Peter Witkowski Christmas

Don’t Miss The Point of Xmas

 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,“Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

Sdon't miss the point of Christmasince Adam and Eve, men and women had been longing for the arrival of the snake crusher. They had been yearning for a deliverer to rescue them from evil. Noah wasn’t able to did it. After the flood, he got drunk and embarrassed his whole family. One of his sons even got cursed because of Noah’s foolishness. Abraham couldn’t do it either, trusting lies and human ingenuity. Moses got mad and smashed the rock. Samson chased pretty girls. David was a murderer. All of the rescuers that God had sent to deliver his people ultimately failed. They had failed to give God’s people rest and peace. And when we come to Luke 2, the people of Israel don’t even have their own ruler. They are under the thumb of the Romans. Instead of liberty, they are captives, political slaves if you will. They needed a deliverer, a savior. And not just from Rome, but from their own hearts. For as Romans 6 says “the wages of sin is death.” This is setting of Christmas is story.  It is one of shattered hopes and never ending waiting.

And then boom, the door opens; the skies literally explode with the glory of God. His angels come with the message, “A Savior, who is Christ the Lord has been born.” The one who will crush the power of the serpent, the one who will liberate all his children from sin, the one who will restore peace has arrived. He bursts into the human story. He left the glories of heaven to come into the world as a little, lowly, baby. He fully identified with us in our sorrow, so that he could perfectly deliver us through his death on the cross. The Lord has come. Our savior has arrived.

Jesus. He is the point of Christmas. If we make Christmas about presents, about family, or about little elves and Santa, we miss the whole point of the holiday. We miss God.

 Jesus didn’t come so that we could have a nice holiday. He didn’t come to give of us earthly happiness. He came to give us peace with God. He came to be the perfect deliverer. He came so that we might be holy. Don’t forget about Jesus. Make time to tell your kids the Christmas story. Make time to worship the incarnate savior, the word become flesh. Don’t miss the point of Christmas! 

Christ the Lord is born today
He came from heaven’s throne
God is born a man today
To bring His children home
To bring His children home

Peter Witkowski Children's Ministry

Being A Family Doesn’t Make Your Kids Safe

family myth blog“We are all family here,” was a common refrain I heard when my church implemented its new check-in system. Since I was the new guy in town, the next comment usually went something like this, “We get that you don’t know anybody, but we do; all this security stuff isn’t really necessary. So, you’re going to stop it once you learn everyone’s name, right?” Not quite. At FBCE, we continue to strengthen our security and safety measures precisely because we do know everyone. And it ain’t good. Look what Paul says about our family, “All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:12).

We Are All Bad

Although media moguls of Nickelodeon, Oprah, and Disney teach us that people are basically good, the Bible does the opposite. According to scripture, every baby is born a sinner (Ps. 51:5). Every baby is born with a disposition to do evil and to always do evil (Rom. 3:23). When left alone, people naturally make bad, selfish choices that hurt harm others (Gen. 6:5). The Biblical view of humanity teaches us to adopt a healthy skepticism of people’s intentions especially when protecting children.   

We Got Tricked

Now thankfully when it comes to kids at church, many of the sinners who walk through our doors have been transformed by the gospel. But can you tell which men and women love Jesus and which ones want to groom a 12 year-old boy to be their spouse? In time yes, we can spot the frauds.  People will be known by their fruit (Matt. 7:16). Their works, actions, and words will eventually reveal what’s going on in their hearts. But how long will this process take? How long will it take us to spot the false Christians? After all, false Christians were able to fool the disciples and the early church fathers because Jesus allows the weeds to grow right next to the wheat (Matt. 13:24-30). Liars, unrepentant sinners, are in our churches and bent on harm. Are we willing to give them the chance to hurt our kids while we sift through the evidence?

The Sad Reality 

man free blogAnd false Christians continue to successfully infiltrate our Christian circles. Just in my own circle, I can think of two tragic deceptions relating to kids ministry (not to mention the sad stories of pastors, elders, and church members falling into all kinds of sexual and financial sins). First, I played football with kids whose parents seemed to be model Christians. The parents had good jobs, dressed well, and even had regular family devotions with the  large family. But when the Bible was closed and no one was looking, the father sexual abused his children for over twenty years. No one at their church knew or suspected anything. Second, I think back to my youth group days. One of the most faithful small group, and mission trip leaders cheated on his spouse the entire time he served. Lacking tattoos and a scary drug filled past, he dressed, and talked like all the other adults, and, yet harbored a deadly secret sin.  If we are truthful, we have to admit that we don’t know what’s in a person’s heart. As Jeremiah writes

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it (17:9)?

