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How (And Why) To Celebrate Biblical Holidays This Spring · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  And one of the things I love that if you have some kind of tradition where you really experience that, I can't imagine a better way to articulate the gospel to your children. Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family.
• 0:29
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited about this one. Spring holidays. April, do you feel the spring in the air? Oh, spring is in the air. I am so excited. Yes. I can feel it. Yeah. Everybody's outside. The weather has changed. And, you know, one of the things that's a little bit odd about, I think, a lot of people's spiritual life is that as dramatic as these seasons are for those of us who are fortunate to live in places where there are seasons...
• 0:57
  And the way that God designed a spiritual journey for his people in Israel was around a lot of these seasonal changes. And so as things were changing, as things were going into the ground, there were spiritual lessons that would come out at the same times every year.
• 1:13
  Of course, we experience this a lot in the West through Christmas. Things are getting cold, dark, and all of a sudden all the lights go up, you know, on the houses. And we're like, whoa, this is so fun, so magical. So God designed that. God loves to create these annual magical moments that are shared as a family. And we don't get enough of that.
• 1:32
  And so one of the things we're going to like really zero in and those of you guys who are part of the Family Teams Accelerator, we are going into a whole month. The month of April is dedicated to the spring holidays. These amazing four festivals that are in scripture that talk about themes that come out every spring. So those holidays, April, do you know what those holidays are? I do. What are those holidays? Okay. Well, it starts with Passover.
• 2:02
  And very quickly after that comes unleavened bread and then first fruits. And then a little bit later than that comes Shavuot, 50 days later or seven weeks later. Shavuot, which a lot of times people also know it as Pentecost. Yeah. But the original in the Torah, it's called Shavuot.
• 2:28
  Yes. So those are the Toreic holidays. They're in the Bible. A lot of people think of them as the Jewish holidays, and they are celebrated by Jewish people. And we love that they're celebrated by Jewish people. However, they are in a Christian's Bible as well, and they are designed by God. And so there are things in there that I think a family can decide to mine for their own spiritual enrichment.
• 2:53
  We don't believe that we're required to celebrate holidays, any holidays. The Bible is really clear about that. Colossians 2 says, let no one judge you based on a holiday or a Sabbath day, a new moon festival, any of those things. And then Paul goes on to say, because they are just shadows of things to come and Christ himself is the reality. So we want to talk about how Christ is the reality of all four of these festivals that are coming up in the spring. There are Christian festivals right now, you know, we're, we're in the season of Lent,
• 3:21
  You go into the, there's Maundy Thursday, there's Good Friday, there's Easter, there's Pentecost, and various traditions celebrate around the Christian calendar these same things. However, we want to really understand that as a family, if one of the things you want to experience is these biblical holidays, in other words, holidays that are in Scripture and actually initially established by God in Leviticus,
• 3:46
  and then have been carried on by Jewish people, but are also an incorporated part of the way Christians have also celebrated over the centuries. How do you do that as a family? Is there a way to experience some of that? So we've been on a journey our whole lives trying to figure out how do we do this? Because ultimately what we're trying to figure out is how do you disciple your kids better? That's really what we want to talk about. This isn't about how to become more religious or more religious.
• 4:08
  This is a get to, not a have to, but is there a good reason that we want to say, wow, this is awesome. We want to get to do this. So we're going to dive into this in the accelerator. For those of you guys who aren't a part of that, if you want to jump in for this month, you can go to familyteams.com and click on the accelerator and join us. We're going to give you tons of content. There's a whole playbook around this. If you just want a freebie, go to familyteams.com slash Passover. And if you go to slash Passover, we'll give you a free one pager on how to really think through.
• 4:35
  designing a Passover that could really work for a family. But April, I'm curious for our family, what are some things that, when you think about our journey into this whole thing, what has that experience been like? Yes. Well, our story is perhaps a bit unique as we, Jeremy and I, met each other in Jerusalem doing a semester abroad. And we were there during the fall semester. And so we got to experience firsthand the fall festivals
• 5:03
  in Israel. And it was so experiential, such a big deal that it influenced us a lot. But today we're talking about the spring festivals, but we were first introduced to the fall festivals. And then I remember as our oldest child was probably like five or six, and Jeremy was really starting to, he was growing a lot in his fatherhood and learning how to lead in our home and started getting really feeling the pressure or the weight of...
