Saturday night in the Baptist parsonage home of our childhood is well remembered for its familiar sights and sounds and smells.
I can still see the lamp with the green shade on father’s desk in the study, by the light of which he spent several hours each Saturday night going over the notes of his Sunday morning sermon. He wrote his sermons in full, following the advice of Dr. Augustus H. Strong who told the men in Rochester Seminary to write their sermons for the first twenty years and then do whatever they pleased about it. After writing his sermons, father made brief notes on them, which he underlined carefully in preparation for taking them into the pulpit.
Mother had her Saturday night duties too—special duties in preparation for the Lord’s Day. She sewed buttons on Sunday clothes and put a pot roast on the stove to get it ready for the morrow. There would be no coming home early Sunday noon to fix the Sunday dinner; the preacher’s wife must have it as nearly ready as possible before she left for the house of God. I can smell the fragrance of that roast now, mingled with the sharper odor of the freshly blacked shoes for all of us.
Yes, Saturday night in our home was dedicated to Bible, bath and bed. Everything pointed to the special day that would soon be here—the Lord’s Day. We didn’t go out on Saturday night. Like the Jews, our Sabbath began at sundown.
The result was achieved. We never thought of Saturday night as the high point of the week; the high-water mark was Sunday. Saturday night was a night of preparation to make ready for God’s holy day.
Sunday morning did not find us rousing reluctantly, to go to church wearily and sit through the sermon sleepily. Sunday morning found us refreshed and ready. This was it—“day of all the week the best.” Our enthusiasms had not been dissipated the night before. There was a zeal in our souls because we had made the right sort of spiritual, mental and physical preparation.
We were brought up not to spend Saturday night for the Devil, giving the Lord whatever tag end of our interest might be left over to the next day. It dishonors God to be handed leftovers.
Has the old fashioned, Christian sort of Saturday night gone with the wind? In many places, yes. Across America it is the night when folks paint the town red. The country is on one wild spree and the rising sun of a beautiful Lord’s Day morning finds people in bed, with big heads, sleeping off hangovers of one kind or another. They enter the day in sin—how can it be a day of blessing for them?
But your home and my home may still be houses of God where the holy hush is upon the souls of the members of the family as the shadows of Saturday evening lengthen, bringing fresh assurance of the presence of him whom we serve.
END
Dr. Paul S. James is Pastor of The Baptist Tabernacle in Atlanta, Georgia.
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