‘Tis the Season

So Thanksgiving has passed so we’re now officially in the Holiday Season. If you braved the crowds on Black Friday, you no doubt saw the Salvation Army bell-ringers in front of your favorite store, indicating that Christmas is right around the corner. If you’re like me, your neighborhood is increasingly illuminated by Christmas lights, but yours aren’t up yet. And soon we’ll be facing one of the hardest decisions we’ll have to make before the New Year. No, not what to get our wives or children for Christmas. Instead, the struggle over how to great people we meet in the checkout lines, at work, and even at church. Do we say Merry Christmas, try and guess by wishing others a Happy Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, or stay PC and just wish others a Happy Holidays?

That’s right, it’s peak season in the Culture War, where we’ll be bombarded with headlines about Christmas trees being taken out of airports, Nativity scenes being stolen, and renewed calls to “keep Christ in Christmas.” So I’ll be doing a series of posts regarding the Culture War and how we should fight it.

The Culture War has many fronts:

• Politics
• Finances
• Possessions
• Pop-Culture
• Language
• Ministries
• Evangelism
• Persecution
• Example

This isn’t comprehensive or authoritative or in any particular order. But between now and Christmas, when the battles in the Culture War seem most fierce, I’m going to describe each of these and give examples. By doing so I hope to prepare ourselves for the battles ahead, encourage our hearts with the Word of God, and train our minds to see the battles the world wants us to take for granted. And through all of this, the ultimate goal of the Culture War is to “be holy because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16, Lev 11:44-45, 19:2, 20:7).