Preparing for the Christian Sabbath - How Our Family of 6 Gets Ready to Rest and Worship on Sundays

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Is a weekly day of rest possible? Can the world of work, shopping, doing, striving actually stop for one whole day every week? Do we even need rest?

God’s answer is yes. (Exodus 20:8-11)

(I wrote a bit more about this in this blog post: Why Rest on Sundays? The Reason We Take a Sabbath on the First Day of the Week)

Figuring out how to practically take a sabbath in our world of doing can be hard, and figuring out how to do it with small children can be harder!

The Lord has been so gracious and patient with us as we’ve figured this out, and the past 7 years of taking an entire day for rest and worship on Sundays has brought more blessings in our lives (LINK) than we ever expected.

But how does it actually work?! In this blog post, I’m going to share a peek into how we get ready for Sundays so that it can actually be a day of worship and rest!

What Are Sundays For?

In the New Testament, Sunday – the Lord’s Day – is established as the Christian sabbath. Sundays are not just for rest. They are for worship! We plan our days around worship – meeting in the Lord’s house each Sunday morning (and evening – we are so blessed at our church to have a separate evening service as well!).

And just as our souls rest in Christ’s completed work on the cross, so our bodies need physical rest, too. The Lord’s Day is a day of rest and refreshment both physically and spiritually.

Our Sundays typically flow from morning worship to a favorite lunch to afternoon rest to evening worship. Some weeks we host friends or fellowship at a friend’s house in between services.

(You can read more about a typical Lord’s Day for our family in this blog post: What Does A Weekly Sabbath Look Like? Lord’s Day Practices for A Christian Family)

10 Systems for Preparing for the Christian Sabbath

Here are the main systems and routines that help us prepare to rest well on Sundays.

Food plan
Outfit plan
Church bags prep
Saturday house prep and evening cleanup
Spiritual Saturday evening prep
Laundry
Weekly to-do list
Training our children
Tech plan
Slow Monday mornings

1. Food plan

Because the goal of Sundays is to rest and worship, we don’t want to take up unnecessary time in preparing overly difficult meals. At the same time, Sundays should be sweet and a day to look forward to!

Here are the best ways we’ve found to do this:

A simple but filling breakfast. Sometimes yogurt and granola, and sometimes sourdough pancakes that we made on Saturday morning so we can warm up the extras quickly in the convection oven on Sunday.

Our favorite leftovers for lunch. We try to make one of our favorite meals on Saturday night – something that everyone will look forward to when we come home from church on Sunday, but only take a few minutes to warm up! Our favorites are homemade pizza, burgers, chicken thighs, or tacos.

A quick and easy dinner. Because we head back to evening service at 5:15, we typically just eat a quick dinner around 4:30. Since we also eat a late lunch on Sundays and don’t get as much physical activity, usually we aren’t too hungry, and a 5-minute charcuterie board works great. If we want more to eat, we might warm up some frozen meatballs or pull out a freezer meal like soup or a casserole.

Favorite snacks. Another way we make Sundays sweet is by making lattes and popcorn with the older kids in the afternoon. If we have any treats from the week (like dessert left over from a birthday celebration or from hosting guests), we’ll often try to save them for Sunday, too!

2. Outfit plan

Getting dressed for church is not hard in our house, and it doesn’t take any Saturday night prep (myself being the exception sometimes!).

The girls each have about 3 dresses. In the winter they wear tights and cowboy boots and each have 1 sweater and jean jacket, and in the summer they wear sandals or boots. Everything matches, so it only takes a few seconds to pick something out.

three young children on porch in matching church clothes and cowboy boots

The boys each have 1 pair of church pants (plus an extra in the basement) and 3-5 button-up shirts that match. They also wear cowboy boots that match with everything.

3. Church bags prep

The diaper bag and church bag are usually mostly stocked with everything we need, so it only takes about 30 seconds to make sure they’re ready on Sunday morning. All we have to do is check diapers, add the ring sling (my go-to for church that I’ve used pretty much every week for 4+ years), and maybe add some extra paper or sticker sheets to the church bag.

(You can read more about what we keep in our church bag for the kids in this blog post: What’s in Our Church Quiet Bag, and why I love using the ring sling in this one: How to Take Your Kids to Church – Tips from a Mom of 4 Littles)

We also throw a quick snack in a tupperware for the car ride home (aussie bites, protein bars, or homemade muffins work well) and pack water bottles.

