holy days and holidays

chapter one

free concerning days

We must settle the foundation first, because once it is settled, half the quarrels simply dissolve. The believer in Christ is free concerning days. Not bound to them, and not forbidden them; free. And that is not my clever opinion; it is the plain teaching of the apostle Paul, who faced these very fights in the early church and answered them with a liberty that ought to have ended the arguing forever.

The first passage is his word to the Romans.

Read that slowly. One believer treats a certain day as special; another treats every day the same. And Paul does not step in to settle which one is right. He says, let each be fully persuaded in his own mind. He hands the matter to the individual conscience before God and refuses to make a law of it either direction. He says the same thing to the Colossians, even more pointedly, and names the very categories we still fight over.

Let no man judge you. Not the man who keeps the day, and not the man who does not. This is the heart of it, and notice that the freedom cuts in both directions, which is exactly why it makes nearly everyone a little uncomfortable. It cuts against the believer who says you must not keep Christmas because of where some custom came from; he is judging you in respect of a holyday. And it cuts just as hard against the believer who says you simply must keep this feast or that observance to be truly faithful; he is binding a conscience God left free. Both have appointed themselves judges over a thing the Lord turned loose.

So plant your feet here before we take another step. On the matter of days and holidays, you are free. You may keep them or not keep them. You may love Christmas and ignore the church calendar, or treasure every season and feast, or treat every day exactly alike, and in none of it are you more or less spiritual than your brother who chose differently, so long as each of you does what he does unto the Lord and is fully persuaded in his own mind. Most of what remains in this booklet is simply working that one freedom out, holiday by holiday, and clearing away the fears and the obligations that have been piled on top of it.

chapter two

the panic over roots

The first thing that steals the freedom steals it from the more cautious, tender-conscienced sort of believer: the panic over roots. You have heard it, and perhaps you have felt it. The Christmas tree comes from pagan custom. The December date was borrowed from some old festival of the sun. The Easter eggs and the very name trace back to springtime rites of the heathen. And so, the reasoning goes, a faithful Christian must have nothing to do with any of it, lest he be steeped in paganism without knowing it.

I want to take that fear seriously enough to answer it honestly, and then I want to lift it off your shoulders. And the first thing honesty requires is that I tell you those confident origin stories are a good deal shakier than the people who repeat them suppose. The popular claim that the church simply stole December the twenty-fifth from a Roman festival of the sun, for instance, is far from settled fact; the earliest solid evidence for that pagan feast being kept on that day actually comes later than the Christians already associating the date with the Lord’s birth, and a good many scholars now think the borrowing, if there was any, may have run the other way.¹ So the ground the roots-panic stands on is not nearly so firm as it sounds. But I will not rest the answer there, on the shifting sand of who-borrowed-what, because there is a far deeper and surer answer underneath.

Here it is: the distant origin of a custom does not own the custom now. Meaning is not buried in the genealogy of a thing; it lives in the heart and the use of the one who does it. A man who brings an evergreen into his home in December to brighten the dark of winter and remind his children of the everlasting life that came into the world at Bethlehem is not, in any sense the Lord recognizes, worshiping a Druid. He is doing a thing his own heart has filled with a Christian meaning, and the heart is what God reads.

Consider that by the cold logic of the roots-panic, you could scarcely do anything at all. The very names of our days of the week honor Norse and Roman gods. Thursday is Thor’s day, Saturday is Saturn’s, yet no one trembles to say Thursday.² Wedding rings, certain flowers, any number of ordinary customs have some tangled pagan thread somewhere back in the mists. If origin contaminated everything it ever touched, the believer could hardly buy bread. But that is not how the Lord deals with His children, and Paul settled the principle plainly when the question was meat that had been offered to literal idols, a far sharper case than a fir tree.

If meat laid on a pagan altar was nothing, because the idol behind it was nothing, then a decorated tree and a colored egg are nothing too, unless you make them something. The power was never in the object. It was always in the heart. So receive this freedom, tender-hearted reader: you do not have to live as a detective forever sniffing your own holidays for traces of the heathen. You have to keep your heart fixed on Christ. Do that, and a tree is just a tree, lit to His glory, and the fear that has dogged you was a burden He never asked you to carry.

The roots do not make the thing evil. Your heart makes it worship, or makes it nothing.

