The Most Biblical American Holiday

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Lord of prayer, our Father and our God, we thank you for the opportunity to be here and to study together and to talk about your word.
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Your word tells us to give thanks in all things and to live a life of thanksgiving.
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And so, Lord, we pray that you would remind us of that every day and remind us during this lesson of the importance of pointing out certain special days wherein we can be reminded of those things for which we are eternally grateful, and that is, of course, the blessings that you have given us through your Son, Jesus Christ.
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And it's in his name we pray, amen.
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There were two friends who bumped into each other on a street, and they hadn't seen each other in a while, and the one just looked really forlorn.
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He just looked really down, and he was almost in tears.
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And so the other guy, interested in what was making his old friend look so down, he said, hey, what's the problem? And he said, well, you know, he said, three weeks ago, my uncle died, and he left me $40,000.
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And the guy said, wow, that's a lot of money.
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He goes, yeah, yeah, it was.
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He said, well, what's got you down today? He says, well, you know, two weeks ago, my cousin struck it rich on the lottery, and he won a million dollars, and he gave me half of it.
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And he said, wow, so you got $40,000 three weeks ago, last week got a half a million dollars, why are you crying? He said, this week, nothing.
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And that really is how we are, oftentimes.
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We are ate up with blessings.
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We really are.
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I mean, the worst case scenario in the United States is better than the best case scenario in many parts of the world.
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You know, people who live in the United States, even the poor people in general, not all, because I know there are people who are homeless, and there are people who are in really transient living.
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But even poor people in general in the United States have basic needs met, like food and clean water.
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I mean, we have clean water.
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It comes out of our sinks and out of our showers.
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And if you were to describe the life that you live to a large part of the world, they would be absolutely horrified.
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You know, how many gallons of water do we use even just taking a shower? And most of the water goes from here to there without ever touching us or anything else.
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It goes from one pipe to the other pipe and never touched anything.
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We are so, so, so blessed.
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And so just like the guy in the story with the, you know, I had a $40,000 and I had half a million dollars, but this week nothing.
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We tend to focus on what we don't have, and we tend to focus on our needs rather than our blessings and what we do have.
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And so this morning, as I said, this is the Sunday preceding Thanksgiving, and even though I won't be preaching a message on this particular topic, my sermon is on the promises of God.
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So we do have those to be thankful for.
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But during this class, I just wanted to talk a little bit about how Thanksgiving is the closest holiday that we have to a biblical holiday.
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Thanksgiving is the closest holiday that we celebrate.
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And you often would probably think, well, Christmas, because it's about Jesus.
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Or Easter, because it's about the resurrection.
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Right? But if you study the history of both Christmas and Easter, you'll find that a lot of the elements of Christmas and Easter don't really come out of Christian tradition at all.
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That is not to say necessarily that we shouldn't have them.
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I mean, I enjoy exchanging presents, and the Bible says a father loves to give good gifts to his children, and I love Christmas morning when I get to get up and give good gifts to my children, and to see their little faces light up.
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There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, as long as we're being moderate and not spoiling and not misbehaving with our finances.
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It's not a bad thing to give good gifts to our children.
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And likewise, come springtime when we celebrate the resurrection and everybody gets a nice new outfit that looks like an Easter egg, you know? But where do the eggs come from? You ever thought about that? Well, I know where the eggs come from.
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A chicken.
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High five.
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I like that answer.
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Well, it came from the chicken, Pastor Keith, don't you know? You're teaching us.
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That's going to be great.
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I'm going to get an email on Sermon Audio.
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That was the best answer I've ever heard.
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Okay.
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After an hour of studying for our GED, we were in history class, and we had to study about Dutchmen, the first people to bring the slaves to America.
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Well, when they were on the test, it said, how did the slaves get to America? My husband wrote, by ship.
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Yeah, well, he was not wrong.
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He said he was not wrong, but he's not right.
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Yeah.
