Sunday, December 24, 2006

The Problem With Christmas #1


#1: Believers


What?! Of all the things I've mentioned so far, how could true believers in Jesus Christ be the number one problem with Christmas.

Think about it. If there's a problem with something faith-related, who else can we blame it on? We have an infinite, infallible God, we have our Savior, the Son of our infallible God, and we have the Bible, which is the message written to us by our infallible God.

Thanks to Rowan for the pic.

So we're pretty much stuck with the human element: us. There are believers who constantly complain about all the things that are wrong with Christmas. The plays, and nativities, and the commercialism bother them, but what do they do about it? Nothing, but rant and rave and hope people are listening.

Wait, who am I talking about? Could it be? Could I be part of the problem? You bet, I'm tossing myself right in there too. We complain and we complain, but what do we do the rest of the year to counteract the problem? Do we focus our energies on prayer, and study, and making it easier for the Spirit to make us more like Jesus? No, we fuss and we curse those around us, we cheat, we lie, we give Jesus a bad name. Then, when Christmas comes around, people like me want to sit around and type up series of blogs about all the things that are wrong with Christmas.

Most of all, we're what's wrong with Christmas. We have to get our act together, shape up. If you think about it, if we could do that, if we could fix this one problem, ourselves, the domino effect would take over and a lot of the other problems would be fixed automatically.

If we spent more time talking, really talking to people about Jesus, maybe the true meaning of Christmas would come shining through, and people wouldn't care so much about toys and TV specials. If people were thinking more about Jesus and grace at Christmas time, maybe they wouldn't threaten their kids with no presents when they act up. If that happened, kids wouldn't be working to earn their gifts, and Santa Claus would become nothing more than a fun Christmas story.

Of course, if believers would shape up and learn to relate more to non-believers, maybe we could all forget this whole war on Christmas, and learn to all remember that Christmas isn't about all our human traditions. We'd also probably be able to correct all the inaccuracies in those nativity scenes and Christmas plays and finally make some Biblical, truly moving Christmas art.

So then, the problem really lies with us, doesn't it? We can complain all we want and talk about doing the right thing and changing the world, but unless we pray and work for it, we're just blowing smoke.

We're are the responsible ones. We're Christ's representatives here on Earth, after all, and, like I've said before, it's really time for us to start acting like it.



4 comments:

John said...

Bravo! Well done series.

robkroese said...

Great post, Gregory. Spot on.

Miss Kitty said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Greg! This series of posts has been great, especially the last two. You finally put words to some of the things that bother me so much about Christmas.

Elizabeth said...

You win.
Big time.