Rabbi Schneider - Finding Gratitude in the Feast of Tabernacles
Welcome. Baruch Haba B'Shem Adonai. Welcome in the name of the Lord. I am in a spot right now. I wish you could be here. I'm in the deep forest of Colorado. In fact, I got some survival training here. And the guy that I brought over here from the survival expert company, he said this was one of the most pure forests you've ever seen in his life. Like the trees are so healthy. And what I wanted to do, I wanted him to train me how to survive in the wilderness alone. And one of the primary things I was concerned about was getting lost up in the mountains and being able to find my way out, because that actually happened to me one time.
Cynthia and I were together in the forest here, and Cynthia was reading and just looking to the Lord, probably reading the Bible and I told her I was just going to walk off a little bit in the distance. So I walked off away from her about 100 yards or less and I was completely turned around as to what the way back was to her. I mean, every place looked the same. I said to myself when I left, Oh, I just walked towards that mountain peak. But after I walked off into the forest for about 100 yards and you're just surrounded by trees everywhere, I went to find the peak of the mountain to walk back and I realized I was surrounded by mountains everywhere.
So I didn't know what peak it was. So I hired this survival training guide to train me how to find my way out of the forest. And he gave me a few pointers, but still you need the grace of God to find your way out of here. But one of the cool things that we did do together was we built this primitive shelter behind me. We actually built this by scratch. All we had was a handsaw. Me and my COO, we basically did all the hard work, cut down the trees, and hauled the trees up the mountain, up the hills. And this training expert, he did a lot of the assembling. We helped him. But together we built this. I was thinking about three days or less. And we slept in here. Cynthia slept in here with me. I just love being in the forest because it kind of recalibrates your system.
If you think about this, we were created from the dust of the earth, right? I mean, we were created out of dust, God formed Adam out of dust, and to dust we return. So we were actually part of the earth, like the earth is in our system. But today we're so separated from the earth that we're a part of. One of the biggest challenges is that we're always like on rubber soles on our shoes, or sitting in houses with carpet on them, so we're no longer grounded to the earth. So there's a movement. I'm not endorsing this, but I do think it's really interesting and cool. It's called the grounding movement. And it's backed by some people with some really incredible testimonies, where basically what they do is they spend time just like walking barefoot on the earth. And they're saying that it recalibrates their system to be grounded to the bigger universe that they're a part of, because we're from the earth.
So I love being outside. I love what God does for me when I'm outside. And here's an application. Thank you for listening to me just share a little bit about my story and my excitement of being outside. But here's an application, sincerely, powerfully for all of us. What I have found is that especially when I'm feeling just really... just like oppressed, like I just have so many responsibilities sometimes, like we all do. We're dealing with just stuff in life, all the things we have to deal with, relationships. And sometimes I find that when I'm really feeling oppressed or just feeling really just anxious or not well inside, if I go outside and just completely focus on the majesty and the vast beauty and glory of God's creation, here's the key.
It brings me out of myself to focus on God's glory and God's beauty, and it completely recalibrates my system. And I share that with you, beloved, because this is true for all of us. We can get trapped in our own tiny worlds, and our worlds are important and we can't help but be affected by the little worlds that we live in. I mean, you've got your world, I've got my world. We've all got our stuff going on. We've all got our family issues, our health issues, our responsibilities, our work, and we can get really just pressed down and compressed into all that and it can cause us to really feel anxious inside. I find when I step out of my own world and focus on God's glory and beauty, I'm brought into something so much bigger than myself.
And I've literally had situations where I've gone out, for example, onto the water when I was feeling really just oppressed, spent some time, a few hours on the water. And when I got back, beloved, from being on the water, there wasn't a thing you could have done or said that could have upset me. I was so relaxed. My spirit was so free. And it taught me the lesson that when we focus on God, when we focus on God's majesty and His glory, it brings us out of ourselves and it recalibrates us and brings us into shalom. Today we're focusing on the Feast of Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles. One of the things that the children of Israel had to do during the Feast of Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles that we celebrate as Jewish people each year for seven days during the seventh month on God's Hebrew calendar called the month of Tishrei is we live in booths for seven days.
