Respectable Sins of Christmas #5 - Sentimentality

There is a hard truth to admit, but it is as clear as Christmas lights: many of us love the feeling of Christmas more than the Christ of Christmas.

When you read the biblical accounts of Christ’s birth, you encounter fear, rage, political upheaval, paranoia, deception, flight in the middle of the night, and the brutal murder of innocent baby boys. You see a child born in poverty, humble even by the standards of that time. And when the curtain is pulled back on the spiritual realm, as in Revelation 12, we see the dragon—Satan himself—actively seeking to destroy the Son of God.

Real Christmas is anything but warm and cozy. Christmas is war.

Yet we prefer a sanitized Christmas, just as we often prefer a sanitized Christianity. And this is a real danger. If Christmas is the foundational story of the Christian faith, reshaping it into something cute reshapes Christianity itself into something harmless. What follows is emotion replacing truth, warm feelings replacing repentance, and “nice” Christianity replacing holy Christianity.

The way God prepared the world for the coming of Christ was not with warm drinks, cute cookies, and feel-good sermon series, as we so often find in our churches today. God sent John the Baptist—clothed in rough garments, eating locusts and wild honey, and preaching repentance. To receive Christ is to receive the King of truth. It is to be confronted with the reality of our sinfulness, our foolishness, our lostness, and our need for rescue.

Jesus did not die and rescue us to make us nice people, but holy people.

Christmas is not nice—just as true Christianity is not nice. Christianity is not a feel-good religion. It is the story of God intervening to rescue sinners from the darkness of their rebellion. From the very beginning, Christmas reminds us that our salvation would come at a cost—the cost of blood, the blood of the innocent.

So as much as I enjoy Christmas traditions, we must recognize the danger of turning Christmas into something it is not. Without realizing it, driven by sentimentality, we begin shaping our own imaginations—and our children’s—with a false story. Feelings and sentiments are not evil, but they must be governed by truth.

May God help us restore not a cute Christmas to our homes, churches, and culture, but a true Christmas—one that forms holy and resilient Christians, ready to follow Christ into His ongoing war against sin, Satan, and the evil systems of this world.

Nino Marques