Now, this freedom is not a license to switch your mind off, and we will come to that when we reach the matter of Halloween, where there is more to weigh than a string of lights. But for the bright, beloved seasons that so many tender consciences have been frightened away from, Christmas and Easter chief among them, hear it plainly: the roots do not make the thing evil. Your heart makes it worship or makes it nothing. Fix the heart, and be free.

chapter three

the god of one day

I must turn now from the tender-conscienced to the rest of us, and say the hardest thing in this booklet, and it is aimed squarely at the comfortable, churchgoing believer who has no scruple about Christmas at all. Here it is. The trouble with Christmas, for most of the church, is not the tree or the date or the gifts. The trouble is that we will adore the Christ of Christmas for one bright morning in December, and then pack Him away with the ornaments for the other eleven months of the year.

We have made Him the God of one day. We remember His birth in December and His resurrection on one Sunday in spring, and in between we can go weeks scarcely speaking His name outside of a church building. We have done to the living Lord what we do to the decorations; we have a season for Him, a box we keep Him in, and the rest of life goes on in its own compartments, sealed off from the one we have labeled holy.

And that, I am convinced, is the true sickness underneath all our fretting about the calendar. We have compartmentalized Christ. There is the church compartment, and the Bible-study compartment, and then, quite separately, behind their own walls, the work compartment, the friends compartment, the entertainment compartment, the dinner-table compartment. He is permitted in the first and politely kept out of the others. A Christian can talk about the Lord on Sunday and would no more bring Him up over dinner on Tuesday than discuss it with the mailman. We have not denied Him. We have just filed Him under the right heading and closed the drawer.

But He was never meant to be a compartment. He was meant to be the air the whole house breathes. The faith Scripture describes is woven straight through the ordinary fabric of a life; you rise, you work, you eat, you raise your children, you talk of this and that, and He is named and known and present in all of it, not quarantined to the religious hour. Moses told Israel to talk of the things of God when they sat in the house and when they walked by the way, when they lay down and when they rose up, woven through the whole day, not boxed into a corner of it.

Let me show you what the compartment looks like when someone accidentally opens the wrong drawer in public. My own father was at a banquet once, a fundraiser for a Christian charity, no less, a whole room of professing believers. The big round tables were full, the conversation was easy and warm, everyone laughing and enjoying themselves. And then my father, in the natural flow of it, brought up the persecuted church overseas, the believers in chains, the work of getting the gospel to those who are suffering for it. And the table went silent. Not hostile. Just suddenly, awkwardly quiet, the way a room goes when someone has said something that does not belong. At a Christian charity dinner, the real and costly Christ had wandered out of His compartment, and nobody knew quite what to do with Him.

Try it. Bring up the living Christ, not the abstract, comfortable, Sunday Christ, but the real one, the persecuted church, the cost of discipleship, the truth of the Word, in an ordinary room of Christians at an ordinary moment, and watch it go quieter than a church mouse. That silence is the sound of a compartment being disturbed. And it is the very thing this booklet is fighting, because a Christ kept in a December box or a Sunday drawer is not the Christ of the New Testament at all.

A Christ kept in a December box or a Sunday drawer is not the Christ of the New Testament at all.

Here is the freedom in it, though, and it is sweet. When Christ is woven through the whole of your life, you are finally free to enjoy the season for everything it is. I will be honest with you: Christmas is my favorite time of the whole year. We put our decorations up the moment Halloween is over and we are in no hurry to take them down before the middle of January. I love the lights and the music and the films and the plays and every bit of the warmth of it. And I can enjoy all of it freely, with a clean and happy heart, precisely because Christ is not confined to it. He is in my every ordinary day; I will move from talking about a film, to something I saw in the Word that morning, to where we are going for supper, to a friend’s trouble, to a passage I am chewing on, all in one breath, because He is woven through all of it and not boxed away from it. That is what frees the holiday to be pure joy instead of the one obligatory religious moment in a compartmentalized year. Tear down the compartments, My Friend, and you do not lose Christmas. You gain Christ, every day, and Christmas on top of it.

chapter four

you don’t have to keep it

There is a quieter error that runs the opposite direction from the panic over roots, and it catches more earnest believers than you would think. It is the creeping sense that there are observances a serious Christian simply must keep, that you ought to be doing Advent with its wreath and its candles, ought to be marking Lent, ought to be keeping the church’s calendar of seasons, and that to skip them is to fall short of real devotion.

