Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

LORD’S DAY, The

Expression occurring once in the NT (Rv 1:10), where John says, “On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit” (niv); synonym for “Sunday” in modern usage.

The earliest reference to Christian activity on Sunday comes in a brief allusion Paul makes to “the first day of the week” (1 Cor 16:2, NLT mg). He instructs individual members of the church in Corinth to remember their poverty-stricken fellow believers in Jerusalem by setting aside a sum of money each Sunday.

Why Sunday? Obviously the first day of the week had taken on a special significance among Christians in Corinth before Paul wrote this letter (AD 55–56), and he makes it clear that the observance was not merely local (1 Cor 16:1). Sunday was the day when special church meetings took place (Paul alludes several times to these in 1 Cor—see 5:4; 11:18-20). Collections were taken on these occasions to meet local needs (cf. 1 Cor 9:7-14). So Paul was saying, “When the collection bag comes around on Sundays, and you are reminded of your local needs, set aside something—privately—for the needs of your brethren in Jerusalem.”

There is a more detailed account of a Christian Sunday meeting in Acts 20:6-12. The all-night service Luke describes there took place in Troas about three years after Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. Luke’s main aim is to tell the story of sleepy Eutychus’s miraculous recovery, so some of the details of the meeting that would interest us most are missing. Nevertheless, the account is full enough to indicate the kind of things the first Christians did when they met together on Sundays.

The fact that Luke mentions the day of the week at all is significant. Elsewhere he rarely identifies a day, unless it is a Sabbath or a special feast. His word for “gathered” (Acts 20:7) is important too. It is a semitechnical term the NT uses for Christians gathered together for worship (1 Cor 5:4). So this was not a special meeting convened to hear Paul (who had already been in town six days) but a regular weekly event. The church in Troas may have met daily, like the church in Jerusalem (Acts 2:42, 46), but the Sunday meeting was obviously treated as a special occasion.

Luke uses the same word to describe Paul’s preaching (Acts 20:7) that he used earlier for the apostle’s preaching ministry in the synagogues at Ephesus and Corinth (18:4; 19:8). This preserves an interesting link between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. When a local church separated from the synagogue, it probably modeled its worship on synagogue practice. Although the three main components of synagogue worship (Scripture reading, teaching, and prayer) are not found together in the few NT accounts of Christian worship, each is separately attested.

The main purpose behind the church’s Sunday meeting at Troas, however, was distinctively Christian. It was “to break bread” (Acts 20:7), the NT’s term for eating the Lord’s Supper (and including, probably, the less formal table fellowship of the love feast—cf. 1 Cor 11:17-34). The Lord’s Supper very quickly became a focal point of the early church’s Sunday worship. As a memorial of the resurrection and the promise of Christ’s presence in the worshiping fellowship, it was an obviously appropriate Christian way of celebrating the first day of the week.

The third clear reference to Sunday in the NT (and the only one that calls it the Lord’s Day) takes us from the Turkish mainland to the Aegean island of Patmos, probably about 40 years after Paul’s visit to Troas. In Revelation 1:10 John describes how he was worshiping on the Lord’s Day when he received his great vision. It is just possible that the expression “Lord’s Day” here means Easter, or even the great day of God’s judgment that the OT prophets foretold, but in view of the way later Christian writers used this phrase, it is far more likely to mean simply “Sunday.”

The immediate context of Revelation 1:10 makes it clear that John saw Sunday as the Lord’s Day because on it Christians expressed together their total commitment to Jesus as Lord and Master (Rv 1:8). It was Jesus’ resurrection on the first day of the week that demonstrated his lordship most clearly (see Rv 1:18 and Jn 20:25-28). One day the whole world will have to acknowledge that he is “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Rv 19:16; cf. Phil 2:11), but in the meantime it is in the church’s worship that his lordship is recognized.