Onward Christmas Soldiers

(The following was originally written for the 2009 Christmas season, but just as applicable today.)


    I haven't seen any statistics, but it seems as though Christmas goes up for sale earlier and earlier every year.
    When I was a kid my grandmother cleaned up from Thanksgiving that night and the tree went up the very next day. She absolutely could not wait for Christmas, but somehow it never occurred to her to interfere with Thanksgiving by piling Christmas on top of it. Nowadays they have Christmas out well before even the Un-Holiday (Halloween).
    Aside from the increasingly disproportionate weight that holidays take on as Americans are driven to add deeper meaning to their lives while drifting farther and farther from God, this grotesque overgrowth of the celebration of the Christ-child crawls out of our deep commitment to the Dollar – that golden image before which all peoples, nations, and languages must bow.
    Every year the news covers the Christmastide economic forecast like nervous meteorologists watching a Category 5 hurricane spinning in the Atlantic. American retailers pin all their hopes and fears for the year on Christmas sales. If the people don't spend themselves into a stupor at Christmas, retailers will close the doors, the axe is laid to the root of the American economy, and the Great and Powerful Walmart will be left shaking behind a curtain in the corner. The nightly message is clear: we must spend enough money to threaten the financial stability of our families, or the financial stability of the nation is in jeopardy.
    What on earth is going on here?
    It can be easy to mistake busy-ness for purpose, especially in the holiday crush with everyone else pressing into that busy-ness, and retail advertisers singing one more chorus of Onward Christmas Soldiers. But all that activity has nothing to do with the actual purpose of the holiday, which is Christ. Not a safe and cozy, sleeping, baby-in-a-manger snugglebox that everyone can feel comfortable, warm, and fuzzy about; but the infinitely blindingly brilliant Prince of Life whose eyes flame with fire, and whose very act of stepping down from the glories and power of heaven to enter this world as the poorest and most helpless of creatures places an urgent, immediate, and unyeilding claim upon our very lives.
    That is what we are shouting down with all our rampant gift giving. I mean, even in "hard" times cash is relatively abundant for us, and easier to throw around than sincere meaning, or real personal investment.
    It might be that our economy would be blessed more if we focused more on putting first things first. But it is absolute folly to suppose that we can somehow spend ourselves into prosperity, at Christmas or at any other time. Real prosperity is built on long term principles of financial stability. If the foundation of the building is compromised, then frantic building activity all over the house isn't going to solve anything. Construction will have to stop, and the foundation will have to be fixed no matter how much time and expense that might entail. If the families of America are financially shaky, then America is financial shaky, and all the bailout spending in Washington isn't going to change that.
    And if our spiritual foundation is compromised (as it surely is), then everything is compromised – economy and all – because that's where it all begins. That's where the principles leading to financial prosperity come from, and a hundred other aspects that are much, much more important than even the Dollar.

Dec 2010 Addendum
This year we saw what seems to be some sort of a record; the local Walmart actually had the Christmas trees back down and off display before December! No kidding. They had two big beautiful trees at the doors, and the big display of all the trees in the garden center. Our four-year-old literally waited all year long to see those trees, ever since last Christmas. All year he kept asking and waiting for the Christmas trees. This certainly beats all. Not even three weeks they had them all up, but they had to get those pesky things out of the way so they could put out racks and racks of important Christmas merchandise like 'Justin Bieber' paraphernalia. We just could not believe it.

Communion vs The Lord's Supper

(The following is taken from a personal communication to a brother and sister in Christ, with personal references removed. If you belong to or are in leadership of almost any 'church' in the land, just pretend that it is written to you personally.)

In the beginning, when the Ekklesia of God was a founded by the Lord Jesus, and guided by the apostles of the Lord through the Holy Spirit, the Lord's Supper was the very centerpiece of meetings of the Lord's people, the Ekklesia. Though they might have met together more often that this, at a minimum the tradition established by the Lord was for His people to come together on the Lord's Day (the first day of the week, Sunday) in the evening, specifically to eat the Lord's Supper. This was not a token fragment of a meal like 'communion', but was a full meal as the central focus of their coming together every week. It was the very centerpiece of Christian fellowship and association throughout the apostolic age; it was what their meetings were ALL about. Everything revolved around the Lord's Supper. You can particularly see this in 1Cor 11:17-34 and also in Acts 20:7-12.