• 5:30
  I have to steward these kids. I need to steward them well. There are so many things I want to impart to them, but how do I do it in such a way that they remember? And it isn't just like this religious, like I'm yelling at them all the time or giving them a bunch of rules to do or something like that. Like I wanted to do it in a experiential way, in a way that the kids would understand. So he started inventing all these holidays. He's like, ooh, let's celebrate. Let's make up a thing about like,
• 6:00
  We could call it, well, there actually is such a thing called Reformation Day, which happens to be on October 31st. And so he tried to make a big celebratory thing around that. And it was fun. We had a good time. But it kind of fell flat. And when the next year came around, we didn't really have the desire to do it. There was no one else even knew what we were talking about when we said Reformation Day. And, you know, it was just very, like, man-made, I guess you could say, a lot.
• 6:26
  A couple highlights, though, from our one practice of Reformation Day. One highlight was pin the 95 theses on the Wittenberg door. Yes. Do you remember the other one? The gummy worms? Because there's a thing called the Diet of Worms. Yes, the Diet of Worms.
• 6:46
  I think that's the technical moment when Luther was giving his defense. It was called the Diet of Worms. And the place called Worms or something. Anyway, so we've had a game where the gummy worms were buried in a pile of whipped cream and the kids had to, with their hands tied behind their back, bend down and try to pick the gummy worms out of the whipped cream. So we had a good time.
• 7:09
  Very meaningful, I would say. Very meaningful. There was a lot of meaning there. Yes. But then I remember him coming home one day and just having this glow on his face and this realization where he was like, God gave us a curriculum in the Bible that's an annual thing. It can last us all year long of ways that we can teach our kids the things that he thinks is important to pass on. And that's when we really started diving in. We. Yeah.
• 7:38
  celebrated passover multiple times and we have done passover and then sukho is one you probably heard us talk about a lot we do that every year without fail and have for probably about 20 years 16 20 years something like that so anyway the spring festivals i oftentimes can kind of get rolled into one because the first three are very close together in a time frame but i i really encourage people to
• 8:04
  Or something I experienced, which I think is phenomenal, is at first I was like, what are these? They're in Leviticus, of all things. Like, who really cares? And Passover has a lot of significance. You see them coming out of Egypt. But what is this unleavened bread? And what is this first fruits? I don't really...
• 8:22
  Shavuot is about the Holy Spirit. That's in the New Testament. Well, I'll tell you, year after year, as we've tried to press into these holidays, the way the Lord has used them to teach me things about himself, about the way he sees us, the things that he thinks is important that need to be celebrated or that need to be remembered or need to be focused on.
• 8:44
  and pass on to the children. It's a powerful, powerful tool that he gave us to do this. So it definitely has felt like a get-to for us. And now that our kids are adults and three of them are married and have their own households, we're in the season of having conversations with them about how they want to carry these things on. And I would say one of the reasons why I...
• 9:08
  You know, I'm sort of creative. I'm creative enough to create these holidays. And I was like, I could invent holidays and maybe we would, our kids would learn a lot. But there were several major downsides of inventing holidays. To me, the biggest downside that I was really concerned about was, are my kids going to do this with their kids? Or are they going to say...
• 9:33
  That was kind of weird. Dad was into that. I'm not into that. There's something about, you know, trying to establish something in one generation. You know, your kids might honor that memory, but it felt like it's going to peter out. Maybe the second generation will do it, but the third generation won't. And one of the things I began to believe was because these biblical holidays are rooted in something so much older, so much more rich, the soil in which they're planted is so much more ancient that I think our kids...
• 10:01
  They're going to tie into that deep root structure. And I think the chance that this will become multi-generational is so much higher. And that's absolutely proven to be true. I would say this transition from inventing holidays to restoring holidays is a really good move if you're concerned about multi-generational transmission, which is ultimately what we care about.
• 10:23
  We're going to be gone someday and our great grandchildren are going to need to also be discipled. They can be discipled through their grandmother, their great grandmother, great grandfather through the establishing of these traditions. And that's really our aim. We're aiming at those future generations. And so I was willing to forego all the fun of inventing holidays and restore holidays for that reason. So I really like this move that we've been making. So there are these seven holidays in Leviticus that were all a part of these traditions.
• 10:52
  movements or these, as you move through the year, you are experiencing these themes over and over and over again, and they're deepening your faith in all kinds of great ways. And so we're moving into this festival season of the spring. The thing that Paul says about the festivals is he says, their reality is Christ. Christ himself is the reality of all these festivals. And so April, I got another quiz question for you. How in the world is Christ the reality of these four
• 11:22
  Well, I'm no theologian, but I can share with you what I've experienced or what I've seen in Scripture. I think Passover is the clearest one, and perhaps it's the clearest because it's the most. The story is so long and drawn out in the Scripture that we have about the Exodus, the Jewish people being freed from their slavery in Egypt.
