COG 9: The Complexity of Celebrating God

7/25/2020

How involved is The Celebration of God curriculum? How much will I have to change? Are there different levels? Join AMBrewster as he explains the three basic ways to approach The Celebration of God.

The Year Long Celebration of God is a family resource from Truth.Love.Parent., a ministry dedicated to rooting families in God and maturing families for God so they can harvest blessings from God.

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Episode Notes

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Transcript

Introduction

Welcome back, friends. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m glad that you either love the Lord or you’re at least curious to learn a little more about Him.

I know this podcast is being consumed by many different people: Christians, non-Christians, people from every continent, people who are single, families, pastors, the old, the young, and everyone in-between.

Listen, I love teaching. I love teaching God’s Word, I love teaching people how to keep bees, cook, I love training people in the martial arts, I’ve taught every elementary, middle, and high school course there is . . . I love to teach.

And it’s my love for God and love for teaching that inspired me to start Evermind Ministries, Truth.Love.Parent., and The Celebration of God. And one of the resources that’s available about which people often don’t think is my preaching and teaching schedule. I love to travel to schools, churches, camps, homeschool groups, and every conceivable gathering of people and teach them from God’s Word.

As a pastor, I’m zealous for the Bible. As a teacher, I’m passionate about information. As a Christian, I love people. So, if there is any way that I can be a blessing to you and your community — whether that be in person or virtually — I would love to talk to you about it.

You can go to CelebrationOfGod.com to learn more about inviting a speaker to interact with your community.

I hope you’ll check that out.

Also, I hope you’ll rate and review this podcast. Wherever you listen, whatever app you use, please take a moment to rate and review the show. When people are online looking for how they can know God better or disciple their families or celebrate Thanksgiving in a more meaningful way, we’ve love for them to find The Celebration of God. And the more people who rate and review, the better chances we have of connecting with searching people all over the world.

Thank you in advance for what you’re going to do.

Alright, just another reminder that CelebrationOfGod.com is the place to find our free episode notes and transcripts. It’s all there to make it easier for you and your family to access, understand, and use this material.

“But Aaron,” you say, “exactly how much is involved in The Celebration of God? You talk about holidays and calendars and even our most average days . . . how much is this going to require of me?”

That’s a valuable question, and it’s what this episode is all about.

Topic

I mentioned earlier that I love teaching the martial arts. I’ve studied over 10 different marital arts, I have black belts in three of them, and my highest black belt is a 5th degree. I’ve been training in the martial arts since the early nineties, and I’ve been teaching them since I was 15. I really enjoy it.

And in the style I teach, I break the Kyu Level belts — those are the belts underneath Black Belt, the Dan Level belts — I break the Kyu Level belts into three categories: 4 belts make up the Beginner ranks, 4 make up the Intermediate ranks, and 4 make up the Advanced ranks.

Well, I’ve approached The Celebration of God from the same perspective. I want to make it accessible to everyone. I don’t want there to be any reason or excuse someone may have to not participate.

So, let me make this patently clear . . . the only way a person absolutely won’t participate in even a stitch of the Celebration of God is if they’re not His child.

But every born again Christian is going to worship and adore and praise and give preeminence to God in one way or another. They real question is how much are you going to give Him?

Now, I’m throwing this out there like a playground challenge. I completely understand. I look forward to one day unfolding for you how this discipleship program was created, but let me spoil it a bit for you . . . it’s take over 10 years.

That’s right. Over the past decade, the Lord needed to do some real work in me to get me to the place where I actually started looking at life in a more Christ-centric way. And, if I know anything about God, He’s not going to leave me where I am, and I pray that in another 10 years I’m celebrating God even better than I am today.

That’s what this is all about. It’s about following Christ better today than I did yesterday. It’s about baby-steps. It’s about growth.

The process whereby we’re conformed to the image of Christ is called our sanctification, and doctrinally we embrace a progressive sanctification. That means that we’re not going to instantly become sinless the moment we choose to put our trust in God. Nope. Sorry. It’s a process, and a former pastor of mine used to describe it this way: “On this earth we’ll never be sinless, but we will sin less and less.”

