The Sabbath Day & the Feasts of the LORD
As a Christian, I went to church on Sundays and didn’t typically work on that day. And then at Christmas, I celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ, and at Easter I recognized his resurrection.
While I had been exposed to some Jewish customs in my earlier days, such as people going to synagogue on the Sabbath Day and hearing of annual holidays such as Rosh Hashana and Passover, I never paid much attention to them — because I was a Christian.
But then, something stirred within me around the year 2008 when I began to pay more attention to the Ten Commandments.
Weekly Worship
I had always heard that Sunday was “the Lord’s Day”. That was because, according to the New Testament, Jesus rose from the grave on “the first day of the week”, which is understood to be Sunday. (See Matthew 28:1-6, Mark 16:1-6, Luke 24:1-7, John 20:1)
But then, when my children were very young, and I started teaching them the Ten Commandments, posting them in every room of the house, I started noticing the fourth commandment regarding the Sabbath Day.
God identified the seventh day as the Sabbath day and commanded that it be remembered and kept holy, and no work was to be done on that day. However, I was never taught as a Christian to adhere to that commandment, and I began to wonder why.
When I asked different people at church, I was told the Law was put away, Jesus is our Sabbath rest, the seventh day Sabbath is for the Jews and the Christian day of rest is on Sunday, the Lord’s Day.
But that made no sense to me because:
- That commandment was etched in stone by the finger of God,
- It’s a command about not physically working on a particular day of the week,
- Jesus himself “kept” the Sabbath day,
- Paul & other believers in Christ “kept” the Sabbath day after Jesus was gone, and
- I couldn’t find anything in the New Testament that said that commandment changed.
So, I began to set Saturdays aside to dig deeper into my Bible and sought out everything it had to say about the Sabbath Day. And eventually I was led to Leviticus 23, and I discovered the Feasts of the LORD.
Annual Worship
Leviticus 23 mentioned things that I was never aware of.
Of course, having spent most of my Christian life focusing on the New Testament, I was somewhat familiar with Passover and the day of Pentecost.
However, I didn’t know anything about the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, the Memorial of Blowing Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, or the Feast of Tabernacles. So, I studied those things out for myself (in the Bible).
In the course of that study, my husband and I chose to set certain days of the year aside to gather with others we found along the way who were also in a similar situation as us. And for us, we wanted to use that time to learn what the Bible had to say concerning those appointed times.
Those with whom we gathered were mostly Christians (at one point) who were also learning about the Hebrew Roots of their faith, and more specifically about the Sabbath day and the Feasts of the LORD.
We left behind Sunday church services and the celebration/recognition of Christmas and Easter and focused our attention on celebrating &/or recognizing those holy days mentioned in the Bible.
While many of the people we came across latched onto Hebraic traditions & teachings of men outside of the Bible concerning these appointed times, I wanted to stick solely with the book — to learn what it had to say.
Over a period of time much of what I learned conflicted with many of the Hebraic traditions & teachings, so we eventually parted ways when it came to Sabbath-keeping fellowship.
Here are some of the things I learned along the way:
– When a Day Begins (14-page .pdf) (This study also addresses several of the most popular texts often used to justify an evening-to-evening reckoning of a Day.)
– When a Day Begins and Ends (video)
Eventually, we came to the conclusion that the Feasts of the LORD couldn’t be “kept” in the manner Torah prescribed and that the “keeping” of them was indeed done away with in the first century.
So, we stopped paying attention to those times of the year and carried on without them.
Unfortunately, that eventually left us without a community within which to operate.
While we continue to take off from work on the seventh day, we no longer gather with other believers on that day for the purpose of Biblical fellowship because our Bible-centered beliefs have transformed so drastically from everyone we know.
As for what I’ve learned concerning the different feasts outlined in Leviticus 23, I believe much of it is irrelevant to the times we’re living in, and I no longer want to discuss them.
(It pains me to even think about them anymore & all the strife that is stirred up by those who insist they are meant to be “kept” today.)
I will continue to keep the seventh day set apart from the rest of the days of the week by not working on it, simply because I find the practice to be beneficial.
I acknowledge that I’ve been “delivered” from an oppressive, enslaving mindset and brought through a wilderness of learning how to live “outside of that System” with the hope of living well & long upon the land, working together with other decent human beings, in harmony with the natural world around us, seeking to make our world a better place for the generations to come.
That’s where I’m at.
[This page was last updated 12/2/25.]