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As the season of Christmas approaches, many are swept up in its traditions without a second thought. This episode prompts listeners to critically evaluate these customs. Rooted in scripture, our discussion traverses through significant biblical commands, offers introspection on how personal confessions are influenced by symbols, and challenges the pervasive assimilation of pagan customs into Christian practice. Join us in unpacking the significance of observing faith according to biblical teachings, mindful of the delicate balance between celebrating cultural traditions and adhering to divine command.
SPEAKER 01 :
Recently, I’ve given a couple of three sermons about why we believe one thing or another, why we practice, why we observe the Sabbath day, why we keep the Holy Days. Today, I want to talk about why we do not observe Christmas. Because it really seems to be a highly significant article of faith among many people in our faith. In fact, I think there are people who would just about as soon work on the Sabbath day as it would to put a green wreath with a red ribbon on the door of their houses. Very vehement about Christmas and about the non-observance of Christmas. Why do we believe this? Why do we feel this way? And why is it a part of our practice? I think for many of us it is a natural consequence of the growing conviction that we went through at a time in our life that the Bible was the sole authority for our faith. There’s a significant denomination, for example, that’s fond of boasting that they speak where the Bible speaks, and they’re silent where the Bible is silent. And I think that they themselves have found that discipline a little hard to maintain. But the truth is that whenever one does even lip service to that idea, that we speak where the Bible speaks, we’re silent where the Bible is silent, and then they come up against the fact that Christmas is not there, they face an immediate crisis. Because you are either going to do something that the Bible does not advocate and does not instruct, and therefore introduce something that’s not in the Bible, or you’re going to go back to the Bible and say, I’ve got to deal with that particular question. Now, this is not to say that the Bible is silent on the subject of holidays or holy days. This was something which, when I first came up against this subject, I had come to believe that the Bible was my authority. In fact, I was involved in an ongoing discussion with another person, another Christian, about different doctrines and ideas, and the one thing we agreed upon was that the Bible was our sole authority, and that whatever it is we were going to come to in terms of beliefs and practices had to be based on the Bible. We weren’t going to be dragging anything else into our discussions along the way. So, we found, and it was kind of a surprise to me to find, that the Bible is far from silent on holidays. In fact, that there are seven significant holy days listed in the Bible. In fact, there’s even more than that, but there are seven of them that are specifically commanded by God. The problem is, Christmas is conspicuous by its absence from that list. And so, when you start asking the question, why do we not observe Christmas? That’s a relatively simple thing. It’s not commanded in the Bible. There’s no particular reason why one should based upon that. And if one wants to follow the Bible and not add things to the Bible, then you’re not going to be observing Christmas on that basis alone. But that wouldn’t account entirely for the strength of the feeling that many people in God’s church have about Christmas and the non-observance thereof. Now, there are certain historical facts about Christmas that are simply not in dispute, not in any way at all. In Rome, December 25th was the birthday of Mithra, the Iranian mystery god called the son of righteousness. And the connection there is so striking as one can hardly avoid it. December 25th was in the middle of the Roman Saturnalia, and it was the custom in Rome to decorate houses with greenery and lights and to give presents to children and to poor people. And that also has a familiar ring to it. German and Celtic Yule rites were introduced a little later. I looked up Yule, by the way, this morning in the dictionary, and the definition said Christmas, the observance thereof. But in the fine print it said that Yule is Old English for a pagan festival held in midwinter. So the Yule rites included food, greetings, good fellowship, greenery, fir trees, fires, lights, and gifts. So history, and this is not anything I don’t feel any particular need to prove this to anyone, because it is so readily acknowledged, so widely acknowledged, just about any source you go to will tell you this. We also know that Constantine, who was probably the most powerful and most influential figure in the early development of Christianity, that is, in the post-apostolic development of Christianity, from about 325 B.C. onward, when he was, quote, converted, end quote, and saw the sign of the cross in the sky, he basically took over and dominated the entire visible Christian church for the remainder of his life. And him being really addicted to sun worship, he introduced a lot of the practices, beliefs, and customs having to do with sun worship into Christianity at that