You are here:
DAYS AND TIMES
Some reasons for not observing fasts and feast days and times,
and other human injunctions and institutions relative to the
worship of God.
Ever since we were a people we have had a testimony
against formal worship, being convinced by the precepts of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the testimonies of his apostles, and our own
experience, that the worship and prayers which God accepts, are
such only as are produced by the influence and assistance of his
holy Spirit; we cannot therefore consistently unite with any in
the observation of public fasts, feasts, and what they term holy
days; or such injunctions and forms as are devised in man's will
for divine worship; the dispensation to which outward
observations were peculiar, having long since given place to the
spiritual dispensation of the gospel, we believe the fast we are
now called to is not the bowing of the head like a bulrush for a
day, but an universal and continual fasting and refraining from
every thing which has a tendency to defile the soul and unfit it
for becoming the temple of the Holy Ghost, according to the
injunctions of Christ to his primitive disciples, "If any man
will come after me, let him take up his daily cross and follow
me. Watch ye therefore and pray always, that ye may be accounted
worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to
stand before the Son of Man." That the primitive believers saw
an end to these shadows of good things, by coming to Him in whom
all figures and shadows end, is evident by the words of the
apostle Paul; "For Christ, said he, is the end of the law for
righteousness to every one that believeth," Rom. 10:4. -- "But now
hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he
is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon
better promises." Heb. 8:6. "Let no man therefore judge you in
meat or drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon,
or of the sabbath days, which are a shadow of things to come, but
the body is of Christ." Col. 2:16-17. And the same apostle thus
expostulated with some who it appears had fallen from the true
faith in these respects, "But now after that ye have known God,
how turn ye again to the beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire
again to be in bondage. Ye observe days and months, and times,
and years: I am afraid of you lest I have bestowed upon you
labour in vain" Gal. 4:9-11.