Well, if you are reading this today, I assume that you successfully survived another Christmas. Christmas is a wonderful time of year, but it can also be a hectic one.
Unfortunately, the weariness of the Christmas season often stems from the spiritual meaning of Christ's birth being drowned out by the noise of commercialism. The gift God gave us in Jesus has been replaced by the special gift you buy for someone else. This shift has created an environment where the focus is no longer on Christ but on the consumer. “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” has been replaced with “What am I going to get them?”
Jesus faced the same consumer culture during His ministry. In John 2:12-22, there is a shocking event where Jesus cleanses the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was meant to be a “house of prayer,” but Jesus declared that it had become “a house of merchandise.” There was more to it than just charging too much for a sacrifice or exchanging coins at an exorbitant rate. The coins and sacrifices were all necessary for worshipping God, but the spirit of commercialism had entered in. In time, the Temple became a marketplace where the consumer could do all their shopping in one place. No longer was the focus on worshipping God; it was on giving the consumer what they wanted and making a profit. No wonder that Jesus responded in zeal and anger by making a whip and driving out all those who profaned the house of God.
Although the Temple is gone, God’s house isn’t. In 1Timothy 3:15 it says, “…that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God…” The church, God’s house, is not to be a consumer-centered enterprise. It’s to be Christ-centered. Like the temple, the church is meant to offer help and guidance to people so they can worship God and have a relationship with Him. To put it plainly, the church is not about merchandising to consumers, but about the messaging of the good news of Jesus Christ that offers you salvation so that you can have a relationship with God.
May we be challenged as we enter a new year in our approach to church. Let us not just view the church as a consumer looking for just the right gift. Let us view the church with a Christ-centered point of view that seeks to worship God as the result of receiving the greatest Christmas gift of all, which is “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