time. There’s an interesting article in Britannica. In fact, there’s a funny thing in the main encyclopedia, the one I have, which is a 1981 edition, If you go through the main encyclopedia, you don’t even find an entry under Christmas. It’s all under Christianity. And you go back there and you’ll find it salted in a number of different places that are in there. But I found this particular statement rather of interest this morning as I was looking at it. It’s talking about the passing of Constantine and how when Constantine passed, that major influence began to disappear from the church. He says, but even after that, Roman paganism continued to exert other permanent influences, great and small, on the church. The emperors passed on to the popes the title of chief priest, in Latin, Pontifex Maximus. The ecclesiastical calendar contains numerous remnants of pre-Christian festivals, notably Christmas. But most of all, this I thought was rather interesting, you might find it so too. The mainstream of Western Christianity owed ancient Rome the firm discipline that gave it stability and shape. Now, know well, the firm discipline and stability that the Western Church enjoyed came not from Judaism, not from the Bible, not from apostolic Christianity. It came from Roman paganism. And that’s what Britannica called it. Not merely Roman custom. but Roman paganism. The article goes on to say, Western Christianity combined an insistence on established forms with the possibility of recognizing that novelties need not be excluded since they were implicit from the start. Whatever that means, what they’re saying is that they insisted on this stable form, but they did not exclude novelties that might be brought into Christianity to maybe spice things up a little bit, shall we say, make them a little more colorful, a little brighter in the middle of winter. The early church fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Epiphanius, all contended that Christmas was a copy of a pagan celebration. Now these things are historical, they’re not even in dispute. Christmas as such did not even enter Christianity really until the 4th century. And that’s where it really began to make its inroads and began to be a part of permanent Christian celebration. So it really did not originate with the apostles. It did not originate with the New Testament. It’s not there at all, neither is Easter for that matter. It came along about 300 years later. Then there are certain biblical facts that aren’t in dispute either. First is that Jesus was not born anywhere near December 25th. You know, this is such a simple thing that it’s hardly worth the time. I mean, you go to commentary after commentary after commentary after commentary, and they will basically tell you that, no, no, Christ Jesus wasn’t born near December 25th. That’s the birthday of Saul Invictus, the pagan Roman sun god, that Jesus was probably born in the autumn. There’s pretty well universal agreement on that subject. Shepherds were not still in the fields with their flocks that time of year. Most commentaries will say by the time you get down to December, really after the first of November, it’s too cold in the fields. They’re no longer out there. And that puts it back into October of a certainty. But the fact is that in the New Testament, just a simple, careful study of that coupled with the Old Testament, you don’t really even need anyone’s help. You need a concordance and a little patience and a little work. And you can establish the sequence. of the conception of John the Baptist that came at the end of his father’s temple duty, which is a fixed date in the Hebrew calendar. He was a particular course of priests. The courses of the priesthood started at a particular time of year. You just simply count off the courses of the priest, the number of years, and you know when John got the vision, or when Zacharias got the vision about the birth of John. And the assumption is that John was conceived shortly after the time he came out of that period of time of duty in the temple. Then you look at the conception of Jesus and the months between the conception of Jesus and John. These things are all carefully laid out in the Bible. Follow the normal gestation cycle, and guess what you find? You find that Jesus was born in the autumn, in the season of the Feast of Trumpets and the Feast of Tabernacles. And so you have essentially the birth of Jesus completely and totally divorced from The time of the present observance of Christmas. Not only that, you find that virtually all the customs connected with Christmas. And I use the word virtually because I want to correct a couple of misconceptions a little later. But virtually everything, certainly the trees, the lights, the giving of gifts, all the pattern of behavior that people go through out here in our society at Christmas time, these things all came from a pagan source and have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the birth of Christ. Here and there you will find A manger scene with a man and his wife and some sheep or maybe some shepherds. And there’s a baby in the cradle. And you will find, oh, there’s something about the birth of Jesus then that is connected with Christmas. And that’s just about it. Of course, there are some stations that you listen to where you will hear what we used to call Christmas carols all