Episode 62: Christmas and Evangelism

To the Ruled Church podcast.

Christ Is King and the Church Is Not a Democracy

This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy.

It's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Guess what I had to do this morning, Eddie?

You had to scrape frost off the windshield of your car. How did you know? Because it is a wonderful, beautiful time in Arkansas. The weather is finally getting right.

Hey, this is the time of year I come alive, man. That's like, I hibernate for like 10 months, and then these two months, maybe into January, too, here I am. So how cold was it. Where you're at this morning?

I did not even look, but I mean, it was getting down around freezing when I went home last night, so I'm sure it was down in about 30.

I mean, it says it's 32 right now.

Yeah, I mean, it may have been down in the 20s. I'm not sure.

I bet y 'all are a couple degrees.

Oh, whoa, whoa.

Yeah, I'm way wrong, because it's 22 right now.

Yeah, yeah, I'm like, if it's 32 here, I was gonna say y 'all are at least a few degrees cooler.

Where you're at.

It's 22 right now, so it must have been colder than that.

All right.

I just love the cold, so.

Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast, episode 62. I'm your co-host, Alan Nelson, and with me is my brother in the faith, good friend, fellow pastor, podcast cohort, Eddie Ragsdale, who has, by the way, started November with a beard and mustache trim instead of no shave.

Well, I let my beard start growing last week, and then I just went ahead and trimmed my mustache because my mustache was real long, so. But yeah, good to be on the podcast today. Hey, so you said, what, 62?

62, yes, your age.

62, so how many podcasts did we do in the first iteration?

Well, and here's the thing, too. Like some of these, I don't know why we've done it. Like some of them, we didn't give like an episode number, so we've actually done more than 62, and so we've basically doubled what we did last time.

So all together, we're getting close to 100.

We're gonna give away free selfies with Eddie.

Yeah, that's right. Free selfies with me. You just have to come to Marshall.

Well, brother, this episode, so we're recording November 1st. This episode is gonna come out the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, which I believe is November 29th. That actually may be a little bit tight for some people to implement some of the things we're gonna talk about, but we really just wanna talk about being aware of this time of year and being evangelistic during the Christmas season, and so we wanna share some ideas, some things that we're doing, and some ideas that you can implement.

First of all, let's just talk real, this part, Eddie, is just gonna be real, real brief, but let's just talk about a quick theology of Christmas. So I'm gonna kick it to you, and you tell me like, what are we celebrating when we celebrate Christmas?

And then I wanna talk about just briefly, should we celebrate Christmas? And then let's talk about evangelism. So number one, just throw it out there. What are Christians doing when we celebrate Christmas?

The Incarnation and the Gospel at Christmas

I would say we are celebrating Emmanuel, God with us. And so it says in Galatians chapter four, in the fullness of time, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law. And so we are celebrating the fact that God himself, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, incarnate.

And he came in the flesh that he might redeem a people for himself through his death, burial, and resurrection, through his righteous life that began being born in the manger. But he wasn't simply born to have this humble birth in a manger, but to go to the humility of the cross and to his glorification and his resurrection and exaltation.

So I would say we don't want to take Christmas and kind of separate it off as we're just celebrating sweet baby Jesus in the manger and forget that it's all about the gospel of God sending his son, Jesus, who would save his people from their sin.

I would say that the theology of Christmas is the theology of Matthew 121.

Oh, beautiful.

You should call him Jesus for he will save his people from their sin.

Amen.

By his righteous life, by his death on the cross, substitutionary death, bearing the wrath of God for sinners and raising again the third day. You don't see the manger properly without seeing the cross in the background.

It's good, brother. So every year, this time of year, I'm sure by the time this comes out, the debates will be swirling. Should we celebrate Christmas? And there are a couple of arguments I want to give for why

And I don't want your bias against Christmas to come into this quadrant.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Let me give you the argument for not celebrating Christmas. And you might be surprised. Some of you may be surprised to hear me say this. It is okay for a Christian to not celebrate Christmas.

Why?

