Traditions

It doesn't matter what age you are or what stage you are at in life, everyone has traditions and most people want to hold onto their traditions and not give them up. Christmas reminds us of traditions because every year we pull out our favorite holiday traditions and we follow them by the book. Whether it is putting up the tree in a certain way on a certain day, or opening your presents in a certain order, or even just having certain family members come over on Christmas. Traditions mean something to us because they are personal and they are sentimental.

Everyone has different traditions and different ways they like to do things. Your tradition may seem silly to someone else but it works the other way around because you wouldn't trade your tradition for theirs.

However, we need to remember traditions mean nothing to outsiders! People that aren't part of your tradition don't care about your traditions, they don't mean anything to them and regardless of how much you want them to like your traditions, they just don't seem to care.

This is what we have run into in our youth group and a little in our church. We are called by Jesus to bring in the outsiders but instead of getting rid of the traditions that are only sentimental traditions we hope that the outsiders somehow attach themselves with our traditions. And I am not talking about taboo traditions like Jesus is God or Salvation is through Jesus, not those type of traditions because those obviously we can't let go of. I am talking about traditions like, "we always go to this place for camp!" or "we have to sing this song on christmas eve" or "I always sit in this spot."

Those are the types of traditions that we need to wary of, they are not always bad but they mean nothing to outsiders. They aren't concerned with what camp we go to or what song we sing or what spot they sit in, what they want to know is how Jesus can change their life and we can't let our traditions get in the way of Jesus!

Sometimes we need to do whats best to win the lost, do whats best to train those won, and do whats best to send the trained into the world; which means our traditions aren't always the best way of accomplishing that, and therefore we need to throw off those things that can entangle us and put on Jesus who should be our main goal and our main purpose in everything we do.

Merry Christmas!

Mark