the time, which have to do with the birth of Christ. Now, so many of the songs have to do with Christmas. They’re like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. And they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus, the birth of Jesus, or anything of the kind. But then, also a matter not in dispute, is this commandment from the law. In Deuteronomy 12 and verse 28 comes a statement that is so profound, it’s inconceivable that anyone could misunderstand it, misapply it, or even assume for a moment that this isn’t God’s will for all time. In Deuteronomy 12 and verse 28, he says, Observe and hear all these words that I command you, so it will go well with you and with your children after you forever. When you do that which is good and which is right in the sight of the Lord your God. I don’t think it’s possible for us to really grasp how novel, how new, how profound Scripture the religion was that God was handing down from these people. Now, I say new. It was new to them. It was not really new, for it had been around for a very long time. But what I’m basically saying is how different, how startling and strikingly different it was from the religions of the time all around them. What he is going to tell them is this is totally different, and I expect you to live by it. When the Lord your God shall cut off the nations from before you, where you go to possess them, and you succeed them and dwell in their land, You take heed to yourself that you be not snared by following them after they have been destroyed from before you. Now, you would think that this would be sort of automatic. You would think that here is a land whom God is going to drive out the inhabitants from before us. God disfavors them. God is down on them. God doesn’t want them to have anything. He wants you to have their land, and he’s going to drive these people out ahead of you, right? Now, you would think that we would know then that what we were bringing with us into this land that God had revealed to us was far superior to any practices, customs, or anything else of the people that God was driving out. In fact, in one place he mentions, don’t do these things, for because of these things I am driving these people out from ahead of you. Don’t do it. And that you inquire not after their gods, saying, How do these nations serve their gods? Even so will I do likewise. Okay, I got that. That’s clear. Do you have any problem with that? He says, Don’t inquire after their gods. as to how they worship their gods, and say, well, that’s a nice custom. I’ll adapt that to the worship of God. Don’t do that, said God. I don’t want you doing that at all. I remember on one occasion, and this was really one of the turning points for me, I was a Southern Baptist at the time. And the Baptist Standard, which is the official publication of the Baptist Church in the state of Texas, Southern Baptist, I should say, had a rather lengthy little article in it about the pagan origins of Christmases. And I was a training leader at the time on Sunday evening, and I got up and I read that to the class that was there. This was in that season of the year. And I pointed out to them these things. And then I turned to Deuteronomy 12 and read this passage, that all these things were customs of worship, of Mithraism, of Saul Invictus, of the sun god, and all that type of stuff. And here we read in the Bible that we should not adapt these things to the worship of Christ. And here we are doing it. And one of the fellows in that room got up. He said, well, he said, when I see the Christmas tree, I don’t think about Baal or Mithra. I think of the new life that we have in Christ. And when I see the snow around the base of the Christmas tree, I don’t, you know, I’m not thinking of something pagan. I’m thinking of the purity of Jesus Christ. And the red of an ornament was the blood of Jesus Christ. And he went on with a complete reinterpretation of all the pagan symbols, including the little round balls, which we know what those are, and all that type of stuff, reinterpretion of all the pagan symbols to have special meaning for him about Christ and about what Christ has done. Now, taken in a vacuum, you know, without something else intruding from the outside, there was nothing singularly illogical in what he was doing. And one could easily make the case that that’s reasonable, that’s sensible. But the problem is, God said specifically… Don’t do that. I don’t want you fooling around with those symbols. I don’t want those symbols attached to me. Those things are things that I hate. And you’re going to use those symbols and say, that means something connected with me. That’s his response. Listen to what he says. You will not do so to the Lord your God. For every abomination which he hates have they done to their gods. In fact, they have even gone so far as to burn their own sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. Think about that when you think about the little baby we just now blessed up here. These people, with all their quote harmless pagan customs end quote, Went so far as to burn their own children to fire. And God says, I hate those symbols. I hate the symbols. To me, I don’t want the smell of it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to think about it. I hate what they do. I hate everything about their religions. And I don’t want