I want to share one of the most special parts of Spring for me - Our Family Passover Celebration. Each Passover Seder helps us to better understand the full meaning of The Passion of Our Lord.
Every year the
Church celebrates The Resurrection of Christ on Easter Morning (I prefer to use the words
Resurrection Day instead of Easter), but you can't have a Resurrection until
you've had a Passosver. At our house, we drink in the whole season and this
makes The Resurrection deeper and richer for us when we arrive in that
place and time
We join together for the Passover before we begin celebrating The Resurrection. We celebrate Resurrection Day with our Church congregation, but we also observe The 7 Days of Unleavened Bread, and celebrate the second day of Unleavened Bread as Early Firstfruits that symbolizes the early grain harvest pointing to The Resurrection of Christ. That was the day that the priest of ancient Israel waved the loaf of barley before the Lord as an offering. This whole ritual process has so many elements of Resurrection, and I believe it was the actual day and pattern of the Resurrection of Christ. I've written about that in another blog though, this article will speak of what happened before that Resurrection day - The Passover.
These are our first decorations of Spring. They come out and are recognized at our house days before any of the little bunnies and chicks and baskets and eggs. Aren't they beautiful? REAL TRUTH is always more beautiful, more special, more significant than our human imaginations. There is nothing wrong with the silly typical fun decorations of this spring season, but first we must know and practice what we believe and find to be real and true, and always make a firm distinction between the two, thus we bring out the Seder Plate and the Haggadah and place two pretty candles on the table with our finest china. Special dishes are selected to be used during the service for certain times.
I like to design the Haggadah that we use each year. Some years they are a new design, and some years we pull out one from the past. It is basically the same service, but I might make new covers or rearrange a few things from year to year. I place one at each
plate on the table. Sometimes I also print (as favors for each person to take
home with them) an eight part beautifully illustrated devotional booklet that
gives more of the details of the stories within the story with a reading for each day of the 7 Days of Unleavened Bread that follow
immediately after Passover.
My family and I were not born Jewish. We are Christians. Our intent is not to imitate the Jews, but to follow the scriptures. We hold the nation of Isreal and the people in the land close to our hearts. We know this is the custom that Our Savior Jesus Christ taught and we only wish to imitate Him. Through Him we feel we have been ADOPTED into the Kingdom of God. We feel that Christ has made it possible for us to be added into that old, old olive tree with the deep, deep roots. So we pray that our observance does not cast any disrespect to our Jewish brothers and sisters. We simply stand in awe of the wonder of their amazing history as a nation. We also feel our God is the same and the God of ALL nations. So it is that we gather at the table of Our Father each year to keep His traditions and honor His Word.
We have discovered that God's family gatherings always tell us another part of His great story! This is the way we chose to pass our Christian heritage down to our children. They must know Our Father's stories! If not for the Nation of Israel observing the Passover and always keeping the torah alive, we would not have been able to know our Messiah!
He is our Passover Lamb!
He is the True Meaning behind the Passover Celebration!
The Passover Story shadows His atonement for our sins. Leaving Egypt and the bondage of slavery is the same as leaving a sin filled life and coming into the freedom of The Kingdom of Heaven. It all ties together, but you will not see all the details until you observe the Passover in the same manner that the Israelites observed it, adding the full meaning of knowing that Our Deliverer has come, not only as Moses leading us out of slavery, but now as Jesus Christ, leading us away from the slavery of sin. The outcome is our freedom! In light of the fact that we are now free, I have added a song to our celebration this year that I feel is very appropriate. I'll attach it below for you to listen to. It is Matt Redman singing "We Are The Free." You may find it on You-Tube later if you wish to use it in your celebration too this year:
It is perfectly okay to open the celebration with the joy of our freedom in this song!
Though we may add a few modern touches here and there, we do use the typical Messianic Seder, keeping it as Hebraic as possible, and we add music, dance, video stories and whatever else God puts on our hearts to emphasize in the season with His story.
We tell the story in a million different ways each year.
We serve a full meal, but never until we've told the story!
Passover, and life in general, is simply all about telling the story.
