All right, by way of announcement just a reminder that on Thursday we will not have Bible class because it is Thanksgiving and so that's a time when everyone should be focused on spending time with their family and not being in a position where they're all distracted or worried about trying to get to Bible class on Thursday night. And then in two weeks from tonight on the first Tuesday of December we will not have Bible class that Tuesday night because that is the week of the pre-trip rapture study group meeting in Dallas and so I believe that is the 5th of December that Tuesday night so we will not be meeting then but other than that everything's the same we will be having our annual Christmas service on Christmas morning since Christmas falls on a Sunday this year So we will be having the Lord's Table on that Sunday morning and not having a special service on Christmas Eve, but that will be on Christmas morning. And then on, I believe it's December 11th, we have our annual sort of combined Thanksgiving and Christmas church dinner here. So that will be some information about signing up for that and everything will be coming out. So I believe that is all of the announcements. How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Jesus prayed to the Father, sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever. Before we get started, we'll have a few moments of silent prayer so we can make sure that we're in right relationship with the Lord, spiritually prepared, which means that we are, anytime we come together to study the word, that is worship. We worship by means of the Spirit and by means of truth. So we need to make sure that we're in right relationship to the Holy Spirit, walking by the Spirit, so we'll have a few moments of silent prayer for confession of sin, and silent prayer if necessary. So let's bow our heads together, and after a few moments then I will open in prayer. Let's pray. Our fathers, we come together this evening as we are on the verge of preparing for our annual national Thanksgiving holiday. We recognize that this is an important time for us spiritually, and it should be an important time for us spiritually as a nation, but unfortunately too many distractions come into play on that particular day. But as believers we recognize that we are to be grateful. We are to have gratitude towards you for all things and in all things. And that we are thankful that our founding fathers, not the ones in the established Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but the Pilgrim Fathers who came here from England, were grace-oriented. And despite the incredible odds that they faced, the extreme difficulties and suffering and adversity that they faced the first year that they were here. That when that year was up, they met to have a feast and to give thanks to you, which indicates that they were not a group that was absorbed with their own pain, suffering, misery, but that they were focused upon you. And that bequeathed to not just their orientation to grace and gratitude, but all those that came with them over the coming decades, bequeathed that mentality to this nation. And it is sad as we see what has happened over the last 100, 150 years as we've gradually seen that erode. But for us, Father, it is still true. And so we want to take time tonight to reflect upon this legacy that is ours. And we pray that we might maybe do a little soul searching in terms of our own gratitude for that which you have given to us. For the blessings we have are far beyond just the immediate material things that we have, but that which has been bequeathed to us in terms of liberty and freedom and, of course, the gospel and the centrality of your word. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen. All right. Well, I was not intending to do a Thanksgiving message this year, but due to just several things here and there, nothing specifically overt, like somebody saying, are you going to do something for Thanksgiving this year? But just various things that were mentioned by different people I thought, I think it's probably a good idea to one more time and continually be reminded of this spiritual heritage that we have been given from the very founding of this nation. And this is so much under an attack today that those who are, who do not attend church where the truth is ever taught or a divine viewpoint of history is ever explained. And they go to public schools and they hear the attacks that are often in textbooks, the snide remarks, the disrespect of the founding fathers and our Christian heritage that very suddenly slips in. And that we have a generation now that hardly knows anything. about the founding of this nation and why this nation is exceptional. And what makes it an exceptional nation is because of the views of the founding fathers and their understanding, as they did not have it as systematized as we do when we talk about the divine institutions, but they're present in their values and the way they lived in the documents that they developed. So I wanted to take some time just to go over what we have been given. Psalm 106.1, we have the command to praise the Lord. O give thanks, for He is good, for His gracious, loyal love endures forever. And that last part is my translation. Often it is translated for his loving kindness, for his mercy, for his faithfulness. And all of those words are really wrapped up in that Hebrew word, chesed, that is used there. We just don't have a single English word that captures the depth of chesed. But we are to praise the Lord and notice that praise in this psalm comes in the form of giving thanks. And that is gratitude. And the explanation of why