Christmas and Christian Liberty

In the winter of 2023 and 2024 I preached a series of six sermons on Christmas and Christian liberty. What follows is that series brought together into one article. Every December, like clockwork, the same fight breaks out on social media. Men and women take to Facebook to educate anyone and everyone about the origins of the holiday. They have set limits for themselves and want everyone else to have those same limits, some going so far as to make it a test of fellowship and threatening to exclude members of their church who disagree. On the other side sit believers who grew up with the holiday and cannot imagine a Christian without it. Both sides want the issue to be cut and dry. It is not as cut and dry as some folks would like it to be, and Romans 14 tells us what to do about that.

Four Facts We Have to Face

Before we open the text, we need to be honest about the facts. I struggled with the wording of some of these, and I am indebted to Brother Albert Martin for his help as I listened to a similar series he preached in 1994, available on SermonAudio.

Fact 1. There is no Biblical warrant whatsoever for the remembrance of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ by means of a specially designated day of religious or social celebration. Search the Scriptures and you will not find any reference to December 25. You will not find a commandment to celebrate it, nor any example of anyone celebrating it. On the flip side, you will not find any commandment not to celebrate.

Fact 2. The designation of December 25 as the date to commemorate Christ's birth is rooted in paganism and Roman Catholicism. This is not hidden knowledge. You can find it in a good encyclopedia and in church history books on every side, Baptist, Protestant, and Roman Catholic alike. For the first three hundred years of church history you will find no celebration of the birth of Christ at all.

Fact 3. The current celebration of Christmas in our society is essentially pagan, humanistic, and licentious.

Fact 4. In God's common grace, much good has come and continues to come in connection with Christmas. For one season the world turns its attention to a glimmer of truth it normally never thinks about: the birth of Christ into the world. People are generally more receptive to the gospel this time of year than any other. You might not be able to have a conversation with your neighbor about the Lord on a normal day, but try it at Christmas and he will probably listen. I saw it myself. One year my boss, who was never interested in anything spiritual, asked me what I preached on Sunday, and I got to tell her about the incarnation of Christ. I was able to witness to her in a way I could not have at any other time of the year. Give a lost man a good theologically sound book this season and he will receive it with thanksgiving. If we are not careful we will miss this.

Hold all four facts together and you see the problem. The holiday is not Biblical, but it is a stretch to call it the devil's holiday. So what do we do? Just like the early churches, we have people with differing backgrounds sitting in the same pews. The answer is found in the principles of Christian liberty.

We Must Receive One Another

There were Jews and Gentiles in the Roman church. Some of the Jews brought their dietary customs and their holy days with them. Some of the Gentiles ate meat sacrificed to idols and may have brought some of their old celebrations along too. Picture two families, both in the church. One is Gentile. They eat all meats with no regard for the ceremonial law, because the ceremonial law no longer applies. The other family is Jewish, raised under those laws. They know much of the meat in town came from idol temples, so to be cautious they eat only vegetables. Paul says they can sit at the same table. They can be members of the same church. They are brothers.

Notice that Paul does not treat everyone in the church as equal in maturity. All are saved the same way, by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. But once we are saved we do not all grow at the same rate. Some are weak in the faith because of temperament, prone to worry and fear. Some are weak because they neglect the Scriptures, prayer, and the assembling of the saints. Receive the weak one as he is, Paul says, but not to pass judgment on his scruples. As John MacArthur put it, the mature believer should not sit in judgment on the sincere but underdeveloped thoughts that govern the weak believer's conduct.

This is difficult when we are raised a certain way. If you were raised with Christmas, it is hard to imagine a real Christian doing anything different. If you were raised without it, it is hard to imagine a real Christian celebrating it. I remember the first time I learned that Christians can enjoy playing card games. It was almost as shocking as finding out that Christians go to movie theaters. The Bible is not as clear on these things as some people would like it to be, and where the Bible is not clear, there is liberty.

The Scripture has strong words for those who make rules where God has made none. Paul, writing under inspiration in 1 Timothy 4:1–3, calls commanding people to abstain from foods a doctrine of demons. That is a direct connection to Romans 14. We are to receive our brothers who differ from us, not build fences God never built.

