Christmas today, tomorrow, and forever

Every Christmas it is our tradition to listen to “A Christmas Carol” (Focus on the Family Radio Theater), and it always puts a fresh and new perspective on the holiday. As the story goes, miserly Scrooge hoards his money and wants no part in the Christmas spirit. As he is visited by three ghosts, revealing his need of redemption in life, he is grieved by lack of human relationships and begins to repent. The end is the best part, when he finally repents and asks forgiveness, and begins his life as a new person truly living life in joy and salvation.

As Scrooge wakes up on Christmas Day to find it all a dream, we see the overflow of gratitude and joy at the second chance he has;

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this. I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees!"

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.

We are not given the chance to review our past sins as vividly as Scrooge did, and as humans we are desperately short sighted and forgetful. What would it take to bring us to our knees with such a joy and newness as Ebenezer? Would the sight of a perfect child, born to bear our sins and sufferings?

Celebrate as a child

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"

"I don't know what day of the month it is," said Scrooge. "I don't know how long I've been among the Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!"

The past was driven away as Scrooge's eyes were opened for the first time. While his wrongdoings were remembered (for they were what drove him to repentance) they were no longer present, chaining him down. Newness of life! He didn't care of the time. Money no longer mattered; it was the joy and astonishment he saw in the faces of clients and friends that he relished. Like a child, all his former wealth was wiped away for the simplicity of a short life lived for those things which last an eternity.

Celebrate always

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.

While I do find certain Christmas songs to be a little overboard with fluffy sayings (“from now on our troubles will be miles away”), it is true that we love, give, remember, and celebrate this time of year more than any other. We worship in song and fellowship on days besides Sunday. We greet complete strangers in the name of Christ; something we would never take the liberty to do on a normal day.

Why do we act like Jesus is alive simply one month out of the year? Why not speak His name with joy to those around us, or give gifts to the poor? What a sin to celebrate His life and death only while we are surrounded by food and gifts! Unlike Scrooge's declaration to not shut out the lessons learned through his past, we insist on living as if Christ's gift lasted only a month, and not a lifetime. Truly we are in need of His mercy every hour of every day, and as constant recipients should never cease to rejoice for it.

Celebrate humbly

Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

This Christmas I challenge you to take a look at your own life and past. Examine your great sin and even greater need for a Saviour to give you new life by His blood. The greater our realization of our fallenness, the greater joy we find in His holiness. May you become like a child, honoring the Holy One with a simple and humble heart.

“Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” Luke 2:14