we should express gratitude to the Lord is given both at the end of that statement, for He is good. How is He good? He is good in His gracious, loyal love. the four at the beginning of both the the clause for he is good and the last stanza for his gracious loyal love extend or endures forever that this shows a relationship between grace and gratitude I've often pointed this out because in the Latin both words both grace and gratitude come from the Latin word gratias And that is important because it shows that relationship that we see in the scripture that someone who is grace-oriented is someone who is grateful, who is thankful, who takes the time to reflect upon the goodness of God in our lives. And so often when we take the time to reflect upon the goodness of God We often think about just immediate circumstances, consequences, thankful for health, thankful for the material blessings that we have, the physical things that we have. We're thankful for friends. We're thankful for family. But one of the things that has impressed itself on me in the last few weeks as I've read over several things, not planning to talk about Thanksgiving tonight, but just in terms of some other things, I kept going back to the founding generations, going beyond this 1776 generation to the original settlers. And we can't imagine what that cost them to pack up absolutely everything they could take with them and nothing more, just a small amount, and to leave and to go buy a ship that isn't very big. I don't know how many of you have ever taken the time to go up to New England and go over to Plymouth Village or go to Plymouth Rock and see the Mayflower II and see how terribly small it really was. And that they braved these extremely stormy seas. They were supposed to have left much earlier, but due to one problem and another they didn't. And so they faced some tremendous difficulties just making it across the Atlantic Ocean. And they came here and they missed the spot. They were supposed to go to Virginia and they ended up in Massachusetts. And the weather's a little bit different in Massachusetts in the time they came, which is in the late autumn, and so it was already cold and they had to survive through a tough winter. And yet they never lost their faith and trust in God and understanding that it was God's providential care that had brought them to that particular place at that particular time. And it shows a depth of character that is often lost today. So I thought that we would reflect upon this just a little bit. And as I pointed out just a minute ago, one of the things that we see in the study of the pilgrims is how the focus upon what they did and the consequences of their actions. was understood by the founding fathers of the War for Independence generation. And in 1820, on the bicentenary of the Pilgrim's Landing at Plymouth in Massachusetts Bay, Daniel Webster gave a speech in which he said, our homage to our pilgrim fathers our sympathy in their sufferings, our gratitude for their labors, our admiration of their virtues, our veneration of their piety, and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty. For what they recognized at that point is that what the pilgrims did was to provide us with a model for religious liberty and what that means and its implications for society in terms also of civil liberty, and bequeathing to us this principle of rule by law, an understanding that is disappearing today. As you see, even in the local courts in Harris County, I don't know how the election turned out on all of the judges, but reports from numerous sources that know what's going on is that with the election of a number of liberal, with all the liberal judges that were elected about four years ago, they're judges that have no understanding of the Constitution, no understanding of the law, and ask questions of the defense attorney, well, what do you want me to do? And who just make things up regarding what they think the law means without having any knowledge of legal precedent, interpretation. And so we say that we believe in the rule of law, but when people actually are pressed to understand what that means, they don't like it. We live in an antinomian world. So we need to think a little bit about the pilgrims and their importance to us, even though that was 400 years ago for Two years ago we had the 400th anniversary of the landing of the pilgrims in Massachusetts, and then last year was the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving. And so we have been remembering this quite a bit in terms of its significance. And to understand why the pilgrims were so important, We have to know history. We have to know what the context was and what was going on. Why did they come? What were the forces that led them to leave England and to go to seek religious freedom in a foreign country in Holland where they were very uncomfortable, they felt out of place, and they didn't quite mesh with either the Dutch Reformed theology of the day or with the culture of the people. And so they wanted to go someplace where as Englishmen they could live out on the basis of their English culture and their understanding of the Word of God. And so in order to understand this we have to go back a hundred years. We're talking about 1620 when the pilgrims landed at Massachusetts colony, and then we go back a hundred years, that takes us to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And so even though we go back a hundred years there, what was the purpose and significance of the Protestant Reformation? How did that shape the pilgrims? And to do that we have to go back even further. We have to go back two or three hundred years