Thank you for joining Alan Jackson Ministries. It's understanding who we worship and that worship is the center of our lives, not music, honoring God. Worship is about giving honor to God, respect to God, reverence to God. We shouldn't need vocalists and a band to worship the Lord. When we're together with other like-minded people, you should have to say, you know, you're all going to stop for a little while, we need to read the word.
We should be so filled with gratitude for what God is doing, or we could be so filled. It's our strength. We enter His gates with thanksgiving, His courts with praise.
Our ministry is to spread God's truth across our nation and around our world. And Alan Jackson Ministries intends to do this in every possible way, including broadcasts like these. If you'd like to listen to the full sermon, you can find it right now on AlanJackson.com on our podcast and on our app.
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Taking time to notice the good things and giving thanks for them is a consistent way to find hope and peace. That's why Pastor Allen recommends keeping a good news list, taking the time to write down the good things happening in the world and your life. Our new 52-week Good News notebook gives you a place to record your good news, prayers you saw God answer, and your current prayer requests. This simple practice will help you see how God is constantly at work all around you.
Request your good news notebook when you donate $20 or more today at alanjaxon.com or by calling 855-5772255. That's 855-5772255. We're so glad you're here to listen. Today's message from Pastor Allen is called the importance of community life values experiences. Kind of a unique opportunity I think to have service on New Year's Eve. It just felt like a
little bit of a unique window to me. So my topic for this session is really the importance of community. It's the life together, the values we share together, the experiences we have together. I want to talk mostly about holidays. But this whole lesson started in my heart a few days ago. Somebody shared something with me. I didn't hear it from the participants themselves, so this is second hand.
But the person that shared it with me is trustworthy and not given to embellishment. But it was about a mom in our church. Now, I've known the family. I've known the moms since before they were married. They have a couple of elementary-age children now. So I have known them for a while.
And this was what was passed along to me. The mom had brought the two children to campus to skate, and they had registered and done all the things, and had already checked in and gotten their name tags, and they were good to go. But there was a line of people that weren't going to be able to get on. It's full. There's some limits to how many people we could put on the ice safely. And there was going to be an hour and a half wait, and some of the people in line had driven quite a distance. And this is what was related to me, that the mom pulled her two children aside and said, you know, we lived just down the street.
And several of these other children won't get to skate if they have to wait an hour and a half. They have too long a drive to go back home. So wouldn't it be nice if we gave them our place? We can come skate any day. Wow. Let me tell you the calls I get most of the time. Pastor, we're out here and we weren't registered.
But we've been in the church since Jesus was here. And we know that you can call somebody or tell somebody and move us to the head of the line. I didn't mention your name, you're good. So if you won't turn red, nobody will know you called. But I thought it was such a wonderful, what really captured my heart was the mom's desire to see the character of her children formed.
You know, skating or activities are way secondary to what's happening in their lives. We had, oh, we have six hours of prayer today and hour blocks and hundreds of people came to campus, but I encourage the families to bring their children. If their children are old enough to read, they were old enough to be a part of that, folks. We've got to let our faith, our children have to see our faith in our lives.
You can't just drag them to church and dump them in a Sunday school class and imagine that you have shown them Christianity matters to you. If you spend more time with them at a ball field or in dance recitals or in some other extracurricular activity than you do letting them see you express your faith, they're not going to imagine it's the primary part of your life, appropriately so.
So it's just been living in me for days. I haven't even had a chance to see the parents shit. I look forward, I wanna give them a hug. But that brought me back to this lesson and I wanna start out with holidays and it's really a, the word holiday is a compilation of the notion of holy days. The most valuable holidays on our calendar are holy days. Christmas is a holy day.
And so when we talk about holidays, we really need to think about it. I'm going to suggest to you around the place of faith and what it means to have a faith-filled celebration or if you prefer even an observation because holy days are about observing what God has done.
So when it comes to holy days or holidays, if you'll allow me, I wanna suggest we would like to begin to think of them in terms of what would it look like to honor God on that day? Or in that season? We're pretty quick to decry a culture that is plummeting into paganism. But I'm not angry with the ungodly or the immoral or the pagans, I expect them to wanna redefine marriage to suit their impulse of the moment.
The response to that or the prevention to that would come from the church being light and salt. And the only way that darkness can grow intense is the light is small and the salt has lost its saltiness. So this discussion around holidays, I want to submit that we can bring our faith to bear in some new ways.