Well, the Bible doesn't command us to celebrate Christmas. So there's no obligation upon a church or the believer to set aside a specific day to celebrate the incarnation. Secondly, the commercialization of this time of year and even the idolatry, the greed, and even here's another one you may not think about, the self-righteousness.

So do you think of this time of year, you're like, well, I feel good about myself because I gave $20 to Salvation Army or I bought my barber a gift card or something. So there's all these sins associated with this time of year.

I just want to open up and say, look, I understand it. I understand the believers out there who in their conscience, they're just like, we're not doing it. We're not putting up anything. We're not doing that.

But if I could give a defense, a couple of things I would say, number one, I know that some people say, oh, it's a pagan holiday, which I disagree with that historically. I think Dr. James White, you'd have to find it.

If you can't find it, you feel free to email me, C-U-A-T-R-O-N-E-L-S-O-N, quatronelson at gmail .com. I'll try to get it to you. But Dr. James White did a great Sunday school lesson number of years ago on this.

I don't think that you could say that the origins of Christmas are a pagan holiday. However, let's say they are. What does the gospel do? The gospel redeems. Is it possible for Christians to Christianize a celebration?

Yeah, I think so. But here's my defense for celebrating this time of year. And that is just the absolute beauty and glory of this mystery and miracle of the incarnation. God became man. And so I know I get a little crazy and I do a lot of different stuff with lights and Christmas tree and all that kind of stuff.

But all that's just kind of fun tradition. I love to build these memories in my children. But what I'm trying to do underneath all that and pointing toward with all that is just celebration of the fact that God has come down to rescue us.

Every other religion, Eddie, is about how we can figure out a way back to God or a God or whatever. Whereas Christianity, the true religion, the truth is how God came to us in Christ to save his people from their sins.

Probably unsurprising to our listeners, but I come down on the side of, hey, let's celebrate Christmas. At the same time, let's allow for liberty of conscience in the issue. Anything else you wanna add to all that?

Yeah, I think there is a danger. And the danger is that we would relegate celebrating the incarnation only to Christmas time. Yeah, that we would say, oh, what are you doing singing about a Christmas song in July?

Well, because we can celebrate the incarnation all the time. So I would wanna push back on the idea that, well, that's only for December.

Yeah, that's good, that's good.

It certainly is not, just like we wouldn't say, we would say we ought to be celebrating the resurrection of the Lord Jesus every Lord's day. That's why we meet on the Lord's day.

Yeah.

It's the resurrection day.

You know, we're Baptist, so we're not so much liturgical in the calendar, but I do find some things that are helpful with that. You know, in our family for Advent, we do little special things during Advent, but again, I think there's liberty there.

There's freedom there for the Christian to incorporate those things or not. But here's the reason I think that the church has these rhythms is because if you just say, we'll celebrate the incarnation whenever we want.

Amen.

And you might not do it at all.

That's right.

That's right. So we want both things.

That's right.

We wanna hold against the danger of only celebrating the incarnation at Christmas time. But I would say it is a good thing to have it in our regular yearly schedule so that we surely celebrate the incarnation at least at Christmas time.

Yeah.

And so pastorally, I would say this, like this is a great time of year for maybe your Sunday school lesson or your Wednesday night or maybe Sunday night, even Sunday morning to bring out big theological concepts like the hypostatic union.

Okay.

This is a great time of year to do that. Like, what are we talking about theologically when we talk about the divine union of the human nature and divine nature of the God man? What do we mean that Jesus is truly God and truly man?

How do we guard against saying things in an unorthodox or even heretical manner? You know, so this is a great time of year to do that. It's a great time of year to preach these wonderful passages, like you mentioned, Matthew 121.

And here's the deal too, I don't have to weigh in, like you can stay expositional and that's fine, you know, but it's also okay to say, hey, you know what? Sunday this year is on Christmas Eve. We're going to do a special focus on what the incarnation looks, you know, so use this time of year to your advantage.

But really what we're going to talk about is evangelism during the Christmas season. So it's not that there's any kind of special, you know, like hearts are more receptive or whatever. I mean, that's not really true that hearts are more receptive because theologically, you know, hearts are hardened.

