Every shiny red bulb we hang on the tree this season is artillery in the greatest conflict of our time. Christmas is a battle. The modern push to secure a salvation that is essentially human in nature – from crisis to solution – demands that Jesus be anything but God and man. The spirit of our age wages war on Christmas at every turn, even as stockings are quietly hung by the chimney with care. Christmas worship can be used by God to help us win this battle within us, and by extension, in the world around us. Here are 3 ways how.
Christmas Worship Can Win the Battle – for Our Hearts
Every philosophy of our age will fight to keep Jesus man at best, and diminish him to the size of our cultural values, political persuasions, and religious upbringings.
Those philosophies will seek to convert us through virtually all the movies, music, and the media of our time (though you and I can and should appreciate the art of much of them).
Every silent battle going as we take in a film in a dark theater, or hum along with Spotify in our kitchen, is an extension of the Christmas battle. We need both awareness that our battle is not “with flesh and blood,” and weapons that secure us in a fight many of us do not know we are in.
Christmas worship is a means put in our hands for the gradual conquering of our own hearts – and the hearts of others – by the God of Christmas.
1. Christmas Worship Reminds Us Of The Claim God Has On Our Lives
If Jesus of Nazareth is God at all, he lays claim to the totality of each one of our lives. If he is not, we are free to do as we please and remain the masters of our own politics, preferences, and destinies.
It is this common, serpent-like course of all historic, practical forms of Gnosticism (that’s a longer story) – to make Jesus into our image – that is confronted by the Incarnation.
Immanuel postures himself as either the world’s greatest fallacy – or the world’s essential remedy. There is no middle ground.
Worship reminds us of God’s claim on our lives, and demands a response. When we sing, we pray and say our response. When we break the bread and take the cup, we declare our Christmas allegiance to Jesus.
O come, all ye faithful – to offer yourself again.
2. Christmas Worship Reminds Us The Cure For The Human Condition Is Christ Jesus
Christmas declares the human cure is found in a saving Christ, who then fuels our great acts of human discovery, creativity, justice, enterprise, and philanthropy with Spirit, and meaning, and context.
Those same great acts, expressed without explicit connection to this Christmas cosmology, are full of merit – yet remain proclamations that we can ultimately cheat death and rampant evil ourselves if we just work hard enough.
