What we want doesn't matter

Christmas : Christianity :: Civic Nationalism : The United States

If you fight for the byproducts of an identity, but won't fight for the identity itself, you will lose your fight.

I know a lot of folks who want to "Make Christmas Christian again", but don't want to call out heretics like Beth Moore, Joel Osteen, or Rick Warren.

If you won't defend Christianity, it won't matter what people celebrate on December 25th, and not just because there is no suggestion from God to do so.

The Old Testament includes explicit detail on how the temple was to be built, down to the specific precious stones and the order they were to be placed in on the clothing the priests wore. God knows how to request something specific when it matters.

When God doesn't request something specific, we aren't ever commanded to try and fill the gap, because the truth is that in pursuing God, worshiping with all our hearts, our minds, and our strength, that would already fill a lifetime without any new ceremonies or rituals. Our different priorities are going to drive different behavior, and defending that is work in and of itself, a work which has been ignored or deemed unnecessary for over a century.

We don't need to create new rituals and practices to fulfill what God commands of us. Even worse, creating them may cause new problems, because then the focus becomes those rituals and practices instead of the God they are supposed to be about.

If everyone was aligned in their worship of the same God, nobody would be concerned with what or how people celebrated on December 25th, because by default we'd have unity where it really mattered, and freedom to act within the framework of a genuine understanding of the difference between righteousness and sin.

But, because we have sinned with idol worship, the list of things which are "permissible but not beneficial" will be different for us than a nation which is not drowning in hedonistic materialism. The things they do will be different from us, and neither is "right" or "wrong" in that difference.

Because we have lost our identity, and have been consumed by pride, our path back to God will look different than other nations.

We will need to get back to the basics, to the heart of Christianity, learn to defend that effectively, and then slowly build up and out from there.

Defending holidays and such, under the current circumstances, is entirely pointless if we're not in agreement with which God that is supposed to be at the center of that holiday. If we're not following God's explicit commands when God has provided them, if we can't even get that right, then we've certainly got no place trying to come up with anything on our own.

We are a nation fixated on pleasure and celebration, and so we'll need to abstain from those until we can understand how to do them correctly. We have to stop sinning, no matter how convenient it is to keep going, to just go with the crowd.

Like an alcoholic, it's possible that we could enjoy an alcoholic beverage responsibly, but if we can't, then our only option is prohibition. If we can't help but create a false god, better that we do without such temptations at all than to try and bed evil and sustain an entirely false pretense of righteousness.

It doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. It doesn't matter how your behavior is going to be restricted compared to what everyone else may be doing.

The purpose of our lives is to glorify God, and God is not glorified when we deny the unrepentant sin that we have enabled or participated in.

We must repent, cut back all that has led us astray, all the distractions, and only rebuild from a position of truth and understanding.

If we end up back where we were before, so be it to the glory of God. If we don't, so be it to the glory of God.

Either way, our goal should not be a maximization of our pleasure and entertainment, but the glory of God, whatever that may require us to give up in doing so.

The sacrifice is worth it, and refusing to sacrifice something so arbitrary and temporal would demonstrate where one's faith is truly placed.