you doing it. Now, to me, this is fundamental to the reason why. You want to know why we don’t observe Christmas? Right there. Deuteronomy 12, verse 28, and the following verses. What things, however I command you, you do that. You don’t add anything to it, and you don’t diminish anything from it. Now, to tell you the truth, this doesn’t leave much room for the introduction of a long list of pagan customs into Christian practice, does it? There’s just not a lot of slack in there, not much wiggle room. We don’t observe Christmas for the simple reason that God explicitly forbids what Western Christianity has done, and that is to allow novelties to enter into worship, life, and practice of the faith of Jesus Christ. Symbolism is important. To argue that symbolism is not important is to argue that words are not important, because words are symbols. Symbolism is a form of language, and the purpose is to convey meaning and ideas. I mean, over here on the wall we’ve got a little poster that says, Team Kid Motto. Learning about God, using the Bible, living for Jesus. Those are just words. No, no. They’re symbols. A word is a symbol. I mean, T-E-A-M. You put the words up there on the board. We scrambled the letters around, you know, that whole motto, and you might not have a clue as to what the thing even meant. They only have meaning when you put them together in a certain way. And the symbol, T-E-A-M, team, brings to your mind certain concepts. So words are symbols. as are wreaths and red ribbons and fir trees decorated with lights, ropes, and what have you. They are all symbols. They are all evocative. They bring to your mind certain things. And God says, you know, that to him, the Christmas tree does not bring to his mind what it brings to yours. If you, for example, see a Christmas tree and you smell the nice evergreen smell in the living room of a home, it may evoke childhood memories of electric trains and Santa Claus and oranges and nuts in the stocking on a Christmas. It evokes all these ideas in your mind. That is not the idea that it evokes in God’s mind. For God, it goes all the way back to the death of Nimrod. to Semiramis faking his resurrection, to all sorts of strange and pagan customs, which in his mind ultimately led to even so far as to the sacrifice and burning alive of their own children. And God says, I hate it, I abhor it, and he said, I don’t want you doing that. So the adoption of the symbolism of another God is a very serious matter. It constitutes, mind you folks, a confession of another God. Confession is so profoundly important. In fact, I think that I began to realize this long before I ever came into contact with the churches of our faith. Because in the church that I attended before, the public profession of faith was required. You couldn’t go to the preacher in private somewhere and sneak around and say, you know, I want to be baptized and be baptized and go your way. No, no, no, no. Fundamental to that was you walk down the aisle, you shake hands with the preacher, and you publicly confess Jesus Christ. It was required. And in fact, when you get into the New Testament, the idea of the public confession of Jesus Christ in some way in your life is required and expected of you. And Jesus said, if you’re ashamed of me before the sons of men, I will be ashamed of you before my Father which is in heaven. If you confess me before the sons of men, I will confess you before my Father which is in heaven. So the adoption of the symbolism of a God has a great deal to say about what kind of a confession you are making. Now the adoption of the symbolism of the Bible involves a number of confessions. I consider, for example, that the observance of the Sabbath day. The abstaining from work on the Sabbath day is a confession of faith in the God who created the world in six days and rested the seventh. He is my God. Someone else is not. The observance of the Feast of Tabernacles is a confession that we are strangers and pilgrims on this earth, that our kingdom, the kingdom into which we belong, is not of this world, that we are not at home here, that we look for another kingdom, another city that has foundations, whose builder and whose maker is God. We’re temporary. We’re on the road. We’re on the march toward the kingdom of God. The observance of the Passover is a confession that Jesus Christ is our Passover lamb, that he died for our sins. That it was my sins that crucified him and put him on the stake. That his sacrifice is what sets us free from sin. You know, you have to confess that. And when you come to observe the Passover in the presence of other people, you actually, when you partake of the wine and the bread, confess before all your brethren that Jesus died for you and that you are renewing your faith in that sacrifice at that time. the acceptance, the observance for seven days of the Days of Unleavened Bread, where we accept the fact that in those seven days, leaven is a symbol, a type of sin. And that we confess that we have been freed from sin, and that we must keep ourselves that way. So by the adoption of all these symbols, we make certain confessions about who our God is, what He expects of us, what our life is like, and what we expect of Him. But the adoption of the symbols of Christmas… invokes an entirely different message. In the modern world, it’s hardly even religious, but