to understand what the precursors for the Reformation were, and then we have to go back almost a thousand years to figure out why that was so important. So we're just going to cover that very, very briefly tonight. But a thousand years before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, it was not possible for any Christian in Western Europe to read the Bible in their own language. It was prohibited by law. And when there were some few who came along and said we should translate the Bible into the language of the people, they were threatened with death or they were executed. And so that the belief was that only the clergy could understand the Bible, and only the clergy could understand theology, and it would be dangerous for people to have their Bible in their own language and dependent upon their understanding and interpretation of the Scripture. But we had forerunners in England of John Wycliffe. John Wycliffe believed that the Bible should be translated into the language of the people. On the continent in Bohemia, the area of the Czech Republic today, you had Jan Hus, who also believed he was about a generation or half a generation later than Wycliffe. And then in the beginning years of the Protestant Reformation in England you had William Tyndale who was translating the Bible from the original languages and he had to flee from England because there was a warrant for his arrest and he would have been burned at the stake. And so he had to flee, he had to live under a false identity in order to be protected and not be arrested because there were bounty hunters as it were who were seeking him and eventually he was found and he was arrested and he was burned at the stake. And these were the men who were fighting to get the Bible into the hands of the people. Now all of this really began to change as a result of what happened on October 31st of 1517 when Martin Luther nailed what is called the 95 Theses. A Thesis was a debating point onto the door of the church at Wittenberg, Germany and the door of the church was basically the town bulletin board so if you wanted to announce anything or you wanted to sell anything you would nail it to the church door where everybody would see because in those days everybody would be going to church. And so his desire wasn't to separate from the Roman Catholic Church, his desire was to reform these abuses. And that exploded on him and so he was eventually brought on a hearing and then he had to escape and he was kidnapped by some of his followers and he spent a year hidden away in a castle where he translated the entire Greek New Testament into German. And so what was beginning to happen was people were going to get the Word of God into their own hands so that they could read it and understand it for themselves. And this Protestant Reformation sparked several movements. You had the German-Swiss Reformation that took place out of Zurich where Ulrich Zwingli was the leader, and in the western part of Switzerland, which is the French-speaking part of Switzerland, you had the development of Reformed theology under the leadership of Jean Calvin. And in each of these traditions that developed, the Lutheran, the Reformed, German Reformed, the Swiss Reformed, rather the French Reformed, you had a back to the Bible movement. And one of the key phrases for the Reformation was sola scriptura, by the scripture alone, and trying to get the scripture into the hands of the people. And this was important because the people needed to be free to make these spiritual decisions for themselves. So this is the seed of freedom and liberty to break away from the authoritarian control of either the Roman Catholic Church or the rulers. Because in those days church and state were united together. And in England you will find there are people who will say that the English Reformation was really different from what took place on the continent because what took place on the continent was a religious reformation but what happened in England was a result of Henry VIII's desire to have a male heir and because he couldn't divorce his first wife that he separated from the Roman Catholic Church and started his own religion. But the problem with that is it basically ignores the fact that Calvin's writings and Luther's writings and the writings of many of the other reformers had made their way to England and so it was really developing as a grassroots movement among the people to get back to the Bible. And people would debate theology on the street. It was important. It had to do with their eternal destiny. And so with the rise of the Protestant Reformation you have basically two things that are important to understand the background for the pilgrims. The first is the English Reformation. And in the English Reformation you had this shift in going back to the Bible, but it was not as simple as one might think. Because what happened was you had the problem with Henry VIII's heirs. But when Henry VIII separated, he became the head of the church, which became known as the Anglican Church, the English Church. And with his authority, the Anglican Church was pretty much the same as Roman Catholic theology. The theology didn't change a whole lot, but it was beginning to change from the bottom up. And this was very, very important. because as a result of these arguments and these fights they were laying out an argument and a basis for understanding individual liberty and the right of each individual to make their decision before God. So what we see there is basically an understanding of the dimensions of what we refer to as the first divine institution and we see the emphasis on personal responsibility to