We Must Not Despise or Judge One Another

Verse 3 cuts both directions, and you need to see which danger belongs to which man. The strong is in danger of contempt. He knows an idol is nothing in the world, and that knowledge puffs up, so he looks down on his scrupulous brother as silly. The weak is in danger of judgment. Because he feels the need to guard himself, he feels the need to guard everyone else, so he sits in judgment: that man cannot be a true Christian, or he would not eat those foods. I am certain the weak man feels strong in his judgment, but it is a sign of weakness.

Bring that into our day. One brother looks across the pew and says, how can you believe in the virgin birth if you do not celebrate Christmas? Are you even a Christian? Another brother sees a Facebook post and says, you celebrate a holiday with pagan origins, and that makes you an idolater. Both have left the facts behind, and no matter how strongly we feel about our position, we are not free to break the ninth commandment against our brother.

I know how that first judgment feels. Several years ago, when I worked in a call center for a phone company, we had to work Christmas Day, and nobody wanted to. The running joke was about who would actually call in with phone trouble on Christmas, and the answer was atheists, Muslims, and people from David Green's church. I got lumped right in with the unbelievers because they knew I did not celebrate. What kind of Baptist are you anyway? People look across the pew, or across the cubicle, and cannot make sense of a Christian who is different from them.

Watch out especially for hypocritical judgment, the kind Jesus warned about in Matthew 7. There are preachers who thunder against Christmas in December while planning their New Year's celebration, and both days come to us from the same pagan and Catholic sources. I knew families growing up who condemned Christmas and kept Halloween. A man will judge a brother for a bottle of wine in his refrigerator while taking any number of prescribed medications without a second thought. That is how it goes with judgmental brothers and sisters on many topics.

Someone will say the Scriptures contradict themselves here. The brother who celebrates runs to Romans 14. The brother who does not runs to Galatians 4, where Paul rebukes the observing of days. Is Paul double minded? Not at all. The difference is context. In Rome, Paul was dealing with weakness and scruples, so he was patient and refused to take sides. In Galatia, men had turned observances into requirements binding on everyone and touching salvation itself, so he rebuked them. Weakness gets patience. Lawmaking gets rebuke.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his commentary on Romans 14, gives counsel every church needs: help the weak as much as you can, but never allow the weak to become dictators, and above all, never allow matters of indifference to be used to decide who is and who is not a Christian.

Fully Convinced Under the Lordship of Christ

What days is Paul talking about? Since he is writing about matters of liberty, he cannot mean the Lord's Day. That day belongs to the moral law of God, and its observance is not up for discussion here. He means the many feasts, festivals, and added holy days the Jews carried with them into the church, and the special days the converted pagans brought along too. We see the same thing today: Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and many others. Some believe you are sinning if you celebrate. Others believe you are sinning if you don't.

When I was in Mansfield we fellowshipped with a preacher who had a problem with all of them, including Mother's Day and Father's Day. He would not even let his children tell him Happy Father's Day, and he practiced at home exactly what he preached at church. That was new to me. But nobody broke fellowship over it, and neither did he. That is liberty working the way it should.

Paul takes no side, because Biblically there is no mandate either way. His command is this: be fully convinced in your own mind, and whatever you do, do it for the Lord. Do not do it for tradition's sake. Do not do it because the old preacher down the road says it is right. Do what you do unto the Lord, and the bigotry will disappear. On any given Christmas Day there are some whose hearts are far more spiritual as they sing carols and open their Bibles to consider the birth of Christ than the busybodies online judging what goes on in other people's homes.

Then Paul presses the argument to its foundation in verses 7 through 12. Not one of us lives for himself. Christ died and lived again that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. He has purchased you, and He has purchased the brother who is a little different from you. So why do you judge your brother? Why do you view him with contempt? We will all stand before the judgment seat of God, and each one of us will give an account of himself. That is you. That is me. That is the meat eater and the vegetable eater, the one who observes days and the one who does not. Christ is the judge. Not you. Not me.

