I found another good read today via a good friend of mine. It was such a good read that I have to post it here:

Why You Shouldn’t Allow Your Children To Eat Thanksgiving Dinner

(Man I’m really on a roll with this theme aren’t I?)

Marion Lovett, Elder at Heritage posted two very good articles recently on how Christians view their children. Check them out!

    • It’s Really About How We View Our Children

    • The Context for Discerning the Body

So I’ve been reading some articles and blog posts in regard to the celebration of Christmas, as I am sometimes wont to do this time of year.

Many of you reading this may know that my immediate family has condemned Christmas as pagan and therefore does not celebrate. No festivities, no decorations, no christmas trees, nothing. In many ways I am glad for this as it gave me the opportunity to examine why we did not. I thoroughly evaluated the celebration of Church holidays, in particular Christmas. I came at it from many angles such as, should the Church be celebrating holidays other than the Lord’s Day, should we celebrate Christmas or is it a pagan holiday? I came to the conclusion that Christmas indeed should be celebrated. We should be joyful! If on no other grounds than this… we, God’s chosen people, of all people have cause to celebrate. We are the elect of God, we are his people, why should we do nothing while the pagans celebrate? The pagans bring out their “seasons greetings” and happy holidays” but we should celebrate CHRISTMAS! We celebrate the coming of our Saviour to the world, we celebrate his life and death for us. We should celebrate because the victory belongs to Christ, this world belongs to our Lord and we should celebrate that victory, not with silly tales of Santa Clause and reindeer, which is a diversion from the truth of the victory of Christ our Lord! It doesn’t matter what the roots of the day are, we can find something pagan that happened on every day of the year, so instead of letting the pagans have the day, we claim it in the name of the Lord as we do every day.

But there is something more thought provoking here that I came across and it made me think. I’ve been in a few different circles of thought in my lifetime. But at this point in my life I am proud to be a part of the reformed worldview. Now, everything has advantages and disadvantages. Everyone has weaknesses and strongpoints. And I think weaknesses and strongpoints come pre-wrapped in schools of thought as well, and the reformed school of thought is no exception.

And I believe in the reformed world that we sometimes have this little problem of wanting to be radical and different for the sake of being radical and different. And I can’t say that I have always escaped this tendency either. We absolutely revel in our radicalness. And, there is a place to be radical and different, we do after all desire reform, and that means being different sometimes. But our differentness should have a purpose and reason behind it, and not just any old reason either. When we as Christians are different or radical, it should be because we have the word of God behind us.

We are called to be a Holy (set apart) people, and this is why we are often seen as radical. And I applaud and endorse many of the “radical” notions within the reformed community such as Covenant Renewal Worship, Patriarchal Leadership of the home, Family Worship etc. All of these things are often seen as radical and often we are accused of being in a cult. No problem.

But, there is a tendency to be different for the sake of being different, and then we try to throw biblical justification in as an afterthought, and it just ruins the whole show! I believe holidays fall in this category for many reformed folk. But wait, the Bible actually does talk about Holidays doesn’t it? And it didn’t tell us to

Make certain though celebratest no holiday not defined in the New Testament. Make sure thou feastest not, except to partake of the Lord’s Supper. Be certain that ye celebrate nothing for I the Lord thy God am a Grinch, desiring that my people be dour and sour and that above all they celebrate not the victory of Christ in the world where he rules and reigns with a rod of iron.

No no no, we are commanded to REJOICE! (Psalm 32:11, Psalm 33:1 Psalm 35:9 Philippians 4:4… and the list could go on forever).

And then also we are told not to condemn either way the celebrating of some days above others, or not celebrating. (Romans 14:5-6)

And throwing all other arguments aside, why should we not have special focus this time of year on the coming of our Lord to this world? Why should we not celebrate that which is right and good! And isn’t it interesting that all the non-Christians are worried about this holiday? This is one of the main holidays that are attacked.

So to that I say to all you Christians, go forth and have a MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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Here are a couple of articles I was reading:

http://jeffreyjmeyers.blogspot.com/2007/11/christmas-time-is-here-again.html

http://jeffreyjmeyers.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-christmas-christian-part-ii.html

http://www.hornes.org/theologia/mark-horne/celebrating-a-calvinist-christmas-with-a-clear-conscience

FOR WHO DID CHRIST DIE?

by: John Owen

The Father imposed His wrath due unto, and the Son underwent punishment for, either:

1. All the sins of all men.
2. All the sins of some men, or
3. Some of the sins of all men.

In which case it may be said:

1. That if the last be true, all men have some sins to answer for, and so, none are saved.
2. That if the second be true, then Christ, in their stead suffered for all the sins of all the elect in the whole world, and this is the truth.
3. But if the first be the case, why are not all men free from the punishment due unto their sins?