we do not believe that we have any business perpetuating the myth that Christmas has anything to do with Jesus Christ. So, we do not observe Christmas. But being human, we have a hard time sometimes with balance. I was struck just recently, as a matter of fact, I look in on some of the computer forums online, A forum is a place where all sorts of people post messages for a lot of other people to read, and so you can read what other people have said, and you can put your own message up there for others to read. Recently, someone asked a question. They’re really concerned about the problem. What do you do when somebody wishes you a Merry Christmas? Now, I’ve heard this question many times before, but what was amusing to me was it actually seems to provoke in some people a crisis. Because they began to confess in messages on the phone. Oh, yeah, I find it really upsetting. I don’t know what to say. I find myself tongue-tied, totally flummoxed. I don’t even know how to respond to people. And there was a whole snowstorm of messages beginning to come in from people about, yeah, what do you do when someone has wished you a Merry Christmas? There’s nothing routine about it. To most people who don’t observe Christmas, it’s a provocation. It’s worrisome. It’s frightening to have that happen to us. Now, I debated about getting on the thing and suggesting that, well, I would suggest they say to you, Merry Christmas and a Happy Saturday to you. But I thought that that probably would not be well taken. It would surely offend the pure in heart of the forum if it didn’t offend the people they told it to. We could reply, you know, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, but that might have pagan overtones as well. I’ll tell you what you could do. You could try, bah, humbug, and turn on your heel and walk away, be nice and rude about it. That might work. But, you know, it’s really, there is, of course, another, I know this is a real unusual idea, but someone says, Merry Christmas. You could say, well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. You’re very kind. But what’s funny about it is that such a simple little thing would provoke a crisis. That even saying thank you bothers some people. Saying the same to you would really bother some people. And many of the, there was really, several people offered replies, and almost in every somebody out there would take exception to the reply that there was something sinister or pagan or troublesome about the reply. Paul said something about this that I think is very important, that I think sometimes gets lost in our zeal and our diligence and our concern to not observe Christmas. I would say at this time, too, just as a matter for you to think about, the churches in our tradition have tended to be reactive rather than proactive. We have tended to define ourselves more in terms of what we are not rather than in terms of what we are. And it is in the antipathy, it’s almost as though we observe the Sabbath in reaction against Sunday observance. And one of the reasons for that was because the way these doctrines were originally perhaps defined to us was done by an advertising man who felt that he had to break you loose from the old product in order to get you to accept the new product. And so consequently, there was a very heavy emphasis on what’s wrong with Christmas as opposed to what’s right with the observance of the Holy Days, what’s wrong with Sunday as opposed to what’s right about the Sabbath day. I was always fascinated by Sam Bakayoki’s approach, which he says, my job is to sell you on the benefits of Sabbath day observance, and he does a very good job of selling the benefits of it. But something for you to watch out for in yourself is the fact that, you know, when something like this happens, are you reacting against, are you defining yourselves in terms of what you were not rather than defining yourselves in terms of what you are? And give that some thought. Now, on this theme, Paul said this, “…as concerning, therefore, the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice to idols.” We know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one. Now, do we all know, can we all agree to that? That an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one. And that an idol, therefore, has no power. You know, if it were a Christmas tree, and these are the strangest looking ones, I’ve never seen a ficus for a Christmas tree before. There is no chance of one of these trees walking over here and throttling one of you in the chair where you sit. They can’t move. They have to be carried. They can’t even feed themselves. They have to be watered and cared for as plants indoor. They have absolutely powerless, as every idol that has ever been made by man is absolutely powerless. I love the way it’s expressed in one of the prophets. He says, you know, here this thing is. You have to actually carve it out of wood. You fasten it with a hammer. You have to carry it around from place to place. It can’t even go by itself. And people are afraid of these things. They’re worried about these things. And I’m afraid that it almost happens to us that our reactions to Christmas and the like are fear reactions. And that’s what I was hearing on this forum when people were really worried sick about how they were going to respond to their neighbors and friends