• 11:44
  being brought out into freedom through the miraculous events that took place to get them through Moses leadership out of their confinement. And the event that is the final straw that gets them kind of kicked out slash released
• 12:02
  from Egypt is this 10th plague of when God sends the angel of death through Egypt and kills the firstborn of every family. God gave the Jews a warning, the Israelites a warning and said that he was going to do this and said, there's a way for you to be saved from this, but you have to follow these instructions and give them instructions about how to kill a lamb and
• 12:27
  how long to have the lamb with them as a family, how to kill it, what to do with the blood, to put it over the doorposts of their house, and how to deal with the meat afterwards.
• 12:40
  and what to be wearing, and then to be prepared. Because that death angel was going to come to every single house in Egypt. But if blood had already been shed and put over the door, then they would be passed over. So we get the Passover word. And it's really significant when you realize that
• 13:03
  And fast forward, and when John the Baptist is baptizing, and he sees way off in the distance, he sees Jesus walking towards him, and he tells the crowd with him, Behold, look, it's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Oh my goodness, that's just such a chilling moment. Because of what we know through the Passover that they have been practicing all these years through this festival,
• 13:32
  Right. So the Passover lamb that John was pointing to, the Passover lamb that was being sacrificed for over a thousand years by the Jewish people, it was all prefiguring what Jesus was going to do. And one of the things I love about the blood on the doorposts is that if you have some kind of tradition in your Passover meal where you really experience that, I can't imagine a better way to articulate the gospel to your children.
• 13:59
  One of the things I always post on Passover is the Lord did not check who inside the house was worthy. He checked for the blood on the doorposts. So the whole gospel is being told through all the different ways that the Passover was designed to be done. And there was a prefiguring of the Passover. And then after the Passover has been fulfilled by Christ,
• 14:23
  He actually was crucified during the festival of Passover. And so we now look back at the fulfillment of what Christ did for us on Passover. There's so many of these elements already baked into the Passover. The second festival, the festival of Passover,
• 14:40
  unleavened bread, one of the ways to think about how did Jesus fulfill that Passover, we believe that Jesus fulfilled all four spring festivals during the festivals themselves. And then in the future, we believe all three fall festivals, Yom Tura, festival of trumpets, Yom Kippur, which is the festival of cleansing the temple or the dwelling of God, and then Sukkot, where God comes and dwells with us. We believe those are all going to be fulfilled in Christ's second coming.
• 15:05
  But in his first coming, the festival of unleavened bread is all about getting yeast out of your house so that God could come and dwell in your house. One of the things that we believe about the festival is really fulfilled in the burial of Jesus. Why do we celebrate the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ? Because the death was fulfilled in Passover. The burial was fulfilled in unleavened bread. He was buried without yeast.
• 15:24
  There was no sin in him. That is the reason why he didn't stay buried. He was buried without sin, without yeast, and therefore the resurrection, which literally happened on firstfruits. So firstfruits always happens on the Sunday after Passover. You have firstfruits just a couple days later, and Jesus was resurrected on firstfruits as the firstfruits of the resurrection. And then, of course, everyone knows on Acts 2, if you study scripture,
• 15:48
  that the festival of Pentecost was fulfilled, Shavuot was fulfilled, the Holy Spirit came on that holiday. Again, every holiday had a perfect reflection of its meaning in something that occurred in the New Testament. And so because they've been fulfilled, that's why we no longer have to, we're not stewarding the celebration of festivals in faith so that a future generation can recognize the movement of God. That was the purpose of the Jewish people
• 16:15
  celebrating these four festivals before Christ came. But after he's fulfilled them, they're no longer religious obligation. What they are now is a religious opportunity, right? They're a training opportunity for us to look back at the meaning of what these fulfillments actually demonstrate for us. And so that's kind of how we think about the different festivals.
• 16:34
  Yeah, and I think it is interesting that we've kind of, as Christians, lost the understanding that these do have their roots in the Torah, that the rich meaning and significance comes because they were given in the Torah for a reason, and then Jesus came to fulfill them.
• 16:50
  So we have all these Christian counterparts, these words like Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter, even Easter. And it's like the significance only goes deeper because we're realizing that Jesus is actually, he did do these things and that alone is amazing. But the significance is so much stronger if we understand what was actually happening becomes very epic. If we understand where the holidays originated. Yeah.
• 17:17
  Right. And one of these is interesting, you know, Maundy Thursday oftentimes is a place for churches that participate in that tradition. They really go through John 13 and they watch each other's feet. They kind of reenact a lot of things that happened in the Last Supper. And then Good Friday, of course, it was the actual day of the crucifixion. It's where we remember that.
