Consequences of the Lordship of Christ at Christmas Time

“Of course we celebrate Christmas. We’re a Christian school. We also say Christian things like, ‘God is love’ and ‘Jesus is Lord’ and ‘Sin is bad.’” We live in the kind of world where we have to say things like this.

In recent years our culture has begun to devise an increasing number of ways to ignore, revise, or degrade the celebration of Christmas as a Christian feast day. For that matter, though we are in many ways buffered against it in the South, there is all around us a bias against any specifically Christian public affirmation as tacky at best or hateful at worst.

Just get on with your holiday shopping and avoid saying the name Jesus, please.

It seems that our nation has accepted the position (and all the historical revisionism that comes with it) that the only official and publicly allowable religious affirmation in our nation’s public square is either skepticism or outright atheism. Cultural commentators far wiser than I have offered excellent documentation and analysis for this trend toward a pretended neutrality. You know, “Happy holidays!”, holiday parties, winter celebrations, and all the rest.

In the midst of it, however, Providence Classical Christian School goes against the stream of officially disavowing Christmas in favor of a more acceptable, non-religious holiday or rejecting other public Christian affirmations in favor of a bland neutrality built on a fear of ever offending anyone’s sensibilities. Providence is – and seeks to be, in every sense of the word – a Christian school. Jesus Christ is Lord – Lord of our school, its classes, teachers, curriculum, policies, culture, and future.

I’ve been ruminating on a few of the consequences of the Lordship of Christ at our school:

• We will not be having any holiday parties or other winter celebrations this December. We are having Christmas parties and Christmas celebrations, including Christmas trees, Christmas carols, Christmas presents, Christmas ornaments, Christmas decorations, Christmas sweaters, Christmas feasts, and Christmas joy. St. Nicholas is one of our heroes. We love celebrating Advent and want to make it one of the most special times of the year. Christmas is a holiday, but we celebrate our holiday because it is a “holy day” and we are followers of Jesus Christ the Holy Lord.

• We are a school, and one of the main things we do is teach children to read. This we do because we believe that one of (if not the) primary purposes for learning to read is to be able to read and understand the Bible for oneself. We put the immense gift of reading to use for a multitude of reasons, but central to them all is the gift of reading and hearing the Word of God. Without this gift, all the other gifts fall apart. We are people of the word because we are people of the Word, who became flesh and dwelt among us.

• We really do believe that prayer is powerful, and we are free to pray without ceasing at our school. This certainly means that we pray together in Morning Assembly each day, our teachers pray with their students at various times throughout the day, and we are each free (and encouraged) to pray individually. And we are very happy we have this wonderful freedom. But our praying means that we believe that God is actually present – and welcome – in our halls and classrooms and ball fields. We look to Him and call on Him and rely on Him and implore His favor through prayer. Jesus Christ is not only Lord of all the earth and the far-flung galaxies. He is Lord here and now, God-With-Us. Our Immanuel is with us to enable us and guide us. We pray because we believe this, not only at Advent and Christmas but also all the year long.

• We believe that what we have is what we’ve been given. Our Heavenly Father is the original giver of gifts. We didn’t make ourselves, and we didn’t give ourselves the riches that we possess and the liberties that we enjoy every day. God is the author of all the blessings that we receive and enjoy at all times. So while we’re not as thankful as we ought to be, we are thankful nonetheless. God is good, all the time, in good times and bad. And thankfulness to God fills the air at our school. In fact, one of our key goals is to cultivate thankfulness in ourselves, to model gratitude before our students, and then to train them to be thankful for what they are being given. We believe we would be failures if we produce smart kids who perform well on tests, go to impressive colleges on big scholarships, and attain success, but who are not humbly thankful.

The Christmas season reminds us that the Child in the manger rules the world as King and Lord. Our school is His school, and I am so thankful for it.