sermonette: What's So Bad About Valentines Day?

Reasons Christians Should Flee Its Observance
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 08-Feb-03; Sermon #596s; 14 minutes

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Well, good afternoon to all of you. Hope your week went well. It's a nice day outside, is not it? Nice and bright. But in the last couple of days we had rain, but the rain was nice too in its time. Still a little cool. We'll be wishing for warmer weather and then suddenly it'll be too hot and We'll just start complaining about that too, so. Never satisfied, are we? Well, the only holiday of note between Christmas and Easter. If you do not count, New Year's Day is Valentine's Day. And this year it takes place on this coming Friday. Always takes place on February 14th, and that's when February 14th is this Friday. It's a favorite holiday of greeting card companies, confectioners, florists, restaurateurs, um, and hotel owners all across America. They seem to make a killing on days like that. We see a lot of red advertising in the print on TV. We see cupids of plenty flying around shooting their little arrows. And it seems harmless enough on the surface. Or is it? What's so bad about Valentine's Day? Why should Christians not celebrate Valentine's Day? Of course, there are numerous reasons not to keep it from the vantage points, point of its pagan origins. And that's normally what people foresee when they really study into this holiday, uh. Any reputable encyclopedia or book on holidays. will tell you very clearly that there is no question that Valentine's Day or similar um Festivals on this day or the day before or the day after, um, predates Christianity by many centuries. At the very least we can say that it began. As a Roman fertility and purification feast dedicated to a Roman God named Lupercus. Uh, if you know anything about your Latin roots, lupus has to do with wolves. And Lupercus was a God of the hunt and a God of fertility. Uh, this ritual, I mean this, this festival that was done around February 14th, had some really strange rituals and customs connected to it. I'll, I'll mention one. And I have no idea why they thought this was significant, but Either young men or young priests would whip women with goat thongs. And that was somehow supposed to give them fertility if they were not pregnant, or if they were pregnant, they were supposed to somehow and do them with a safe birth. But you know, you wonder where they got all this. It, it must have come from something, um. The Roman God Faus might have had something to do with it. He has sometimes been Mistaken for Luercus, fawus was of course a manlike creature who had a body of a goat and horns like a goat, and so whipping them with, with goat thongs may have had something to do with fawn, but really strange customs that people in the world have, have attached to these festivals. Now, the Catholic Church as usual, merely Christianized this pagan feast, and that was in 8496, and they dedicated it to a Saint Valentine. Now, Valentine, historians do not know exactly who Valentine was. Um, it could have been one of two men, both were named Valentine. One was a Roman priest and the other was a bishop of Terne in central Italy. And both lived about the same time and died about the same time in the mid 3rd century. So it's one of those two, and again, nobody knows why these two particular Saints, call them are associated with Romance and love. And the best guess is simply that these two days, these two saints or one of these two saints was given a feast day on February 14th, which just happened to coincide with the festival of Lupercalia, and they got melded together so that Saint Valentine began to take on, or Saint Valentine's feast began to take on the rituals and Various and sundry characteristics of the Lupercalia. So somehow these two got melded together. There, there is the heart symbol that we see in Valentine's. Uh, it was once associated with bale or Nimrod, and that's because the, the Babylonian word for heart is BA or BEL, one of the two, and that's similar to the word bale. And so the similarity fixed the symbol onto the God. Uh, there is also Cupid. And his bow and arrows, they are obviously pagan remnants. Cupid was the son of Venus, who was the goddess of love and beauty, and just Seamus under a different guise. And Cupid was the God of erotic love. You can understand that if you if you know his Greek name, Eros, which is simply the Greek word for erotic love, sexual love. Let's begin here in I Peter 4 verses 1 through 3, and just give a summary scripture for why we shouldn't keep holidays that have such pagan origins. Peter sums it up very. Well, here in I Peter 4 verses 1 through 3. Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that he no longer. And this has happened to us. Christ suffered for us and died for us, so. Because of that, we should do these things. We should no longer live in the rest of our time in the flesh for the lust of men, but for the will of God. Notice what Peter says here, for we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles when we walked in licentiousness, lust, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries. He says, since we've been covered by the blood of Christ, we've put these idolatrous, pagan practices behind us. We should have nothing to do with them, especially when we consider what Christ had to go through to redeem us from them. So The, the apostle's warning here is, better not get involved in these type of things because they just take you right back where you came from. And you know what he says in another place about The the end of that is worse than where you came from and it's like a a dog going back to his vomit, etc. So not a good thing to go back to pagan practices at all. OK, But even so, for some people that is not enough to dissuade them from keeping Valentine's Day. Some people can shrug that off. I do not know how, but they can. They want so-called spiritual reasons why they should not keep Valentine's Day. Well, I've got a couple. And I hope these are spiritual enough. The first is Valentine's Day is spiritually dangerous for children. And physically dangerous if you want to add that in as well. It can begin something that could end up ruining their lives. For starters, it teaches them to get involved in boyfriend-girlfriend relationships long before they are ready for it. I remember, here I even grew up in the church, but when I was in elementary school, There was great pressure from the teachers for everyone to send everyone else in the class. Valentine's Day cards, but it was almost an unwritten rule that there would be one that was your special Valentine. Now, of course, as a growing up in the church, I always got out of it somehow, but I could understand. So, I can understand now how things could have gotten very, gone very wrong in my life. If I had an attachment much too early in life like that. Such pairing off, even innocent pairing off. Should not occur until one is ready for and has decided to marry. It's just not good. Otherwise there is a bit of asking for trouble. And this holiday encourages that sort of practice. Let's go to Ecclesiastes 3 verse 1 and verse, then we will go down to verse 8. We just want to pick these up quickly to get the, the principle. Ecclesiastes 3:1. Solomon writes, to everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven, then we will skip down to just the first line of verse 8, a time for love. For a child in elementary school or junior high school, and in some cases, even high school age, the time for love is not that time. And this holiday encourages that. As parents, it's our job to make sure that our children do not get involved Romantically before the time is right. And that time is when they are mature enough to handle both Romance and sex. And we know that young kids are not ready for that. We can see that in our culture like black and white. And obviously I could have gone to the 7th commandment as well, and that would have covered this this also. OK, the second reason That Valentine's Day is not about love. But about lust and licentiousness. The key word in all of this is cupid or eros, the Greek word for erotic or sexual love. Just pay attention to the advertising that goes on during this time of year. on radio, on TV, and there is no doubt about what they are selling. They're selling sex. Sex and more sex. And we married people know. I do not know if you single people are aware of this, but we married people know that the vast majority of those who whoop it up on Valentine's Day are singles. Not married because we married people are too busy and too tired to do anything. Just kidding. But if these singles are whipping it up on Valentine's Day, what are they up to? Let's go to Romans 13. Romans 13:13. Romans 13:13 and 14. Paul says, Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in licentiousness and lewdness, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lust. That's very plain. Following our lusts Romantically or otherwise goes directly contrary to putting on Christ. So Christians are to run screaming in the opposite direction of Valentine's Day. So here are 3 good reasons why Christians should not celebrate Valentine's Day. One, its origins are pagan and no Christian veneer makes it any better than its pagan heart. 2, it encourages children too early to begin having Romantic interests. 3, it is based on lust and licentiousness, sins of the flesh we are trying to put off. Valentine's Day is no gray area for us. It is not a Christian holiday and no Christian should keep it.