Thanksgiving and the Original American Vision - History Talks

Hey, I'm Pastor Steve Hole.

I want to empower you today to walk in your true identity as a worshiper and warrior.

Today, embrace the power of God's Word and the Holy Spirit.

Welcome to the Born for War podcast.

Okay, we're gonna do something a little different today.

We're not gonna be in the book of Romans.

We're gonna be looking at Thanksgiving and the history of the roots of our nation.

And if you have your Bible, turn to Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

And this was the seminal passage that guided the pilgrims as well as the Puritans in their calling to come to America.

Now the Lord had said to Abram, Get out of your country from your family and from your father's house to a land that I will show you.

I'll make you a great nation.

I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.

I'll bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

So I'm gonna talk about the pilgrims today rather than the Puritans, because I talked about the Puritans a couple years ago, both of which are really, really vital and really important in our understanding of the founding of America.

But I want to go back a hundred years.

I'm gonna go back to the 1400s and look at Christopher Columbus.

Christopher means Christ bearer, and Christopher Columbus, you may not know this from a revisionist historians, was actually a pretty devout Christian.

At least in the initial days he was.

Now, a lot can be said about where his endeavors eventually took him, but at least in the early days, he felt called to go to the New World because of his own faith.

So he was a part of a group called the Order of Penance, which was of the Franciscan Order, the order of St.

Francis in the Roman Catholic Church.

And when he went before the monarchy in Spain, his conviction was the propagation of the gospel and that the Christian message would go forth into the new world.

So he wrote in his journal.

I could feel his hand upon me.

The fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies.

All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me.

There's no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because he comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures.

I am a most unworthy sinner, but I have cried out to the Lord for grace and mercy.

And they have covered me completely.

I have found the sweetest consolation since I made it my whole purpose to enjoy his marvelous presence.

For the execution of the journey to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics, or maps.

It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied.

No one should fear to undertake any task in the name of the Savior if it is just and if the intention is purely for his holy service.

So in 1492, as you know, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

If you remember that from your history in elementary school, he discovered the Indies, which would be now the present-day Bahamas.

And it was there that he started with his mission.

Now, I'm not going to talk much more about Columbus.

Columbus's further expeditions were full of greed and the search for goal rather than God.

But at least the initial days and the initial first discovery, this would be what we have of Christopher Columbus.

Now, move a hundred years later, and it's April of 1607.

April 1607, a fleet of three ships settled in Chesapeake Bay.

The settlers sailed up a river they named James after the king of England, and in May established a settlement called Jamestown.

Now, what would be interesting to do in the future, and we could probably even do it now, you'll get at least a glimpse of it this morning, is to look at the vision and values of Jamestown and look at the vision and values of Plymouth.

And you're going to get a little bit of a picture of it here without me endeavoring to go too far into it.

But Jamestown was about greed and not about God.

Jamestown, the people of Jamestown, the makeup of the team was problematic.

Because even within the group that settled on the three ships that came into the James River, where they decided to settle was a malaria-infested, contaminated river, which they called the St.

James River.

They treated the Indians with contempt, paid dearly with hostile attacks.

But one of the biggest problems about Jamestown was the communal system.

So everything went into a common store.

Everything that they touched basically failed.

And it took 19 years before Jamestown had its first crop.

Now here's what's interesting.

If you follow Jamestown, like if you could just imagine with me a map of the United States of America, Jamestown, there, if we were to plot Jamestown in Virginia, straight across to the especially the southern part of the country, you could write on that line slavery.

Slavery kind of came out of the vision of Jamestown.

Now with Plymouth, which we're going to go to in just a second, we could plot freedom.

Two different settlements, two different visions, two different moral codes.

The character of Jamestown, I would put it into three, I would say three things about the character of Jamestown.

First is greed.

Number two is class systems.

And number three is racial injustice.

So under class system, what I mean is that even within the rubric of the group at Jamestown, you had your upper middle class to upper class, and then you had your lower class.

And one of the reasons they were unable to have a successful crop was the upper class expected the lower class to do all the work for them and they didn't do anything.