However, there are some maybe avenues opened to be able to use that aren't as readily available for the Christian, maybe in other parts of the year. So let me give you an example of what I mean. When you walk into a store, now typically anymore, some of these stores aren't doing this, but you can hypothetically walk into a store that publicly basically hates the things of Christ and yet Silent Night is playing over the speakers, you know?

And so there's just some avenues that you can use for that. So let's talk about that for a little bit, Eddie. What are some ideas or even some things that your church is doing? We'll just kind of go back and forth here, but what's something that comes to your mind when you think about evangelism during the Christmas season?

Christmas Evangelism Through Community Events and Tracts

The first thing is we maybe want to think about the opportunities that arise because of what our communities do during the Christmas season. So I know that in Perryville and here in Marshall, in both communities, we have Christmas parades.

And so those are opportunities where we can, you know, you can have a float and I know you preached it. You're from the float last year, right? In the Christmas parade?

The other, I was gone during it, but brothers, yes, they did preach. But yeah, usually when we have a parade, we just jump up on that thing and preach, you know?

And so whether it's using the parade as an opportunity to pass out tracks or as an opportunity to proclaim the gospel open air the way that you guys were there or you're getting some kind of message out.

In the past, we've used live nativity kind of things. We've used, you know, different kinds of things like that to get, you know, to get the gospel out there. So I think one, you've got an opportunity to use different kinds of things to express the gospel maybe in a big way like that.

Another opportunity is the individual members of your church are gonna have opportunities with their family members. And so we wanna equip all of us in the local church as we're engaging maybe with extended family who don't know the Lord to be ready to have those gospel conversations, you know, when we're gathering together for these different holiday parties or traditions or however individual families do that.

So I think those are a couple of ways we can be thinking both big, like, what can we do for the town? And then also how can we equip our people whether that's tracks, man, there's some really great tracks that are Christmas specific, but really just being ready to talk about Christ of Christmas.

Yeah, I'm a pretty big track fan. And I think that sometimes people undervalue those. I was listening last year. I've probably shared this before, but Ecclesiastes 11, brother Randall Easter preached this at our church in 2022 says, cast your bread upon the waters for you will find it after many days.

Give a portion to seven or even to eight for you know not what disaster may happen on earth. If the clouds are full of rain, they emptying themselves on earth. And if a tree falls to the South or to the North and the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.

He who observes the wind will not sow and he who regards the clouds will not reap. Now, this is one of the applications he made from the text. And that is about casting your bread upon the waters. Cast it, cast it, cast it, cast it.

And then see what the return will be. If you sit there and look at the wind or sit there and look at the clouds, you won't sow, you won't reap. And so the idea was sow nothing, reap nothing. So you say, hey, I'm going to not pass out any tracks because I don't believe gospel tracks work.

Well, I can tell you this. No one will read a gospel track that they don't have. So if you don't pass them out, no one's going to read them. So I do think one thing, I think it should be a regular purchase of your church.

You could do this very, very cheap. Like with Vistaprint, we do ours with Vistaprint and we kind of design our own. And I think we just bought like maybe like 3000 and it was like 150 bucks or so. I don't know.

I mean, you know what I'm saying? I mean like that'll last us a good while. Now we bought, most of them we bought were just general but we did buy some that were kind of 500 that were Christmas specific.

But anyway, tracks. Also, when you said about the family thing, if we can encourage our people, even if they just took two minutes and said, hey guys, we're about to eat Christmas dinner. Can I just remind us?

This is why we're doing it. Now, most family gatherings around here, this is the problem with the South. Most family, oh, we know, we know, we know, we know. But take the opportunity to explicitly share the gospel.

And one of the things you may do, especially in the Bible Belt is not only expound the gospel but explain, okay, when someone receives the gospel in repentance and faith, this is what it looks like. And that, you know, because I think that's an issue in our world today, a lot of people could articulate the meaning of Christmas or whatever but they cannot articulate well, or at least they're not living like they've received the message of the gospel.