when their neighbors and friends were kind enough to say, Merry Christmas. And they hadn’t probably spoken to them all summer long, but now they’ll speak to them and wish them a Merry Christmas. An idol is nothing in the world, and there is no other God but one. However, Paul says, there is not in every man that knowledge. For some with conscience of the idol, to this hour eat it as a thing offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. The implication is, if their conscience were strong, it really wouldn’t matter. Because, in fact, Paul says, the meat is meat. It doesn’t make a hill of beans worth of difference whether it was offered to an idol or whether it wasn’t offered to an idol. He says food doesn’t commend us to God, for neither if we eat are we the better, neither if we eat not are we the worse. The food does not make any difference in your relationship with God. However, take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to them that are weak. For if any man see you who have knowledge sit at meat in an idol’s temple, then the conscience of him that is weak would be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols. And through your knowledge shall the weak brother perish for whom Christ died. It might not be a big deal for you, but it might turn out to be a very big deal for him. But when you sin so against the brethren, who are you sinning against when you eat meat offered to idols? Interesting. Paul said, when you sin so against the brethren and you wound their weak conscience, then in turn, because of that, you sin against Christ. Wherefore, if food will make my brother to offend, I will eat no food while the world stands, lest I make my brother to offend. So his effort was to try his best to avoid offense, but in the process he told us the idol is nothing. Don’t make a big deal out of the idol. You do not have to be afraid of them. One of the prophets back in the Old Testament made a statement very similar to that. You know, here are these idols. I mean, they have to be carried around. Why are you afraid of them? Don’t be afraid of them. They are, in fact, nothing. Now, you know, this is not necessarily what I would have expected Paul to say. The actual eating of meat offered to idols is not nearly as important as the offense to a brother. Although elsewhere, Paul will acknowledge that eating meat off her dials is something we should not do. He is, in this particular place, putting it in relationship to the offense of a brother and says it’s not as important as that. Now, what I derive from this is that sometimes our reaction to these things, like Christmas and so forth, both not only in public, not only when your barber wishes you a Merry Christmas, but among your own family and friends when you get together, that sometimes our reaction to these things is a bit overdone. Paul, a little later in 1 Corinthians, will develop the thing a little further. He says in chapter 10, verse 19, What do I say then? That the idol is anything? Or that which is sacrificed to idols is anything? I’m not saying that. I am saying this, though, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God, and I don’t want you to have fellowship with devils. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. You cannot be partaker of the Lord’s table and of the table of the devils. Are you going to provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are you stronger than he? Now the fact is that what Paul is telling you here is that you should not voluntarily be partaking of the table of a false god. You absolutely in no circumstances should be involved in that kind of thing. God doesn’t want you doing that. All things, Paul said, are lawful for me. That’s a funny statement. I think what he is doing here is replying to the Corinthians who were arguing about this matter and saying, look, all things are lawful. I mean, we can do that. That’s not a problem. Paul says all things are lawful, but all things are not expedient. Just because it’s lawful doesn’t mean I ought to do it. All things are lawful, but all things don’t edify. Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth or well-being. Now here he comes to some very specific instructions for them. You and I can derive some ideas from this about the way things ought to be. Tell me something. Is there anybody in this room that has ever, as far as you know, eaten any meat that has been offered to an idol? Is there anybody in this room that even knows of in your lifetime any meat that has been offered to an idol? No, nobody’s doing that now, right? And so consequently it isn’t even relevant in one way to us. And yet I think there is a lesson to be learned from this. Paul says this, whatever is sold in the market, eat asking no questions for conscience sake, for the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. In other words, you’re going in there and you are going to ask, of course, is this beef or is it pork? But as far as how was this animal killed? Was this animal offered to an idol or what have you? Because meat apparently was sold in the marketplace that had either been sacrificed to a false god or that had simply been butchered simply for sale and to sell to whoever came by to buy it. Both kinds of meat were there. And it’s awfully hard to tell the difference, I gather, looking at a cut of beef, what they were