Well, this Christmas season is a great time to reflect on how to be a Scrooge. I used to think of Ebenezer Scrooge as the villain, this cold, selfish, cruel guy. But the more I studied the story, the more I realized Scrooge is not that bad a guy. He is actually the hero of the story, and because of the radical transformation that takes place in his heart, Scrooge becomes a picture of hope. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and today I want to go through our little mini-book called How to Be a Scrooge. We wrote this book as a giveaway for all the guests who came to our production of A Christian Christmas Carol. We did it four years in a row and had hundreds of guests at our church every year, and every one of them got a copy. I wanted to go through it today. You probably know the story of A Christmas Carol: Jacob Marley and the three ghosts give Scrooge a glimpse into his own life. We adapted it as A Christian Christmas Carol and showed how we can be like Scrooge. We can see our lives as God intends them to be, and sometimes we have to be confronted with the afterlife. Thankfully, we are given the same chance to change that Ebenezer Scrooge had. You may not feel you are quite as bad as Scrooge, and I am sure you are not, but what if the very same problems that plagued Scrooge live in all of us? So let us walk through this little book together. This is a message straight from my heart to yours.
The First Scrooge I Ever Met
The first section of the book talks about the first Scrooge I ever met, and it was not Charles Dickens’s character. It was my neighbor, a man named Hank. Hank was the most generous man I ever knew. He would pay my brother and me about $10 for about ten minutes of work. My mom would bake Amish friendship bread, and we would bring him a loaf, and he would let us dig into his stash of coins. He would remove all the pennies so it was just silver, and he let us do fun things like that. He was just a generous man. Hank was the transformed version of Scrooge, the kind and generous Scrooge at the end of the story of A Christmas Carol, but it took some time for him to get there.
Mad at God
The second section talks about Scrooge being mad at God. In our Christian adaptation, we showed that Scrooge was just bitter at God, and it is no wonder why. He felt God had taken his sister, and he could not understand why. You might have asked the same thing: why do bad things happen to good people? That is what Scrooge said. In our play, and in this book, we quote him as saying, “She left this world bringing him into it, and now he would give his life to the very God who would not spare hers. I do not understand this love of which you speak.” I have been there too. Maybe you have too. When you hurt, you often blame God. You search for answers. You reach for comfort anywhere you can. Some people reach for substances, and some reach for entertainment or work or some way to distract their minds, and you might be there. But none of those things ultimately last. If you are watching this and you are searching for something deeper, I want to help you find it. I want you to become like Scrooge.
A Covetous Old Sinner
He started as a covetous old sinner; that is how he is described in the original book. Scrooge was bitter, but bitterness was not his only problem. Dickens described him as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” That word covetous is important. It is the last of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not covet.” So from God’s eternal perspective, Scrooge broke the tenth commandment, and if we are honest, we do the same thing. When we covet, it is statements like, “Man, I wish I had…,” or, “I wish my family could do this,” or, “I wish we did not have to…,” or, “I wish I had a genie.” These thoughts come to mind naturally, and they are symptoms of a covetous heart, a heart that is not content. So if we are honest, we are all a little like Scrooge. You may not be as bad as Scrooge, but there is a little Scrooge in all of us. What about the other commandments? We have to admit we have probably broken just about all of the Ten Commandments. Jesus said in Matthew 5:28 that lust equals adultery, and that anger is the root of murder: “Thou shalt not kill.” I have hated. I have lusted. I have lied. I have stolen; yeah, it was a pack of blue sour straws from Six Flags in 1999. But how about you? Your conscience tells you whether you have broken God’s commandments. Even beyond the commandments, something inside your heart tells you right from wrong. That is God’s moral law written on our hearts, and God’s law convicts all of us. The Bible says in Romans 3:19, “Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” That is the point of the Ten Commandments.
