Joey and Carla Link
December 4, 2024
When I was growing up, one of the favorite movie musicals my mom and my sisters and I liked to watch was “Fiddler on the Roof”. Written in 1905, it is about Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman with five daughters. Tevye tries to explain the customs in their Jewish settlement in Russia where they live, and Tevye with the rest of the folk where he lives, lived by the traditions that had been passed down to them for ages.
Tevye tells his daughters that because of their traditions, the Jewish people have kept their balance for many, many years. They give them stability in a land where their lives are as precarious as the perch of a “fiddler on the roof”.
When one of Tevye’s daughters asks him how the traditions they live by got started, Tevye had to think about it and then responded by saying, “I don’t know. But it’s a tradition, and because of our tradition, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”
What is a tradition in today’s culture? The dictionary says it is a “belief or custom handed down from ancestors for posterity.” While having turkey for Christmas dinner instead of ham can be called a tradition, they are much more than that. When I think of our family, especially when our kids were growing up, I know that it was important to both of us for our family to celebrate religious traditions like getting shiny new clothes to wear to church on Easter to represent our newness in Christ after his death and resurrection. At Christmas, we wanted Jesus’ birth to be our primary focus, not Santa and the decorations in our home reflected that. We looked for ways we could serve or do something for others as a family. We often had widows in our church who didn’t have family in the area over for a meal, games and exchange of presents.
The first church where Joey served as a youth pastor was near a Marine Corp base. On Easter and Christmas, we had the wives and their kids whose husbands were on deployment over to spend the day with us.
Tradition is more than just what you do at holidays. Going to church every Sunday was a family tradition for us, and now all our grown kids and their families attend good evangelical churches.
Think about it. Talk about it with your spouse and kids. What kinds of traditions do you and your kids want to continue when you get together in the future with their families?
“So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings
we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter”
2 Thessalonians 2:15 (ESV)
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