Which was very similar to England at that time.

And we'll see that there's a big difference with uh with Plymouth.

And then when I say racial injustice, the way they treated the Indians.

They were cruel, they were mean-spirited, and they cheated the Indians out of anything that they could cheat them out of, and so they were constantly under hostile attack.

Well, at the same time as Jamestown, there's two movements happening in England.

The first, we'll call the Puritan movement, was based out of, tended to be upper, middle class to upper class people who were a part of the Church of England and who believed in Christ, had a relationship with God and the Bible, and they loved the Lord.

Some of our great writings came from the Puritans, but they believed that you could purify the Church of England.

So they stayed within the Church of England systems.

They stayed within the Church of England organizationally.

A lot of your parliament, probably most of your parliament, would have been what we call Puritans today.

Those who had a faith in Christ.

William Wilberforce, you know, a hundred years later, would be an example of a Puritan.

The teachings and the and the writings of the Puritans have affected our country amazingly.

Jonathan Edwards in the first Great Awakening was a Puritan, came out of the ancestry of the Puritans.

So that's one group, and I've taught on them before.

But there was another group that chose to separate from the Church of England, felt like that the Church of England was too far gone, it was heretical, the formalism was, it made the church so dead that they separated and started their own independent churches, and we called them separatists.

And that's what I'm going to talk about today.

The separatists who were the first to found America on the principles of Christian religion or Christian faith.

So the separatists believed that there was no hope in the Church of England.

So they were maligned, they were hunted down, they were persecuted, they lost their jobs, and many of them even lost their lives.

So this group out of Scrooby, England, decided to move to Leyton, Holland.

And so for 11 years they lived in Leighton, Holland, but because of the school system there and the way in which there were no child labor laws, there were no child labor laws in England either.

But especially in Holland, the kids were not getting an education.

They were being worked literally to death, so they moved back to England.

And it was at that time, as a church, that they began to investigate and consider and pray about the possibility of taking a ship, paying for a ship, to go to the New World.

The separatists are what we classically call the pilgrims.

John Robinson, the pastor of the group, wrote at this time, now, as the people of God in olden times were called out of Babylon civil, the place of their bodily bondage, and were to come to Jerusalem and there to build the Lord's temple or tabernacle, so are the people of God now to go out of Babylon spiritual to Jerusalem and to build themselves a lively stones into a spiritual house or temple for the Lord to dwell in.

When you study the Puritans, the pilgrims, and other Christian movements in the 17th century, you constantly read about the idea of the New World being the New Jerusalem or the New Israel.

So this is some of that classic writing.

So in 1620, 35 pilgrims along with 66 others boarded the Mayflower in Plymouth, England, and set sail for the New World.

That day was declared a day of fasting and prayer, and their leader, John Robinson, admonished them as following.

Very interesting that he uses the term civil government, and that'll become more clear as we go along.

And are not furnished with any persons of special eminency above the rest.

So already, on two fronts, just in the first sentence, they're setting themselves in contrast to Jamestown.

Let your wisdom and godliness appear not only in choosing such persons as do entirely love and will promote the common good, but also in yielding unto them all due honor and obedience in their lawful administrations.

Seven weeks, seven weeks of hell on earth was the trip from England to Plymouth in Massachusetts, an ill-lighted, rolling, pitching, stinking inferno.

The pilgrims were also confronted by the sailors.

One story is told about one particular obnoxious sailor who called the pilgrims, quote, psalm singing puke stockings.

Not exactly the terminology we'd use today if you're bullying a kid, but that's what they used back then.

And it's noteworthy in the annals of history that that particular sailor soon became gravely ill and died.

Yes.

Finally, on November 9th, the cry, land ho was heard.

The place was identified as what we presently call Cape Cod.

On November 11th, William Bradford wrote, Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean.

But the pilgrims had a problem.

They landed outside of the jurisdiction of the London Company and thus had no basis for civil government.