A couple of things that we're gonna do that'll be different during this time of year. Everything that you said was good. I would just add a couple of things. One, by the time this episode airs, we'll have already done this, but you still have time to organize something like this.

If you want, you could do it on a Sunday night or a Wednesday night or, you know, whatever, Friday night. But we're doing an evangelistic letter writing service. So what that'll look like for us is we'll take a Sunday evening service.

We will have finger food potluck. We will, you know, I'll share the gospel. There'll be a short kind of message on Christ. And then I'll exhort our people to write letters. And the idea here is to explicitly share the gospel in these letters and use them.

You can write multiple letters, but use them to share the gospel with people that, I mean, really there's no rules in the sense, like it could be someone you've known for a long time and you just haven't, you know, really pressed on the gospel.

Or maybe you've shared them with it a hundred times and you want to share it again. Or it could be like, you know, the person you get your haircut from, or maybe the person delivers mail or, you know, someone you come into contact regularly, you know, that person you smile, you say hi, you feel like, you know, but you don't see them, you don't really talk to them that much.

You know, anything like that, specifically and explicitly share the gospel in a Christmas card and explain to them the good news of why Jesus came and how it is that they can have Christ as their Savior and King.

So that's one thing that we're going to do, evangelistic letter writing. And the first time, again, I heard that from my friend, Randall Easter. The first time we did that was last year. And I would say that it went well.

And again, it's another opportunity to encourage your people to evangelize. Another thing that we're going to do now, we kind of did it last year, but the night we were going to do it was so cold. And so this year, we're really going to do it more intentionally.

I don't know, we're going to do it better this year. And that is evangelistic Christmas caroling. So we're bringing back the old school, going door to door and going to sing Christmas carols.

Christmas Caroling, Nursing Homes, and Jail Ministry

Yeah, we are too.

And, hey man, I mean, you know, it's like, we're just going to go. I mean, the idea, and now last year, we ended up actually did it in a couple of stores too, in town, but we're just going to go, we'll knock on door, we'll sing a couple of songs.

And we will, and by the way, when I say that, like we'll sing like gospel heavy songs, you know, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. You know, we're not singing Jingle Bells or whatever. Right, right. And then we will pass out tracks, you know, with the Christmas carol.

Now, what we're probably going to do this year is do it at least in Perryville one night. And then we're talking about maybe Conway or Russellville or something, at least, you know, hopefully try to do two nights, but did y 'all do it last year?

We didn't do it. Yeah, yeah, we did. We've been caroling for a few years. I'll tell you something that reminds me of something we did. And this was seven years ago, cause it was my first Christmas pastoring here in Marshall.

But we did one Wednesday night, we went to the harps and we did, and I don't, some people may remember this cause this was kind of a thing seven or eight or 10 years ago. We did a flash mob kind of like we were all over harps and then just all of a sudden we started singing, you know, our Christmas carol.

It was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. And we passed out gospel tracts. I mean, it was pretty cool. So yeah, there are lots of ways like that, that you can get the gospel. That same year we also went and we caroled at the jail.

And like the way that it was, the inmates were able to be in like this yard area. And so like, we couldn't go into the jail, but we could stand outside and sing and they could be in there. And then we were able to, we bought some food for those that were in jail.

Like we bought their dinner that night, a special meal. And we were able to, you know, to get them some gospel tracts that way. So yeah, there are opportunities like that. Especially because even some of those things, when you think about issues like with the jail or maybe you've got some kind of recovery type ministries or whatever, usually those kinds of ministries, or maybe they're not even ministries.

I mean, those kinds of services in your community at Christmas time, they're a little more open to let you come in and be more explicit about the gospel because you're able to think of it from the perspective of the Christmas season.

Yeah, another thing along those lines. And this kind of got messed up because of COVID. And so it might be hard to get into some of these places, but the nursing home is another place. And one of our members actually has talked to already about, hey, what about getting into the nursing home?

A couple of things. One, you might say, well, that's maybe just kind of a service or whatever, but that's evangelism too. Talk with your nurse, the local nursing home and see like, can we come, can our church come and do a service there?

