Seventh-day (Saturday) Sabbath

Seventh-day Adventists affirm that the biblical Sabbath falls on the seventh day, Saturday, and that Christians are called to keep it holy as a day of rest and worship. They hold that the fourth commandment, resting on God's rest at creation, was never abrogated and that the common Christian observance of Sunday arose later by human authority rather than divine command. The Sabbath, kept from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, is thus for Adventists a standing sign of loyalty to God's commandments and of trust in him as Creator.

Sabbath-keeping entered the Adventist movement through Joseph Bates, who was converted to the practice by Seventh Day Baptists and in turn persuaded Ellen G. White and her husband James White around 1846, in the aftermath of the Great Disappointment of 22 October 1844, when followers of William Miller's prediction of Christ's imminent return found the date pass without event.

Ellen White's subsequent visions, which the church regards as the gift of prophecy rather than a source ranking above scripture, reinforced the Sabbath's importance and helped organise the fledgling movement, formally constituted as the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863, around the conviction that the fourth commandment (Exodus 20:8 to 11) remained binding.

The seventh-day Sabbath is a defining mark of Seventh-day Adventism, distinguishing it from the great majority of Christians, who worship on Sunday in commemoration of the resurrection. It returns Christian practice to the day kept in Judaism and commanded in the Decalogue, though Adventists observe it on Christian and Adventist terms. The affirmation is bound up with the movement's strong emphasis on the abiding authority of the Ten Commandments and with its distinctive reading of biblical prophecy and the end of the age.

Seventh-day observance did not originate with the Adventists: Seventh Day Baptists, tracing to English Sabbatarian congregations of the 1650s and established in America from 1671, kept the practice for over a century before Joseph Bates encountered it through them and brought it into the Adventist movement. Because it is otherwise a fully trinitarian, Sunday-surrounded Protestant body, Adventism's Sabbath keeping sometimes causes it to be confused with, or courted by, the modern Hebrew Roots and Messianic movements that urge Christians toward wider Torah observance; Adventist teaching keeps the practice narrowly to the Sabbath commandment itself and does not extend it to the dietary or ceremonial law in the way those movements do, beyond its own separate, health-based counsel against unclean meats.