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Well, you know, when we have our Resurrection Sunday, and everybody, you know, the world calls it Easter.
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Normally, we don't.
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We call it Resurrection Sunday.
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We celebrate with eggs and bunny rabbits.
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You ever wonder why? Well, because it's more, because the secular holiday is not about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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The secular holiday is about fertility.
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In fact, the word Easter is possibly, we don't know for certain, but it's possibly a derivative of Ishtar, the goddess of fertility.
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It's one of the reasons why we don't use that word when we're advertising our service.
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We say Resurrection Sunday, because we're not interested in fertility.
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We're not interested in eggs or bunnies.
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We're interested in Jesus.
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So, when I say that Thanksgiving is one of the closest to a biblical holiday, what I want to share with you today is how it mirrors the biblical holidays of Scripture.
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Because if you remember from the Old Covenant, and you guys have been studying that in this class, you've been studying Genesis and Exodus, and you've been studying the Old Covenant.
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In the Old Covenant, Israel was given holidays.
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They were given different days throughout the year where they were going to celebrate different things.
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And I want to just remind you of a few, and I brought them with me, because you'll remember these.
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The first one is Chag HaMatzah.
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Chag HaMatzah is the Feast of what? Unleavened Bread.
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The Feast of Unleavened Bread.
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Alright, and that was a week of eating bread made without yeast.
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It was a whole week.
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And remember that God brought the Israelites out of Egypt in haste.
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They didn't have time to get the bread to rise, so they would eat their bread without yeast.
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In fact, they would clean all the yeast out of their homes.
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It was a very important holiday, festival.
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Another festival was the Festival of First Fruits.
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This is a horrible marker, so you'll have to forgive me.
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But First Fruits was Yom HaBikkurim.
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I'm going to say it, HaBikkurim.
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And this was the First Fruits.
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This was presenting a sheaf of the first of the harvest.
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This was the offering of the first day of the Sabbath after the Passover.
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And then, of course, there was Shavuot, which is Pentecost.
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Pentecost is the...
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This was celebrating the time given of the Law of Moses on Mount Sinai.
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It was 50 days after Passover.
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Then you have Rosh Hashanah, which is also called the Feast of Trumpets.
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The Feast of Trumpets was the Jewish...
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This is New Year's.
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But this is the beginning of the Jewish New Year.
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So they had a New Year's festival, which was the Feast of Trumpets.
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And then they have Yom Kippur, which is what? You guys maybe will know this one.
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What's Yom Kippur? The Day of Atonement.
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The Day of Atonement.
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That was the day that the sacrifice was made.
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Remember the high priest went into the Holy of Holies? So having sacrificed the animal, he goes in and he puts the blood on the mercy seat there in the tabernacle.
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So that was Yom Kippur.
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That's the Day of Atonement.
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This is not going to work.
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There's another one, Michael.
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Oh, yeah, look at that.
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Maybe.
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Then you have Sukkot, which is the Feast of Tabernacles.
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This is where the, recall the 40 years in the wilderness, and they would go out of their homes and they would live in tents for that period.
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And it was sort of like a big, not a big camping trip, but it was sort of like going out away from the home to remember the fact that they were 40 years in the wilderness.
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So they had this feast where they would, called the Feast of Boots, or the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Tents.
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They would go out from their homes.
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This was after they had established homes.
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They quit being the nomadic people.
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They had homes.
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But they would go out and stay in the tent for the purpose of reminding themselves that for 40 years they were nomadic traveling people going from Egypt to the Promised Land, which was an 11-day journey.
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It took 40 years.
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You know why? Because they weren't obedient.
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And when you're not obedient, you tend to go in circles.
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And they kept hitting the same spots.
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And you kind of wonder, why are they hitting the same spots? Because you go in a circle.
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It's like four lefts.
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Take four lefts and you'll be there.
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No, you'll be here.
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Take four lefts.
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And then, of course, Pesach, which is the Passover.
