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Why Christians Don’t Celebrate New Year’s
What’s wrong with celebrating the new year? What’s wrong with “ringing out the old and ringing in the new”? After all, aren’t real Christians commanded to “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4), and isn’t that what New Year’s celebrations are all about? The plain truth may surprise you!
January 1st, the stroke of midnight: Phil and Julia party like there is no tomorrow, on a ballroom dance floor crowded with men in tuxedoes and women in evening gowns.
Ralph, feeling happy and warm, weaves through traffic, while drunk behind the wheel of a potential killing machine, oblivious to the danger he presents to himself and to others. Todd and Mara, strangers who have just met, exchange kisses while dancing to 120 beats per minute in a dark nightclub. Fred runs outside his house, points his pistol into the air, and fires off a few rounds. Marta sits on a bench in a cold cathedral and whispers the same prayer over and over again. Susan sits at home watching television and envies the masses that crowd together at Times Square and wishes she was there, anywhere, instead of home alone on New Year’s.
And yet there are a few others scattered around the world who will not be out on New Year’s Eve. They will not be partying on a ballroom dance floor, or drinking and driving, or exchanging illicit kisses with strangers, or firing pistols into the air, or sitting beside other professing Christians, praying by rote. And they will not be sitting at home alone, wishing they were out and about with the rest of the world, ringing in the new year. Instead, they will treat New Year’s like just another ordinary day.
Why?
Because they are true Christians—those who carefully hold fast to the exact same truths, teachings and traditions which Jesus Christ taught His apostles to pass on to the New Testament Church (Matt. 28:18-20). True Christians do not celebrate New Year’s. They do not get caught up in its “eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die” attitude. And they do not crave to imitate those who do. Yet the vast majority of professing Christians today see nothing wrong with observing New Year’s. They do not see what the “big deal” is. Nor do they care.
What about you? Do you want to know why true Christians—whose calling and goal is to imitate the perfect, sin-free life of Jesus Christ—choose not to celebrate New Year’s or get caught up in its excitement? If so, read on. You may be surprised to learn the plain truth that most “Christian” church leaders refuse to teach.
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