Okay, a couple of things you're gonna do. One, you'll be sharing the gospel with the residents of the nursing home, and you'll be sharing the gospel with the workers in the nursing home, and you'll be worshiping the Lord together as a church.

So I understand you probably couldn't, but you probably couldn't logistically fit everybody in your church, maybe in a nursing home, but you could take a team, you could take several people, someone play guitar, sing some songs, this is another benefit of this.

You could give opportunity of a brother in your church that maybe doesn't get to preach a lot, and there, here's an opportunity, preach the gospel. So nursing home, jails, these things actually that should be year round too, but you also have the opportunity, a special opportunity during this time of year.

Like you say, some of these places will be more open to that. That's great, brother, what else?

And sometimes those opportunities can open up something throughout the year. So maybe you come and you do a ministry like that, and you haven't been doing anything at your local nursing home, or you haven't been doing anything with your local jail, but you go, and especially if you're able to give them something, you create some value from their perspective.

I'm saying from the perspective of especially the administrators, then maybe that opens up the opportunity to continue sharing the gospel in those places long-term, maybe on a monthly or bi-weekly basis or something throughout the rest of the year.

So that's really great. Also, I'll tell you something else, social media. Man, I know, I get tired of it, and you're far more engaged than I am in social media. But for example, I'll tell you something I've done the last couple of years.

And man, I don't think that this is world-transforming kind of thing, but I've just tried throughout the month of December, I post a song every day.

Yeah.

Some kind of gospel-rich, whether it's a modern hymn or a classic Christmas carol that proclaims the gospel. But I try to post a song every day, just an opportunity to get out the message of the gospel.

So I think there are all kinds of ways that like we've said, people are just a little more open. It's not that their heart, like you said, we know that their hearts are as they are, but we also know that whether it's psychologically or it's just socially, there is a readiness.

Like we're talking about Christmas, Christ is right there, front and center. And so we can put the spotlight on the glory of Jesus right there in front of people.

So yeah, that's what I wanna say too. I wanted to step back. I've got something else we do, but I wanted to step back and say, for example, just remind us here, and if you've listened to our episodes long enough, you already know what's coming, but just to remind us, why are we doing evangelism?

Well, first and foremost, we're doing evangelism because Christ is worthy to be proclaimed. We are proclaiming the lordship of Christ and God is honored when his son is rightly proclaimed. So don't lose track here and think, man, this is first and foremost about the people.

No, no, it's first and foremost about the worthiness of King Jesus, the one who came, the one who was born of the Virgin Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit, who lived a righteous life, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, who bore our sins in his body on the tree, who died and rose again.

We're preaching Christ and Christ is worthy to be proclaimed. He's worthy to be shared. And then secondly, we truly desire the salvation of sinners and we're commanded to go. To not evangelize is to be disobedient to God.

So all of these are our motivations and we're just saying this time of year, afford some opportunities that are not readily available, maybe at other times during the year.

Yeah.

Another thing that we do, again, this will also be on a Sunday night in December, but it's kind of become just a tradition for our church, but we have a member who lives really close to our church and has a shop and we have a big Christmas dinner, and we usually wind up with people that come to that that are lost.

And so what we always do now, we've messed up, man, we have messed up and this year we're not gonna mess up. So we have eaten and then share the gospel. Mistake.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this year we're sharing the gospel, we're preaching first.

Right, yeah.

And so anyway, that's just something logistically that's happened, but just taking opportunities like this to proclaim Christ. What else? You got anything else that you guys do?

Shadow Play, the Lord's Day, and the Glory of Christ

Yeah, I think this year, Lord willing, by the time this comes out, we will either be well into getting the planning going on this or it won't be happening. But a few years ago we did like a shadow play thing.

And so Lord willing, we're gonna try to do that again. And my hope is that we can do that. Now, I will say the last time we did it, I wanna repent where we do things wrongly. I think the shadow play was good last time.

I think it was God honoring, God glorifying. The thing that I would not do again was last time we did it, we did it as like our Sunday morning service. And then I preached afterwards. So we still preached, but we basically did it as the song portion of our service.