Understanding man's sinful nature, understanding that they needed discipline, they came together and 41 of the men on board signed a document which has become the precursor to the Declaration of Independence, one of the great documents of our country called the Mayflower Compact.

And let me just read a little of that.

In the name of God, amen.

We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by the grace of God and of Great Britain, France, Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc., having undertaken for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith, an honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia.

You understand they classified Virginia as just that whole northeastern part of our country.

Do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.

So the Plymouth colony was established, and the first winter was dreadful.

Six dead in December, eight in January.

By February, they were dying at a rate of two to three persons a day.

At one point, only five men were well enough to care for the sick.

Forty-seven men, women, and children had died.

So that's out of 101 who came over.

47 men, women, and children died.

13 out of 18 wives were dead.

But compared to Jamestown, where the mortality rate had been 90%, they felt blessed.

And gradually the gospel was moving forward, and there became a new unity within the Plymouth colony.

Instead of it being disunified, it became unified.

And even those who were not separatists, who were not pilgrims, began to gather and it became very unified.

But the turning point was when an Indian walked into the Plymouth colony and said in perfect English, welcome.

I don't know if it was welcome or welcome.

His name was Samuset, and he was a Sagamor or chief of the aliquins.

It was then in conversation with Samoset that the pilgrims realized how incredibly sovereign it was that God had placed them there at Cape Cod.

The area had been the territory of the Patuxet Indian tribe who had killed every white person that had come on those shores.

Just four years before a plague hit the Patuxets, and all of the men, women, and children were killed.

And literally, this was no man's land.

Nobody owned this land where the pilgrims landed.

Samoset then returned with Masasoet, the Indian chief, who had become a true blessing to the pilgrims.

It was Masasoit and Governor Bradford that signed a treaty that lasted for 40 years.

After Masasoit and Samoset left, one Indian brave stayed behind, and that was good.

Awesome.

Yes, Squanto.

And according to Governor Bradford, Squanto was, quote, a special instrument sent to God, sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.

Now, you could do well in understanding American history to study the life of Squanto.

It's an amazing story.

His story reads something like the biblical Joseph.

And how through all that he went through, the slavery he went through, the freedom that he got, and the slavery again that he went through, and how he ended up back in America is amazing.

It's a phenomenal story, but I won't go into it right now.

Anyway, he just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Let me just stop and say this.

When you study this stuff, it really is amazing.

I'm going to say the power of God's tool of fasting and prayer.

These people are constantly fasting and praying, constantly seeking God.

And it's just unmistakable God's hand on the events of the pilgrims.

Same thing with the Puritans, but especially the pilgrims at first, because they had nothing, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

And that's absolutely true.

They didn't have the right supplies, they weren't dressed the right way, they didn't even know how to till the land for a crop in New England.

Nobody did.

Nobody did.

And so they were on their own, man, and that they, but they hung in there and they kept moving forward.

And it's amazing how God began to put people in their lives that knew more than they did that were key to them making the right decisions.

So I think that's true in our lives, that if you'll keep making the right decisions, if you'll just do the next right thing, watch what God will do.

How He'll orchestrate people into your lives that are smarter than you, wiser than you, and they'll guide you.

So that was Squanto.

So Squanto taught the disciples how to plant corn the Indian way.

Not the way it was done in England, because the climates are different.

So he taught them how to plant the Indian way, and he also taught them that you could also plant pumpkins in between the lines of the corn.

So they came away with 20 acres of corn that they harvested that year because of Squanto.

Squanto taught them how to fish for cod and for eel.

He taught them how to hunt turkey, deer, and he taught them how to.

Is Dr.

Fauci anywhere in the room?

Okay, good.

Dr.

Fauci would be very upset that Squanto taught them how to be homeopathic.

And there were no vaccines.

Can you believe that?

And so he taught them herbs that could be used medicinally and herbs that could be eaten.

Isn't it ironic that we're kind of going full circle in America?

It's just it's crazy how much more and more people are moving away from big pharma and into uh what even the Indians knew to be the healthiest way for you to live.

So Squanto knew all that, he taught them that, and uh, and it was amazing.

