\u201cAs soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.\u201d
\n \u2014 Matthew 2:8<\/p>\n
Christmas in the Western world has become a highly secularized holiday. While the celebration still bears the name of Christ, the season marks a time of gifts and parties, lights and decorations. And while many of those themes are relatively harmless, they do not call attention to the worship of Christ that should be at the center of the holiday celebrations.It\u2019s sad that the priests and scholars who knew the prophecy about the Savior\u2019s birth weren\u2019t interested enough to see if it was fulfilled, despite the fact that Bethlehem was only a few miles from Jerusalem. And Herod, who was interested because he felt threatened, didn\u2019t want to hear about the kind of king God desired\u2014a gentle ruler and shepherd (Matthew 2:6). At times, we too have our tendencies to ignore what we know about God\u2019s promises and to try to maintain our own sense of authority and comfort.In just a few days Christmas will be here. Perhaps you\u2019ve already begun your celebrations, and you\u2019re enjoying the traditions our culture has built up around this holiday.As we celebrate, let\u2019s be careful not to let our traditions or attitudes bring about a false Christmas that rejects the worship of Jesus. Instead of staying in our own comfortable palaces, let us go, as the Magi did, to seek God\u2019s promised Savior.<\/p>\n
Gracious God, we confess how easy it is to get caught up in our own version of Christmas and miss the wonder of the Savior\u2019s birth. Forgive us, and fix our attention on Jesus. Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cAs soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.\u201d \u2014 Matthew 2:8 Christmas in the Western world has become a highly secularized holiday. While the celebration still bears the name of Christ, the season marks a time of gifts and parties, lights and decorations. And while<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[813,1810],"class_list":["post-13059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-devotionals","tag-christmas","tag-false"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}