Let's stop saying that they've taken down the nativity scene from the public square, and let Christ become so real in us that we just take Him everywhere we go. So that's really the target, and I thought starting, it's our New Year's Eve, so it's a holiday. And I want to commend you for being in church as a part of celebration. We built a prayer time today on purpose.
I made the selection for the day and the time. The question around doing it had come up. I said, well, if we're going to do it, let's do it on Saturday afternoon, New Year's Eve, while the college football playoff is going. We asked for a 45-minute commitment for a time of prayer.
And I believe God is worthy of that. And I'm happy to report hundreds of people participated on campus. I don't have the numbers yet how many participated with us digitally in other places, but I can tell you Wednesday night when we prayed, we prayed for South Africa and for Ukraine and the pastors there. One of those pastors sent me a text that night and said we were watching the live stream. Thank you for praying for us. So we've got to lose the imagination.
Then we're isolated by our walls. But I lived in Israel for a while. Well, we studied at Hebrew University and I had to learn new holidays. It's a Jewish, it's a secular Jewish state. It's not a religious state. You know, one of the questions through the ages is what makes you Jewish. And that has really varied depending on the circumstances of the Jewish people.
You know, at one point in the unfolding story of the Bible, to be Jewish meant you lived in the land of Israel and you worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So it was about location. But when the Jewish people were exiled and then the sacrifices could no longer be offered and the temple was destroyed, how did you understand your Jewishness? Then it became about dissent. It was about your DNA. And then there's the Jewish religion
So it's a more complex question. In Israel, modern day Israel is a secular Jewish state, which means there are some people there who have a great faithfulness to the Lord, and there's some people there who have hearts a long way away from him. Tel Aviv is the gay capital of Europe, second largest city in Israel. But their holidays are different.
And the Jewish New Year, the Jewish community doesn't follow the same calendar that we do. We're on a solar calendar, the earth's rotation around the sun. The Jewish community follows a lunar calendar, which is slightly different. And so their calendar dates are different and their New Year's celebration is different. Their New Year's celebration in 2023 will be in September. And the Jewish New Year's celebration is called Rosh Hashanah.
It's at the beginning of their high holy days. In our calendar, it's in the beginning of that fall window, usually somewhere in the middle of September towards the end of that. And Rosh Hashanah is followed by Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, which is the holiest day of the year in Israel. And Yom Kippur is a sombre day. It's a sober day, the nation fasts.
Even the secular portions of the nation will at least in public fast. There's no food available. I mean, the restaurants are closed, the stores are closed. For many years, we would travel to Israel for the portion of the high holy days. And I was there one year for Yom Kippur, and I hadn't been there when we were staying in hotels.
I'd lived there through that, but I thought, and we were staying in a lovely hotel, I thought, well, there'll be some food available for the guayim, the non-Jews. Was I wrong? And not everybody traveling with me wanted to observe Yom Kippur. So we had to find someplace other than a Jewish establishment in order to get some groceries. I mean, there weren't crackers.
So Yom Kippur, and then that's followed for the High Holy Days by Sukkot, which is the Feast of Tabernacles. And the Feast of Tabernacles is an annual celebration remembering the time through the wilderness when they lived in the Tabernacles. They didn't have homes yet. They were moving from Egypt to Israel.
And if you're in Jerusalem, you'll see on all the patios, and even in the restaurants, they'll make a sukkah. They'll take pomfrons, and we've together a roof, and they'll decorate them with lights and some special elements. It looks a little bit like Christmas decorations. And the families, a lot of times, will eat their evening meals in the sukkahs. And the children will even sleep in them. During Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, they're commanded to be happy.
I mean, it's a happy holiday. The Jewish community comes from all over the world. It's a fun time to be in Israel. There's a lot of, and it's not a fun time trying to get any work done, because everything's closed. And you have to, you need the leading of the Holy Spirit to know what's gonna be open when. But then the high holy days come to a conclusion with Simchat Torah. It's when they complete the reading of the Torah in the synagogue.
And that evening, the families in the neighborhood synagogues are typically neighborhood-based, not exclusively, but often. And in the neighborhoods, they'll bring the Torah scrolls out of the synagogue into the streets. Because they finished the reading cycle for the year, and they'll begin the next day with another reading cycle, like we're gonna begin tomorrow with our reading plan for our Bibles. And they'll literally dance in the streets with their Torah scrolls. It's a wonderful time of year.