thinking about when they actually sacrificed the animal. So eat it. Don’t worry about it. Which tells me, again, that the idol is nothing, that it has no effect on it, that I need not worry myself over that. But if any of them that believe not, here we’ve got an unbeliever, not in the church, has no knowledge of Jesus at all, and he invites you to go to a feast, and you are disposed to go, whatever is set before you eat, asking no questions, for conscience sake. You don’t have to worry your head about that. It’s put in front of you. Eat it. Just assume that it’s good. But if any man will say unto you, this is offered in sacrifice to idol, eat not for his sake that showed it, and for conscience sake, for the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Conscience? Conscience, I say, not your own, but of the other. Now, why should I be judged, you might say, of another man’s conscience? For if I by grace be a partaker, why should I be evil spoken of for that which I give thanks? I give thanks over it. God blesses it. I eat it. Why should I be worried about somebody else’s conscience? Well, whether therefore you eat or drink, whatever you do, do everything to the glory of God. Give it none offense, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God, even as I please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit, but the profit of many. that they may be saved. So Paul basically, even though he acknowledges that we should avoid meat’s offer to idols, he is making a very strong case of where the real problem and the real concern needs to lie. Now, I’ve got to tell you something, though, that if you are invited to your mother-in-law’s house, along with your wife and your kiddos, on, let’s say, the day before Christmas, or maybe even on Christmas Day itself, and you’d be disposed to go, And the great turkey and dressing and so forth is laid out before you in the traditional Christmas dinner. I want you to understand something. The turkey that is before you and the cranberry sauce that is before you and the dressing that is there before you was not offered to an idol. It wasn’t. A turkey is a turkey is a turkey. And you don’t have to worry your head over the fact that I’m breaking God’s law and eating meat offered to idols by eating a, quote, Christmas turkey, and it’s only a Christmas turkey because your mother-in-law called it that, on Christmas Day with my family. I mean, there are people who absolutely, under no circumstances, would do a thing like that. The fact is that that turkey is not any different from any other turkey. It’s conscience, I mean, it’s your conscience and knowledge that is important. Now there is, I think, in this a small metaphor for us. The reason I bring it up for you. Someone recently wrote this. They said, everything that has anything to do with Christmas is pagan and we should have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Right, I got it. We should then never give gifts to children. That has long been associated with Christmas. It is pagan, and we ought not to do it. Think of all the money that’s going to save you. No gifts for children. We should never give food to the poor. That’s been associated with the Saturnalia, and it’s pagan. And therefore, we should not be giving food to the poor. When we get our Thanksgiving food drive together to carry food out to poor families around the community, we shouldn’t do that. It’s been associated with paganism. It’s wrong. However, let me tell you something else that’s been associated with Christmas. The birth of Jesus has long been associated with Christmas. Are you prepared to say that the birth of Jesus is paganism? I don’t think so. But, you know, there is a difference sometimes between what we consciously will acknowledge with our minds and what we intuitively react to with our heart, with our belly, as it were, in the sense of the feeling that there’s got to be something wrong with the birth of Jesus or it wouldn’t have been associated with Christmas for so long. I know how absurd that sounds. But sometimes our feelings are not rational. Our feelings aren’t sensible. But they are there and they have to be dealt with. There’s a strange antipathy among some extreme elements, I would say, to the nativity of Jesus. They don’t even know why. But they would be more comfortable with a Bible that did not have the second chapter of Luke in the Bible. Really. The word nativity makes them very uncomfortable. Now, do you know what the word nativity means? You may feel free to look it up if you’d like. It means the birth and the circumstances surrounding the birth of whoever’s nativity it is we’re talking about. So the nativity of Jesus simply means the birth of Jesus and the circumstances surrounding his birth. The nativity of Jesus is the story of the second chapter of Luke. But if you want to get yourself in trouble in some very, very conservative quarters of our faith, just start talking about the nativity. Or mention a nativity scene, you know, to kind of evoke in the image the mind of a stable and a crib and straw and a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes in it and Mary who’s given birth in the stable and shepherds having come to see the newborn king. All that’s a part of the nativity in your Bible. And the fact that you also find it in nativity scenes around our hometown tonight, with all