Jeff:
Today, we’re talking about celebrating the Festivals of Faith. I love this conversation. I love this topic. I want Jeremy to speak mostly on this from experience and wisdom but one thing I’ll say, which is interesting, is I bet if you’re listening, if you’re a common Western Protestant, Christian, talking about the biblical holidays probably made you either cringe or immediately put on your skeptical glasses, right. And you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know about that. That seems allistic. That seems this.”

Right. And the first thing before Jeremy talks that I’ll say is, do we realize how non-consistent that is with our own holidays, right? Just that feeling alone, you just maybe had is interesting because we never even do that with our own holidays, right. We embrace Christmas and Easter and all these other holidays without even thinking twice, manmade ones but yet we’re all of a sudden skeptical the minute it’s actually from the Bible. Doesn’t that seem weird to anyone else? That seems weird to me but yeah. Jeremy, what would you say about this?

Jeremy:
Yeah. Do you have to celebrate the biblical holidays? No, you do not. It’s very clear in the New Testament. You don’t have to. Paul says that in Colossians chapter 2, “Let no one judge you according to what days you keep.”

And you don’t have to celebrate cultural holidays or Christian holidays either. However, I love this conversation because one of the things that I’m constantly asking as a father, is how might I better immerse my kids in the story? What tools am I given to help story my children so that they will have faith in the gospel? And man, holidays are awesome at this. This is what they are for. And so I just find this as a tool that I find irresistible. And it’s interesting, Paul did say in Colossians 2, “Don’t let anybody judge you based on a holiday.”

But we know he celebrated holidays. And even with the Gentile churches, about them celebrating holidays. In 1 Corinthians 5, he says to them, “Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed for us. Let us celebrate the festival. Not with old bread of wickedness and evil but with the new bread of sincerity and truth.”

And so I have an assignment for you guys. I think it’s important as fathers that you just get to know your father’s curriculum for training his people in faith. And that is these holidays, right. You can look at any of them. If people are skeptical, I always tell people, “Start with the festival of Sukkot.”

Most people don’t know about that one. They might have heard about Passover. And Passover is a little bit more of a somber holiday. Sukkot is just awesome, immersive fun.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Jeremy:
And so it’s a holiday where one time a year, fathers are told to take their kids out of their house and to build a little hut and then point back at their house and say, “That is not our home.”

Remember, our identity is we are sojourners on the earth. We are walking in faith. And so we will not be held captive by material things. Our faith is in the Lord alone and we are on a journey of faith to the new Jerusalem. And man, I can’t imagine a more exciting thing to celebrate than that. And so we’ve been celebrating this for over a decade. And it’s been such an incredible part of our family’s life.

I just want people to be aware that when God was crafting these holidays in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, he made them immersive. He made them full of meaning and he made them all very fun. And they all have some really amazing, fun elements. And so there are seven holidays there in the Torah. Don’t read them all and try to do them all in one year because you will overwhelm yourself but oftentimes people will complain all the time about, “Man, holidays are so commercialized and … “

Guess what, Hallmark has not gotten a hold of any of these holidays, as far as I know. If they have, it’s not gotten to me. They’re all based on what we believe in. They’re all centered on the person of Jesus. And so it’s really exciting to learn these things. And so we’re not going to be able to unpack the meaning of all these holidays to you guys. We maybe will in subsequent podcasts but I just want to overall say man, I love the fact that God, as a father, designed holidays. You can design holidays if you’d like. You can take the ones from our culture and redeem those. And we do a lot of that in our family. You can take the ones from the Bible and really experience the meaning that comes from those. We’ve done a lot of that in our family. And so these are all great. And I love the fact that holidays are a place where we story our children and we get to experience immersive fun, meaning, as a full family.