A Christmas Carol: The Christian Sermon Charles Dickens Didn’t Realize He Wrote

Four ghosts, one night, and a transformation so complete it’s been pointing people toward a baby in a manger for nearly 200 years.

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THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SCROOGE

Introduction

Sometimes the most profound truths about God come wrapped in the most unexpected packages. They show up in places we’d never think to look for spiritual wisdom — like a Victorian ghost story written by a man who had complicated feelings about organized religion. So let’s crack open this Victorian ghost story and see why it still lands so hard nearly two centuries later.

A Tale of Chains and Chances

Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in December 1843, and the world hasn’t been the same since. The story centers on Ebenezer Scrooge, a London businessman whose name has become synonymous with greed and coldness. When we first meet Scrooge, he’s squeezing every penny from his underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit, refusing to give money to charity for the poor, and growling “Bah! Humbug!” at anyone who dares wish him a Merry Christmas. His business partner Jacob Marley died seven years earlier on Christmas Eve, and Scrooge has spent those years becoming even more isolated and miserable.

On this particular Christmas Eve, something remarkable happens. Marley’s ghost appears to Scrooge, draped in heavy chains forged from cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, and deeds — all the things Marley valued more than human connection during his life. Marley delivers a warning: three spirits will visit Scrooge to give him a chance to escape Marley’s fate. Throughout the night, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the terrifying Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come take Scrooge on a journey through his own life — what was, what is, and what will be if he doesn’t change.

By morning, Scrooge is a different man. He sends a prize turkey to the Cratchit family, increases Bob’s salary, becomes a second father to the sickly Tiny Tim, and spends the rest of his days living with generosity, joy, and genuine human connection.

It’s a beautiful story. One of my personal favorites. But here’s what I find fascinating — Dickens, whether he fully intended it or not, wrote something that lines up remarkably well with Scripture. I didn’t realize that when I first fell in love with the story – it took a few years (a few Christmas pasts, you might say) for me to come to the realization. These four ghosts represent stages of spiritual awakening that we all need to experience if we’re going to move from spiritual death to abundant life.

MARLEY’S GHOST: The Wake-Up Call We All Need

Jacob Marley shows up first, and he’s not there to make small talk. He comes to deliver a warning, and his very presence is that warning made visible. Dickens describes him wearing the chains he forged in life — link by link, yard by yard, through every greedy choice and every moment he turned away from human suffering.

Scrooge asks Marley why he’s bound in chains, and Marley’s response cuts to the heart of things. He tells Scrooge that in life, his spirit never walked beyond their counting-house, never roamed beyond the narrow limits of their money-changing hole. He wasted his life on accumulation instead of connection.

Here’s what hits me about Marley: he represents the voice of conviction that breaks through our comfortable denial. We all have Marley moments — those wake-up calls that God sends to get our attention before it’s too late.

The Apostle Paul describes this in Romans 2:4, asking whether we show contempt for the riches of God’s kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead us to repentance. God’s kindness is meant to wake us up. But sometimes we’re so good at ignoring kindness that He has to send something a little more dramatic. Like a ghost in chains.

I think of the times in my own life when God has sent Marley figures — that friend who told me a hard truth I didn’t want to hear, that health scare that made me reevaluate my priorities, that failure that forced me to admit I wasn’t as self-sufficient as I pretended to be. We don’t usually enjoy these moments. Scrooge certainly didn’t. His first response to Marley was denial — claiming the ghost was just an undigested bit of beef, a fragment of underdone potato. That’s actually in the book. Scrooge literally tries to blame his spiritual encounter on bad food.

And honestly? That’s so relatable it’s painful. How many times have we explained away God’s warnings? We chalk up that nagging conviction to stress. We sit through that sermon that hits too close to home and spend the whole time thinking about who else in the congregation really needs to hear it. We watch someone else face consequences for the same thing we’re doing and tell ourselves our situation is different. It’s like seeing that “check engine” light on the dashboard and just turning up the radio to block it out of our minds. We ignore that still, small voice because we don’t want to deal with what it’s saying.