My grandfather was James Hobbs. His favorite commentary set was Matthew Henry. Mine was John Gill. We had great fellowship together. There is liberty in commentaries too, and in Bible conferences, and in a hundred other things where brethren today are marking one another off over preferences. Study the old confessions of faith and you will find they were broad and deep on the primary doctrines. Some of the newer statements load up on secondary issues and even matters of liberty, and the fruit of that kind of confession is preachers who ride pet doctrines, divide the flock, run people off, and kill churches.

Do Not Put a Stumbling Block Before a Brother

Here the letter turns. Having told us not to judge, Paul now tells the strong to regulate their practices for the spiritual wellbeing of their brethren. But we have to be careful to understand what he means, because if we get this wrong the weaker brother becomes a tyrant to the stronger.

What first set me to studying this question years ago was not Christmas at all. It was a brother who was offended that I carried a concealed firearm in church. He never saw it, but he asked me point blank and I told him the truth. I was breaking no law of man and no law of God. But he was offended in the way we usually use that word, and it drove me to the text to find out whether that is what Paul means here.

Does "grieved" in verse 15 mean irritated, annoyed, or displeased? It does not, and thank God for that. We live in a super sensitive culture. If the rule were that we must never displease anyone, imagine the confusion. One member might be irritated by the color of a brother's shirt, another might not like that the pastor has a beard, and everything from the length of the sermon to the temperature of the building would become a battlefield. We would end up voting on church uniforms. You cannot please all people all the time, and Paul never asks you to try.

Douglas Moo explains that the grief in this verse is not the sadness one feels watching others do what he thinks inappropriate. The weak are grieved, or stumble, when they imitate the behavior of the strong without having the faith of the strong, acting against their own conscience. Naselli and Crowley say the same in their book Conscience: if a brother simply does not like your freedoms, that is his problem, but if your practice of freedom leads him to sin against his conscience, it becomes your problem. Christ gave up His life for that brother. Are you unwilling to give up a freedom?

So the brother who eats meat does not destroy his vegetarian brother merely by eating meat in his presence. The destruction comes when he serves the meat to him and presses him to eat it, compelling him to act against conscience, for "he who doubts is condemned if he eats." Picture it. You know your brother has a problem with idol meat, you invite him to dinner, you serve it to him anyway, and after the meal you laugh and tell him what he just ate. There is no command in Scripture against that meat, but you have led him to sin against his own conscience, and you did it on purpose. That is the stumbling block Paul forbids.

Bring it over to our subject. If you celebrate Christmas and you have a brother opposed to the practice, do not invite him over while your tree is up, and do not hand him a gift. I grew up in a home that did not celebrate, and one year my dad's sister came to the house with Christmas presents for us kids. My dad told her not to bring those Christmas gifts into his house. She got mad, ripped the wrapping paper off, and said, here, give them this toy. She should have just brought the gift without the paper. If you want to give a gift to a brother who does not celebrate, buy it at Christmas if you like, save it, and hand it to him some other time of the year. On the flip side, if you do not celebrate, do not appoint yourself a missionary to rid the world of Christmas, and do not go to his house to tear down his traditions. Paul was gentle among the Thessalonians. Be gentle among your brothers. Don't be a jerk.

Somebody will object that Jesus made a whip and drove out the money changers, and that this is how we should treat everything contrary to Bible practice. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but praise God there is more to the Scriptures than that. In John 10:22–23 our Lord walked the temple at the Feast of Dedication, what we know as Hanukkah, a celebration found nowhere in the Scriptures, added between the Testaments. He neither denounced it nor refused to be present at it. He did not treat an extra-Biblical feast the way He treated thieves in His Father's house, and there is something to be learned there.

Liberty Is Never Liberty to Sin

Nothing in this series is a license for sin, and there are extremes on either side that must be addressed. It is a sin to give Santa Claus the attributes of God, to tell children that a man knows when they are sleeping and knows when they are awake and knows if they have been bad or good. It is a sin to kiss someone who is not your spouse under the mistletoe. It is a sin to get drunk for Christmas. It is a sin to miss church on the Lord's Day to celebrate Christmas, because long before any calendar said Christmas, God gave us the Lord's Day. We are not at liberty to do these things, and they may well be reasons for church discipline. But not everyone who celebrates Christmas does these things.