God. And so as that developed in the period of the Protestant Reformation, you had another movement that came up on the continent called the Anabaptist movement. And what made a person anabaptist, the word anabaptist, ana is a prefix that means again. So they were getting baptized again. All of these leaders of that movement had been baptized as infants when they were babies. But they realized that wasn't what the Bible taught. The Bible taught that you should be baptized when you trust Christ as Savior. Otherwise it had no significance or it had no meaning. But over the time period, because of the unity of church and state, baptism had taken on a citizenship role as well, so that by being baptized into the church you were also becoming a citizen of the country, and so you had this merger of the church and state, so that the local monarchs were also tied to the leaders in the church. So you have two main things that made you a Baptist, the separation of church and state, and in doing that they are recognizing another realm of freedom and liberty, and then believers' baptism. Well in England what you had is the development of the Protestant Reformation through the heirs of Henry VIII. Now Henry VIII was unable to produce an heir, have a male child with his first wife so that he went on and he married others and had three children, Edward, Mary, Tudor, and Elizabeth. So when Henry died in 1547 Edward VI became Edward VI the King of England He was only about seven or eight years old when he became king. He was very young and he only ruled for six years but he was a Protestant and those that were his advisors were committed to the Protestant theology and so that developed throughout England. But when he died his sister Mary became Queen and she hated Protestants. She was Roman Catholic and so during her five years on the throne. There were over 300 Protestant leaders who were burned at the stake on the fields of Smithfield outside of London. So Mary is known in history as Bloody Mary and then when she died there's all this religious turmoil that's taking place in England and her sister Elizabeth came to the throne and she is trying to come up with a middle way where she is going to retain a certain amount of Roman Catholic ritual, but also have more of a Protestant theology. And this did not sit well, really, with either side. But she is able to bring peace. Now this is the context of the rise of a group of people known as Puritans. because they were the more conservative biblicists at that time and they were very uncomfortable going into a church that still had the trappings, the physical trappings of Roman Catholics. And so they resisted that and what they wanted to do, because Puritans get a bad rap from a lot of people. They don't understand what a Puritan is. They think it's somebody who is extremely legalistic and self-righteous and constantly trying to keep people from having any fun, and that's really a picture of the Victorian era in the 1800s. It's not a picture of the Puritans during the late 1500s and early 1600s. They wanted to purify the church, that's where the term Puritan comes from, from all elements and all the residual elements of the Roman Catholic Church. And so you had two kinds of Puritans. You had Puritans who stayed within the structure of the Anglican Church, and then you had another group that were called Separatists, because they did not want to be under the authority of the Anglican hierarchy, because they did not believe that that was biblical. Now, these separatists were still in the tradition of Reformed theology. They were still heavily influenced by Calvinism because during the period of Mary Tudor, your major leaders, many of those who were under a threat of death, left England and they made their way to the continent and eventually made their way to Geneva which was sort of the headquarters of the French Reformed Movement. This is where Jean Calvin lived and taught and after his death he was succeeded by Theodore Bizet and this is where they had basically a seminary and training ground and so they went there and while they were there because under Henry He still, he was the one who had William Tyndale executed. There was still no freedom to have the Bible in the English language. So there in Geneva, they translated the Bible into English. And this, it wasn't the first English-based Bible, but it is the most significant English-based Bible. And it is significant not in its just its English translation, but because when it was published, it was basically published with a lot of study notes. And this made it distinctive. And the study notes were written by these Reformed theologians in Geneva who had developed a pretty clear understanding of the role of the church under a monarch. And often the notes refer to any monarch as a tyrant. So if we go back to our chart here of the lineage of the kings from Henry VIII, we look at after Elizabeth died, she is succeeded by a distant cousin who is James VI of Scotland, but he is the closest heir to the throne of England, so he became James I of England. And he was of the view called the divine right of monarchs that the king was over the law. And through this period of time they were developing the idea that the law is king. In fact one of the most significant books written in the 1640s, a little bit after this time that we're talking about right now, was a book by a Puritan theologian by the name of Samuel Rutherford called Lex Rex. The law is king, not the king is law. So this is the conflict that's taking place is over this issue of what we would call today the rule of law. Are we ruled by people or are we ruled by law? And the