Now we are repeatedly told in the Bible that we are to adhere to apostolic teaching and to continue to observe these apostolic traditions as the commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ: In 1Cor 11: 2 Paul says, "Now I praise you brethren that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you." In 1Cor 14: 37 he says, "If anyone thinks himself to be a prophet or spiritual let him acknowledge that the things which I write to you are the commandments of the Lord." In 2Thess 3: 6 he says, "But we command you brethren in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which he received from us." And in 1Thess 2:15 Paul says, "Therefore brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle."

We today are not of those who were taught these traditions by word, since we have never seen Paul, but we are those who have received the traditions through the epistles (the writings of the New Testament) and it is our duty to search them out and to do them to the best of our ability from what was written to us. Paul is not talking about the traditions of men that we have wrongly received from outside the Bible – whether Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Holiness Pentecostal – but the original traditions which are there in the scriptures for us to read and learn and do. Regarding the difference between human traditions and God's traditions the scriptures say in Jer 2:13, "My People have committed two evils: The have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water." and again in Hosea 5:11 "Ephraim is oppressed and broken in judgment, because he willingly walked by human precept." This is the sad state of the 'church' today, and how sad that, "...he willingly walked by human precept." Yet how true. Point out to a churchman some difference between the traditions given of God in the New Testament and their current 'church' traditions, and the traditions will win out every time even if they are only a few years old.

People – even the Lord's people – love their human traditions and don't want to let go of them for anything.

But we fully believe that 'God's will for our lives is in the Bible itself' and that if we want to know His will for our lives, our families, and for the Ekklesia of God, it is found right there in the Bible. So many 'churches' that we have seen have been so close, but unwilling to step over the threshold to true Bible fellowship. So many 'pastors' just won't let go.

But today, and for well over a thousand years, the 'churches' have replaced the Lord's Supper with 'Communion'. Communion does not come from the Bible, but from the Catholic Church, which replaced the God-ordained Lord's Supper with a magical rite called 'The Mass'; unfortunately, when the reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox broke from the Catholic Church they still retained the form of the Mass, stripped of its magical doctrine, and called it 'communion', but they never obeyed the Scriptures in actually returning to the Lord's Supper.

In your particular case, you not only do communion in opposition to the Lord's Supper, but you are actually doing it in a way that is in direct opposition to Paul's entire point in 1Cor 11, for 'each one takes his cracker crumb ahead of others'. The Lord's Supper is supposed to depict and produce unity in the body, but leaving it lying around for everyone to have or not have whenever they want to is depicting and producing disunity. The only saving grace is that it is only 'Baptist Wine', so at least no one can get drunk. But if you read through this section of scripture as a whole, the dreadful things which Paul pronounces against the believers in Corinth are not so much because they come to the Lord's Table with some secret sin, but because they don't take the form of the Lord's Supper seriously, and thus are chastened by the Lord.

You asked me with surprising earnestness why it was so important to observe the Lord's Supper literally. I couldn't  help but think of a quote from Steve Atkerson of the New Testament Restoration Foundation that said, "The question is not 'Why do we have to do things as they did in the New Testament?', the real question is, 'Why would we want to do things any other way?' " And I think that alone goes a long way to answering your question. Try asking yourselves in earnest, "Why exactly would I want to do things some other way than what they did in the New Testament?" Try going to the Lord in prayer and asking Him that very question. "Lord Jesus, why would I want to do things some other way than what they did in the New Testament?"

Well for one thing, if you can believe that baptism should be done as they did in the New Testament – if you can agree that baptism is only for genuine believers, not infants, upon conversion, by full immersion – then you really ought to be able to understand why the Lord's Supper should be done as they did it then. It's really one and the same issue. Baptism is one issue that Baptists and Pentecostals and Charismatics are pretty well in agreement on; but when the first Baptists started insisting on it the established denominations thought they were a bunch of reckless upstarts stirring up trouble over nothing. But guess what? Those Baptists were right, they were just some folks that believed the Bible, just saying what was actually in the Bible, and we today are the beneficiaries of the persecution they faced. Even today many denominations refuse to accept the truth about Baptism, and they are still just as wrong as their forerunners. In fact, they are even more wrong because they have had a few hundred years to think it over now and they still choose to love and cling to their human traditions instead of simply submitting themselves to the Word of God.