We're not gonna do that. But what we are gonna try to do this year is we're gonna try to do it on a Friday or a Saturday night, and then maybe do it again during our Sunday school hour. And then we will have our normal service on Sunday morning.

And the hope there is that that will be, one, it'll be an opportunity on Friday or Saturday night to draw people that aren't gonna come on Sunday morning.

Yeah.

And then also on Sunday morning, that during the Sunday school hour, will be an opportunity for some people that wouldn't be able to come on the nighttime and it'll lead into our normal Lord's day worship.

And so that's the... And what that is, is basically it's, I know probably everybody knows what a shadow thing is, but essentially we take several songs, some Sovereign Grace songs and some traditional Christmas songs, and we follow the gospel story all the way through.

Not just the Christmas story, but really the gospel story all the way through.

And that's something I would like stand my ground on as a pastor, and I would encourage pastors to think through this well and just like, do not give up your main Sunday gathering. So like, I would just give the exhortation and we've all been there and been different.

I remember years ago I was at a place and they did the Cantata and then I preached afterwards. Well, I got in trouble for it.

Yeah.

I didn't know, honestly, I didn't know. And it wasn't like I was trying to be rude or anything. I was just like, it's Sunday, I'm preaching.

Right, yeah, of course.

So Sunday mornings are not the time for Christmas place.

Yeah.

They're not the time for your service to be taken up in a Cantata or whatever. I mean, for us anyway, and I know not everybody listening and St. Pais, like for us, regular principal worship, that just actually makes it easier.

For me, I was like, it's a lot more freeing because it's like, nope, nope, nope, not, you know.

Right, yeah, yeah.

But I would just encourage like, you don't give, it's like, it's Christmas time. No, we don't give up the singing of God's word together. We don't give up praying together and preaching the word. Like we don't give up these things just because it's Christmas time.

Now I know there's temptation. Oh yeah, but we can use Sunday morning to attract people in. No, no, that's not the kind of evangelism that we should do because that doesn't honor Christ.

Right.

And, you know, in my opinion, you're even more evangelistic when you say, hey, we don't change what we do on Sunday morning simply because it's a certain time of year. Like this is how we are, you know.

So again, we've all been through that. There's grace in that. Like I'm not trying to beat anybody up with that. I'm just trying to say, hey, let's think through this well. And maybe even right now you have the opportunity.

Now I will say this, man, you can really make some people mad with that because, you know, traditional and all that, but you can do some things that you've done, Eddie. You say, hey, I'm not saying that you, you know, for us doing a Christmas play, probably not doing that, you know, but I'm not saying like, we can't do a Christmas play.

Okay, just do it on a, do it on a, why don't you do it on a Friday night or whatever, you know? And just move it. You know, I'm not saying your choir can't do a cantata.

Why don't you do it on a Sunday night.

Or a Saturday night or, you know, whatever. You know, I'm just, so just think through that and guard the Lord's day gathering. It's precious, you know. Anyway, I kind of got off. We weren't planning on talking about that, but just, you know, I kind of went that way.

So go ahead, bro.

And here's the thing. Here's the thing you have to realize. And like you said, we didn't mean to get off on that. Just mentioning things we're doing, but you have to realize now it's not really an issue here at Marshall, but you've got to prioritize doing what we believe is biblical more than what we believe is practical.

Because that Sunday, that Sunday that we did the, in the seven years that I've been here at Marshall, that was the highest attended service. And I'm saying, we're not going to do that again.

Yeah.

It was the highest attended service.

Yeah.

The entire time I've been here and I'm saying we're not going to do that again.

Yeah. What are you, what are we, what are we honoring? Who are we trying to honor? You know, just keep honoring God. Do we trust, do we trust that honoring God that he will continue to be faithful? You know, as pastors, we, both Eddie and I can relate.

Like it's, there's so much pressure and temptation to say, okay, but if I do this, man, we'll have a house full and everyone will feel good.

You know?

But at the end of the day, now I'm not saying this about you, Eddie, but at the end of the day, remember in Isaiah one, you know, it was like, God's like, I'm tired of your sacrifices.