Marley tells Scrooge that he cannot rest, he cannot stay, he cannot linger anywhere. He says he wears the chain he forged in life and asks Scrooge if he recognizes the pattern of his own chain, because when Marley died, Scrooge’s was already as heavy as Marley’s chain. And in the seven years since, Scrooge has been adding to it. As Marley states… “it is a ponderous chain.”

That’s a terrifying image — this idea that every selfish choice, every hardened response, every time we choose money or comfort or pride over love or kindness adds another link to an invisible chain we’re dragging around.

But here’s the good news that Marley brings: there’s still time. He tells Scrooge he has a chance and hope of escaping his fate — a chance and hope that Marley procured for him.

This is grace breaking through. Marley can’t save himself, but he can point Scrooge toward salvation. That’s what conviction is supposed to do — not condemn us into despair, but wake us up to the chance we still have. As it says in 2 Corinthians 7:10, godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.

So the first question we need to ask ourselves is this: What Jacob Marley warnings have we been ignoring in our own lives? What chains are we forging link by link, yard by yard, while pretending everything is fine?

THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST: Facing Where We Came From

The first spirit Marley told Scrooge would visit, arrives at one o’clock, and Dickens describes it as a strange figure — like a child, yet also like an old man, with a bright clear jet of light springing from the crown of its head. It’s young and old at the same time, which makes sense when you think about memory. Our memories are both ancient history and somehow still immediate, still capable of making us feel everything we felt in the original moment.

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge on a journey through his own history, and this is where the story gets emotionally devastating.

We see young Scrooge alone at boarding school during Christmas while all the other boys have gone home to their families. His father sent him away and apparently didn’t want him back. Scrooge is just a child, reading by himself in an empty classroom, and even the cold-hearted present-day Scrooge begins to weep at the sight of his younger self.

We see Scrooge’s sister Fan arrive to bring him home, telling him that their father is so much kinder than he used to be and that Ebenezer is never to come back to this place. This moment explains so much about who Scrooge became. Rejected children often grow into adults who protect themselves by rejecting others first.

We then see the Scrooge as a young man, working for old Fezziwig, a generous employer who threw wonderful Christmas parties for his workers and their families. Fezziwig could have been a template for who Scrooge might have become.

And then we see the moment everything went wrong — Scrooge’s fiancée Belle releases him from their engagement because she realizes that money has become more important to him than love. She tells him that she has watched his nobler aspirations fall away one by one, until the master passion of gain engulfs him.

That phrase — “master passion” — is biblical language, even though Dickens might not have intended it that way. Jesus said in Matthew 6:24 that no one can serve two masters. We’ll either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. We cannot serve both God and money.

Scrooge chose money. And Belle saw it happening and loved him enough to tell him the truth, even though it cost her everything she’d hoped for.

Here’s the spiritual principle: we cannot change what we refuse to examine. The Ghost of Christmas Past forces Scrooge to look at his life honestly — to see where he came from, to understand how he got here, to trace the path of choices that led him to become the man he is now.

We need to do the same thing. Not to wallow in guilt or to excuse ourselves because of our difficult backgrounds, but to understand our patterns.

Psalm 139:23-24 says to search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

That’s an invitation to let God be our Ghost of Christmas Past — to let Him show us the moments that shaped us, the wounds that still affect us, the choices that set us on paths we’re still walking.

Maybe you had a father like Scrooge’s, distant and cold, and you’ve spent your whole life trying to earn approval you never got. Maybe you had a Fezziwig who showed you generosity, but somewhere along the way you forgot those lessons. Maybe you had a Belle moment — someone who loved you enough to tell you hard truths that you weren’t ready to hear.

The point isn’t to get stuck in the past. Scrooge tries to do that at one point — he wants to linger in a happy memory of Fezziwig’s party, but the Ghost of Christmas Past moves him forward. The point is to understand the past so it no longer has unconscious power over us.