Geneva Bible was an irritant to the monarchs of England because of its emphasis on that kings were tyrants. And in fact, when Elizabeth became queen, she made this announcement that she was now the head of the church. And one of her ministers had the temerity to say, well, the Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the church. So she had him executed. This was the context out of which the pilgrims come. So they believe in the rule of law, they believe in individual liberty and the right of individual conscience to worship God according to how you understand the scriptures. And they had an understanding of the separation of church and state. And there were several from different different areas, several different ones. So you had the Puritans that were part of the Anglican Church, and then you had those who were called the Separatist Puritans. You had some who followed a pastor by the name of Robert Brown, and they were called the Brownists. And then you had another group that were followers of a pastor named Henry Barrow. And they were Baroists. They later came back to England as the first Anabaptist church in England. And then you had a group from Scrooby. And so we have this map here of the migration of the pilgrims who were English separatists as they left Scrooby under the leadership of their pastor, John Robinson, who took them to Leyden in Holland. because in Holland you had a great measure of liberty, of religious liberty and so they could worship as they believed the Bible taught them and yet they didn't quite feel comfortable and it was difficult for them rearing their children there because their children had to go to school where they spoke Dutch and they had to learn Dutch and they were picking up a certain cultural values from the Dutch that weren't consistent with their English heritage. And they just wanted to be Englishmen and go somewhere where they could live as Englishmen. So after a while they sought to leave Leyden and to go to someplace else. And so the opportunity came for them to go to America. and these people were basically your blue-collar craftsmen and workers and they did not have a great deal of money. But this was a time, the era of exploration. Columbus had discovered the Americas in 1492. This is roughly a little over a hundred years later. And so there have been a number of explorations of South America, Central America, the North American continent, and the British were laying a stake for the eastern seaboard of North America. The French were already into Canada, and so the British wanted to lay claim to the territory that was south of Canada. And so in 1605 you already had the Virginia colony established and they came to America and they were a little bit more of a secular group, but they weren't a secular group in the way we think of it today. They had an Anglican chaplain with them and they were believers for the most part and so that was not You'll often hear in secular classrooms today that they were not the religious group. Everybody in that era was religious in terms of their focus one way or the other. They may not have been as devout as some of the pilgrims were, but on the voyage on the Mayflower about half of those on the Mayflower were not in John Robinson's congregation. They were not going for Christian reasons. They were not going for religious liberty reasons, I should say. They were going for the opportunities to build a new life, to establish a business where they could get involved with trade and to develop a future. But those who were with the SCRUBY group were coming because they desired to build a foundation of a culture that was based on the Word of God. And so I think I misstated the founding of Jamestown, it was 1607. So they came to America and they initially they left from Holland and they came to Plymouth They had a boat there, the Speedwell, that was going to join them, join on the Mayflower, but the Speedwell was actually sabotaged by the owners and it sprang leaks and so it didn't get very far before they had to turn back. So not as many ended up going as initially intended. There were 102 on the Mayflower and They had 34 children with them on the voyage, which was 2,750 miles and took them 66 days. So they left on September the 6th and they arrived on November 11th. And by then it's feeling pretty chilly when you get into New England. On the voyage there was one young man by the name of John Howland who was swept overboard by a freezing wave and it's amazing that he survived and was rescued. His descendants included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Humphrey Bogart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush. So it's interesting to see how one person 400 years back could have had so many different descendants. On the voyage, one man died, mother gave birth. They intended to land in Virginia because they were under a contract with the Virginia colony, and they were supposed to be under the authority of the Virginia authority. But due to storms and the strong tides along the North American coast, they were swept offshore. I mean, swept off course. And that's something for us to be thankful for. Because if they had landed in Virginia as they intended, they would have been under the authority of the crown, excuse me, of the Virginia Colony, which was a Virginia company chartered in 1806. And actually by 1624, four years after the Pilgrims landed, the Virginia colony went bankrupt and it became a royal crown colony which was ruled directly by the king. By being blown off course, landing in Massachusetts, it left them in a position where they were going to go ashore and there was no authority, there