You answer, “Because of unbelief.” I ask, Is this unbelief a sin, or is it not? If it be, then Christ suffered the punishment due unto it, or He did not. If He did, why must that hinder them more than their other sins for which He died? If He did not, He did not die for all their sins!

There’s a funny thing I run across sometimes, and it’s quite a paradox. It seems that some people have no problem believing in God’s sovereignty when it comes to praying for someone’s salvation, but they can’t stand the thought that they didn’t have a choice in their own salvation. I actually find this position less consistent than the full Armenian position that says, “You can pray that God will influence someone, but ultimately the decision is theirs to make.” At least that’s consistent.

But it seems inconsistent to me to pray to God that he save someone when they really believe he is incapable of doing so without their permission, and they ultimately believe that God must have the person’s permission because they want to say they had a choice in the matter of their own salvation. In fact in a conversation about running the race as referenced by the Apostle Paul, someone said that God enables them to run the race, but that they still could choose not to run the race. Now I respect this position, and respect and like the person I was talking to who said it, but I have to disagree with it. You are either elect or you are not. If you are not elect, then God is not enabling you to do anything. I believe that you can fall away from the faith and make shipwreck as the Apostle Paul said, but what does that mean exactly?

It is helpful at this point to look at the Old Covenant.In the Old Covenant, one could be one of the Children of Israel, part of the covenant, and yet not be saved. But they were among the chosen people of God. Yet being of the chosen people did not make them individually elect. Still, those who fell away were described as cut off! How can you be cut off from something you don’t have? Because they were a part of the elect people of God! But that individual was not elect.

The number of elect/saved individuals is a constant. But there can be those in the church, part of God’s elect/chosen people, yet as an individual, they may not be chosen.

God is all powerful, God is sovereign. And God certainly doesn’t change His mind, “You were saved but now your not, I was enabling you to run the race but now I’m not,” etc. I believe that to be a misrepresentation of God’s sovereignty.

At the request of a friend I am revisiting this subject. In fact, I had intended to revisit this subject and unfortunately it had fallen of the edge of my task list.

The email I received asked for clarification as to what I meant by stating my disagreement with Doug Phillips in his three posts dealing with Narnia. He also asked the question, “Was I defending paganism?, Or CS Lewis’ theology over Doug Phillips.?” To both questions the answer is no. I am sorry to have been so neglectful as to leave my readers to any such speculation on the subject.

I will not have time today to address all the issues in this post, and hopefully a couple more posts on the subject won’t slide off the edge of my plate and become forgotten again.

Here I will deal with Doug Philips post called, Hollywood Elites Use and Abuse Lewis; Use and Abuse Christians

My first point is that it is quite natural to expect Disney and Walden media to try and market this to anybody they can. Their final goal is to make money off of the film. And while the film company I work for is Christian, we do also intend to make money off of the films we produce in order to provide for our families. But since we are Christian, our motives, and our other goals are going to be much different. The point I am making here however is that we can expect as much from “Hollywood.” This does not mean that the film is bad.

Secondly, in one article Doug Phillips linked to by the Washington Times, they quote Douglas Gresham, stepson of the late C.S. Lewis as saying that the religious emphasis was an American disease. But this does not change the fact the they did not remove the religious aspect from the movie. To quote another part of the Washington Times article,

“There are powerful themes that resonate with the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, but it’s a book with universal appeal,” Mr. Mattson said.

Here they admit that the themes resonate with Christianity. And yet they made the movie anyway. Another quote from the article,

“The problem now is that when Christians do great work, they hide their Christianity out of a sense of embarrassment to avoid the inappropriate stereotype.”
To counteract stereotypes, Disney is going the inclusive route, he said.

Disney is going the inclusive route… what does that mean? It means they are not dropping the Christian themes from the movie, for which we should commend them. It’s not enough to condemn, we also need to commend. There is plenty of evil to condemn in Hollywood, I mean lots and lots. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the common phrase goes.

We should also be thankful that Christianity is now being seen as a big enough market to require their attention. Let’s keep up the trend. I believe God may yet send a badly needed reformation.