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The Passover was the remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.
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And you guys remember Passover because we do that every year here.
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We have the Seder meal where we celebrate the Passover.
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Remember, every year I open the Bible up to Exodus chapter 12, and we read the story of how God told the Israelites to take a lamb, one for each household.
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And if the household wasn't big enough, that they would take one lamb for two households, and they would cut the lamb, and they would drain his blood, and they would smear the blood on the lentil in the doorpost of the home.
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And then as God made His way through the camp that night, the nation of Egypt, as He went through Egypt, He would see those houses that the blood was smeared on, and be reminded that these are His people, and the destructor would not go in and take their firstborn.
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And so, in the Passover, we have this picture of God's promise to protect His people in the midst of judgment.
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Anyway, I mention these things, there's seven of them here, because there are seven holidays in Scripture, and each one of them has in it four elements that I believe we have in our Thanksgiving holiday.
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It's the closest one to a biblical holiday.
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Let me share with you what those four things are.
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The first thing, I don't know if you take notes in here or what, but if you'd like, the four things are...
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The gathering of community is the first thing.
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Whenever these holidays would take place, it was a time for the whole nation to take part.
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The community would stop in observance, and all was to focus on this special occasion.
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Thanksgiving in America is similar in the same way.
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Every year, the whole world just sort of stops.
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In fact, I've gotten to the point where I'm a little frustrated because so many people have decided not to stop on Thanksgiving.
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Used to, they had something called Black Friday.
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And what was Black Friday? Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving.
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It was the kickoff for the Christmas season, and it was 6 a.m.
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If you wanted to go, so you got to go eat your turkey on Thursday.
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You got to go sleep off the tryptophan in the afternoon.
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Tryptophan is the stuff that's in the turkey that makes you nice and sleepy.
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Then you got to wake up and maybe watch Rudolph, and go back to sleep, and sleep until about 5 o'clock, and then go out and do your shopping.
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Well now, then it was, okay, well we're going to move it back to 4 a.m.
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Then we'll move it back to 3 a.m., and then midnight.
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Now, Black Friday starts on Thanksgiving.
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6 p.m.
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on Thanksgiving.
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And you got to think.
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Wasn't there a time in some of your lives, and really hasn't been in my lifetime, but some of you guys remember when people didn't even work on Sunday.
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I remember when you didn't buy alcohol in Jacksonville on Sunday.
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In fact, play Bill Licker.
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Pat remembers this, I'm sure.
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Remember play Bill Licker? Where was it? Right on the county line, right? Because Nassau County didn't have the same rule as Duval County, so people who wanted alcohol would go right over the county line, and it was hopping until the law changed, and then it went out of business.
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Well, that's what I'm saying.
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We used to, as a community, if you will, make observations for certain days, and Sunday was the day that people observed.
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But even after that stopped being as regularly understood as normal, holidays would be held on, and we as a community would stop.
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Okay, we're going to stop on Thanksgiving.
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We're going to stop on Christmas.
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We're going to stop on these special days.
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And even other holidays, secular holidays, Veterans Day and things like that, kids would be out of school.
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And that's sort of why I say this is where we're sort of mirroring the nation of Israel in that sense, because that's what they did.
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The whole nation just sort of came to a screeching halt, and everybody stopped and observed what was going on as a community.
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And it reminded the community of the faithful of their unity in their faith.
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So that was the first thing that we see, was that the community was gathered together.
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The second thing was a giving of thanks.
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I want you to, if you're taking notes, you can write down Deuteronomy 16.11, because this is the text referring to this one, the Feast of Weeks, excuse me for a moment, which was the Shabbat, the Pentecost.
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So on this particular one here, Deuteronomy 16.11, it says, So again, he's saying, Everyone in the community, mother and father, son and daughter, everyone from the oldest to the youngest, took the time to give thanks for what God had done.
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And each one of these, again, representing something that God had done.
