When your life is over, do you think anybody will remember what you said? What do you think they remember? Our hero today spoke words Americans still remember.
William Bradford grew up in England 300 years ago. When he was a boy, everybody was told what church they must attend. It was the law! Some Christians thought it was wrong for their government to tell them where to go to church. In the olden days, only priests could have Bibles but with the invention of the printing press, English translations of the Bible were now available to all the people. [hold up a Bible] And many people wanted to change church to be more like it was in the Bible.
The people who wanted to start their own churches were called Puritans or Separatists. The Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England; the Separatists wanted to start a new church. William read the whole Bible and felt God speak to Him through it, so when he was just 12 years old he joined a Separatist church that met secretly in someone’s home.
The Puritans and Separatists made the government officials very angry. They said they were disobeying the law. So they arrested many of the Separatists and put them in prison. The Puritans and Separatists refused to stop worshiping God the way they thought the Bible said, even if it meant going to prison. They said it’s more important for me to please God than it is to please the government.
William didn’t want to go to prison so he and some of his friends decided to move to the Netherlands. But when the government found out, they put William in prison. When he got out he quickly ran away to the Netherlands. At first they were free to worship the way they wanted to but then the Dutch started persecuting Puritans and Separatists too. That’s when his church got a new idea, they said, “Let’s go live in the New World and worship God there. In the New World we will be free from these English religious laws.”
Raise your hand if you know what they meant when they said “the New World”. That’s what they used to call America. Very few English people had ever been to America but they had heard the story of Christopher Columbus discovering the New World 100 years earlier and they had heard stories about the Indians who already lived there.
The Puritans and Separatists who decided to leave England and go start new towns in the America were called the Pilgrims. Raise your hand if you know how they got from England to America? (Ships) Raise your hand if you know the name of one of the first big ships that the Pilgrims took to America? (Mayflower) William and his friends sailed from the Netherlands to England then to America. It was a long hard journey. It took 65 days until they spotted land on Cape Cod on November 19 – tomorrow!
The first year in America was difficult for the Pilgrims. They had to clear the land, build homes, and find food for their families. About half of the people died during their first winter in Massachusetts. In fact, all of them would have died of it hadn’t been for the help they received from the Indians. The Indians showed them how to grow crops in a different climate. The Pilgrims thanked God for putting such love and kindness in the hearts of the Indians.
How do you get heat in your home in the winter? How do you think the Pilgrims got heat? (chopped firewood)
How do you cook food in your home? Pilgrims? (no electricity, open fireplaces)
Where do you get dishes and tools and clothes? Pilgrims? (sewed clothes, made dishes and tools)
Even though life was very hard, the Pilgrims thanked God they could at least worship Him freely.
James Carver, the first leader of the Pilgrims, died that first winter. So the people elected William to be the next Governor. William was a wise leader. He was so popular, he was re-elected 30 times!
First of all, William got along well with the Indians. He did a good job of settling arguments and getting the Pilgrims and the Indians to cooperate with each other.
Second, William did a good job of getting all the Pilgrims to help each other out with the hard work and stay alive through cooperation. Some “strangers” on the Mayflower weren’t Separatists. Some people wanted to settle in Massachusetts and others wanted to keep sailing south to Virginia. So William got everybody to agree to stick together as a group even if they didn’t agree about everything and sign the Mayflower Compact that he and his friends wrote.
But most of all, William wanted everybody to cooperate with God. William had a dream to build a City on a Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts where everybody put God first in their lives, everybody studied and knew God’s Words and did their best to obey God and live life the way He wants us to. William knew that one important way to worship God and put Him first in your life is to tell Him thank you. So he said let’s have one special day every year where we stop working and thank God for all the ways He has helped us. And they did!
What a wonderful celebration they had! The Indians brought wild turkey and deer meat. The women worked to bake and cook and roast. There was pumpkin and squash and corn and fish and all sorts of other food. They gathered together with their Indian friends around long tables outdoors to eat, laugh, sing and thank God for the good things He had done for them. What do you think they thanked God for? (good crops, good leader, kind Indians, survival)
After many years, this day became known as Thanksgiving Day. George Washington, our very first President, made Thanksgiving a special time of the year. Abraham Lincoln called it Thanksgiving Day. In 1941, the US congress voted to make Thanksgiving Day a national holiday to be held on the 4th Thursday of every November.
Do you think William’s dream to build a city where everybody put God first in their lives worked? No, it didn’t. As the years went by most people got too busy just working and surviving and they ignored God after a while. Even in our country today we remember to eat turkeys and pumpkin pies but we forget to tell God thank you just like the 9 lepers.
What are some ideas you have for remembering God with your family this Thanksgiving?
William must be thankful that you heard his story today. He wrote a book called On Plymouth Plantation, but the British stole it during the Revolutionary War. After we won the war, we asked them to give it back but they would only give us a copy. Finally, after the North won the Civil War, Great Britain gave Abraham Lincoln the original. This was big news and On Plymouth Plantation became a bestseller. God made William’s dream part of our story we tell every Thanksgiving. The Bible says that your life is a flower that blooms and dies, but that God’s words will last forever. Of course, William is still alive in heaven, but his words are still alive on earth because they were God’s words.
Bibliography
Schmidt, Gary D., William Bradford: Plymouth’s Faithful Pilgrim, Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, Grand Rapids, MI, 1999.
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