Dear Friend,

We all know what an ideal Christmas looks like: family together, good food, gifts and compliments, hugs and smiles, fond or humorous memories, and, for Christians, Christ and His birth narrative, gratefully shared and discussed. But not every Christian experienced this this past Christmas day.

Rather, they suffered through a cold Christmas in a dysfunctional family. They gathered with their families, but with difficulty, uncomfortableness, awkwardness, even deep pain. Why?

The reasons are too many to cite, but here are a few samples:

As I write, politics, parties, climate change, pandemics, real or pseudo-science, and yes, vaccines, are dividing millions. But let's look a little deeper into holiday dysfunction.

You may be the only truly born-again Christian in your family, so you feel the underlying darkness-light, faith-unbelief division despite all the cordial pleasantries given and received. Or, your family may be divided, as Jesus prophesied, two against three, or vice versa, unbelievers against believers (Matthew 10:34-39).

You may hold different doctrines or practices with which some in your family openly or secretly disagree. You may attend a church or embrace a spiritual movement your relatives reject. You may be wholly committed, while your parents, siblings, or children are uncommitted or half-committed professors of Christ.

Or your whole family may have once been very serious disciples of Christ, yet now one or two have defected and returned to seek life and meaning in a meaningless, dead world. Or you may be called to the ministry, yet the others object to your worthiness and ignore, find fault with, belittle or even scorn your ministry.

Or, being called to missions, scholarship, or charitable ministries, you may be content to live very austerely, while the rest of your family chases or admires the Joneses and can see little meaning in life beyond money, possessions, worldly accolades, and social status.

Now for the 800-pound gorilla sitting on and suffocating your Christmas: the past! Some family members simply will not let you live down past failures, follies, or missteps. Others will not forget their past disagreements with you. Some may recall these to your face, but most merely keep them well preserved and cherished in their smugly superior minds. But they're still there. You can feel them in the air. In their looks. In their body language. In the warm statements they don't make.

These things may easily make our holiest of days our hardest of days. But they need not. Careful obedience to God's Word will lift us above exacerbating strife - or catastrophic depression. A little biblical insight here will go a long way.

For any Christian suffering holiday gloom, here's your first consolation: Jesus knows all about it! Not Christmas, but family dysfunction. Let's retrace His footsteps.

When the blind Jewish leaders officially declared Jesus a demonic false prophet (Mark 3:22), His family decided He had lost His mind (3:21) - and then promptly lost theirs! They immediately tried to stop His ministry and take Him home, by force, if His disciples resisted (3:21).

Later his brothers mocked Him as a prideful, miracle-working showoff and urged Him to go up to Jerusalem to continue His messianic ministry charade: "for neither did his brethren believe in him" (John 7:5). You think Jesus didn't feel their hateful vibes? His humanity sensed every spiteful jolt!

So, banish all self-pity! Jesus faced, and overcame, the worst family dysfunction. And He warned us, "A man's foes shall be they of his own household" (Matthew 10:36).

But He issued His most illuminating and liberating instruction when His family came to shut down His ministry and take him back to Nazareth. "Who is my mother, or my brethren?" (Mark 3:33). Or, paraphrasing, "Who is my real family after all?" His answer? His followers! Those who sat at His feet, feeding on His Word, and doing God's will above all else in their lives (Mark 3:31-35). They were His eternal, spiritual family.

So, when Jesus' temporal, natural family misunderstood, resisted, and deeply grieved Him for three years, He took refuge in His eternal, spiritual family. And He recognized deeper spiritual forces were acting upon His natural family. He was not wrestling with mere flesh and blood.

In short, falsehoods had captivated them. They had been lied to by respected religious leaders, and had swallowed, and been poisoned by, their lies. And He knew the source and purpose of those lies. The father of lies instigated them hoping to use those Jesus loved most to hurt Him most. Why? To stop His close spiritual walk with His Father and His illuminating teaching and powerful ministry to God's people. And if Jesus had reacted wrongly, that would have happened.

But Jesus determined that would never happen! The result? His family later came around to the truth and, thanks to His prayers, ended up in the family of God (Acts 1:14). Our lesson here?

May I suggest that, since Christ lives again in Christians' hearts, the same source and motives are at play in our domestic dysfunction?

Now if you are a carnal Christian continuing to live sinfully or offensively toward your family, this interpretation doesn't fit you. They are reacting to your carnality and God is using their rejection to try to awaken you to change.

But if you're living humbly, seeking God's presence daily, putting His will first, loving, studying, and obeying His Word, and relating to your family with all the grace and kindness you can muster, this message is for you. And you must recognize Satan's "device" (2 Corinthians 2:11), or strategy.

Simply, it is to get you to hold unforgiveness and bitterness toward your family members so you cannot live the Christ life before them or, just as important, pray effectively for their salvation, and also, their repentance for misjudging you. If you fall out of fellowship with Christ, you can't pray them into fellowship with Him. The Devil is a devil, but even he knows that much.

So, it's up to you now. Will you see them carnally or spiritually? Will you choose to keep remembering their hot words, cold shoulders, groundless accusations, or twisted misrepresentations of you and what you believe or do? Or will you cast down those imaginations and bring them into captivity by obeying Christ's specific teachings on forgiveness, suffering, or spiritual thinking?

Will you let your inhospitable, or even hostile, family members' untruthfulness make you untruthful - no longer a lover of God's true, written Word or a faithful seeker, servant, and worshiper of the Truth incarnate, Christ? Or will you choose to remain truth-soaked: facing the truth, not hiding in unreality; obeying the truth of God's Word, not ignoring and disobeying it; and walking forward in truth (faithfulness), still loyal to the One who is unfailingly faithful to you (Hebrews 13:5-6)?

And, like Jesus, when you can't find comfort in your natural family, will you seek it in deeper fellowship with "the God of all comfort" (2 Corinthians 1:3) and in your real family, your new, eternal, spiritual family - fellow committed believers who sit at Jesus' feet, worshiping Him and hearing and obeying His Word every day?

Christian, these simple biblical insights will soften and heal the raw, deep, painful grief that gnaws on you every time you realize those you love most love you least. It will keep you close to Jesus and, like Him, able to pray your loved ones into the kingdom.

Staying spiritually minded, close, praying,

Greg Hinnant
Greg Hinnant Ministries