The same warning falls on the other side. For those who do not celebrate, there is no liberty to slander or make false accusations against good brothers and sisters. Exodus 20:16 is still applicable in December.

Here is a test of whether you have liberty at all. If you cannot give up your wine or your tobacco for a weekend while you are with someone who disagrees, you are not exercising liberty. You are in bondage to that bottle or that cigarette, and Romans 6:16 says you are a slave to the one you obey. Spurgeon smoked cigars until the day he saw a tobacco company advertising the very brand Charles Spurgeon used. He realized his liberty had become a stumbling block to others, and he gave it up.

Faith Before God

Do you have a clear conscience about celebrating? Have it to yourself before God, and do not parade the liberty in the home of the brother who disagrees. Do you doubt? Then leave it alone. As Spurgeon said, "If you are not sure a thing is right, leave it alone, for it will be sin to you." What you believe about neutral things is between you and God. As a church we cannot tolerate the arrogance of the strong, and we cannot bend the whole congregation to the scruples of the weak.

The Strong Bear With the Weak

Why does Paul lay the burden on the strong and not the weak? Because the strong can give up more than the weak. If the weak gave up his scruple to join the strong, he would sin against his conscience. The strong gives up nothing but a preference. So bear the infirmities of the weak, and look to the greatest example there is: Christ did not please Himself. In Gethsemane He prayed, not My will, but Yours be done. Are we better than Jesus, that we cannot bear with a brother who is a little different from us?

Then Paul prays in verses 5 and 6 that the God of perseverance and encouragement would grant the church to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus, so that with one accord and one voice they might glorify God. One mind, not two. One mouth, not two. Not glory to the great meat on one side or the great vegetables on the other. Not pride in the fact that you celebrate Christmas or pride in the fact that you don't. The early church did not divide over diets and days, and the church of Jew and Gentile at Rome was only possible because unity is found in the gospel of Christ. There are enough factions among Baptists already. Let's not divide over the holidays.

Remember what our weapons are in these disagreements. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10 they are not carnal but mighty through God for the tearing down of strongholds, the walls of pride, custom, and tradition that people build up so the truth has a hard time getting in. The aim is never to tear down the person. Tear down the person and you lose him. Tear down the stronghold with the Word of God and you win him.

Look at how differently that verse lands when you remember what you were. With all your imperfections, your sins, and your blemishes, you were at odds with God. You had committed high treason against Him, and yet He loved you and received you. Are you better than God, that you cannot receive your brother?

Not All Things Build Up

Paul closes his treatment of the same subject in 1 Corinthians with these principles. As Christians we must consider not only what is lawful but what is edifying, and circumstances may make that a sin which, in itself, is none. The kingdom of God is not about meats, or days, or any of these things. Whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. If you celebrate Christmas or don't, do it to the glory of God.

Let me give you my own position plainly. I do not celebrate Christmas, and I will not bring it into the church. By that I mean we will not have a Christmas celebration, and I also mean it will not be made a test of fellowship or membership or a reason for disciplinary action. I have no authority in your home and you have none in mine. It is wrong to bind the conscience of any person where God has not done so in His Word. I would oppose anyone who wanted to bring trees, poinsettias, and a nativity scene into the church building, and I would just as quickly oppose a church that voted to exclude members for celebrating. I would leave a church over either one. Without making a festival of the day, the pastor can and should preach Christ on the public holidays, because there is a real possibility of a visitor or two, and there is no harm in a sinner being reminded of the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of our Lord. These days can be used to the glory of God.

This is nothing new. The older preachers did not celebrate Christmas, and they preached plainly on its origins, but they allowed for it in the homes of those who did. Nobody, not Joe Wilson, not James Hobbs, not Milburn Cockrell, not Reggie Moore, made it a test of fellowship, and nobody was ever brought up for church discipline over it. The liberty was always implied, even when it was not preached. They remembered something some of the younger men have forgotten: we are all of the same family. We can be a bit different and still have unity. Many churches are small, not because of the truth, but because people are weird. Don't be that way.

There are hills to stand on and even to divide over. Christmas is not one of them. Receive one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God, and take Paul's closing word as your pattern in every matter of liberty: "Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1, LSB).