Keep Church in Christmas
By Jay Lickey
12-16-16
It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas when you start seeing statements made here and there about keeping Christ in Christmas. It’s a pointed reminder in our increasingly secular age. But what about keeping church in Christmas? I have never seen that statement on a Facebook post or a t-shirt. Yet, every 6+ years Christmas falls on a Sunday. How important is it to keep church in Christmas?
There are several things that are going to get revealed on this Christmas Sunday. Let’s think through each one.
How well does Christ compete with your nostalgia?
Christmas is that intensely personal time where families develop and enjoy a special aspect of their identity. Each family does Christmas different. One dad pulls out that goofy song he likes to sing, and another dad gets everyone into the van to see Christmas lights in their p.j.s. One grandma makes her holiday casserole, and another grandma tells favorite stories of Christmas’ long past. These things are special and rightly so. They are things you want to get right, because so much of the year is not right.
But then the calendar says Christmas falls on a Sunday. Church can feel like a rude interruption; like a phone call from some election polling group just as you’re tearing into gifts. The nostalgia of all you were hoping for gets tripped up by the uniformity of a planned church service.
Here is the question. How does Christ compete with your nostalgia? Is he the goal, or is nostalgia the goal? Is the joy of this special day the joy of worship or the joy of food, family, and fun? If Christ is not dominating, can you not see a massive problem with that? It is His birthday, by the way. When it is a person’s birthday, we try to do what they want. When that person is Lord of the universe, we really should make a double effort, right? But one may ask, “Isn’t reading the Christmas story from Luke 2 and a prayer enough to make Christ central on Christmas, even a Christmas that lands on a Sunday?” Does Jesus want you at church this Sunday? Well, let’s think about the next point.
How well does your doctrine and practice relate?
I assume that everyone reading this knows the meaning of Christmas. If you saw the Charlie Brown Christmas you know the meaning. Christmas is about Christ’s incarnation. But it goes farther. The incarnation had a purpose. Jesus put on flesh so that he could do what Adam and his race failed to do; keep the whole law. And having kept the law, he could now give us his righteousness and he can take our sin. But it goes farther still. Who did Christ come to save? You? I hope so. But more than you. Christ came to save a people. As the famous hymn says, “From heaven he came and sought her, to be his holy bride…” This isn’t just a hymn lyric. This is the testimony of Scripture.
John 10:14–15 (NASB95) — 14 “I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, 15 even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.
Titus 2:14 (NASB95) — 14 who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.
Ephesians 5:25 (NASB95) — 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her,
Jesus was born on Christmas morn to create the church. How crazy would it be, then, to say on the very day of celebrating his birth that we won’t join that gathering which is His reason for being born? That practice would undermine the very doctrine we are celebrating.
Do churches conform to culture or convict culture?
There are churches who are canceling their Sunday morning service so that this conflict of church and family will not be an issue. But all they have done is traded one issue for another far larger issue. That larger issue is conforming to the whims of the day. I am not saying that churches cannot adjust and change the way ministry is done to a degree. But setting aside the word of God for super bowls and family events is a dangerous precedent. It is a nose dive into cultural priority instead of Christian priority and that dive is very, very difficult to pull out of. The church has always functioned as the conscience of a society and this year that can happen on Christmas morning.
So my call is to keep Christ in Christmas in a special way this year. You can keep Christ in Christmas by keeping church in Christmas. It will be an undeniable declaration of worship over wrapping paper, of the eternal family of God over the temporal family of blood, and of Christ over culture.
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