Consider “Jesus is the reason for the season!”

For those who follow Jesus, shouldn’t he be our reason in every season?  He wants all of you. He doesn’t just want your church attendance on Christmas and Easter (in my old church we called those people “Chreasters.” Get it?)

He wants you 24/7, 365 days a year.

I hear my fellow Christians lament, “Christmas doesn’t mean anything anymore, we need to put the Christ back into Christmas.”

Brothers and sisters, nobody has taken Christ out of Christmas but us.  Nobody can take Christ out of Christmas but us. We Christians are often times our own worst enemies. We have made it about something else. The materialistic, greedy world will do what it always has, and spin the wheel of fortune and profit for as long as it spins on this earth.  It’s up to Christians to show another way. A different road. And at this, we’ve failed miserably in recent history.  We go right along with all the commercialism, selfishness, rush, and “get-aheadness.”

Christmas is a religious holiday. People are getting mad about others saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Whatever you want to say, that’s fine. But it doesn’t anger me when the clerk at the grocery store doesn’t say “Merry Christmas.” In fact, I only say “Merry Christmas” to my fellow Christians that I know at least in part.  I don’t avoid saying to the Joe on the street out of some notion of tolerance or not wanting to step on toes, but rather out of reverence for Christmas itself.

I don’t want the holy day where I celebrate the birth of the Savior to be whiddled down to a jolly ole’ time where a clerk hands me my receipt and says “Merry Christmas!”

On Easter, for instance, a traditional saying is, “He is risen!” (Followed by, “He is risen indeed!”)  Now, I don’t say that to everyone I see on Easter Sunday. I only say it to my fellow Christians, who I know share in the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.

So I think we’re taking Christ out of Christmas by making it a less reverent holiday. By making it more about toys, kids, gifts, and Santa than about the birth of a Savior. Thing should progressively slow down as Christmas approaches, but instead things intensely speed up.   And we’re all buying into this corporate pace.  Christmas for most people is about nothing but selfishness and corruption.

Christians are the ones responsible for taking Christ out of Christmas.  No one else could’ve done it. It’s not about us putting our foot down and lifting our heads defiantly and saying confidently, “Merry Christmas.”  We’ll do that, sure, but we still take part in the same things that support the rush and insanity of a secular, anti-gospel Christmas.