By Joel Hess –

Every year around Christmas we are privileged to hear the predictable lectures by our History Channel PhD. candidate friends on how the Grinch stole the winter solstice. Errr… how Christians stole pagan holidays such as Sol Invictus, Saturnalia, etc.

Of course there is absolutely no evidence that this occurred. Just like high school evolution apologists, these Facebook geniuses have never really investigated anything they so desperately believe and promote. They just trust what the “experts” say. Yes that sounds like Germany, 1936. But that doesn’t matter, it’s far too tempting to rain on people’s parade. Who doesn’t love to knock down sand castles or shock people’s worldview by pulling the veil on the wizard. I would be just as annoying if I was still a pagan.  Well maybe more.

The joke is, it completely wouldn’t matter at all if Christians took over pagan holidays and made them their own. Christians could absolutely care less if Dec. 25 was stolen from other religions and replaced with a holy day centered on Christ. It literally does not affect the claims of Holy Scripture or the validity of Christ death and resurrection for all mankind at all!

Truth be told, it’s actually how Christianity works. It’s how Jesus works. We were all pagan once. Myself included. We all once worshiped creation instead of the Creator, or worse, like many today, we worshiped ourselves and our fleeting desires. We were born in darkness, groping at shadows, and if some of us had not been rescued at a young age we too would be inventing stories about those shadows, even a whole other reality where evil is good and good is evil. We too would be confusing our ever changing yet downward spiraling instincts with truth. We would be worshipping the sun. We would be desperately clinging to the seasons, reading tea leaves, and appeasing unknown gods, fates, or whatever it is that pulls our strings.

Christianity is not the product of some ethnicity or culture. it isn’t a Jewish thing or a Greek thing that rudely forced other cultures to submit.

Don’t get me wrong, Christianity is a foreign religion to be sure. Extremely foreign. Foreign to all of mankind. It is light and we all were living in darkness.

So it is true, Jesus is the invincible Son. Christmas is an imperialist plot, an alien movement meant to rob pagans of their holy days and to replace them with Jesus. Praise God! We all desperately need that. I needed to be robbed of my old religion! My religion led to death and despair. My old ways of either holding up my sins or my good works proudly to the sky thinking I deserved something has been knocked down! Instead, sitting on my altar, is Jesus.

I’m glad I was conquered and made His own.

He has taken over my asinine religion with all its empty holy days and replaced it with Himself, the final sacrifice, the free gift, the way the truth and the life. No more sacrifices. No more sweating before an unknown god. No more wandering in circles. No more blind clinging to the motions of the earth and circling of the sun. No more revolving around myself.

O Lord this Christmas continue to replace my old ways with yours. Continue to empty me of my dead self and fill me with You. Until you come again and make everything new.