So let me say it plainly and set you free: you do not have to keep any of it. Not Advent, not Lent, not the liturgical calendar, not one of the seasons and observances the church has developed across the centuries. Many of them are lovely. Some have been a real help to real saints; lighting a candle through the dark weeks toward Christmas can genuinely turn the heart toward His coming, and if it does that for you, light it with my blessing. But hear the difference, because it is everything: these things are aids, not obligations. They are tools offered to you, not laws laid upon you. The moment a good and helpful practice hardens into a thing you must do to be faithful, it has quietly slipped from being a help to being a yoke, and Christ did not buy your freedom so that you could go shopping for new yokes.

Christ did not buy your freedom so that you could go shopping for new yokes.

Now I want to give you a way of thinking about all these optional observances that goes beyond merely you are allowed to skip them, because there is a wiser question underneath. It is not only a matter of what is permitted. It is a matter of stewardship. The Lord has given each of us a strictly limited supply of the most precious things we own: time, attention, energy, the bandwidth of these finite minds and finite bodies. You have twenty-four hours in a day and not one minute more, and a limited store of strength to spend in them. And He holds us responsible for how we steward what He has lent us, as plainly as the master in the parable held his servants responsible for the talents.

So the real question about a practice you are not commanded to keep is not merely Am I allowed? but Is this the wisest use of the finite time and strength my Lord has lent me? For one believer, a particular observance genuinely feeds the soul and draws the heart to Christ, and for him it is time well spent. For another, it is mostly motion, a thing done because it seems expected, that quietly crowds out prayer, or the Word, or the actual people in his life who need him. There is no sin in keeping it. But there may be a quiet waste in it, and a soul serious about stewarding its few short days will at least ask the question instead of simply absorbing every observance that drifts past. You are free to keep them. You are also free to lay down the ones that are not serving you, and to spend those hours on what matters most. Number your days, My Friend. They are fewer than you think, and they are not your own.

chapter five

two different beasts

Before we leave the subject of what we are not obligated to keep, I want to draw a line that matters more than it may first appear, because two very different kinds of things get filed under the same heading of holy days, and lumping them together muddies the whole question. On one side stand Christmas, Easter, and the Lord’s Supper. On the other stand things like Lent and Advent. They look, at a glance, like members of the same family. They are not. They are two different beasts entirely, and the difference is what is actually being done.

Christmas and Easter are acts of remembrance pointed at something that really happened. A child came, born of a virgin, God in the flesh, on a real day in real history; a man died on a real cross and walked out of a real tomb three days later. Remembering a true event is a thing Scripture itself commends; Israel was told to remember the Exodus, to keep it before their children’s eyes forever, and the church keeps the Lord’s Supper by Christ’s own direct command, do this in remembrance of me. Whatever you make of the calendar dates attached to Christmas and Easter, and we have already dealt with that, the thing being done in the observance is remembering a fact.

Lent and Advent do not remember an event. Nothing happened on the first day of Lent. There is no fact behind the season the way there is a fact behind Bethlehem or the empty tomb. What you have instead is a manufactured observance, a fast that took its familiar forty-day shape only in the fourth century, generations after the apostles, a countdown built onto the calendar with its own rules and its own required duration, and none of it commanded anywhere in the Word.³ It is not remembrance. It is invention, however sincere and however old the invention may be.

Christmas and Easter remember a fact. Lent and Advent are an invention, however old and sincere.

Now, I want to be careful here, because fasting itself is thoroughly biblical, and I have no wish to be misheard as scorning it. The Old Testament is full of it, and our Lord Himself fasted forty days in the wilderness. But look closely at how fasting actually functions in the New Testament, and you will notice something the church’s invented seasons do not honor. It is never a fixed calendar obligation laid on the whole body. It is tied, every time, to a specific occasion and a specific weight of decision. The church at Antioch fasted and prayed before they laid hands on Paul and Barnabas and sent them out. Paul and Barnabas themselves fasted when they appointed elders in every church. The Lord assumes His disciples will fast, and says when ye fast, not if, but He gives no calendar, no required forty days, no season fixed to the year; He warns instead against doing it to be seen of men, which tells you the whole thing was meant to stay a private matter between a soul and its God, not a corporate rite kept on schedule.

