Monday, December 24, 2018

Spurgeon's Love/Hate Relationship with Christmas

"Charles Spurgeon had a love/hate relationship with Christmas. In seventeenth-century England, Christmas was often associated with moral laxity and splurging. The Puritans resisted the Roman Catholic flavor of the festivities, and so did Spurgeon. Like his predecessors, the preacher often played the Scrooge and humbugged the holiday.
Certainly we do not believe in the present ecclesiastical arrangement called Christmas:
*first, because we do not believe in the mass at all, but abhor it, whether it be said or sung in Latin or in English;

*and, secondly, because we find no Scriptural warrant whatever for observing any day as the birthday of the Savior; and, consequently, its observance is a superstition, because [it is] not of divine authority.”
Many would not consider they had kept Christmas in a proper manner, if they did not verge on gluttony and drunkenness.”
If there be any day in the year of which we may be pretty sure that it was not the day on which the Savior was born, it is the twenty-fifth of December.”
But Spurgeon also loved Christmas. He preached at least twelve sermons on Christmas.
I wish there were twenty Christmas days in the year.”
SpurgeonCenter
 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; Luke 2:4