So, I think it’s great if you and your family or your church or you disciplee ease into this. Remember, we have freedom to worship the Lord in the areas He hasn’t explicitly prescribed or illustrated.

So, here are the three levels in the Celebration of God

1. The Basic Level

We’re going to encourage Christians to celebrate — on the personal and corporate levels — 12 of the major holidays.

And, if after hearing the list, you only want to observe 5 . . . so be it. Again, there’s liberty.

The Basic events and character of God that I and TeamTLP believe all Christians should love to celebrate are as follows:

The Creation
The Creation Mandate
The Grace and Mercy of God
The Love of God
Christ’s Incarnation
The Death and Resurrection of Christ
The freedom we have in Christ
God’s gift of the family.
God’s gift of the Scriptures
God’s gift of the church.
Christ’s Return
Family celebrations — physical and spiritual birthdays and anniversaries

Now, we’re not going to talk right now about why those 12 in specific or the major and minor holidays designed to celebrate them, but I’ve found that most Christians already celebrate at least 6 of those character traits and events. But really, all of these either have or will affect the life of every believer.

And I look forward to explaining the significance of the others later on.

And when you better understand Who God is and what He’s done, and you’re comfortable observing those special days, then we’d encourage you to move to Level 2.

2. The Intermediate Level

The Intermediate introduces even more opportunities for you and your church and your extended family and your friends and your school to celebrate other amazing things about God.

What about God’s gift of family? Yes, we celebrated fathers and mothers, but there are more.

What about developing a deeper appreciation of the good gifts God has given us like prayer, work, the stewardship of the earth, the individual beauties of each member of the Trinity, the church family, freedom in Christ, and many more.

You see, God illustrated for us the content of our celebration when He ordained the Old and New Testament feasts and memorials.

He is the subject, and His character and His works are all up for grabs. And since God’s infinite, we could — technically — celebrate just one facet of His majesty for the rest of eternity without ever repeating any character trait or miracle.

Of course, at this moment, the Celebration of God does not have a major event scheduled for every day of the year. That would be ignoring the rhythm principle we’ve previously discussed. But there are a lot of amazing things the Lord is and has done for His New Testament believers that are worth celebrating.

So, if the Basic Celebration of God is two handfuls of celebratory awesomeness, and the Intermediate Celebration of God introduces even more ways to adore our Creator . . . then what could the Advanced Level be all about?

3. The Advanced Level

As we’ve already discussed, Christians do themselves, their churches, their families, and their communities a massive disservice when we act like God is only to be celebrated on certain days of the year with pomp and circumstance.

We know now that every choice I make to value God’s will over my own is a form of personal celebration.

But, you know what, it’s a lot easier to celebrate Christmas than it is to stand up to the sinful temptations in my school or respond correctly to a spouse who’s cheated on us.

So, throughout the year we’re going to discuss more mature concepts like how we celebrate God during our morning commute, how we give Christ the preeminence on our family movie night, how we shop to the glory of God and eat to the glory of God and pay bills to the glory of God.

The Advanced Level is where we’re serious about showing God that He’s worth it. We’re not just going to give Him 10 or 20 days out of our calendar . . . He gets to be the King of every day, hour, minute, and second of our lives.

The Advanced Level has you and your community truly working toward a non-stop Year Long Celebration of God.

Now, of course, none of us are going to do it perfectly. There will be seconds and minutes and hours, whole days, and even strings of days where we celebrate our own desires. They will come, but there’s a way to celebrate God in those moments too. It’s called recognizing His glory and repenting.

Really, the question we have to ask ourselves is can you really do too much of a good thing? If there is nothing more important, more glorious, more powerful, more life-changing, more redemptive than celebrating God in all I do . . . how could I do too much?

And that’s the passion everyone here at Truth.Love.Parent. and the Celebration of God want to help instill in you and the people God has entrusted you to disciple.

Conclusion

Please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets and join us next time as we try to better understand the biblical calendars and time calculations.

I think you’ll enjoy it more than you realize.

I’ll see you then!

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