So by the summer of 1621, the pilgrims are brimming with Thanksgiving, as long as their Indian friends, who said, let's have a day of Thanksgiving.

So they invited Masasoit and the tribe, and the day before the festivities were to begin, Masasoit shows up with 90 Indian braves.

And they're like, whoa, I mean, there goes all our food that we've harvested, except that he came with 12.

Let me see if I got my notes here.

He came with five dressed deer and 12 turkeys.

That's a pretty good meal.

And they watched college football.

No.

Um, and they were the first to introduce a new product line, which has become very popular in this country, and that is you take corn kernels and you put them in a pot over a fire and they pop.

So the celebration lasted for three days, but the next winter was more difficult than the first winter.

But unlike the Jamestown colony, in the second winter, literally nobody died.

Everybody survived.

And so April of 1623, they're so thankful that no one died during the winter, but they realized they've got to double, they've got to double their harvest, or they're gonna go through this all again.

And there was a listlessness, there was uh a lack of vigor in the colony.

So Governor Bradford called the leaders together, and they thought through what we are going to do.

And remember, what I'm about to tell you had not been done before.

The idea of free enterprise, as we're gonna read about it and the way you grew up, was unbeknownst to England and people from Europe at that time.

And that was there's gonna be two plantings.

The first planting is for everybody, it's a common store.

So we're gonna plant, and that's what they have been doing, and that's what Jamestown continued to do.

For over 20 years.

But then there's going to be a second planting, and the second planting is for you.

You get to keep what you plant, it's yours, it's your own personal harvest for your family and for your livelihood.

And this is what Governor Bradford wrote about this experiment called free enterprise.

It suddenly made all hands very industrious.

So as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better content.

The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

So suddenly there was this vigorous free enterprise was introduced, true democracy was introduced to the Plymouth colony.

Now here's what's interesting.

Soon after that, 12 weeks of drought.

So no rain came.

The Indians danced before their God and prayed.

Nothing changed.

And the separatists, the pilgrims, called for fasting and prayer, and not only did it rain, oh man, did it ever rain, and they had a bumper harvest like they had never had before.

So the Plymouth colony would go on to be vibrant spiritually, vibrant economically, and a huge, massive success.

So what are the foundational lessons?

I want to give you six foundational lessons from the pilgrims.

Number one, the pilgrims believed that they were planting a Christian nation that would be a blessing to the whole world.

So let me read Genesis 12 again.

Now the Lord said to Abram, Go out into your country, out from your country, from your family, and your father's house, to a land that I will show you.

I'll make you a great nation.

I'll bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.

I'll bless those who bless you, I'll curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

In 1647, Governor Bradford wrote, Last and not least, the pilgrims cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations, or at least making some ways toward it, for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remotest parts of the world.

And it's still true, you guys.

We still send out more missionaries.

The gospel goes out through radio and TV and all different means through the internet, like no other nation of the world.

America leads the world in the proclamation of the gospel around the world.

And we give more money to poverty-stricken nations.

We give more money for the building of hospitals and clinics and for the healing of the sick and the paralyzed, like no other nation ever in the history of our country.

So we are, we have become exactly as the pilgrims said we would.

We're mightily a blessed nation.

Number two, the pilgrims were committed to God, not gold.

So Jamestown was built on greed.

The pilgrims built Plymouth on God.

I think Hebrews 10 describes the pilgrims well.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

But recall the former days in which after you were illuminated you endured a great struggle with sufferings.

Partly while you were made a spectacle, both by reproaches and tribulations, and partly while you became companions of those who were so treated, for you had compassion on me and my chains, and joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods, knowing that you have a better and an enduring possession for yourselves in heaven.

So there was a commitment to God.

So you didn't have the plethora of publishing that you can afford like we do today with the Bibles that we have.

So generally a family would have what we call a family Bible.

And you may have that.

We have, I have a couple family Bibles that come out of my family that are about that thick and huge.

I've got one that's from Germany, actually a Lutheran Bible from Germany that's at least 150 years old.