That is the New Testament pattern, and it is worth naming plainly: fast when you are wrestling with a real decision, when the weight of a thing has driven you to seek the Lord with your whole attention and your appetite set aside for a season. That is fasting used the way Scripture actually shows it used. A fixed forty days kept every year whether or not any decision is being wrestled with at all is a different thing, built on a different pattern, resembling far more the prescribed calendar of fasts Israel kept under the law than the free and occasion-driven fasting the church was actually given.

So here is the plain word on it. If you want to observe Lent, or keep Advent, you are free to, and it is no sin. But do not imagine you are doing something more spiritual than the believer who does not, and do not let anyone tell you that you are doing something less. It was never commanded, it does not remember an event the way Christmas and Easter do, and wherever a church has turned it into an obligation, a thing you must keep to be truly devout, it has done precisely what we named at the very start of this booklet: taken a thing God left free and hung a yoke on it. A dead religious rite is not a rite with the wrong birthday. It is any observance, however old, however sincere, kept as duty rather than desire, form without the life that was supposed to animate it. Guard against that, whichever side of the question you land on, and you have guarded the thing that actually matters.

chapter six

for us, but not to us

A question has grown louder in our day, and it needs a steady hand and a clear principle: what is the Christian to do with the feasts of Israel? Ought we to be keeping Passover, the Feast of Tabernacles, Hanukkah? There are voices, sincere ones, insisting that believers recover these Jewish observances, that we are missing something essential by neglecting them. So let me give you the principle that settles it, and it is one of the most useful keys in all your Bible reading.

All Scripture is for us. But not all Scripture is spoken to us. Hold those two sentences together and a great deal comes clear.

Here is the foundation underneath, and this author comes from this particular stream of Bible belief, the normative dispensationalist. The church has not replaced Israel, and the church has not been grafted into the national covenant promises God made to Israel. This is the great error to avoid in both directions. God made specific, unconditional promises to Abraham and to his physical descendants, promises of a land, a nation, a kingdom, and being a God who cannot lie, He will yet fulfill every one of them, literally, to Israel, in a day still to come. The church is not Israel and did not inherit Israel’s national feasts and obligations. We are something else, with our own calling and our own blessed hope. The men I learned my Bible from labored to keep this distinction clear, and it has saved their readers from no end of confusion; J. Vernon McGee, who walked the ordinary believer through the whole Book, was forever pressing his listeners to notice to whom a passage was actually spoken, rightly dividing the word of truth, knowing what was said to Israel, what is said to the church, and what belongs to all.

So when it comes to the feasts, Passover, Hanukkah, the rest, understand that they were given to Israel, spoken to Israel, part of a covenant made with that nation. They were never laid as an obligation upon the church. The Jewish people keep them still, within their own situation, still looking for a Messiah they do not yet know has come. And I will say it plainly, because the whole spirit of this booklet is honesty: there is no reason a Christian must keep Hanukkah, and frankly little point in adopting it as your own, as though it made you more spiritual or more biblical. It is not yours to keep. If you wish to, you are free; it is no sin; but do not imagine an obligation where God laid none, and do not let anyone tell you your faith is lacking for setting it aside.

It is not yours to keep. You are free; it is no sin; but do not imagine an obligation where God laid none.

And yet, here is the other half, and it is just as important, every one of those feasts is profitable for you. Not to keep, but to learn from. For all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable; whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning. When you study the Passover and then see Paul say that Christ our passover is sacrificed for us, the whole feast opens up and floods your understanding of the cross with light.

The word itself repays the digging. Our passover is pascha, carried straight over from the Hebrew pesach, to pass over, the very word that named the night the angel of death passed over every house marked by the blood of the lamb.⁴ Paul does not reach for a loose comparison when he calls Christ our pascha. He is telling you that the ancient night in Egypt was a rehearsal written in advance, a shadow with the substance still to come, and the substance was a real man bleeding on a real cross so that the true and final judgment would pass over everyone marked by His blood. When you study the feasts and see how they foreshadow Him this exactly, your worship deepens.