• 17:37
  One of the things that happens when you celebrate a Passover is oftentimes you can incorporate some of these elements into that tradition. In the Jewish world, they have a kind of a booklet or a order of how they practice a Passover. It's called a Seder.
• 17:53
  The booklet is called a Haggadah. And oftentimes you can, there's different ways to think about a Haggadah. These, this sort of like booklet that walks you step-by-step through a Passover Seder. And there is Messianic Passover Haggadahs. You can go online and you can buy them.
• 18:09
  ones that are much closer to the way that Jewish people today celebrate Passover, incorporate a lot of elements that really reflect a faith in Christ as the Messiah. There's also a Passover in the Bible, and a lot of people don't even know this. I was very confused about this until fairly recently. I was listening to a person describe how odd the gospel of John is. And what they said is, they said, you know, you can never say the gospel of John is a
• 18:39
  The half of the gospel of John happened in one week, right? So nobody would ever write a biography and then sort of spend an entire half the book about one week of somebody's life. It's clearly trying to do something else. I got kind of scratched my head. I'm like, that is really interesting. And I was looking at the gospel of John. I was like, he's right. My gosh, this like half the half the gospel is one week of Christ's life. Like, why is this? And so one year I was reading through the gospel of John and I'm like,
• 19:04
  And then all of a sudden I saw that in starting chapter 13, Jesus begins the Passover. And then he has this meal. And then all of a sudden come this Q&A, the questions of the children and the responses of the father. I'm like, I've been through this before. I'm like, this is a Passover Haggadah. Like...
• 19:23
  John 13 through 17 is like exactly what was supposed to occur during a Passover, except for it's all very much being recorded and spontaneously described by the Apostle John. But what happens in a Passover is there's an incitement of a Q&A that happens between a father and the children.
• 19:40
  And so as you're reading through like John 14, John 15, Jesus is answering different questions posed by various ones of the disciples. And the responses are so interesting. And then it ends with this epic prayer. I think one of the most epic prayers in the Bible, John 17, where Jesus is praying for all of us.
• 19:58
  And so that's another Haggadah. You could just literally, we've done this many years, we'll just go through John 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 over the course of like a three or four hour dinner. And one of the elements of that is we will go outside and find a vine. We had neighbors who had one of the most, like a 20 year old, like a wisteria vine. And so we would
• 20:18
  When we got to John 15, we would always gather around the vine, look at the vine, like talk about the significance of what it means to be vine and branches and why Jesus made a big deal. Anyway, these are different ways you can use to celebrate this. And if you jump in the accelerator or if you go over to and want that one page guide, you can see different ways of like creating this kind of an event for your family. Like familyteams.com slash Passover is a one pager. I'd love for you guys to get a hold of that. But these are some ways that we've celebrated. April, any other memories from Passover that's sent out to you?
• 20:48
  Yeah, I do think that Passover is one of the potentially hardest things for the kids because it is such a long thing. We definitely started off doing just the really long haggadah that's four hours long and the kids have to sit still and it was hard for them. I think there are a lot of elements and ways that you can make it more interactive for the kids. So that's something I look forward to. It is very experiential. There are tastes, there are drinks, there are food.
• 21:14
  Like Jeremy said, there's the vine. There's these different things that you can do to be really great experiences for children as well. Yeah, there's the blood on the post. One of the ones I remember we did, I kept on trying to figure out, okay, how do we connect Passover and in the gospel to the resurrection? And so one of the years what we did was we had all the kids take these strips of white butcher paper and,
• 21:39
  And write sins on them that they've committed or that, you know, whatever, all black and like, you know, you know, it looks terrible. And so we had like 10 kids that night or something. And they put all of the, all of these sashes, these, these, like they made them into little sashes and put it all around one person. One of the kids covered with dark colors that are all about.
• 22:00
  sin that lists, you know, different kinds of sins. And so he was there and we just talked through the gospel and like what Jesus did on the cross and how he took our sins. And then we took all of those ashes off and buried them in a spot in the house in this really dark place in our basement. And then on Easter Sunday, we went down there, opened the box that all the sin was buried in. And guess what was there? Do you remember?
• 22:26
  There's these like strips of perfectly white linen or satin. Satin. Yeah, satin sashes. So it looked like kind of like those butcher paper ones, but they were perfectly white and they would wear those all day during Easter. So like, and because it's such an incredible opportunity to create an immersive experience for your kids in your house, through your family of the gospel.