I can't remember exactly the date on it.

But you had a family.

But they they had how many of you have heard of family worship or family devotions?

Okay, that would be very much the caliber of the type of people the pilgrims were.

They would start each day before going into the fields, before doing anything else.

They would open the Bible, and of course they homeschooled their kids at that time.

There was no public school, and they read from the Bible together, and usually the father would teach the kids in the ways of the Lord.

Number three, the pilgrims were willing to suffer hardship.

So these guys lost everything for Christ.

I mean, they they really did.

Um, whatever they had in England, they got rid of.

There was no place to sell or buy uh when they came to the new world.

So it was really completely up to them to till the land, have the first harvest, take care of each other, and stick together against the hostile environment they were in.

And they were ready for that.

And I think there was something of the hardship that they had been through before that prepared from the hardship they went through in the New World.

Number four, the pilgrims were the first to experiment with true democracy and succeed.

What made the pilgrims even different than the Puritans and definitely different than Jamestown was no one was special.

There was no special, I don't know, reverence given to those who had a more high-level ancestry than others.

They all considered themselves equal.

And the Mayflower Compact is still considered the finest precursor to the Declaration of Independence.

The pilgrims believed that the freedom to work hard and free enterprise and entrepreneurship was to be one of their highest values, and they experimented that with that second planting that they did.

Number five, the pilgrims believed in the power of God.

So the pilgrims were really committed to fasting and prayer.

They fasted and prayed before they left for the new colony.

They fasted and prayed in that first winter.

They fasted and prayed during the second winter.

They listen to this.

They always, and it was a tradition for I think a hundred years, that they would fast and pray before every political election.

So they were highly committed to who one voted for for particular office in the government, the civil government of Plymouth Colony.

And then sixthly and lastly, the pilgrims were the first to give us a separation of powers.

I think because of the persecution that they had been a part of in England with the Church of England, they wanted to see a separation between the civil government and the church.

So Elder Brewster was the minister of the Plymouth Colony, but organizationally separate from the civil organization, which was Governor Bradford.

So Governor Bradford had no ability to confront the church on anything spiritual, and the spiritual church certainly had influence on the civil government because everybody, at least at that time, went to church.

But there was a separation between the civil and the church.

And that's what we have today.

And unbeknownst to maybe some of us in this room, that's what they're trying to take away.

Because the it's a it's actually a misnomer to think that the idea of separation of church and state means the church has no influence over the state.

It was actually the other way around.

It was to keep the state out of the church.

And so, isn't that great?

What we have to be blessed by and what we've been given.

So I thank God for the pilgrims.

I thank God for what they were willing to do in bringing the gospel here.

William Bradford, the first governor of the colony, would later write, as one small candle may light a thousand.

Of the light kindled here was shown unto many, yea, in some sort, our whole nation.

We have noted these things that you might see their worth and not negligently lose what your fathers have obtained with so much hardship.

So I want to encourage you to, you know, keep the light alive, keep the flame burning in your family.

And in the whole Thanksgiving, we read my blog to them, which is kind of a summation of this particular sermon.

So you guys realize, don't you, that the spiritual input and in some ways the historical input into your children and grandchildren is up to you.

I'm not sure it was ever meant to be in the school system, but it is in the school system, but so revised and different.

I want to encourage you that you would always take time at Thanksgiving to remind, remind your children and grandchildren why we have Thanksgiving.

And same with Christmas.

So, Father, we thank you and bless you.

God, I thank you for the pilgrims.

I thank you for the Puritans.

I thank you for the Indians, Mossasoit, and Squanto.

And I thank you, Lord, for um the generosity of the pilgrims in giving us the foundations that we have as a nation, and they're willing to suffer hardship for us, and that's why we're here right now, some 400 years later.

So thank you, Lord.

Pray we would never forget and be thankful for what we've been given.

Thank you for listening to the Foreign for War podcast.

We hope today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.

To connect with Pastor Steve's sermons, books, and blog, visit Steve Holtonline.org.

God bless.