Journey to Scrooby - A Thanksgiving Pilgrimage
by Douglas W. Phillips, Esq., November 22, 2011
Each day this week I will be sending you a brief Thanksgiving celebration teaching for you to share with your family at the dinner table. I hope these will be helpful as you lead your family in Thaksgiving and praise to the Lord and remember the mighty things He has done in our generations!
Dear Friends:
Last year I fulfilled a lifetime dream by travelling to Scrooby, England, where the pilgrim congregation first met at Scrooby Manor, and where the friendships of men like William Bradford, William Brewster and church elder John Robinson were solidified. It was an inspiring and emotional moment that included important commentary from Dr. Joe Morecraft, Bill Potter and a rare visit inside “the house that changed the world.” Please take a minute and watch this video. Share it with your children.
After you watch the video, take a few minutes and think hard about what you want to teach your children this week. You have a big opportunity before you. Take advantage of it, and consider this——There are many important and distinctive American national holidays—days remembering presidents, veterans, wars and more. But perhaps the single most biblically-rooted national American holiday is our day of Thanksgiving.
There is strong biblical precedent for the responsibility of civil magistrates on appropriate occasions to declare days of prayer, fasting and also thanksgiving to the Lord God. This biblical precedent was honored by the Christian forebears who built this nation. From the earliest days at Jamestown and Plymouth to the Continental Congress and the presidency of George Washington, civil magistrates have declared days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving, not to some ubiquitous one-size-fits-all god, but to the trinitarian God of the Bible.
Our own national day of thanksgiving is especially precious because it finds its true origin in the remembrance and recognition of one of the most distinctively biblical and Christ-honoring beginnings that any nation has experienced in the history of Western Christian civilization—the theologically sound, godly, multi-generational vision of victory of the Mayflower pilgrims and the society they established.
On this Thanksgiving week, we can rejoice in a national day of thanksgiving which has its origins not in paganism, not in statism, not in religious syncretism or pluralism, but in the biblical principle that the state, like the family and the church, is under God and bound to acknowledge Him.
For these reasons, I believe that wise Christian fathers will take advantage of this national day of Thanksgiving to give praise to God, to express gratitude for the blessings and the mercies of God, and to disciple their families by seeking to inculcate a deep appreciation for God’s providential history of the Mayflower pilgrims and the settlement at Plimouth Plantation. Stay tuned this week for some short articles I will be sending you to help you accomplish this very goal.