Don't Settle

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. How many of you are from a snowy, cold kind of environment? And that's what you grew up as a child with that kind of a Christmas. It can be a little kind of a juxtaposition of things here in Florida during Christmas time that just feels kind of odd, doesn't it? Yeah. The Christmas I grew up with was always one where it was cold, long, dark nights, snow, hot chocolate, cold feet bundling up and snuggling by a fire, none of which, by the way, has anything to do with the original Christmas any more than Frosty or Olaf or Rudolph, okay? None of that. And yet, we associate all this stuff with Christmas. And one of my favorite Christmas carols, it goes, in a bleak midwinter, frosty, wind, and cold, none of which that first line, can we be sure, was true of the first Christmas. Was it in winter? I don't know. In fact, we think probably with the shepherds on the hills, with the sheep, according to Luke 2, it might have been springtime, because that's when the hills were the greenest in Palestine and Israel. And frosty, wind, and cold, Bethlehem didn't get a lot of frost or cold. And so I still love the carol. We'll sing it. It's got a great message in the end. You just have to realize what you have to separate out. And so we're looking, in fact, at how Christmas is more a little fitting in with the climate and culture of Florida than you'd ever imagine the real one. And we're going to be looking at a Florida Christmas today. The text that we're looking at and the whole message is going to be on palm trees and promises, okay? Because you can find palm trees in the Bible a lot more in the promises of God than you can anything else. And of all things, we're going to be reading from the book of Leviticus. I've never preached on the book of Leviticus. Have you read the book of Leviticus? You have. Good for you. It's a tough one to get through. It is tough. It's full with a lot of rituals and laws and things, right? But there are some great messages in it, and I'm learning more as I'm growing to understand what's going on. And hopefully today we will be looking at the festival called Sukkoth or tabernacles or booths or I think it should be camping. Let's go camping because that's really what was going on. So Leviticus 23, on the 15th day of the seventh month, now you will notice a lot of sevens in this text. When you have gathered in the produce of your land, you shall celebrate the feast of the Lord seven days. And on the first day shall be a solemn rest, and on the eighth day, another seven, shall be a solemn rest. And you shall take on the first day the fruit of splendid trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. It is a statute forever through your generations. You shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. That word booth that's translated here in the ESV is the word Sukkoth in Hebrew, which means either a kind of a tent-like structure with, and here, branches on the top kind of as a roof for that structure. So what is it? You may have never heard of this festival before because, well, we're immersed not so much in the story of the Bible as much as in the story of today in modernity. You probably know more about the Beatles than the Beatitudes, okay? I understand. And I have a feeling there's a few people here who quote more Taylor Swift lyrics than psalms right now. Maybe, maybe not. No? Good for you. Do we have any Swifties here? It's okay if you are. It's not, not, not, not terrible. But you are Swifties? I'll tell you this though, she's not the Messiah, okay? Let's just get this. I mean, people scrambling over the tickets for the Tampa concerts, oh my gosh, you can't believe some of the students and how they were just so focused on that for days. But anyways, getting, what? Carrie Underwood, oh my goodness, okay. So Sukkoth, it's, did you know this? It is the seventh of seven festivals that in the Jewish year that were supposed to be celebrated. And it was celebrated in the seventh month and it lasts seven days. And each family in Israel was to make a tent, more or less, with a canopy of palm branches, maybe a few others on the time. And then they were supposed to camp out for seven days to remind them how God had tented with them, tabernacled with them, been present with them, and provided, in a sense, a little Eden, a little garden, even in the midst of the desert for those 40 years, and how he was present with them. So Israel would go back and look back, and then Israel would look forward, and then Israel wouldn't settle. That's what Sukkoth i...