And some observe it from a very secular perspective and some observe it from a very faith-filled perspective. There's a great deal of diversity in how they celebrate, but the whole nation pauses to celebrate. Holy days.
They all have very real connections to their story as a people. And I want to suggest to you that the church, God's people, the community of faith in our culture, has a role in seeing that holidays are more holy days than they are anything else. Thank you for listening to Alan Jackson Ministries. We'll be back to the message in just a moment. But first, Pastor Allen wants to tell you about a new resource from the ministry.
You know, the two most critical junctures of any enterprise are how we begin and how we conclude. So the beginning of a new year is a tremendous opportunity. We've prepared a tool we want to share with you. It's a good news journal. We want to help you set a habit this year to do something with a bit more intention than perhaps has been our pattern in the past.
We want to start our year with an attitude of appreciation and gratitude for the blessings of God in our lives. So we've designed this journal so that you can use it as a part of your devotional. It's something you could include the children, the grandchildren. You can take it to work and create a good news journal for the people you work with.
Wherever that may be, let's start our year out purposefully, intentionally, saying thank you to the Lord for His goodness to us. I know there's challenges and we have places where we need God's help, but we're gonna begin with gratitude and walk into the blessings of God in this year. I think you'll enjoy the journal. God bless.
a warm home when it's cold outside, a surgeon who knows how to fix what's wrong, a stranger who stops to help. We have so much to be thankful for. When we turn our focus away from what's wrong with the world, and instead give attention to what's good, we find a path towards hope and peace.
That's why we created our 52-week Good News notebook. It gives you a place to record good news in your life and the world around you. You can also write down prayers God answered and your current prayer requests. Over time, your Good News notebook will become a personal record of God's faithfulness to you.
Request yours when you donate $20 or more today at EllenJackson.com or by calling 855-5772255. That's 855-5772255. Now, let's get back to Pastor Allen with his message called, The Importance of Community, Life, Values, Experiences. From the Exodus to the tabernacle when they escaped Egypt, the beginning of the sights and sound of worship to me are all wrapped up in that Exodus narrative, the plagues.
The fear, the hush that would come over the community. Moses has said, what? We're making bricks with no straw. Somebody shut him up. He's gonna get us all killed. The first signs were frustration and not understanding and anxiety. And this isn't working. And who does he think he is and why did we ever listen to him? And then the plagues began. And before they're done, the plagues aren't bothering the Hebrews, but they're decimating Egypt.
and you hear the cries of the Egyptians and I suspect a rather eerie silence over the Hebrews. And so you get to pass overnight and death comes through the land and the whales, the fear, the abject terror. Can you imagine if the first born in every home died tonight? What the emotions would be in the morning? And then the sound of the red sea parting.
You think they ever forgot that? Don't you think they told that story a few times around the fire? What did you think when you heard it? I promise it wasn't on mute. The sound on the water collapsed on the Egyptians. They celebrated. They had suffered so long when the Egyptians drowned. They danced. The chariots are floating in the water and they're dancing. Miriam, the women are dancing.
And in 72 hours, they're at Mara. It means bitter. They came to an oasis and they couldn't drink the water. So they said, we should have stayed in Egypt. They still got mud on their sandals from crossing the Red Sea. We should have stayed in Egypt. They get a tabernacle and they have to learn to worship and what it means.
Then they get a temple eventually, but that's gonna be hundreds of years down the road. But a part of that journey were the sights and the sounds of worship. And we've got to gain some traction on this. It isn't about style. It's understanding who we worship. And that worship is the center of our lives, not music, honoring God.
Worship is about giving honor to God, respect to God, reverence to God. We shouldn't need vocalist and a band to worship the Lord. We're together with other like-minded people. You should have to say, you know, y'all are going to stop for a little while. We need to read the word. We should be so filled with gratitude for what God is doing, or we could be so filled. It's our strength. We enter as gates with Thanksgiving as courts with praise.
Psalm 81 3 says, sound the ram's horn at the new moon. And when the moon is full on the day of our feasts, the ram's horn is the so far. Someone gave me this one as a gift. I just brought it so you could see it. I don't intend to try to blow it. My lungs are better this week. I'm not going to rupture one. If you know how to blow it so far and you do it well, it sounds like you're choking a goat.
