As a young man in my twenties, there was a time when I sent Christmas cards to my family to wish them a Merry Christmas. I didn’t write “Merry Christmas”. I wrote “Merry Xmas” instead. I don’t think I did that because I wasn’t a believer in Christ at that time, and I wished to avoid making any reference to Christ, or Jesus, or God. You see, even though I wasn’t a believer, I was also not someone who opposed the Christian faith. I went to church. I attended Christian schools. I did not think very much about what I did or did not do in those days. I simply copied what I saw many other people were doing. I saw others wrote, “Xmas”. So I did the same thing.
After I accepted Christ as my Savior and Lord at age thirty, I learned that there were people in the world who preferred to write, “Xmas”, and not “Christmas” because they didn’t want to be mistaken for being religious. They might still say, “Christmas presents” or “Christmas cards” to their families and friends, just not in writing. They would write “Xmas”. So what did I do? Every chance I got to write the word, “Christmas”, I would make sure I wrote out “Christmas”, and not “Xmas”.
And I think it might still be true today that there are people in the world who write, “Xmas” because this is their war against the Christian faith. In my opinion, these are some of the same people who say, “Happy Holidays” rather than, “Merry Christmas” whenever they greet their families and friends during Christmas holidays.
Fast forward couple of years, God gave me the privilege of studying Greek in seminary. I learned that the Greek word for “Christ” is Χριστός, and that the word begins with the Greek letter that is the equivalent of our English letter X. What happened to me next was that I began to think is it possible there were people all these years who wrote, “Xmas” instead of “Christmas”, not because they wanted to take Christ out of Christmas, but simply because they wanted to make reference to the original Greek word for Christ, albeit it was an abbreviation of the original Greek word for Christ? I think so. I learned that just because someone writes, “Xmas”, that I cannot assume he or she is making a statement against Christians. Writing “Xmas” instead of “Christmas” does not decide whether one is against Christ or one loves Christ.
But let’s not have any disagreement between us about this. Our world is making a war against the Christian faith, and it is not diminishing, it is intensifying. I remember that as a little boy growing up in Asia, whenever I thought of Christian people, I thought of them as kind and helpful people. Today, when unbelievers think of Christian people, they think we are people-haters. They want to have nothing to do with Christians, and they hate us. Some of them, no doubt in my mind, would not be satisfied until the Christmas celebration is fully secularized.
Have you noticed our world has already become quite uneducated about the true message of Christmas? For those of you who were at ChristmasFest this past Sunday, and if you noticed, there was a time towards the end of the evening when I invited the children from the community to come up on the stage, and sing Christmas carols together. I placed my microphone in front of the lips of children one by one as they sang. But to my surprise, the children were not singing. They were not singing not because they didn’t like singing. They weren’t singing because they didn’t know the words to the songs. They didn’t know, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”, “O Come, all Ye Faithful” or “Joy to the World”. But the words to, “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer”, those they knew. The next generation is becoming more oblivious to the real Christmas than ever before.
Our world is not interested in God’s message contained within the Scriptures, and it is growing less and less interested. People don’t want to get close to us the moment they hear we are believers of this message. We must use love and grace whenever we represent ourselves to the world to make them blink. Will we interact with them in a way they expect us to interact? Or will we interact with them in a way that surprises them? What we think of people who write, “Xmas” or people who say, “Happy Holidays” is so minor compared to the message we are all carrying that can save them from the path they are on to eternal destruction.
Your Friend
Alvin