As it says in Lamentations 3:40, let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.

One more thing about this spirit: Scrooge eventually can’t handle the light anymore. He grabs the spirit’s cap — a device that can extinguish the light from its head — and forces it down onto the spirits head, over its head, covering its entire being. But even pressed to the earth, the light streams out from under it.

The truth about our past can’t ultimately be suppressed. We can try to stuff it down, but it leaks out sideways in anxiety, anger, broken relationships, and addictions. Better to let the Ghost of Christmas Past show us what we need to see while there’s still time to heal.

THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT: Seeing Beyond Ourselves

The second spirit arrives in a room transformed into a feast — walls hung with green, a roaring fire, and more food than Scrooge has probably seen in years. The Ghost of Christmas Present is a giant wrapped in a green robe bordered with white fur, barefoot, and holding a glowing torch. His life is short — he tells Scrooge his lifespan is the single day of Christmas — but he uses that brief existence to show Scrooge what’s happening right now.

And what’s happening right now is that other people exist with lives every bit as real as Scrooge’s own.

That sounds obvious, but for Scrooge, it’s revolutionary. He’s been so focused on his own concerns — his money, his routine, his resentments — that he’s forgotten other people have inner lives too. They have hopes and fears, celebrations and sorrows, and they’re happening right now whether Scrooge acknowledges them or not.

The spirit takes Scrooge to see the Cratchit family’s Christmas dinner. Bob Cratchit earns fifteen shillings a week from Scrooge — barely enough to survive. His house is small, and the Christmas goose is small, and the pudding is probably small. But the Cratchit family treats their modest feast like a miracle.

And then there’s Tiny Tim. The boy is crippled, walks with a crutch, and Scrooge asks whether he will live. The spirit’s answer is devastating: if the shadows remain unaltered by the future, the child will die.

Here’s what cuts deepest — the spirit then throws Scrooge’s own words back at him. When charity workers asked Scrooge for donations to help the poor, he asked whether there were no prisons or workhouses for them to go to. Now the spirit asks if Scrooge would decide who should live and who should die. He says it might be that in the sight of heaven, Scrooge is more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.

That’s not a comfortable word, but it’s a necessary one.

Jesus told a parable in Luke 16 about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus (not the same Lazarus Jesus brought back from the dead – different guy). Lazarus sat at the rich man’s gate, covered with sores, hoping for scraps from the table. The rich man walked past him every day without really seeing him. After they both died, Lazarus went to Abraham’s side (kind of like heaven) while the rich man went to torment (hell or Hades). The rich man’s sin wasn’t that he was wealthy — it was that he was blind to the suffering right in front of him.

The Ghost of Christmas Present cures this blindness.

The spirit who is lively and boisterous, also presents one of the most terrifying scenes in the book – towards the end of his visit, he reveals two emaciated children hiding under his robe — a boy called Ignorance and a girl called Want. They represent humanity’s children, neglected and dangerous. The spirit warns Scrooge to beware of them both, but most of all to beware the boy, for on his brow is written doom unless the writing be erased.

Dickens was making a social point about poverty and education, but there’s a spiritual truth here too. When we remain ignorant of others’ suffering, when we ignore the wants and needs of our neighbors, we’re not just failing them — we’re forming ourselves into people incapable of love. And that’s its own kind of doom.

Hebrews 13:16 tells us not to forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

First John 3:17 asks how God’s love can remain in anyone who has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them.

The Ghost of Christmas Present calls us out of our self-absorption into awareness. We can’t love what we don’t see. We can’t serve people we’ve convinced ourselves don’t exist or don’t matter.

So here’s the question this spirit asks: Who are the Cratchit families in our lives? Who are the people we walk past every day without really seeing them? What suffering exists in our community, our church, our neighborhood, that we’ve trained ourselves not to notice?

