Keep Christ in Christmas?

I’ve taught a lot of Bible studies over the years, and preached many sermons.  I’m young, but God has given me many opportunities in my early years to use the gifts of communication that He has given me.

One thing that has happened far too often is that I have come into a study or sermon ill prepared.  I will teach or preach obviously wanting in the areas of clarity, content, or execution.  Often want in execution flows from want of clarity or content.

There have been times when I’ve walked away from a Bible study or sermon thinking, “Man that was bad.  I really didn’t execute what I knew.”  But in fact the real issue isn’t that I didn’t execute what I knew, but that I didn’t know what I was executing well enough for it to happen naturally.  Either I didn’t know the content well enough, or I knew it, but didn’t rightly order it so as to make it most clear.  To use a football analogy, my poor execution didn’t have as much to do with a perceived inability to “stand in the pocket” as much as it did with not knowing the plays well enough. 

I should have prepared better.  Perhaps I should simply be prepared better.  “Always be ready to make a defense” (1 Pet. 3:15); “be ready in season and out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2).   The implication in these verses is that if you know the content of the Gospel, you’ll be able to execute in the pocket because it’ll come naturally to you.  In other words, if you know the Word, you’ll always be ready to communicate the Word.

December is always the month when many of my fellow Christians speak a lot of “keeping Christ in Christmas.”  While I would never argue with the need to keep Christ on the forefront of anything, I have been intrigued at the recent surge of challenges by skeptics to the Americanized version of Christian Christmas.  It seems to have started with The Great Starbucks’ Holiday Cups Debacle of 2015, and has now flowed further into many people questioning the integrity of the Christmas holiday itself.   They cite the questionable history of the December 25 dating; they cite the obvious pagan use of things such as trees and how Christians several hundreds of years ago took those pagan celebrations and Christianized them; they note connections between early Christmas celebrations and ancient pagan “holidays” and cry foul over it.  While it is a complicated history (and shouldn't be oversimplified), there is warrant for questioning the integrity of the modern version of Christmas as at least partially unbiblical.  That isn’t to say that celebrating Christ’s birth is wrong by any means – Christians are to observe all that the Bible says, including the birth narratives as the miraculous accounts that they are.

But I wonder if many of my fellow Christians are pushing too hard to “keep Christ in Christmas,” because, frankly, they aren’t keeping Christ in the rest of their year.  In other words, could it be that we want to protect Christmas so bad because it is when we (finally) feel closer to Jesus, when in reality, Jesus wants us to be closer to Him all the time?  The New Testament message is nothing short of fellowship with Christ:  “You were called by God into the fellowship of His Son” (1 Cor. 1:9); “Our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ” (1 Jn. 1:3); Jesus said to His disciples, “Surely I am with you always” (Matt. 28:20).  Christianity is nothing less than a present awareness of His presence with you.

If deep and rich communion with Christ – union nonetheless, as in marriage (Eph. 5:32) – is Biblical Christianity, then why do we have to try so hard to “keep Christ in Christmas?”  Won’t our participation in the holiday, as His disciples, mean His participation in the holiday?  The reality of Christmas is meant to flow out to the rest of life: Immanuel means “God with us”; and as the passages above make clear, the true Christian is the one who lives in that place all the time: God is with them, in Jesus.  “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son” (1 Jn. 5:11). 

Let us not be a people who uses this time to fight.  Instead, let us be a people proclaiming peace.  Secular people and nonbelievers are never won to Jesus by bickering or fighting, but are won by Jesus making Himself known to them, as He made Himself known to us.  If during the Christmas season we show the peace of God ruling in our hearts, it will mean that the peace of God really does rule in our hearts all the time, and perhaps the Lord will bless our witness.  We’ll be prepared to show Christ to people in this Christmas time because Christ is really with us all the time.  In other words, we’ll execute because we know existentially and truly the very truths which the holiday is supposed to communicate.  

If we "fight" to "keep Christ in Christmas," we’ll lose; and it won’t be because we didn’t fight well enough.  It might sadly be because we fought for something that is perhaps only true to us for a month out of the year, instead of being true to us every month.  And if it's only true for you this month, it won't be true for you this month or any other month.  But if Christ is truly with you now, He's with you all the time, and the peace of God will rule over you now and all the time.