was no government, there was nobody in charge. And so Though they had an original set of bylaws that were written by the investors who were called the adventurers who invested money in the trip hoping that the pilgrims would be able to repay as they developed trade and other things that it would then be a profitable investment for the adventurers. So you had that as a guide for their rule, which didn't last long because it was based on the idea that they would have a communal system for the first seven years. It was an experiment in communism at the time. And then as they were approaching shore, they recognized they needed to present a unified government and that they needed to work together, the saints and the sinners needed to come together and agree upon a basic form of government. And this they did. And as they got to the point where having landed here at Plymouth Rock, which is in this area right here, You see this, they had tried to land on Cape Cod and several places along here that were unsatisfactory and eventually they landed here. But before they went ashore, they wrote a document called, we call the Mayflower Compact of 1620. And many people believe that this document is one of the most significant founding documents in our history. Because it recognizes, number one, that they are all under the authority of God. And number two, it lays down several basic principles, which I will get into in just a minute. But we should ask, where did they get the ideas that are embedded in this document? They got them from their pastor, from John Robinson. And they derive from the word of God. And so there is a picture of him, here we go, that is prominently displayed in the rotunda of the Capitol building. And here you see him kneeling in prayer with those who are about to leave Holland because he was unable to go with that group, and in fact he never made it to North America, but they always referred to him as their pastor. Now, the Mayflower Compact starts like this, in the name of God. Now, I want to say something about this because I find that a lot of people haven't heard this. It's an obscure thing. But if you notice up there where I have ye, what it looks like ye, that y is a superscript y. It's not on the same baseline as the other letters. This was actually a letter in the alphabet. It was the combination of th. So you should never, now you're as an educated American, ever pronounce it yee. It is dee. That superscript y was th. So I replaced all of those so we could read it a little easier. But they start off in the name of God, amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, having undertaken for the glory of God an advancement of the Christian faith. They had a desire to take the gospel to the native population. They were missionary minded. To the advancement of the Christian faith in honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, which of course they didn't accomplish. And then they said in the presence of God and one another, we covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic to enact just and equal laws as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." And at the conclusion they signed it in witness whereof we have here under subscribed our names and everybody signed it. Now there are several important implications of this document. It's not very long, but these implications are significant. First of all, they are making themselves a self-governing colony. They weren't under a charter company. They weren't under the king. They weren't under an external authority. They were going to govern themselves. And so since it was signed by both saints and the non-Christians, the sinners on board, it showed that they viewed themselves as standing on equal ground morally and as human beings created in the image and likeness of God. It was that Christian worldview that laid the foundation for how they were going to organize themselves in a society, in their body politic, that each one had an equal say. The second assumption that comes out of this is their view of economic literally. economic liberty. The pilgrims took seriously the command in Genesis, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it. So they looked out on North America as a land that was wild but God had given them the mission to bring it under their control. So everyone in their company shared this expectation that through their combined energy and creative work then they could better themselves, they could have a better life than they had in England, and they could bring order into this wilderness. A third thing that we see here that's foundational for understanding this is that they believed in the rule of law. That they were establishing on the basis of a covenant And this joining together is a civil body politic to enact just and equal laws. So they have the foundation of the rule of law. And fourth, when they have been there for a year, and they have that first thanksgiving, it shows that they had a mentality of gratitude. For in that first year, half of the people died in that first winter. It was a tough winter and so hard that many of them lost a spouse, husband would lose a wife, wife would lose a husband, and then they would marry and have children. That happened with John Winthrop and with several others. but it shows that they had the tenacity to stick through the difficult times and they did not harbor bitterness and they did not harbor any anger or resentment toward God. Now on the other side of this you have the bylaws that were part of the deal with the adventurers and those who were the investors. And due to the nature of these bylaws, they were forced to set up a communal