shortage of people who wonder, “Why gather twice on Sunday? Is it really necessary? It seems like it is just too much.” Those are important questions that deserve a helpful answer.

At Covenant Grace, we desire to trust the wisdom of our Father in heaven by striving to “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” (Ex. 20:8). While this practice has been widely neglected in our modern culture, we believe that all ten of God’s holy commandments remain not only wise, but also needful and beneficial to our souls as his beloved children. One whole day in seven is to be set aside unto God. But which day is it?

The Christian Sabbath is the Lord’s Day

In the days of the Old Covenant, the Sabbath fell on Saturday—the final day of the week. By God’s design, believers spent their weeks symbolically looking forward to the rest that was to come—a repeating pattern which anticipated the promise of Christ’s future ministry. However, in the age of the New Covenant, the Christian Sabbath now occurs on Sunday—the first day of the week which the Bible refers to as “the Lord’s Day” (Rev 1:10).

Lots of people wonder why there was a change in the day. I would like to share two important reasons why Christians keep the fourth commandment on Sunday rather than Saturday.

First, Sunday is the day on which our Savior Jesus Christ was resurrected in victory. Since the time of the Apostles, Christians have gathered in worship on Sunday because each and every week is a time that we remember not only that “it is finished,” but also that “he is risen!” (Jn 19:30; Matt 28:6). Every Sunday—the Lord’s Day—the Holy Spirit is reminding us that Jesus’ victory over sin, Satan, and death was not for himself alone, but for all who are united to him by faith, (Isa 53:5-6). Just as Jesus lived for our righteousness and died for our wretchedness, so he rose again that we too might have life in his life, (Jn 14:19; Col 3:4).

The apostle Paul declared the vital importance of the Sunday resurrection by saying that, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain,” (I Cor 15:14). Thankfully, the tomb is empty and our Savior’s resurrection is sure. But notice something with me; isn’t the opposite also true? If Christ has been raised then our faith is priceless, and our preaching is the most important message the world could ever hear! And there is something very important about this truth that is often missed. In the infinite wisdom of our Father in heaven, not only do we “preach” the gospel of Christ’s resurrection victory to others with the words of our lips, but we also proclaim the gospel of Christ’s resurrection victory to others by the weekly rhythms of our lives. The very weekly structure of the people of God now declares to the the world each and every Lord’s Day that “this Jesus” is the one whom “God raised from the dead…and there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved,” (Acts 4:10-12).

Secondly, there are numerous symbolic reasons why God’s people now keep the fourth commandment on Sunday rather than Saturday. Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that the transition from the Saturday Sabbath to the Sunday Lord’s Day was prophetically anticipated in the Old Testament, (i.e. the spiritual significance of all the 8th day [or first day of a new week/creation] ceremonies in the Old Covenant such as circumcision, ordination of priests, healing from leprosy, etc. All of these rites pointed forward to what Jesus has now accomplished through his earthly ministry). For the same reasons that the covenant sign of Circumcision has given way to the covenant sign of Baptism, and the covenant feast of Passover has given way to the covenant feast of the Lord’s Supper, so the holy commandment to “remember the (Saturday) Sabbath” is now rightly fulfilled by obediently observing the (Sunday) “Lord’s Day.” Those Old Covenant signs which formerly anticipated Christ’s future work have given way to those New Covenant signs which beautifully declare that his work is now complete, (Acts 20:7).

By God’s design in the days of the Old Covenant, Saturday (or the last day of the week) proclaimed, “Salvation is coming!” By God’s design in the days of the New Covenant, Sunday (or the first day of the week) now proclaims, “Salvation has come!” The Sabbath no longer falls on the last day of the week because, unlike our believing ancestors, we are no longer waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promised salvation to come. Instead, the Christian Sabbath is rightly honored on the first day of the week—Sunday, or the Lord’s Day. This is because in the age of the New Covenant we live on the other side of Christ’s saving work. We are not waiting for salvation to be accomplished. On the contrary, at the very beginning of every new week, we now set aside a whole day to remember that our salvation has been accomplished. New Covenant believers honor the Lord of the Sabbath by beginning each new week resting in the work of salvation which has already been finished and joyfully worshiping the One who has finished it in our place.

Struggling Toward Sabbath Faithfulness Together

So, as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to set aside the whole day every Sunday as a day of worship and rest unto God. Together with all the saints, we are called to rest from our worldly works and endeavors, and to set our hearts wholly upon the Lord. For the heart that loves God, that ideal sounds incredible! But there is just this one little problem: we generally stink at it.

Anyone who has sought to be faithful to God’s call to honor him on the Lord’s Day has no doubt found that even if the spirit is willing, the flesh is indeed quite weak. It can be very hard to know how to learn to set aside a whole day unto the Lord. Do you know what? That is okay to acknowledge. You are not the only one who has had that experience. For almost all of us, faithful Sabbath observance is simply not something we have ever had modeled for us, nor something which we ourselves have genuinely or consistently sought to implement. The plain and simple truth is that the vast majority of God’s people need a lot of help in learning how to both practice and enjoy the precious gift of the weekly Lord’s Day.

While there is far more good counsel that could be shared about learning to faithfully keep the Sabbath, let me simply start here: As a local church, we have found that gathering together a second time for afternoon discipleship (or perhaps someday for evening worship) is both a joyful and fruitful way for us to honor our Redeemer each and every Lord’s Day. We find that when we are gathered together again in study, prayer, and fellowship, we do a much better job of setting our hearts upon the Lord throughout the whole of the day than any of us could when we are simply left to ourselves. In our experience, we have seen that the exhortation given in Hebrews 10:24-25 is as deeply important for our lives as it was for those Christians to whom it was first written:

“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

So Why Do We Gather a Second Time On Sunday?

Simply put, we do so to honor God, to trust the wisdom of his holy commandments, to proclaim the truth of his resurrection to the world, to enjoy his promised presence among his gathered people, to grow in our faith as we dig into his Word, to draw near to him through prayer, and to deepen our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ. If you tried to wrap all those things into one, I guess you could say that we gather a second time on Sunday afternoons in order to continue to say “I love you and I trust you!” to the One who has first loved us, (I Jn 4:10).

We hope you will join us!