If you don't know what you're doing, it sounds like the goat is choking you. And because I've spent a lot of time in Israel and amongst the Christian community that loves Israel, I've seen many, many variations on sofars and services. It's just a general rule. When I see somebody with a so far in a holster,
looking for an opportunity to call God's people. I think if it phrased, my grandfather taught me, big hat, no cattle. You see, we don't need something to draw attention to ourselves. The point of worship is to bring our attention to the Lord. I think what is helpful for you to understand is that the so far was used for many things.
It was a signal that it was a new moon. We're turning the calendar again. When Herod built the magnificent temple in Jerusalem, the one that was there in Jesus' day, one of the corners of the temple was the place of trumpeting where they could blow the shofar as a signal for the whole community to know it was the beginning of a holiday or a new moon or a Sabbath. And the way we would send out a group text or an amber alert
It was a means of communication. They were used in battle when Joshua and the crew walked around Jericho for seven days. At the end of the seventh day, it said the priests were to blow the shofar and the people were to shout. So I don't think we think of worship as a conflict that brings victory over our enemies. So don't get caught up in trying to be unique. God is the one who's unique.
I want you to know what the so far is, but you don't need a goat horn to worship the Lord. Now, if it's a part of their culture and they're, yeah, I got that, but my time is gone. I brought you some prayers. I think it's important. Next session, God willing, we're going to look at Zechariah and Malachi because we just finished that.
But I like to read through the book of Psalms and you can do it as a part of a monthly routine. And so I was going through the end of the book of Psalms this morning. And some of the statements there were such amazing proclamations and prayers. I just wanted to bring them to you tonight. I was looking forward to kind of a holiday gathering with you. And I wanted to give you some proclamations and prayers that you could take away to begin the new year.
We'll say them together, but let me read Psalm 141, but my eyes are fixed on you, O Sovereign Lord. And you I take refuge, do not give me over to death. Keep me from the snares. They have laid for me from the traps set by evildoers. Let the wicked fall into their own nets while I pass by in safety. I like that as a proclamation over my life.
Now when you take your voice and say what God's word says about you, you give it spiritual authority in your life. Can we make that proclamation together?
Let's read it together. Psalm 141, eight to 10. But my eyes are fixed on you, O sovereign Lord. In you I take refuge. Do not give me over to death. Keep me from the snares they have laid for me, from the traps set by evildoers. Let the wicked fall into their own nets while I pass by in safety. Who I like that for 2023.
And in Psalm 143, there's a little bit of a guide to refresh. If you ever get tired or worn down, you know how to restore yourself physically, or if you get the symptoms of the cold, what do you need to do? You want a little bit of zinc, you want your vitamin C? What would you do spiritually to be refreshed? Well, Psalm 143 says, I remember the days of long ago. I meditate on all your works, and I consider what your hands have done. That's the Psalmist language for a good news list.
I spread out my hands to you and my soul thirst for you like a parched land. Some of you come from traditions where doing this in church would be like almost obscene. So you don't have to do that here. Do this at home. Good luck yourself in the bathroom. And say, Lord, I'm not ready to do this out there where they can see me yet. Why would you do that? Well, it says I spread out my hands to you.
So it's just a guide to refreshing. How about if we offer that as a prayer to the Lord? You read it with me? Psalm 143, five and six. I remember the days of long ago. I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done. I spread out my hands to you, my soul thirst for you like a parched land.
And in Psalm 144, there's a wonderful prayer for families, for the children especially, I thought, just let our sons and their youth be as grown up plants. And our daughters as corner pillars fashioned as for a palace. I like that. We're different. We're not all the same, but it's really not that confusing. And God has roles for all of us.
Let our garners, that word we don't use a lot, you can put barn in there, it's the same. Some of the translations do. Let our barns be full, furnishing every kind of produce. And our flocks bring four thousands and ten thousands in our fields. Let our cattle bear without mishap and without loss. Let there be no outcry in our streets.
How blessed are the people who are so situated. How blessed are the people whose God is the Lord. Our new 52-week Good News notebook gives you a place to record the good things God is doing in your life and the world around you. Write down prayers you saw God answer in your current prayer requests. When you keep these lists consistently, you'll create a personal record of God's faithfulness.
Request your good news notebook when you donate $20 or more today at alanjaxon.com or by calling 855-5772255. That's 855-5772255. That's all for today on Alan Jackson Ministries. Thanks for listening. Tune in next time for another encouraging message. This program is sponsored by Alan Jackson Ministries.