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This was about their deliverance.
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This was about the promise of God to continue their blessing.
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This one was about the time, the weeks, the Feast of Weeks.
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This one was about the New Year, God starting something new.
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This was about the atonement, the promise of forgiveness.
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This one was about the time spent in the wilderness.
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This one was about the time protecting them from the destruction that happened in Israel.
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There were all these things they had to give thanks for.
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And the reality is, giving thanks is sort of a lost art.
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We used to, as people, give thank you cards.
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And some people still do.
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I'm always grateful when someone is thoughtful enough to give thank you cards.
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But they're really not as common as they used to be.
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A ministerial student in Evanston, Illinois, was part of a life-saving squad.
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In 1860, a ship was aground on the shore of Lake Michigan near Evanston, and Edward Spencer waded in and again into the frigid waters, rescued 17 people.
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In the process, his health was permanently damaged, and some years later at his funeral it was noted that not one of the people he rescued ever thanked him.
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Even though it affected his life, affected him.
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And I know he didn't do it for thanks.
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Guys who run into frigid waters or into battlefields to save other men don't do it so that one day they'll get a thank you.
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They do it because of a sense of duty and love and honor.
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But yet, we have as a people a real history of being ungrateful.
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Think of the story of Jesus and the ten lepers.
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What a great analogy for percentages.
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Remember this story? I think in Luke 17, where Jesus says that there were ten men with leprosy, and Jesus sent them to the priest to be examined, because they have to be examined.
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He couldn't just heal them and send them on.
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They have to be examined and called healed by the priest.
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So Jesus sends them on to be examined, and on the way it says they were healed, and they recognized their healing.
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That the leprosy, which was very obviously on them, had gone away.
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And so one of them does an about-face and comes back and falls at Jesus' feet and thanks him.
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And Jesus is in awe, not because the man came back, but he asked the question.
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You read the story.
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Jesus looks at him and he says, Where are the nine? Is there not only one who came to give thanks for this blessing? And he, a foreigner, if you read the story, it's more to the story than just the thanksgiving.
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It was who was giving the thanksgiving.
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It was a guy who wasn't even a Jew.
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It was a guy who didn't even probably understand the God who had saved him and Christ who had healed him.
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He's the only one who even thought to come back and say thank you.
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It was a guy who doesn't even know anything.
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But it's a great percentage thing.
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One out of ten, maybe, will give thanks.
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The teacher asked her students to list what they thought were the seven wonders of the world and the students were able to cast their votes.
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And the students who cast their votes, the majority of the seven wonders came up as the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Panama Canal, Empire State Building, St.
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Peter's Basilica, and the Great Wall in China.
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Well, when gathering the votes, the teacher noted that one of the students had not turned in her paper.
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And so she went up and said, well, the seven wonders of the world, have you come up? And the girl says, well, I'm having trouble making up my mind.
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And she said, well, tell us what you have.
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Maybe we can help.
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And the girl hesitated.
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And she said, well, I think the seven wonders of the world are to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to feel, to laugh, and to love.
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Because those are the truly wondrous things.
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And those aren't things that we built.
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Those are things that God gave us.
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And, you know, we often forget to be thankful even for that.
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You realize your heart beats because of God's command, not because of you.
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And one day it won't beat anymore.
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And no matter how far that day is off, it's coming.
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And we all have an appointment to keep.
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And on that day, when we face God, I wonder how much we will have wondered and wish we would have given him more thanks.
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The third thing that's done on these days is remembrance.
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You have the gathering of the community.
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You have the giving of thanks, which is a community event.
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And then you have the remembrance.
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Each feast reminded the people about something that God had done.
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This included remembering his law, remembering his forgiveness, remembering his presence.
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And in a way, Thanksgiving is that for us as well.
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Because the whole reason why we gather to give thanks is because we're remembering what God has done for us.
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And it reminds us, too, of God's blessings on us as a people.
