Make Christmas a Starting Point, Not a Dead
End Zone
By Melissa Edgington
Something happens in Christian families around
the holidays.
Everyone starts looking for advent resources. We
get online and buy books about baby Jesus.
We start googling creative ways to make
Christmas about Him instead of about presents.
We decide to start new traditions, like reading
the Christmas story from the Bible beside the Christmas tree.
We put as many nativity sets as possible in our
house, and we try to find Spotify lists that are heavy on carols about the
manger.
We know that we want Christmas to mainly be about
Jesus.
Yet, we also want it to be
about presents. And family. And food. And decorations. And Christmas movies.
It’s wonderful to focus as
much as possible on Jesus and the deep, true, forever impact that the birth of
Christ has on everything.
In fact, it’s essential. We
should do that as much as possible throughout this season.
But, what really matters is
not how much we talk about Jesus during December.
What will make an eternal
impact on our families is how much we talk about Jesus during all the other
months of the year.
What matters is whether we
are living out this faith in regular, every day life.
Does Jesus have any other place in your family’s life, or is He
reserved just for the manger?
Are you deeply involved with a local church, where your children
are learning and growing in His word?
Are you serving others
through your church family so that your children see what true Christianity is?
Are you allowing God’s word
to impact the decisions you make, the conversations you have, the spending you
do, the ordering of your priorities?
Is December the only time you talk to your children about
spiritual things?
How many of us, when we put our tree away and begin a new year,
will forget all about the zeal we had during the Christmas season for teaching
our kids about Christ?
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Instead of making Christmas
just another spiritual dead end, what if we used it as a crucial, beautiful,
world-altering starting place for a life that revolves around Jesus?
What if we prayed and asked
God to revive our hearts this Christmas, to restore the joy of our salvation?
What if this Christmas Jesus
brought real and lasting revival to our own hearts, our families, our churches?
What if this is the very good
beginning of a changed life, one where we and our our children and our
children’s children will see the impact of true devotion to Christ alter
everything about us?
It will mean an invasion of our hearts and minds. A no holds
barred attack on the sin in our own lives.
It will mean giving up
entertainment and activities that are separating us from Christ. It will mean
sacrificial living.
But, it will all be worth it. We want our children to be able to
stand before Jesus and hear those precious words: Well done, my good and faithful servant.
It begins with us. How are we
helping to get them to that moment?
What are we placing as a
higher priority? Sports? Sleeping in? Money?
Everything else seems
ridiculous when compared to an eternity with the King of Kings.
Our kids need to know there’s
more to Christ than a sweet little baby on a bed of hay.
We have to get them beyond
the Christmas story.
We have to show them though
our own lives and through the church and through His perfect word that He is
mighty and merciful, and everything about Him can change everything about us.
Do your advent calendars and your Jesse trees and your nightly
reading of the Christmas story. But, don’t stop there.
When January rolls around,
will your kids be able to look back at Christmas and recognize it as the beginning
of a Jesus-focused life for your family?
Or will it look like yet
another spiritual dead end?
We are the last people on this Earth who should be walking our
kids down spiritual roads that lead nowhere.
Run to Christ and watch your
little ones follow.
Abundant life and eternal
hope are the sweetest gifts of all.
Melissa Edgington is a former English teacher
turned stay-at-home mother. With three small children to raise and a pastor
husband, she is never short on stories, although she is often short on sleep.
Melissa earned a Master's Degree in English and read some of the greatest
literature ever written, but these days she’s more into Dr. Seuss. Despite her
lack of literary sense, she finds herself laughing a lot and knows that the
three little souls in her life are worth more than all of the literature in the
world. Melissa enjoys writing about the Christian life at Your Mom Has a Blog.
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