And that's why I was kind of thinking of my primitive shelter here because it kind of reminds me of a sukkah or a temporary shelter similar to what the children of Israel lived in when they were in the wilderness. I know you'll see some pictures on the screen of some of the sukkahs or sukkot in plural that Israel or Jewish people build today, live in them for seven days. It reminds us that when we have nothing in life, God will still provide. Because when the children of Israel live in these temporary structures, these temporary dwelling places, these sukkot or singular sukkah each year for seven days, they are reminded of how when they were in the wilderness, beloved, and they had nothing but God. They had no medicine. They had no doctors. They had no money. They were in the wilderness. They had no food. They had zero, zilch.
But you know what? God came through and provided for His children. And He does the same still today for you and I, for everyone that is truly in covenant with Him and walking in dependence upon Him and honoring Him with our hearts and our lives. God is Yahweh Yireh, the Lord our provider. And so celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles every year for both Jewish people and Gentile Christians that have been grafted into a relationship with the God of Israel through Messiah Yeshua of Nazareth, we too have that promise from Yahweh Yireh, the Lord, our provider, that even when we're in a wilderness experience in life, even, beloved one, if you or I lost everything, you know what, and this is so freeing to realize this, God would come through and provide for us just like He did the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Let me read a bit from the Torah now where we read about this special sacred day. I'm in the 23rd chapter of the book of Leviticus, we call in Hebrew Vayikra. I'm going to read verse 39, 40, and 42. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but my beloved brother and sister, the word of the Lord abides forever and it will never... He will never fail you. Hear the word of God. "On exactly the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the crops of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the Lord for seven days with a rest on the first day and a rest on the eighth day. Now on the first day you shall take for yourselves the foliage..." And here we go back to nature. "Now on the first day you shall take for yourselves the foliage of beautiful trees, palm branches..."
And by the way, palm branches are so beautiful. It's part of the decoration of the temple, part of the engravings of the holy temple that God commanded Solomon and gave him instructions to build had the engravings of palm branches on them. "...palm branches and branches of trees with thick branches and willows of the brook..." Now get this here. "...and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days". So before I continue with verse 42, I just want to focus on one of the key fundamental concepts of Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles for you and I to apply to our lives today. Because these holy days are to be imparted to us today. We're to receive them. Because these holy days, beloved, they're not just Jewish holidays, as you've heard me say so many times, they're Hashem's, they're God's appointed days. And because they're God's appointed days and we're His children, they're our appointed days to be united with Him in these days.
There are times where He's called us together to meet with Him. And so once a year for seven days, we're called to just rejoice and celebrate before Him and be a... spirit of gratitude. Now, obviously, we should do this all year long, but having a specific time in the calendar every year set apart to do this, it keeps us in line to do it the whole year round. It makes it a practice. It reminds us to do it for the rest of the year. And we have an enemy on earth, right? And the spirit of darkness, HaSatan, the adversary, who's the alter reality. Satan is the inverse of who God is. Whatever God is, Satan's the opposite of it. He's the empty reality. He's the image.
The adversary is the image of God inverted. God is good. It's Satan who becomes the adversary of God and stands for everything that God is not. And what is God? God is good. God is happy. God is rejoicing. God is filled with all the joy of the Holy Spirit. But because we're in a war, and the adversary, HaSatan, the devil, the accuser is everything that God isn't, what is he going to do? He's going to try to press upon us, put upon us. He's going to try to make his spirit overwhelm us so that rather than walking in a spirit of gratitude, rather than walking in a spirit of joy and thankfulness, instead we fall in, if we're not careful, to a spirit of what, friends? Ingratitude. Rather than being thankful, like we're supposed to do on this feast of Tabernacles or Sukkot, just trying to be thankful for everything, it's the feast of thanksgiving, what does the enemy try to do? He tries to make us unthankful and bitter and criticize.