lights on them, does not mean that it’s not in the Bible or that it is pagan in and of itself. It has been improperly associated with a pagan holiday. The only duty you have is to disassociate it. No more. Not to avoid it. Certainly not to deny it. And one of the things that I was really shocked about not long ago, one Sabbath school teacher was really surprised. She was teaching a group of kids that have kind of grown up in this culture, and she was surprised several of them did not know the name of Jesus’ mother. you know, defy you to go find some kids in a local Baptist or Church of Christ or what have you and see that they don’t know the name of Jesus’ mother. Most of them have probably been in a little play in which one of them played Jesus’ mother, and they knew their name was Mary, and so on it went. Now, in our tradition, we solve this tension by acknowledging the nativity of Jesus in the autumn where it surely took place. Our first Sabbath school quarterly on the life of Christ begins quite naturally with his birth, where it really ought to be. Isn’t that where you normally would begin the life story of somebody? It was born, and that’s where ours begins. We could have started with the preexistence of Christ, but we kind of thought that was a concept for the kids that would be a little older. We hope in time that that lesson will be taught in the autumn. That’s generally speaking the kind of annual cycle that we envision as we start doing this is a cycle that begins in the autumn, which is the beginning of the year in that sense, and makes its way around the year back to the Feast of Tabernacles again. And so that that lesson about the birth of Christ would be being taught in the season in which Jesus was born. In our tradition, we believe that this is one way that we confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. You know, I don’t know how, how we got to doing it, or how the attitude ever got there. But there began to be a funny background doctrine almost, hanging and lurking in the background. John addressed it in the first century, in 1 John 4, in verse 1. He said, Beloved, don’t believe every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God. Because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know you the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God. And every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God. And this is that spirit of Antichrist, whereof you have heard that it should come, and already it’s in the world. Why is that such a big deal? I don’t know, but there were people who came to believe, there was almost a belief that Jesus Christ came down to the earth or fell to the earth full grown. And that he was not really flesh and blood at all, that he was a spirit and only appeared to be flesh and blood. There have been a lot of strange doctrines that have come up down through time dealing with Christ and with his circumstances. What is really interesting about the gospel writers is that they are all at pains to let us know that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. and none more so than Luke, who not only goes to the trouble to tell us that Jesus was flesh, but emphasizes, explains, and develops all the concepts related to his physical fleshly birth. I mean, I think to me, what is there that could more clearly emphasize that Jesus Christ was come in the flesh than the realization that he was a baby? A real baby who had to be nourished at his mother’s breast, who cried when he was hungry, who cried when he needed to be changed, who cried when all the things that babies cry about, he cried about. I bet he was a good child. But at the same time, he was a normal, flesh and blood, human child. We do not observe Christmas, but there is no reason for us to withdraw from our family and friends at this time of year. We do not observe Christmas, but there is no reason for us to be tense with our family or with our friends at this time of year. There’s no reason at all why we should not enjoy songs like Joy to the World or O Come All Ye Faithful or any of the songs that celebrate the coming of God into the world in flesh. You know, you may be driving down the road, hear some of them on the radio in this season. Feel free to sing along with them because they’re about Christ. They’re about His physical birth. It’s a joyous occasion. It wasn’t now. It wasn’t this season. It was back in the autumn. But, you know, we think about a lot of things about Christ at different seasons of the year. And the winter is not a time when the birth of Jesus is off limits, to talk about it. There’s no reason not to do that. Jesus was not born on December 25th, but he was born. He was. And I don’t think what could be more gently and profoundly expressed the love of God to man… but that his own son was born in humble surroundings, was a baby who was laid in a feeding trough on a bed of straw, who was nourished at his mother’s breast. We should not be negative like Scrooge. We ought to be positive as those who love their Savior and who confess him. We’re not really better than the people who observe Christmas. We may be a little bit better informed. And I guess my wish for you at this season of the year is may the meekness and gentleness of Jesus Christ… guide you in this season as you respond to those who choose Christmas to tell us that they care.