And I’m talking to myself here too. It’s so easy — especially in our screen-saturated age — to become absorbed in our own concerns. We can curate our feeds to show us only what we already agree with, surround ourselves with people just like us, and never have to confront the uncomfortable reality that other people are struggling in ways we might be able to help with.

The Ghost of Christmas Present tears away those blinders. And if we’re willing to let him, God will do the same for us.

THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME: The Mercy of Warning

The final spirit is different from the others. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come speaks no words. It’s simply a dark phantom, a presence draped in black, with only a spectral hand pointing the way forward. And what it shows Scrooge is nothing less than the consequences of his unchanged life.

Scrooge sees businessmen casually discussing someone’s death with complete indifference. One says he’ll only go to the funeral if lunch is provided. Another can’t remember who died, just that it was the old man with the countinghouse.

Scrooge sees his own belongings being picked over by thieves — his bed curtains, his shirts, even the blankets that had been on his corpse. A cleaning woman had stripped them off his dead body before anyone else could get to them. The thieves laugh about how unpleasant the dead man was in life.

Scrooge sees a young couple who owed him money, and they’re relieved that he’s dead because his creditors might be easier to deal with. His death is good news to them.

Scrooge sees no mourners at any funeral home, no friends gathered to remember him, no legacy of kindness or generosity.

And then Scrooge sees the Cratchit home again — but this time it’s quiet. Too quiet. The family is dressed in mourning clothes. Bob Cratchit speaks of his poor little child, his poor little child. Tiny Tim is dead.

Finally, the spirit takes Scrooge to a neglected grave in a churchyard, and Scrooge sees his own name on the stone: EBENEZER SCROOGE.

This is the moment of crisis. Scrooge falls to his knees before the spirit and asks whether these are shadows of things that will be, or shadows of things that may be only.

That question is everything. Are we locked into our futures? Or can we change?

The biblical answer is clearly the latter. God’s warnings are always invitations to repentance, not declarations of unchangeable fate. 2 Peter 3:9 states, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

And here’s the beautiful part — God says in Ezekiel 33:11 that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is terrifying, but it’s also merciful. It shows Scrooge what will happen so that it doesn’t have to happen. That’s not cruelty — that’s grace.

Revelation 3:19 says that those the Lord loves, He rebukes and disciplines. So be earnest and repent.

Sometimes love looks like a terrifying glimpse of where we’re headed. Better to be scared into change than comfortable into destruction.

Scrooge begs for mercy at the grave. He says he is not the man he was and will not be the man he must have been. He pledges to honor Christmas in his heart and try to keep it all the year. He asks the spirit to tell him he may sponge away the writing on this stone.

And then? The phantom shrinks, collapses, dwindles into a bedpost. Scrooge wakes up in his own bed, and it’s Christmas morning.

THE REDEMPTION: From Death to Life

The final section of A Christmas Carol is pure joy, and Dickens writes it at a sprint. Scrooge discovers he hasn’t missed Christmas Day. The spirits have done it all in one night. He still has time.

And here’s the thing about Scrooge’s transformation — it’s immediate and total. He doesn’t set up a committee to investigate charitable giving. He doesn’t promise to start being nice next quarter after he’s reviewed his finances. He acts right now.

He sends a prize turkey — the biggest one in the poultry shop — to the Cratchit family anonymously. He increases Bob Cratchit’s salary. He gives a large sum to the gentlemen who had asked for charity donations the day before but had pushed out of his office. He goes to his nephew Fred’s Christmas party, the one he had refused so coldly, and he’s welcomed with open arms.

And from then on, it was always said of Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well. Dickens tells us that Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew. He became a second father to Tiny Tim, who did not die. And Scrooge had no further dealings with spirits, because he had learned to live in the spirit of the season all year long.

This is what repentance looks like. It’s not just feeling bad about our past — it’s a complete reorientation of our present and future. The Greek word for repentance, metanoia, literally means a change of mind, a turning around, going in a completely different direction.

Second Corinthians 5:17 says that if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here.

Scrooge becomes a new creation. The old miser dies in that bedroom, and a generous, joyful man wakes up.