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We live in a nation and this country, which has afforded us all so many blessings.
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And we get to look at that and we get to say, you know what, God has walked with us through all of this.
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God has been here with us through all of this.
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I, like everyone, am concerned about the future of our nation.
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But we can't for a second say that we haven't been completely and utterly given so much as a nation.
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You know, wherever we're going is unknown.
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But where we've come from is amazing.
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We are a people that have done so much.
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You realize up until a hundred years ago, well, I'm dating myself now because a hundred years ago, can you believe a hundred years ago was 1916? You know, I used to say a hundred years ago was 1800s.
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Not anymore.
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A hundred years ago was 1916.
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But just preceding that, for the six or seven thousand years that preceded that of mankind's history, mankind was pretty much the same technologically.
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We rode horses or other animals.
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We had wells that we pulled water out ourselves.
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You know, we pretty much lived an agrarian lifestyle.
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But in the last hundred years, we've seen mega communities and mega cities and buildings that boggle the mind.
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And a lot of that is a result of what God has done in America and the industrial revolution and seeing things.
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I mean, think about it.
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We went from horseback to the moon in 70 years.
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We went from the Wright brothers making it, what, like a couple hundred feet to having a space station in less than a hundred years.
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Five, six thousand years of human history.
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And it's only been in this last hundred years that so much has happened.
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You carry, if you have a cell phone, you carry the wealth of human knowledge and stupidity in your pocket.
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Because the Internet is full of both.
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It is the great balancing act of intelligence and stupidity all in one place.
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Huh? Yeah, it's good and evil.
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The Internet, in a sense, is neutral because it's both.
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It provides an outlet for man's depravity.
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I remember when I first realized what a website was.
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And it sounds silly, but when the Internet, you know, I was alive before the Internet.
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I was there when Al Gore invented it.
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No, but I remember when I built my first website.
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This was back in the early 2000s.
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Like, no, I'm sorry, it was in 99.
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I built a website on homestead.com.
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It was a free website builder, and you could build it yourself.
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And I remember finding out what a website was.
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Do you know what a website is? A website is a public restroom wall.
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That's all a website is.
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It's a public restroom wall.
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Because anybody can come and put up whatever they want.
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And some people put some really funny stuff.
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Some people put some very thought-provoking stuff.
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And some people put, you know, a phone number.
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But all it is, it's a public wall that everybody gets to ride on.
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So the Internet is dangerous in that regard, because you never know what that phone number or that portal or that link is going to take you to.
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It's a public restroom wall is all it is.
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It's a place for people to put stuff up.
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It's a bulletin board for people's ideas.
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But I've kind of gone off topic, because ultimately what I'm trying to say in this is we get at this moment to remember our blessings.
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And I like what Walter said earlier.
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Well, every day should be Thanksgiving because we remember our blessings every day.
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But God knows that we need times of remembrance.
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That's why we have communion.
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Do this in remembrance of me.
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Well, shouldn't you remember the gospel every day? Shouldn't you remember the blood and body of Jesus Christ every day? Yes, but there's going to be a time where you're going to put it right in your face and you're going to shove it in your mouth and you're going to remember what Jesus did.
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Because it's going to be that poignant and that real.
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And you're going to feel it in your mouth and you're going to say, this reminds me of something.
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The same way with Thanksgiving or any of these feasts.
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Each one of them was intended to remind them of something.
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And what does Thanksgiving remind us of? It reminds us of how good and gracious God has been.
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The first American Thanksgiving, a lot of people think, they get this picture of the Pilgrims and the Native Americans and they're sharing a feast.
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But the first recorded Thanksgiving took place in Virginia, 11 years before that scene that we all think about.
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It wasn't a feast either.
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The winter of 1610 at Jamestown had reduced 409 settlers to 60.
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Can you imagine the attrition rate from 409 people to 60? The survivors dying from disease and exposure prayed for help not knowing if it was going to come.