• 22:51
  And that's, we even called for a while, we called our celebrations gospel week. I know it's typically called holy week, but I think I was so like, I so wanted my kids. It's not easy for kids to, who grew up in a Christian family who hear about Jesus all the time. It's, it's actually challenging. You know, they didn't have the testimony necessarily of like living in the world and, you know, experiencing sin and then coming out of sin and feeling all that freedom from sin that a lot of people that are first generation Christians get to experience.
• 23:18
  And so I think there's a different experience that we need to do. There's a different level of intentionality that parents need to have around training their children in the gospel. And it requires some creativity, right? It requires us to like actually think through how are we going to communicate that? And that's what these festivals or these holidays are so helpful because once a year you get to take a crack at really communicating the gospel in an experientially immersive way, in a way that your whole family, your kids can really see and understand.
• 23:46
  And you get to see their reactions, you know, like what, what is it when they are putting the blood on the doorposts or, you know, they're, they've got the handcuffs on. Or we have, if you look at the playbook and there's a bunch of examples in the playbook of how our friends, the Krutovs who actually wrote this month's playbook, because they've done such an incredible job of.
• 24:03
  being super creative with their kids. I mean, we were just blown away by, they have younger kids. And so we wanted you guys to have the experience of like seeing how a family with younger kids that are really, really creative, how they've figured this stuff out. And so they have examples for all the holidays. One of the play, the plays, the last play in the playbook for this month is actually around Shabuot. And we got to see some pictures of the Krutofs Shabuot. That was pretty awesome. What started out to you about the way they were doing it?
• 24:29
  Yeah, I think the Shavuot is so powerful because the original is the giving of the law. In the Torah, we see that it was significant because it was when God gave the law to Moses. And to translate that into what it became in Pentecost is like, what is this? How is this?
• 24:48
  Well, the receiving of the Holy Spirit, you know, he came in like wind and tongues of fire and the way the Krutafs celebrate by, I don't know exactly what they use, but some kind of powder. Yeah, colored powder. So you can see the wind.
• 25:02
  colored powder that gets released with a fan or something like that. And so you can see the wind and everyone gets it all over their clothes and that's part of the game and it's like in their hair and all this stuff. But it's like you can see the effects of the wind and it's so powerful for the kids to very experiential to be able to remember, you know, as I can just imagine as they get older that those things really stick with them.
• 25:25
  Yeah, man, such cool Instagram worthy pictures. They're pictures of these clouds of powder. It was like, oh my gosh, I'd never forget that if I were a kid seeing a scene like that. And one of the things that they did that was really creative was something like during their dinner. So they're talking about a Pentecost or Shavuot is the transition from the law to the spirit. So they would start with the law and they would have they have like these 10 laws that they had to follow during dinner.
• 25:54
  napkin time. If you didn't say napkin time, then you have to take one of your lambs. They got like a bunch of lambs stickers and you lost, you know, one of your, and so they, they experienced like this transition from the law to the guidance of the Holy spirit. Um, there's a lot more details how they do that. And it's there in the, in the playbook, but anyway.
• 26:13
  I'm so, so glad that, you know, we're getting to just stir up like, like creative traditions for families. We think so much, we outsource so much of this to like VBS or the church's children's program or whatever. And it's like, man, some of this stuff really in your house as a family and then.
• 26:33
  establishing it multi-generationally. It's so cool. One of the things that, one of the reasons we are excited to do this also, some people are a little nervous because they're like, oh, aren't these Jewish holidays? But one of the things that my friend Mark Tiderman said that just really struck me is he said, for thousands of years, the Jews have been celebrating these festivals and they've been enjoying these festivals without Christ. They've kept the feasts without Christ. And for the last 2000 years, Christians have
• 26:58
  have remembered Christ, but haven't celebrated the festivals. What if they came together, right? What if the holidays were actually designed to help unite Jews and Gentiles in some way, and also then reflect back to the Jewish people, the essence of why Jesus is the Messiah, man.
• 27:16
  Such a beautiful picture. And so we love getting a chance to celebrate these things. So if you're interested in that, again, go to familyteams.com, jump in the Accelerator for this month, and we'll give you the playbook. We have lots more content. The Crew Tops, we've mentioned, they're going to be on the podcast next week. We're going to go deep into some of their traditions. They're also going to be our community coaches. And so they're going to be doing the Zoom call for the Accelerator for the month of April. So if you want to ask them the questions, Brent and Katie are awesome what they've done.
• 27:43
  And then we're going to also have a town hall with our kids. And so you can hear about all of our war stories for how we've done some of these traditions. But yeah, we're excited to jump in and help you guys in any way, like get any kind of tradition established that will present the gospel to your kids. So April, thanks for jumping on here today.
• 28:02
  Absolutely. Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.