Celebrations

This is difficult, not doing the typical celebrations. I don't do easter or christmas so what DO I do? There are festivals commanded in scripture; I want to celebrate those and I will. It's a little difficult to figure out how they are to be done now, after Yahushua has come. It's obviously way different, the festivals were a foreshadowing of his coming and other works our Heavenly Father will do. Some are fulfilled, some are not yet.

I realize many argue that we shouldn't keep any of the festivals now but I fail to see that replacing them with "pagan" festivals is an improvement. It's just odd to do nothing on days when everyone else is celebrating. I'm worried that my laziness and my boys' introversion will make us do nothing out of apathy instead of any conviction. We need to find someone who has experience keeping God's commanded festivals the way we do now. Obviously things are changed, like Passover, the sacrifice that lasts has been made. It will help at Passover if I've found someone to keep it with.

The Feast of Unleavened Bread is one I tried to celebrate last year. I cleared my house of leaven - I thought. There is leaven in things I had never known about, I didn't even really know what leaven was before at all. To discover I hadn't "fulfilled" even the basic physical requirements was a shock. Of course, the point was to clean "leaven (sin) from my heart and life". This just brought it home so strongly that no matter how hard I tried and how much I thought I could do, I failed. It doesn't come from me.

For people who would have been successful, perhaps someone who enjoys cooking, what impact would this day have? They still would have to be on the lookout for someone who innocently brought a gift that had leaven - and that would point out that temptation to sin is not always obvious. It can be a temptation because you wonder, "do I accept this gift and not hurt their feelings or is that putting this person before YHWH who commanded to avoid it for a time?" What about the fact that love is demonstrated in obedience? Which is love? Will it be different for each person depending on their understanding at the time?

I have never managed a full year of keeping the feasts YHWH calls His own. (Some people call these Jewish feasts because they were the people He first revealed them to.) The first place I heard about them was NOT in church, it was from a homeschooling curriculum I read about long ago called Heart Of Wisdom. The woman whose family developed this curriculum is online here at Heart Of Wisdom