4. Saturday house prep and evening cleanup

Saturdays are typically for family activities (wood stacking, house projects, thrift shopping, park dates) and/or hanging out with friends and family, so we definitely don’t spend the whole day getting ready for Sunday! Most of it gets done during the week (see #7 below).

But, we do try to tie up a few loose ends to make sure the house is ready for Sunday. This includes:

Making sure we have enough wood inside to heat the house until at least Monday (learn more about heating with wood and why we love it here!).
Double-checking that meals are ready for Sunday (i.e. anything we need from the freezer is set out).
General kitchen and house cleanup. (Not a deep clean, but a little more in-depth than other nights. We mainly want to make sure there are no projects sitting out on surfaces or extra toys out, and that the kitchen is ready for breakfast in the morning before we head out the door.)
Additional cleaning if we’re hosting. If we have friends coming over on Sunday we might do just a little extra cleaning on Saturday, like wiping down bathrooms.
Closing my to-do list. My to-do list is basically always out during the week, but on Sundays, my notebook gets closed and put away. This is such a big help to me in focusing on rest and worship and not the other tasks of the week.

Our Saturday clean is really not a big deal, but tying up any loose ends makes it much easier to rest on Sunday without having to look at a mess or unfinished projects.

5. Spiritual Saturday evening prep

In addition to making sure the house is ready for the Lord’s Day, we also try to make sure our hearts are ready for to worship. We find it helpful to go to bed at a decent time and avoid things like watching tv or budgeting that tend to carry over into our thoughts on Sundays.

6. Laundry

I usually do a load of laundry every 1-2 days all week, so there’s never a big pile of laundry to do. On Saturdays, I like to try to make sure everything is at least washed, even if it’s just a small load, just in case I’m forgetting about something we’ll need for church (like a pair of tights, socks, or the right black shirt for me).

Even if it’s a busy Saturday and I don’t get it folded, it can sit in the dryer and if we’re missing something we can easily grab it.

7. Weekly to-do list

Being able to rest on Sunday necessitates that we steward the other days well. We have found that when we give our bodies and souls the spiritual rest they need on Sundays, it’s much easier to be diligent and focused the other 6 days of the week. (And vice versa – it’s easier to rest when you’ve worked hard for 6 days!) Surprise surprise, God’s ways work!

My weekly planning method is super simple but very effective for me! I just use a simple, spiral-bound notebook to write out what I need to complete each day and what needs to be fit in at some point during the week. Planning in advance makes it so much easier to prioritize what has to be done and then find spaces to fit in what I hope to get done.

We also make sure that we get all of our necessary shopping (groceries and otherwise) done during the week so that we don’t have to make other people work on Sundays!

You can read more about how I create my weekly schedule in this blog post: The Simplest Weekly Planning Strategy

8. Training our children

I think sitting through church on Sundays would be very hard if our kids didn’t have other similar times during the week where they’re expected to sit. A few ways we help train this during the week include:

Family worship. This is something we are always working to improve at, but we try to do family worship as many nights as we can after dinner. It’s usually only about 10 minutes, but the kids are expected to sit and participate.
Morning Bible reading. Most mornings, the kids and I end breakfast with a story from The Child’s Story Bible. This is another time where they’re expected to sit quietly and listen (although there’s definitely conversing and sometimes even acting involved!).
Afternoon quiet time. We have a 2-hour block each afternoon when the big kids are allowed to sit and do a quiet activity (oftentimes with a story).
No screens. I credit a lot of our kids’ attention spans to keeping screens and electronic toys out of the house. (We do plan a family movie night about 2 times a year and sometimes they watch a VeggieTales bi-monthly during our small group.)

(You can read more about helping kids to sit through church in this blog post: How to Take Your Kids to Church – Tips from a Mom of 4 Littles)

9. Tech plan

On Sundays, we find it helpful to stay off screens as much as possible. While we don’t completely put our phones away, we try to limit screen use. I try not to open my computer at all, since I mainly use it for work and productivity during the week, and it can be distracting, even if I’m researching a Biblical topic.

10. Slow Monday mornings

This has been a big one in really being able to rest on Sundays. Sunday is not the day for planning out my upcoming week. While I sometimes start planning during the previous week, I try to leave Monday open as a day to catch up on laundry, cleaning, cooking, and planning my other tasks for the week.

It can be hard to rest on Sundays when I know we have to be ready to get out the door or have guests over first thing Monday morning.