Closed on Sunday: Southern’s cafe hours raise questions about keeping the Sabbath

By: Houston Beckworth

Long before Kanye West popularized the words “Closed on Sunday” in his album Jesus Is King, Chick-fil-A has been running on founder S. Truett Cathy’s belief that Sunday should be observed as a Sabbath day of rest, per Exodus 20:8-11. While its executives may follow Biblical principles under faulty knowledge (resting on Sunday rather than Saturday), God has immensely blessed them, with each restaurant averaging $9.4 million dollars in revenue—the highest of any franchise in the United States. 

Within this context, God’s promise of blessings in response to following the Sabbath may be at work: “If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the lord honorable … then you shall take delight in the lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth, I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.” (Isaiah 58:13-14, ESV). God judges according to our level of knowledge, and it may be that Chick-fil-A executives are being blessed according to that scale (e.g., Romans 2:12-16; Luke 12:47-48; James 3:1).

Do Adventists ever fall short of God’s command? Adventists tend to be flexible in following the mandate prohibiting others from working on Sabbath (Exodus 20:10). Often when there is no food for last-minute social gatherings, Adventists tend to visit restaurants during Sabbath hours, which means people are being made to work on Sabbath. Southern is not immune to this, with the cafeteria operating during Sabbath hours and instead choosing to be closed on Sunday.  

Moreover, the Sabbath is the key criterion for God’s end-time judgment. Revelation’s only call for mankind to worship God says the time for “his judgment has come,” and this is placed in the context of worshipping “him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water” (Revelation 14:7). This phrase is directly drawn from the Exodus 20 command to observe the Sabbath, suggesting this day is a focus of end-time judgment.

Adventists believe that Revelation’s end-time judgment is a fulfillment of the Day of Atonement. Should it be any surprise, then, that this day includes the same judicial criterion? According to Leviticus 23:30, Israel was to avoid all work on the Sabbath, and if they did not, they would face destruction.  As one scholar describes it, “By the end of this day there are only two classes of Israelites: (1) a remnant who are morally ‘pure,’ that is, having no impediments to their relationship with YHWH (Leviticus 16:30), and (2) those who have no future with YHWH and his people (Leviticus 23:29–30).”

Why would the Sabbath be so important in judgment? “At the heart of the matter is the fact that the Sabbath is an ideal way to test whether people are truly loyal to God.”

Nine out of the ten commandments are formed on moral and relational logic. The Sabbath, however, is not at all dependent on logic. It only rests on the fact God instituted the day to bless us. Moreover, it commands us to do less rather than more. This lack of logic and self-interest naturally leads us to devalue it. However, it is this lack of value that places it as the perfect test of loyalty. It displays whether we take God at His word, no matter how lacking in logic it might seem at first glance.

The Bible hence shows three general reasons why we should follow the Sabbath: (1) it’s the criteria for God’s judgment, (2) it serves as an intrinsic blessing by disconnecting us from the stress of life, and (3) the Bible promises further blessings for Sabbath’s observance.

Will you choose human convenience, or will you allow God’s logic to bless every part of your life? In the same light, might the cafeteria consider switching its day of closure?

Certainly, one can justify the current closing pattern. First, setting aside Sundays for special events provides the catering department extra time to prepare. Second, Southern is an Adventist “Mecca” and finds many people coming together on Sabbath, so having a running cafeteria helps supply the need for food. Yet, it is this very popularity of the cafeteria on Sabbath that makes its compromise more apparent to others. 

How will non-Adventist guests to the cafeteria view our faithfulness? Our caveats are not something God can’t solve, not to mention other blessings He may have in store for following Him, so I encourage Southern’s administration to consider being closed on Saturday. 

Letter to the Editor (Debra Hicks, 1991 Alumna): 

Houston Beckworth has raised points that I’ve heard my entire life and are popular among Adventists throughout the world, but recently I read an excellent article on pages. 24-26 of the Winter 2025 issue of Adventist Today, available at atoday.org, that points me in a slightly different direction. 

The historical piece tells about a Dutch Adventist whose extreme legalism took such a line of thinking to its logical conclusion, and the man just about drove himself and everybody around him crazy in his attempts to make sure that his music business required no work to be done on Sabbath—by anyone, even by people handling goods and products that would eventually come to his store. 

This man was very highly principled and sincere, but his beliefs sparked a controversy that devastated the Adventist Church in the Netherlands in 1902. Virtually all of the pastors and members left Adventism; only 37 members in the entire country remained on the church books. I think it serves as a cautionary tale to those of us who are inclined to put “protecting the Sabbath” above loving God’s people. 

I used to be zealous about this issue of Sabbath dining, but I’ve found over five plus decades that people flourish more when I let God defend His Sabbath and instead focus my efforts on defending His people. This helps me avoid extremes in idealism that wound rather than uplift those I know and love.