Sometimes we think, “If I do more good things than bad things, I will be fine. I just have to let my good works outweigh my bad.” But that is not justice. Even our human courts do not work that way. A criminal cannot come into court and say, “Well, judge, I have done many good things. Just look at all the good things I have done.” No. If he is a good judge, he is going to say, “No, justice must be served.” And of course God is a good Judge. Romans 3:20 tells us the law was not given so that we could earn heaven; it was given to help us see our guilt. “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” And Titus 3:5 says salvation is “not by works of righteousness which we have done.” So we understand the law as more like a mirror. It just shows us who we really are. That is just telling it straight. Some people feel that is harsh, but I think of it like a doctor delivering a serious diagnosis. If the problem does not feel urgent, you will not really care about the cure. So it starts with the bad news: sin is a life-or-death problem.
The Cure Is Jesus
But on the other side is the good news. Sin has a one-hundred-percent cure rate, and Jesus is the cure. You might have heard that. You might know that Jesus died on the cross. But do you know why Jesus died on the cross? He died for your sin. There is a book called Colossians, and Colossians 2:13-14 says He forgave all trespasses, blotting out the record against us and nailing it to His cross. “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.” Your entire record, every sin, was written down like a police report, and when Jesus died, His perfect blood smeared the ink. The evidence against you was erased. The theological word is atonement, but the simple explanation is this: I was a covetous old sinner, just like Scrooge, and Jesus died for my sin. Romans 5:8 says, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” That is love right there. He showed it to us on the cross. And then He said, “It is finished.” When Jesus cried, “It is finished,” on the cross, 2 Corinthians 5:21 explains what that meant: God made Jesus to be sin for us, so that we could be made the righteousness of God in Him. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” He took our place. He took your place. He paid your penalty. He took your judgment. And three days later He rose from the dead. No other religious founder even claims that. If the resurrection is true, then Christianity is the only true teaching, and that is what Christmas is all about. God came to earth to save sinners.
ABC
To summarize, I think of it like ABC; the booklet ends with a gospel summary in ABC. A is admit that you are a sinner. It starts with admitting that the law has exposed my need for a Saviour. The verses we covered for that were Romans 3:23 and Romans 6:23. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The wages of sin is death: eternal separation and eternal punishment, separated from God in hell. B is believe that Jesus died for you and rose again for your sin. We covered 2 Corinthians 5:21. The Bible also says in Acts 20:21 that we are to believe on Him, and so we can be saved and receive that free gift of salvation. “Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.” C is call on Jesus to save you. We confess that He is Lord. “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” Romans 10:13 says, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Faith is not just head knowledge. It is like a hang-gliding moment. I was given a hang-gliding flight as a gift, and I saw the hang gliders out there, but it was not until my pilot said, “All right, we are going to run and jump off that cliff,” that I went from head knowledge to actual trust in my pilot. The actual trust came when I leapt off the cliff and put my full faith in the pilot’s abilities. Faith happened right when I ran toward the cliff and jumped. So have you ever taken the leap with Jesus?
Scrooge’s Prayer
There is a beautiful example of the moment Scrooge confesses and calls on Christ. There is a prayer written out directly from the script of our play that reflects this repentant heart, a kind of prayer you can pray today. Your faith is not in the prayer; it is in Jesus Christ. But if you are watching and you want to be saved, you can call out to Jesus today. It is not magic words that save you. It is not an incantation. It is not a rosary. It is not a recited prayer, but a genuine cry for mercy from the heart. Scrooge’s prayer went something like this: “God in heaven, I believe I understand now how You have worked. You have used the events in my life to call me to You, but I have rejected You. I have embraced my anger. I have embraced my bitterness. I have embraced my sin. But they tell me that You love me, and that You love me so much that You sent Your Son to die on the cross for me, and that He rose from the dead to forgive me of my sins. I reject my former life. I repent of all my wicked deeds. I only want to honor You with my life, from this Christmas to my last. Please, dear God, forgive me of my sins and save me.” You can pray a prayer like that too. It is just a confession of what your heart believes. And if you have called on Jesus, the Bible says you are a new creature. The first steps I give to people who have called on Christ to save them: as believers, Christians grow from infancy to adulthood, so I encourage you to read your Bible every day, pray every day, find a Bible-preaching church to get baptized in, and tell somebody what God has done in your life. If God could change Scrooge, just as God changed my neighbor Hank, He can change you too. Merry Christmas, and may this message of God’s forgiveness, transformation, and hope change the way you live your life from this day forward, just like Scrooge.