system. So this is the first time you have a communistic system set up, a communist economic system set up where everybody would share everything. And so we can read what William, I mean, not William Standish, and he was the governor, and he established, and I've lost his name, I had it right in front, Bradford, William Bradford, wrote this in the Pilgrim Plantation. And he said that based on these bylaws, the adventurers and planters do agree that every person that goeth, being aged 16 years and upward, should be given a single share. And the persons transported and the adventurers shall continue their joint stock and partnership together in the space of seven years." So for the next seven years, they were to have this communal system. During this time, all profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or persons remain still in the common stock. and that all such persons as are of this colony are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provision out of the common stock and goods. And then at the end of the seven years, the capital and profits of the houses, lands, goods, and chattels be equally divided between the adventurers and the planters. But Bradford recorded that this was a colossal failure. It did not last the first year. He writes, and this is an important lesson for us to learn from these pilgrims, is that they had this experiment. And they discovered that those who, if everybody was going to have equal share for non-equal work, then there were those who were going to be too lazy and not work, and those who were working resented those who didn't work and didn't want to share with them, and everything came to a collapse. He wrote The failure of that experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years and by good and honest men, proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property and the possession of it in community by a commonwealth would make a state happy and flourishing as if as if they were wiser than God, as if they were wiser than God. For in this instance community of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit. For the young men who were most able and fit for the service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men's wives and children without any recompense. For in this instance community of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit. For the young men were most able and fit for service, objected to being forced to spend all of their time doing that." So it just goes on. But the point is that that failed. And so what we take away from looking at their coming is number one, they believed in individual liberty and that individuals were responsible before God. And each individual needed to have their own Bible in their own language. And every one of them brought books with them when they came from England. They had theologies, they had histories, they had books on English and English grammar, things of that nature that one would have, as well as mathematics and geography and things that they needed to teach their children. But by and large all of them had Bibles and other biblical works with them. So it was a colony that emphasized the role of the individual and that each individual was responsible for their destiny. Now the idea of the first Thanksgiving was that at the end of the first year as they were coming together they recognized that God had richly blessed them even though Half of them had died even though they had suffered from a drought during the summer and many other things. By the fall they had an abundant harvest, more than anything they could have ever asked for. And so they declared a three-day feast for December of 1621 to thank God and to celebrate with their Indian friends, for it had been two Indians, Squanto and Samoset, that were used by God. These two, for different reasons, had learned English and they were able to talk to the pilgrims and to teach them basic agricultural techniques as well as hunting techniques and they were able to build a friendship with the Wapanoag Indians of that area. And so the governor, one of the leaders at that time, later to be governor, was Edward Winslow and he declared a feast that God be praised that we had a good increase of corn and by the goodness of God we are far from want. They had a three-day feast. They invited the Indians. They had 90 Indians that joined the 50 pilgrims for three days of feasting, which included a wide variety of food. So they celebrated, and this was not the last Thanksgiving they had or the only one. They were not out of the difficulties yet, for they had times of of drought in the future. They had hardship. In 1623, as a result of a long drought, they called for a day of fasting and prayer. And in fact, most of the times that they called for a day of Thanksgiving, it wasn't accompanied by a feast. It was accompanied by fasting and prayer. so that they could take the time to go to God in prayer and to beseech him to take care of them and to end the drought. And in 1623, not long after their time of prayer, the rains came just in time to provide for a bountiful harvest. And so again they had a time of thanksgiving and invited the Indians. As the years went by in New England, they would have these periodic thanksgivings. But after the War for Independence in 1789, President George Washington was the first to declare a national day of thanksgiving. It was initiated in the Congress by Elias Boudinot, who was one of the strongest and most devout believers in the Congress at that time. And so they passed a resolution from both houses to call upon the president to declare a National Day of Thanksgiving. And over the years, there were