And here’s what I love most about the ending: the ghosts don’t stay. Once Scrooge has truly changed, he doesn’t need supernatural visitations anymore. The lessons have been internalized. He’s not dependent on signs and wonders to keep him on track — the change is in him now.

That’s spiritual maturity. We might need dramatic wake-up calls to start the journey. We might need visions of our past to understand ourselves. We might need glimpses of others’ suffering to break our selfishness. We might even need terrifying previews of consequences to shake us into action. But eventually, if the transformation is real, we carry those lessons with us. They become who we are.

Romans 12:2 says to not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

Scrooge’s mind is renewed. His pattern is broken. And the world around him responds to his change with generosity of its own. His nephew welcomes him. His clerk forgives him. Even the boy he sends to buy the turkey thinks he’s joking at first, but then happily goes to fetch it.

Here’s the thing about grace: it creates more grace. Scrooge’s transformation blesses everyone around him. Tiny Tim lives. The Cratchits celebrate. Fred has his uncle back. The businessmen who spoke callously about Scrooge’s death in the vision of the future? That future never happens. Those words are never spoken. Because a changed life changes everything downstream.

Conclusion: Our Own Visitation

So what do we do with all this?

Charles Dickens gave us a story about transformation, and I don’t think it’s an accident that this story has endured for nearly two centuries. We keep coming back to it because we recognize ourselves in Scrooge. Maybe not in his extremity, but in his tendencies. We know what it is to harden our hearts. We know what it is to prioritize comfort over compassion, security over generosity, self over neighbor.

And we know, deep down, that we need to change.

The four ghosts of A Christmas Carol represent four elements of spiritual awakening that we all need:

Jacob Marley is the voice of warning that breaks through our denial. It’s the conviction of the Holy Spirit telling us that something is wrong and there’s still time to change.

The Ghost of Christmas Past is the honest examination of where we came from — the wounds that shaped us, the choices that defined us, the patterns we’ve been repeating. It’s the invitation to understand ourselves in God’s light. It’s not who we are, but who we were and where it has brought us up to now.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is the call to see beyond ourselves — to recognize that other people exist, that their suffering matters, that our lives are meant to be lived in connection and service rather than isolation and accumulation.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is, despite the terrifying appearance, the merciful warning of consequences — not to condemn us, but to wake us up while change is still possible.

And then there’s Christmas morning. The new beginning. The chance to live differently.

We don’t need actual ghosts to experience this. We have something better — the “Holy Ghost” – the Spirit of the living God who convicts, illuminates, connects, warns, and transforms. As it says in Ezekiel 36:26, God promises to give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us; He will remove from us our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh.

That’s what happened to Scrooge. His heart of stone became a heart of flesh. And if a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner like Scrooge can change… so can we.

The beautiful thing about the gospel is that no matter how many chains we’ve forged, no matter how dark our past, no matter how blind we’ve been to others’ suffering, no matter how grim our projected future — it’s not too late. We still have time if we change now.

So this Christmas, as you read “A Christmas Carol”, or watch one of the numerous film versions, or listen to the audiobook that I’ve narrated of the classic… however you absorb the story, remember this message. Let’s hear Jacob Marley’s warning and take it seriously. Let’s let the Ghost of Christmas Past show us what we need to see about ourselves. Let’s let the Ghost of Christmas Present open our eyes to the people around us. Let’s let the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come scare us enough to actually change direction in our lives.

And then let’s wake up on Christmas morning as new creations, ready to live generously and joyfully, honoring Christmas in our hearts and keeping it all the year.

Because here’s what Scrooge discovered, and what we can discover too: it’s better on the other side. The life of generosity is simply more joyful than the life of accumulation. Connection is better than isolation. Giving is better than hoarding. And redemption — real, transformative redemption — is available to anyone willing to receive it.

May it truly be said of us that we knew how to keep Christmas well.

And of course, I can’t end a message without being a bit cliché…

God bless us, every one.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.