We need to put up hedges around our children to protect them from false Christians intent on harming God’s church.

Yep, We Still Got Problems

And lastly, we need to protect kids from ourselves. Though we are redeemed, we are not perfect; we still sin; we still face all kinds of temptations from the world, our heart, and Satan. Even the apostle Paul lamented, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Rom. 7:18-19).  We need to be skeptical of our own ability to consistently avoid evil and to follow Jesus. If you doubt me, think back to Noah who got drunk, Abraham who slept with a family employee, and David who had an affair with the girl next before killing her husband. These were all great men of God who succumbed to sin. To love our brothers and sisters in Christ and to care for our own souls, we need to keep ourselves out of bad situations. We need to create policies and checks that will prevent even the most mature Christian from having a chance to molest a 5 year-old girl. Nothing is more loving and representative of the people of God than keeping a brother and sister from sin and a child from harm.

Regardless of blood lines and geographical proximity, we don’t know people all that well. And what we do know about them from scriptures, screams, “Don’t trust them. Don’t trust yourself.” We called to treat sinners with skepticism and believers with caution when it comes to caring for kids at church. We live in a world tainted with sin. To pretend that we don’t isn’t loving; it is ridiculously dangerous and may expose our kids to all kinds of horrors.  

Peter Witkowski Apologetics

Sinking The Ark Matters

Sinking the Ark MattersUnderstandably, there has been a lot of hoopla around the Noah movie. Not only did the movie touch the usual Hollywood crowd, it also managed to stir up the increasingly silent evangelical right. Now, you can’t go on Facebook or anywhere on the web without seeing someone talking about Noah.  I too am guilty of adding to people’s frustrations. Now being exhausted with the conversation, many Christians and generally moral people have begun trying to quiet the crowds desperate to sink Russell Crowe’s ark by saying, “You see tons of sexually sinful films, I think Noah is the least of your problems” or “It’s Hollywood; they never get the Bible right.”

But Noah is different than all of those sex and violence filled films. Movies such as Kill Bill and Friends With Benefits portray a worldview dynamically opposed to the God of the Bible. They invite their viewers to either directly or indirectly participate in the sins of murder and fornication. As believers, we shouldn’t be allowing these stories to darken our imaginations. (Focus on The Family’s app/webpage “Plugged In” is great resource if you are unsure about whether or not to watch a film.)  But for all of their problems, these movies in no way claim to represent God.

Noah does! Director and co-creator of the film, Darren Aronofsky told the Atlantic that

“It’s just important that you don’t contradict any of it [the Genesis Account] and that you study each word, and study each sentence, and try to use and extract as much juice out of that to be inspired to turn it into a vision that represents the spirit of it all. That’s the goal.”

Despite Aronofsky’s words, Noah is not just another film such as The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt employing historical fiction to help move the story along. Aronofsky did much more than give a voiceless Noah a few lines to say. The director radically recast the story of redemption into a narrative about the evils of urbanization. Believing that each generation has the freedom to manipulate the “myth and legend,” that is Genesis, to fit the stories of their times, Aronofsky claims his rewritten story is accurate representation of the Old Testament. He firmly holds the Bible to be, “a living breathing document.” The end result is a film showing Lamech being murdered, Noah trying to slaughter babies, and many other things that never appear in the Genesis 5-7. Thus, Aronofsky happily scuttled the biblical story of the Noah, replacing it with a modern man’s spiritual musing. And, he calls it truth.

Because our God, the evil of sin, and the beauty of salvation have been radically redefined in a film claiming to represent the Bible, Christians have cause to express concern.  Following Paul’s encouragement to Timothy, believers should stand against those who advocate false religious ideas based on “myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than stewardship from God that is by faith” (I Tim. 1:4). As Christians, our goal is not to set the world aright or to radically define what does or what does not constitutes a good film.  Rather, we should be graciously defending the character of the one true God who mercifully saves sinners like you and me.