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And when it arrived in the form of a ship filled with food and supplies from England they held a prayer meeting and thanked God.
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And that's the first recorded Thanksgiving in America.
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That's what we do.
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We take a time, should be more than once a year, like I said, the Israelites had seven.
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But we take a time in the year and we say, you know what, God needs to be thanked.
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What do you do at your house? Do you sit around and everybody go around and say something they're thankful for? Tell you, when you have teenagers, that's tough.
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Because they don't want to do it.
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And Hope doesn't understand yet.
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What are you thankful for? Pokemon, I don't know, something silly.
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She doesn't quite get it yet.
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And JJ just wants what's on the table.
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He eats more than five, Hope's.
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Hope gives her her food.
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She doesn't eat very much and he just, I worry.
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But we do, before we eat, we always pray, of course, at every meal, but we pray specifically at the prayer of thanks.
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And we say, what are you thankful for this year? What are you thankful for in your life? And that's what this opportunity is.
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Should we do that every day? Yes, but this moment, just like the Israelites needed this moment, so too, we need moments of remembrance.
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Finally and fourthly, what went with every one of these seven things, and why I think this correlates to Thanksgiving, is every one of these had a feast that went with it.
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Notice, in God's economy, His holidays were always with a meal.
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Some of them had symbolism.
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You know, we have the Passover, the Seder, and it's all symbolic.
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The whole meal is symbolic.
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Well, some of them were like that.
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And we sit down at our Thanksgiving feast.
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We're reminded, again, of how many blessings that God has given to us.
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And we're reminded, you know, that the early Christians had, how many of you have heard of the agape feast? The agape feast, it was what the Christians had, it was their weekly meal.
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They shared a meal together every week, and that's when they did communion.
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They did communion, not as part of a worship service.
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They didn't have silver plate holders and little cups that were the size, just enough to get that wafer down.
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But they had bread and they had their wine that was there with the meal, and during the meal, they would stop and they would have this communion as part of what they were doing.
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And I think about that because in 1 Corinthians 11, the Apostle Paul challenges the church because by the time the Apostle Paul is writing 1 Corinthians, the church had been going now for a few years.
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By the time he writes to them, he says to them, you're not celebrating the Lord's Supper because you're being stingy, because some people were bringing food and they would hold it to themselves and they wouldn't share it with others, and some didn't have any food and others did have food and no one was being loving and generous with what they had.
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And the Apostle Paul was saying, how can you say you're having communion with one another if you don't care about each other's needs? That's the great thing about feasts.
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Because everyone gets fed.
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Or everyone should.
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You know, you bring the table and you invite people, maybe people that you're not used to having meals with.
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How many of you have meals at Thanksgiving with people you don't normally eat with? Crazy cousins and family that you might not normally like.
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Well, let me just give you a thought to end with.
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Each one of these feasts, it was a time for gathering, it was a time for Thanksgiving, it was a time for remembering, and it was a time for feasting.
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But in the feast, there was the community.
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It was an opportunity to show all of these things in a very physical, real way.
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This Thanksgiving, when you're sitting with your families, and maybe it's that cousin who voted a way you think is crazy or a sister-in-law who just loves something that you think is outrageous, this is an opportunity for you to express your faith in a very real, in a very non-necessarily, not confrontational way, but to simply say, I want to thank God for all that He has done in giving me this.
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And they might, pfft, God.
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They might not believe in God.
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They might not care about God.
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But this is an opportunity for us as the believer to look at this, everything that we've been given, and proclaim to the world, everything I have is because of Him.
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So I pray that your Thanksgivings will be well.
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I pray that you will, in your celebrations, enjoy your families and be a good witness to them, reminding them to whom and from whom all blessings come.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for this opportunity to study.
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I thank you for an opportunity to be reminded about Thanksgiving and our responsibility to give you thanks.
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I pray now as we go into worship that you would glorify yourself in our study.
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In Jesus' name, amen.