numerous other days of Thanksgiving that were declared both by governors as well as by presidents. And in 1864, Lincoln called for a national day of Thanksgiving, and he called for a day of prayer and fasting. And he repeated that in his 1865 second inaugural address. It's interesting, I have heard some people say Lincoln was a believer, other people say he wasn't. Usually the evidence that they give is pretty weak. But I read this quote from Lincoln that seems to indicate that he was not a believer until after Gettysburg. He said, when I left Springfield, Illinois to assume the presidency I asked the people to pray for me, but I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Over the next 75 years following Lincoln's Thanksgiving proclamation, president after president followed his precedent and declared a national Thanksgiving Day until 1933 when President Franklin Roosevelt had it moved to a celebration on the fourth Thursday of each November, and then Congress established that as a permanent National Thanksgiving Day. Throughout our early history, these proclamations were times of focus upon God, upon what God had provided to give thanks to God for what He had blessed us with as a nation, not just in terms of physical blessing, but in terms of the spiritual heritage that was ours, the importance of the Word of God, the importance of each individual having God's Word in their own hands, which led to the First Amendment, our liberty to worship as we choose without government interference, the separation of church and state. But that must be understood in the way they understood it. It was that the state should not interfere with the church, but the church had the freedom to direct criticism to the state. And that was clearly understood in Jefferson's letter to the Baptist Church in Danbury, Connecticut, which is where the phrase separation of church and state entered into our language. It's not in any legal document whatsoever. But I think that this year and every year as we come to Thanksgiving, we should follow this precedent where we stop and we think about what God has given us in spite of the chaos in our culture, in spite of uncertainties in our election, in spite of leaders who have great flaws and failings, that we should thank God that we live in a nation where we still have freedom of worship, where we still see in many places a culture that emphasizes the divine institution and believes in them, although their numbers do diminish. But we still have that. That is our heritage. That is our culture. And that is what makes our individual lives so much better. It's that spiritual heritage. What is it that made America great? It's the Word of God. It is people who made the Word of God the central focus of their lives. And it's that heritage that goes back not just to the pilgrims, but it goes back to the reformers, and it goes back to those who were the pre-reformers. It goes back to those who were willing to give their lives so that you and I can have a Bible that is ours, that is in our own language, and that on the basis of that we can study and learn what the principles of true liberty are, which is the liberty of the soul, the freedom of our soul in Christ and the liberties that we have been given because of the death of Christ on the cross. So as we celebrate, watch football games, have a good meal, enjoy our pumpkin pie and everything else this week, we need to make sure that as families we take time to just be truly thankful to God for all that he has blessed us with and blessed us also with this church and with all of the members of this church and how I'm thankful for how everybody's pulled together and over the last 17, 18 years and that God has just really blessed us in many, many different ways. And so let me close in prayer and then we'll be dismissed. Father, we just thank you so much. As we reflect on this history, we see your hand in working through decade after decade, individual after individual, changes that took hundreds of years to work out in some cases. But as your word became available to people in the pew, as your word became available to everyone to have as their own, to own as their own, to read in their own home, and to study and reflect upon it, it transformed the culture of Western Europe. It transformed the culture of the world through the missionaries that they sent out. through the believers that left their homelands in Western Europe to travel not only to North America, not only to the United States, but throughout the world. Taking your word with them and seeing other cultures, other nations transformed from paganism into civilizations that were shaped more by your word. Some had a greater impact than others. But we see how your word spread and how it transformed society. And much of that goes back to the great courage of these few people that went on the Mayflower and were willing to risk everything to come to North America and lay this foundation. And Father, we know that Satan is attacking this foundation and has gained great victories in recent years. But we know that Christ has gained us the victory at the cross and therefore we rejoice in that and we can face life no matter what happens just as the pilgrims did, thankful for everything. And so we are reminded of what Ephesians 4.20 says that we are to Be grateful. Be thankful for all things. And echoed in 1 Thessalonians 5.18 that we are to be thankful for all things and in all things. And Father we are so grateful for your word and we pray that we might go forth and continue to grow as lights in the midst of this wicked and perverse generation. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.