Christ in Christmas

I hope you and yours have a wonderful Christmas season with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ at the center of all of your activities. This will undoubtedly be another remarkable Christmas season. Remarkable in the sense that there will be many businesses and governmental institutions that will once again try to extricate Christ from Christmas as well as multitudes of Christians that will demand that we keep Him in.

I praise the Lord for the work that will be done this holiday season to return Christ to His rightful place in Christmas. As I pondered this work the thought occurred to me that perhaps the reason so many of us will rise up is because this is one of the last bastions for Christianity in a culture that has been secularized. I fear that the problem isn’t that the culture isn’t saying “Merry Christmas” or that the secularists are attempting to remove Christ from Christmas, but it’s the fact that they already have removed Christ from the rest of culture. America has already secularized most of reality, and so what’s left other than “holy days” like Christmas and Easter? From their viewpoint, if we as the Church have already surrendered Christ’s lordship over the rest of creation then at some point we will eventually yield on Christmas.

How have we surrendered to secularism everywhere else? By not proclaiming the Lordship of Christ over ALL things! Jesus is Lord of far more than Christmas and is the central focus of much more than a single holiday. Jesus is Lord of ALL, in him all things consist and find their meaning (Acts 17:28; Heb 1:3). But I have yet to hear the church rise up and proclaim “Keep Christ in Calculus!”, or to see a church billboard read: “Keep Christ in Chemistry”, or a Christian radio talk-show host declare, “Jesus is Lord of literature!”. Yet this is exactly what we have to do, and have not done. We need to shout it from the rooftops that Christ is the beginning of all wisdom and knowledge, (Col 2:2,3) that He is King over the entire universe and that Christ is as central to Calculus, Chemistry and Civics as He is to Christmas (Col 1:16,17).

Many years ago, before you and I were ever born, secularists like Rousseau, Voltaire and Dewey began to remove Christ from academia. Back then, when Christ was still understood to be central in all creation, they began the campaign to remove Christ from education, attempting to separate things created from their Creator. Well, needless to say, the church bought into it. We bought secularisms’ idea of “neutrality”, that there are subjects out there that are morally and religiously “neutral”. “Christ has nothing to do with math. You can know math apart from any mention of Christ”, said they…and we believed it! And then we began to parrot their words and train our children this way. Even now many homeschooling Christians teach their children subjects like math and English and many other subjects without any mention of Jesus. Yet, Jesus made math and language, science and government. If you believe the Bible then you must acknowledge that Christ is the reason not just for the season, but for everything that was, is or ever will be. He is the one that brings all things meaning, and all things were created by Him and for His glory (Prov. 16:4). How then can anything be religiously neutral or religiously free? It can’t. All things are by their very nature religious for these very reasons, and a right understanding and application of any and all subjects, holidays and events can only be found in reference to Christ.

So during this Christmas season let’s not just fight to keep Christmas, but let’s fight to recapture the territory that has been stolen. Let’s teach our children that through a simple mathematics equation or a complex calculus proof we can see the mind of God. Let’s teach them that history is the manifestation of God’s perfect providence. Let’s show them why science works, why logic is logical, and why the world operates in the manner that it does. Let’s proclaim to our dear little ones and to the world that “the earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains!” (I Cor 10:26). Let’s show the world that in Christ is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge and that Christ is King of not only Christmas but of Civics, Chemistry and Calculus as well!