How many of you know what I'm talking about? We're surrounded by negativity, right? The world that we live in is a negative place. How many times do you and I get together with people and almost immediately the conversation turns negative? The people around us, they start criticizing other people, being negative about other people, being negative about situations, negative about life, negative about their work, negative about their spouse or whatever it is. We're surrounded by the power of darkness. But God has given us his Spirit. The Ruach HaKodesh, the very uncreated life of God is inside us, giving us the power to transcend the darkness through an act of our own will, through choice, because the unique spark of divinity within humanity, beloved, is the ability to choose good and evil. You have the ability to choose good.
The Torah says the Lord says to man, "I have put before you both good and evil. Choose good that you might live". But the easy thing to do is to not do anything to remain passive. And if you and I don't purposely, with effort, shift and choose the good, what happens is we're overwhelmed by the Spirit of HaSatan, by the power of darkness, and we find ourself getting grumpy, complaining, being down and depressed. So Sukkot reminds us to be thankful, to celebrate.
One of the key features of this holy holiday is to, listen, rejoice. Did you know that the Lord actually brought darkness and punishment upon Israel because they did not rejoice before Him and thank Him for all the good that He had done for them? In other words, God actually punished Israel and brought severe chastisement on them, painful suffering He brought upon them, because when He was giving Him all types of good gifts, rather than them being grateful and thankful and rejoicing, they just took it for granted and complained and were spoiled.
Does that speak to some of us today? How many of us have so many good things in our life, but rather than focusing on the good things that God has brought into our lives, and being thankful for them, and truly having gratitude for them, and because of focusing on that we're happy, rather than that, we've allowed the power of darkness to get the upper hand and we become negative. Well, now is the time to repent. That's why God's given us these holy days. As I've been teaching, God's given us these holy days to recalibrate our souls, to bring us back into divine alignment, just like you might bring in your car for a tune-up or a maintenance touch-up every now and then.
So these holy days tune up our soul to bring us into alignment so that we can walk with God in His light and in his prosperity, and I don't mean prosperity like prosperity gospel teaching. I'm talking about we're surrounded by the goodness of God. How many good things are going on in your life right now that you need to take count of and just thank the Lord for them? I don't know what they are. For me, my wife, my beautiful wife that just takes such good care of me and is such a blessing to me, and every morning I wake up and she's happy, and whenever I greet her, she's happy, and when I call her on the phone, her voice is just happy, and it's just like, wow, wow, what greater blessing could I have on earth than my wife Cynthia that God's given me, and my beautiful children, and the beautiful food, and the ability to taste, and my great friends, and my staff.
When I go to work at Discovering the Jewish Jesus every day, my staff are my best friends. Literally, my best friends are the people that work with me at Discovering the Jewish Jesus. And what a joy to have friends. So what about you? What should you be focusing on today? Because God wants us to rejoice. He wants us to thank Him. Again, listen to what he says here. In the Torah, he says, "You shall rejoice..." In verse 40, "You shall rejoice before the Lord your God". And so I just want to bring you back into an attitude of gratitude. This is the season of rejoicing. This is the season to be thankful. And we all should be thankful.
Finally, I told you I'd read the 42nd verse. Let me read the 42nd verse. The Lord said, "You shall live in booths for seven days..." And when we think about why the children of Israel were living in booths for seven days, it gets back, beloved ones, to what I said at the beginning of today's teaching. Because it reminded the children of Israel that when they were alone in the desert and had nothing, God was with them and took care of them. And remember I read earlier in the text today that they were to take the branches of beautiful plants. And the Lord specifically said "beautiful". You shall take beautiful trees, palm trees, and wave them before the Lord.
This is a time of year, beloved, this is a teaching to help us understand we need to be focusing on the beauty around us. We can be so addicted to technology and the internet and our problems that we don't even see the beauty around us. The beauty outside, the color, the bird. I just saw a beautiful red bird outside here. It was gorgeous. It was like, wow. When you focus on God's beauty, you'll know, beloved one, that He is with you. There's so much to take away from celebrating the Feast of Sukkot. And this is why, beloved, whether you're a Jewish or you're a Gentile believer in Messiah Jesus that's been grafted in the Commonwealth of Israel, all these holy days are for you. I want to thank you for supporting Discovering the Jewish Jesus. God bless you. Thank you for your love. Chag Sameach. Happy holiday.