merryxmasIt’s official. Christmas is controversial. Celebrating Christmas has been getting more and more divisive in recent years. Just when you think that the opposition to Christmas couldn’t get any worse—it does.

For example, WABC News reported a controversy that popped up just three weeks ago: “…5th graders at RJO Intermediate School in Kings Park

[New York] recently performed the song ‘Silent Night’ with all religious words like Christ, God, and Jesus taken out.” My first thought was, “Have they forgotten that the celebration is called CHRISTmas?”

I recently learned that this isn’t the first time in history that a culture tried to erase Jesus from Christmas. Hitler’s Germany went down the same path that we seem to be going down.

At first the Nazis argued that Christmas had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, but that it was actually a celebration of a “rebirth of the sun.” Since they taught that the swastika was an ancient symbol of the sun, they substituted it for a star on the top of the Christmas trees—which they renamed “fir trees, light trees or Jul trees.”

Nativity scenes were changed too. The manger was replaced with toy, wooden deer and rabbits. Mary and Joseph remained, but they were shown as blonds, holding a blond baby. They also attempted to replace the coming of Jesus with the coming of Adolf Hitler and called him “Savior Führer.”

Christmas music was changed, too. The words to “Silent Night” (which brings us back to the school in Kings Park, New York) were distorted so that it had no reference to God or to Jesus. Another example was the ancient hymn “Unto Us is Born a Son,” which was changed to “Unto Us a Time Has Come.”

These attempts to change the traditional meaning of Christmas really bother me. They bother many other Americans, too. For those of us who feel this way, there is a danger in all of this that we must carefully avoid. When we condemn those who want to rewrite Christmas, we can actually become guilty of doing our own rewriting. We can do that by making the focus of Christmas all about cultural and political controversies. We, too, can forget that Christmas is all about adoring Jesus, not just about winning cultural wars. The Apostle Paul put it this way, “I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3).

Here is the point. While we are opposing those who try to erase Christ from the Christmas celebration, we can find ourselves distracted from loving and serving the Jesus we are celebrating. This is dangerous because anything that distracts us from worshiping Christ is wrong, even if it seems like the right thing. Why? Because Jesus deserves to be worshiped every day of the year, and not just on Christmas Day.

I hope that you have embraced the full importance of who Jesus Christ is and what He has done. That is why Paul prayed that we would embrace “… all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2–3).

 Christmas should be all about Christ, but we should also be loving Him on every other day, too.