There is the key, and it will serve you far beyond this one question: for us, but not to us. The feasts of Israel are profitable for your learning and your worship, and they are not binding upon your conscience. Mine them for their treasure. Do not wear them as a yoke. And let no one judge you either way.

chapter seven

seeing it for what it is

We have saved the thorniest holiday for nearly last because it deserves a more careful hand than the others, and because it lets me draw a line I very much want you to see. The holiday is Halloween, and here is where I must correct two opposite crowds at once, for on this one, unlike the Christmas tree, there genuinely is more to weigh.

To the first crowd, the ones who wave away every concern with a cheerful it is all just harmless fun, I have to say, not so fast. Halloween, more than any other day on our calendar, carries a real freight of darkness around it: the open trafficking in witchcraft, the occult, the celebration of death and the demonic, things that are not nothing. Because here is what the Christian knows that the world has forgotten: the spiritual realm is real. Witchcraft is real. The demonic is real. There is an actual enemy and an actual war, and though we do not see it with our eyes, we see its effects everywhere.

So no, a believer cannot simply switch his brain off and pretend there is nothing there to reckon with. But, and now I turn to the second crowd, the ones who see a demon behind every plastic pumpkin, neither does seriousness about the spiritual realm mean that a child in a costume gathering candy from the neighbors has trafficked with devils. Those are not the same thing, and the panic that cannot tell the difference does the cause of Christ no favors. The answer to a real darkness is not hysteria; it is discernment.

And discernment means this: look at the thing for exactly what it is. Do not look at the glass as half full, the way the careless crowd does, and do not look at it as half empty, the way the fearful crowd does. Look at the water itself. What is actually in it? Is it clear, or is something floating in it? Is this particular thing, in this particular form, clean or unclean, and is it safe for you to drink? That sober, clear-eyed looking is precisely what Scripture asks of us, and it is the opposite of both the careless shrug and the fearful flinch.

The answer to a real darkness is not hysteria. It is discernment.

Sober and vigilant, wits about you, in other words. You will not always be able to avoid every shadow; you will be in a shop or a friend’s home or a public place where something dark is simply on the screen and you cannot help it. Avoidance was never the whole answer, and it cannot be. Discernment is. So keep your wits about you, look honestly at what a given thing actually is rather than at the label the careless or the fearful have slapped on it, and then let the Holy Spirit guide your own conscience in it. He may give you liberty in something today and check you about that same thing later, and you follow His leading, not the crowd on either side. There is a great deal more to say about how the believer walks wisely through a world full of such things, the films, the stories, the entertainments, where exactly the line runs, than these pages have room to hold. For now, hold the principle: see it for what it is, stay sober, and let the Spirit lead.

chapter eight

how then shall we keep a holiday

So let us gather it all up, and land where the whole matter was always meant to land, not in fear, and not in obligation, but in freedom. We have cleared away a great deal: the panic that a custom’s roots can contaminate a heart fixed on Christ; the false duty to keep observances God never commanded; the notion that Israel’s feasts are ours to wear rather than ours to learn from; and the careless shrug that forgets the darkness is real. What is left, when all of that is swept off the table, is a believer standing genuinely free before his Lord, holding a calendar full of days.

How then shall he keep them? Joyfully, and unto the Lord. That is the whole of it. The same Paul who refused to bind the days told us what to do with whatever we do: do it heartily, as to the Lord; and whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. A holiday kept that way, received as a gift, enjoyed with gratitude, turned Godward, needs no nervous inspection of its pedigree and no anxious checklist of required observances. It simply becomes one more of the ten thousand good gifts a generous Father gives His children to enjoy.

So enjoy your Christmas with a full and happy heart, the lights and the music and the warmth of it, and let it be only the brightest flare of a Christ you carry woven through every ordinary day. Keep Easter, or keep every Lord’s day as a little Easter, as you are persuaded. Hand the feasts of Israel their proper place, a treasure house to learn from, not a yoke to bear. Look at the darker corners of the calendar with clear and sober eyes, neither careless nor afraid, and follow the Spirit’s leading in your own conscience. And through all of it, refuse to sit in judgment on the brother who has landed somewhere different than you, for the Lord has set him free too, and to his own Master he stands or falls.

This is how a stranger passing through this world keeps its calendar: in the world, enjoying its good and innocent gladness with thanksgiving; but not of it, never enslaved to its fears or its superstitions or its empty obligations; free, fully persuaded in his own mind, and doing all of it, the keeping and the leaving alike, unto the Lord, to the glory of God. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. And then, My Friend, go and enjoy the day.