And that is all we are saying, that the Lord's Supper is simply an issue on which we should bow the knee and submit ourselves to the Word of God: why would we want to do any differently? What would be the reason for that? What would be in us that would bristle and get defensive at the idea of doing the Lord's Supper the way the Apostles established at the beginning instead of doing it like some smart guys that came along a couple of thousand years later? Could we suppose that Jesus didn't get it quite right? Or that we have thought up some useful improvements that He simply hadn't thought of?

There are other reasons than this but this is really the beginning point.

Sunday School

Of late we have attended a local semi-itenerant 'church' on Sunday mornings. Though thinking themselves anti-traditional, they come from a holiness-pentecostal/charismatic background and the 'services' certainly reflect these traditions. And in general they have a very traditional 'church' mindset about what the body of Christ is supposed to be.

Case in point: they recently decided that it was time that they started having 'Sunday School'.

Now like a lot of things, Sunday School is as Sunday School does, and some does it better than others. Most of my experience with Sunday School has found it rather wanting.

"My, that certainly is a rather broad and sweeping condemnation if you will.." I can hear you thinking in a voice not unlike like J. Vernon McGee.

And yes I suppose it is. In fairness I want to say that for many years in my childhood my own Sunday School teacher was a very Christ-dedicated man named Terry Barns, and that most all of the core doctrine and real Christianity I learned as a child came from this man in Sunday School, who stuck with my age-group for several years and did about as good a job as anyone can do. I can think of no real criticism of his work, except that I do think he taught us the 'Once-saved-always-saved' doctrine, and being raised in a Southern Baptist Church I continued to labor under that error for many years until I really got into the Bible for myself. But mostly this man did a top notch job.

So it may surprise you to read that 'Sunday School', even at its very best, is primarily a failure of the Body of Christ, and as such, actually, a fairly predictable product of the 'church', which steadfastly refuses to embrace the ekklesia truths in the Bible. It's no surprise then that the Sunday School weed which My Father has not planted has gone on to produce increasing weeds like awanas and youth programs and children's church et al.

Sunday School, even at it's dead-level best, is primarily a failure of the Body of Christ.

The Ekklesia of God is so completely different from the 'churches' that it is hard to know where to begin to explain the magnitude of my statement.

The Ekklesia of God was interactive and vibrant and inclusive (of input from the believers I mean, not of sin or sinners). The Ekklesia of God was the assembling together of the believers, not of believers-who-hopefully-invited-their-unbelieving-neighbors-and-strangers-so-that-we-hope-they-might-get saved-at-the-'altar call'. The Ekklesia of God had real, intimate fellowship in Christ as the centerpiece of its coming together, looking at one another at the Table of the Lord, as they broke bread in the Lord's Supper as a full meal every Lord's Day. The Ekklesia of God had a body full of working parts that together built up and encouraged and admonished one another for the love of one another and their Lord.

The 'church' is a weak and pitiful thing, dead and dried up and run over, full of social club members who sit quietly in their pew (or maybe 'church chair'), facing the back of the neck of the person in front of them, thinking about how beautiful their new sanctuary will be, and letting all the edifying, encouraging, and admonishing be handled by an overworked, pretentiously educated, and 'licensed' individual known as 'The Pastor', who, considering the unwieldly load set before him, and the expectation to provide 30 to 45 minutes of entertainment three times a week, quickly devolves into a trite routine of anecdotes, rhythmic speaking, and jokes – trusting in the 'worship leader' to play the right beckoning chords to get enough people down to the 'altar call' to justify the salary that he depends upon his patrons for.

In such an impoverished setting, small wonder that the things that are lacking should be so evident that people should try to set up a 'program' in an attempt to supply their desperate want, like an aged and emphysematic cigarette smoker desperately drawing poison into their lungs to calm the fear they feel from their lack of oxygen, clutching the very instruments of their death ever tighter.

The Body of the Living Christ should react to Sunday School (and all those other programs) like a professional athlete would to someone who wants to put him in an electric wheel chair for the rest of his life.