If You Give a Witch a Cookie

            My husband and I got to go to the pumpkin patch with our granddaughter’s kindergarten class. We had great fun going from station to station with the kids. They dug slimy pumpkin seeds out of the shell and heard how new pumpkins grow from these seeds. Not long later, we ventured into the corn maze. We chatted with the children as we wove our way through stalks more than twice their height. We agreed it was a good thing we had a leader to help us find our way out. At another station the kids made a delicious pumpkin pie filling in a baggie, to sample on a graham cracker.

            At the last stop before choosing a pumpkin to take home, we gathered for a story. It was about a witch, a mummy, a vampire, a ghost, and a bat who were trying to pick a very large pumpkin. The witch wanted to take it back home to make pumpkin pie. From a very young age, our children are indoctrinated in “Halloween theology.”

            Just two nights before at Celebrate Recovery, I listened to the testimony of a man who had spent years in bondage to sin, including the practice of witchcraft. A friend invited him to church as a teen, and even though he came in Gothic dress and was a practicing Wiccan, he felt accepted by the people of God. For years, he went to church on Sundays and asked forgiveness for what he knew was wrong, but continued to “practice his craft” and cast spells on people throughout the week.

           

In the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books, the mouse is never satisfied. If we give the devil a foothold by teaching our children that witches, ghosts, and vampires are harmless storybook characters, they will want more as time goes on. At haunted houses, death and the supernatural are depicted as pretend, desensitizing our children to the reality of the spiritual realm. Once they get a taste of “Halloween fun” they begin to hunger for more experiences deeper into Satan’s territory. Horror films, Ouija boards, séances, and dabbling in the occult feed the hunger already created.

            The only thing that breaks this power is hearing and believing the truth of scripture. When the young man practicing witchcraft began to obey God every day of the week, he was finally free of guilt and shame. He had the courage to get rid of all his paraphernalia when he got serious about Jesus. Like the sorcerers who heard the Word in Ephesus, it represented quite an investment. “Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas” (Acts 19:18-19, emphasis mine; A drachma was about a day’s wage.)

            The price of following Jesus in our culture is to get rid of the tools of sin and be different from the world around us. I choose to separate myself from Halloween and all its practices because I don’t want to feed, even innocent looking witches, cookies. They get hungry for more - more time, attention, money, and worship that belongs only to the Lord God.

            When we treat God’s instructions lightly, and allow our children to pretend that what is evil is okay with God, we are in great danger. God said, “Do not let your people practice fortune-telling, or use sorcery, or interpret omens, or engage in witchcraft, or cast spells, or function as mediums or psychics, or call forth the spirits of the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord” (Deut. 18:10-12, NLT). Anyone can be saved from these practices, but only if they hear God's truth and respond to it wholeheartedly.

If you would like to know more about how Christianity lines up with the celebration of Halloween, I recommend my book, Taking Back October, available on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Back-October-Believers-Pursuit/dp/1502516292

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