Where will you be the Christmas Sunday morning?

I remember a few years ago when December 25 fell on a Sunday.  I was aghast when I heard how many of our local churches had decided (ostensibly for the sake of the families in their fellowship) to cancel Sunday worship service.  In those churches that did not cancel, countless parishioners abandoned Sunday morning worship in favor of “family time” around the Christmas tree.

    Santa Claus, Nat King Cole and the Miller Hill Mall exerted more influence over alleged Christians than the incarnation. Many of those absent on Christmas morning deduce that since they attended Christmas Eve service, then gathered worship on the following day would be redundant—especially if Christmas Eve services were held in the evening.  The early believers in Acts saw no redundancy in meeting every day in the temple.  The attitude was apparently more, “I get to be with my brothers and sisters every day ” rather than, “Two services in two days is hardly necessary.”    At the risk of sounding like a rigid legalist, here are ten reasons (in no particular order) why this rearrangement of Christmas priorities is incomprehensibly backward.

1.    Allowing gift exchanges and family traditions to take precedence over Christmas worship sets a horrific example for our kids who hear from our lips that “Jesus is Lord” when in fact it might very well appear to them that several other things are placed ahead of him—gifts, traditions of men, Santa, families, etc.. .  Kids are very quick to spy out what really matters to us and if you want them to see what is really important to your family, let them see what you do on the morning of Sunday, December 25.

2.   It seems hypocritical for the same church people who have for years groaned about the wretched commercialism of Christmas fail to exalt the manger over the mistletoe on Sunday, 12/25.

3.   For those concerned about disappointing family by coming to church on Christmas morning, we are called to practice the fear of the Lord, not the fear of family reprisals for not showing up at Aunt Martha’s annual Christmas brunch.

4.   Our absence from worship services on the 25th is not so much the problem as it is a reliable expression of the real problem.  That is—we love the world more than we love Jesus.

5.   It diminishes the spiritual family—the church with whom we worship when we, on a day when set apart to celebrate the incarnation of God, choose our temporary biological families over our eternal family--Christ’s blood-bought bride.

6.   It probably indicates that the families who do this have for a long time been kidding themselves if they think they are serious about reaching the lost people in their families.  In this one opportunity to exalt Christ over the world, before the watching eyes of their family, they exalt the world and in so doing, diminish Christ.

7.   Manifesting these priorities on Christmas is an indicator that the “warm feelings” you get on Christmas Eve have probably been much more inspired by visions of sugar plums than a vision of God incarnate.

8.   It probably means that all those Christmas seasons where you have justified all that time spent in malls, baking cookies and breads and decorating trees as “a way to celebrate Christ” were in truth, a celebration of Santa.

9.   You are expressing the belief that the gifts you have waiting for you under the tree are of more importance than the gift God placed in the manger.

10.                It should be a wake-up call as to how far your actions are from your testimony.

Where will you be this Christmas Sunday morning?