Do we have a very lightweight view of the Lord’s day? Is Sunday a matter of coming to worship on Sunday morning, and then the spiritual book is closed, so that we may then do anything we please? Go to the shops, trade on the Lord’s Day, because we have been lacking in discipline and have not sorted that out beforehand. ‘But I need this, I need that; going to the shops does not matter.’ Turn on the television and it is not just the news, the entertainment rubbish too. But it is the Lord’s Day. Organise other things, do not come back to church; that is tiresome. Do not support the ministry of the church through the day, the Sunday schools, the Gospel ministry. No, the Lord’s Day has closed a third of the way through. Now I can do anything, be indifferent to the Lord’s command, to the apostolic example, to the standards laid down in the Scripture. There is a lot of it goes on these days in the churches. There are churches in our vast city and the people who run them mean well but they only have one service on the Lord’s Day. There are churches not very far from here who will have that service at the most congenial, convenient time about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. That leaves the evening clear for the television, and the morning for whatever. That is absolutely flouting the Lord’s Day.
We are commanded repeatedly to avoid worldliness. Friendship with the world is making ourselves an enemy of the Lord, says James. Worldliness. Do you ever go to a pub? Do you ever go to a club, a bar? Why it is absolutely forbidden in the Scripture. In Proverbs 22 it is quite clearly stated as something most objectionable and utterly wrong and sinful for a Christian to associate with such a place where that is the centre of influence, drinking and so on. Cannot be. That is worldliness, that is as bad as idolatry and visiting the idol temple. You should be separated from. Do not do that, friends.
Consider also separation from false teachers. We are supposed to have nothing to do with false teachers. If we ignore their false teaching and we approve people, even though they deny the essential points of salvation, then we put ourselves outside the true church of God. There is a lot of this in Britain today. The Church of England, for example, is ninety percent false teachers and blatantly so. Why do not those dear Bible believers among them come out and leave it alone? That is the command of God. So we have to be very careful with Anglican ministers even if they are believers. We may acknowledge they are believers and appreciate that much about them. We may wish the best for them and try to persuade them, but we cannot mission with them because they are in disobedience with the Lord. In fairness to them, some of them are rebels within; that is a slightly different position, but most of them are fraternising with the enemy and that is disobedience to God.
Is it legalism to speak like this? Those who say so do not know what a legalist is. A legalist is a person who thinks that you do things in order to be saved. No, you do things in obedience to God because you are saved and you know you must obey him. That is not being a legalist. They do not know their theology, the people who say this kind of preaching is legalism. Legalism is believing that in doing a certain thing it gets you saved. Well, you do not believe it gets you saved, but you believe you must do it to honour and obey God as a saved person. It is very important.