I Don't Want to Give the Devil Any of My Days: How Christians Should Handle Halloween and Other Listener Questions

Every year around this time I get the same question. What do we do about Halloween? You'll hear everything from it's a free-for-all with no spiritual implication, to turn the lights off and hide in the house. My answer lands somewhere in the middle, and it starts here: I don't want to live in a way that hands the devil my days. Today we take on Halloween, and then a harder question about free will and the passages where God hardens a heart. Join me on an immersive Bible Study Experience. Learn more at BibleStudyLive.org Have a question about the series or a prayer request? Leave me a voicemail: SpeakPipe How should Christians handle Halloween? I'm answering this as both a parent and a former children's pastor. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment and later served in a charismatic one, so I've watched different churches handle this very differently. Here's my baseline. As Christians we're called to take light into the darkness, not run from it. Most Christians would agree. But for some reason we treat Halloween as the one exception. I don't want to give the devil any of my days. If I'm on this earth a hundred years and I hide every Halloween, that's a hundred days I handed over out of fear. That said, I won't pretend there's nothing there. There are real spiritual implications around Halloween. So my answer isn't either extreme. What does a good alternative look like? When I was a children's pastor, we did a trunk or treat. We played music from Jump Start 3, a ministry that set Scripture to music kids actually liked, and gave away their CDs. We served a lot of low income families whose kids didn't get CDs bought for them. We used that same music in Sunday school because it got God's Word into kids in a way they remembered. We had rules for the trunks. Nothing evil, nothing scary, nothing representing the occult. We had a Candyland trunk and an apple harvest trunk. We ran contests and giveaways and made it a genuinely fun night, so families had somewhere good to go. If your church does something like that, it's a great option. When does a church alternative go wrong? I've also seen the other side of it. We took our youngest daughter to a trunk or treat at a local church. They'd advertised a fall harvest party, so we weren't expecting anything unusual. It turned out to be inside the building, and to get in you had to walk through a black tunnel with skeletons on the walls, stinky smoke, and fire. I thought maybe it was one of those heaven-or-hell presentations, which I'm not a fan of, but you couldn't turn around and you couldn't get out. When we came through, the gymnasium was covered in scary, creepy Halloween decorations. My husband and I looked at each other and we were out. Then we met the pastor and he told us they wanted to make it even scarier next year. That's losing the plot entirely. There's no reason to invite families into a church building and hand them a haunted house. What else can we do on Halloween? We're called to live in the world and not of it, so this has looked like different things for our family over the years. Sometimes when we went house to house, we gave something instead of taking something. Sometimes we'd make it an exchange and ask people if they needed prayer. Here's what I keep coming back to. Yes, there is evil happening that night. It's also a night when kids and families are out looking for something. They are literally going door to door asking. If you live in a neighborhood with kids, you could hand out Scripture music, or candy with a Bible verse attached. Or you could simply say, I love your costume, is there anything you need prayer for? This is one of the few nights a year when we have a natural reason to meet our neighbors. If we have the good news, why wouldn't we offer it on a night when people are at our door asking for something? Now, if you start handing out ghosts and goblins, you've missed the plot. But hiding with the lights off and pretending we're not home is literally hiding your light under a bushel. We all learned that song as kids. Halloween is a good chance to actually live it. What about my kids? If you're going to participate, it comes with a conversation, and it's still your responsibility to protect your children. Letting them dress up as a witch is not okay. But there are plenty of options. They can be a favorite character or dress up as popcorn. There's a lot of room between a witch costume and hiding in the house. While you're out, if a house looks evil, you skip it. Or maybe you pray for it. Or maybe you go up and offer to pray for those people. That depends on the age of your kids. If you have a four-year-old, I wouldn't. If you have a sixteen-year-old, maybe you should. If we take the mentality of hiding from evil, where does it stop? We're not called to hide. We're called to face it. What about "God hardened his heart" and free will? A listener wrote in accepting that God is sovereign while also beli