December 21, 2025 • 33 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:23):
story and see why it still lands so hard nearly
two centuries later. Hello, Weirdos, I'm Pastor Daron. Welcome to
the Church of the Undead. Here in the Church of
the Undead, I step away from being the host of
(00:45):
Weird Darkness and step into the clothes of a reverend.
I still share things that are dark, strange, or macabre,
diving into the paranormal, true crime, monsters, and more, but
I try to find a biblical take on the subject matter.
I have to say it's a fun challenge if you're
a Weirdo family member from my Weird Darkness podcast or
a weirdo in Christ from this one. Welcome to the
(01:07):
Church of the yon Dead. And I use the word
undead because as Romans six, verse eleven says, in the
same way, count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to
God in Christ Jesus, and as Ephesians two States. Even
when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us
alive together with Christ. If you were dead and now
(01:28):
are alive, that makes you un dead. If you want
to join this weirdo congregation, just click that subscribe or
follow button and visit us online at Weird Darkness dot
com slash church. In this episode, four Ghosts, one Night,
and a transformation so complete it's been pointing people toward
(01:48):
a baby in a manger for nearly two hundred years.
Full disclosure before I get into the message, I might
use the term pastor because I've branded this feature as
a church and I got a minister's life license online.
But I do not have a theology degree, nor did
I ever go to Bible College. I'm just a guy
who gave his life to Christ at the age of
twenty one and has tried to walk the walk ever since,
(02:11):
and has stumbled a lot along the way, because like
everybody else, I am an imperfect, heavily flawed human being.
So please don't take what I say as gospel. Dig
into God's Word yourself for confirmation, inspiration, and revelation. That
being said, Welcome to the Church of the Young Dead. Wow.
(02:38):
Charles Dickens published a Christmas Carol in December eighteen forty three,
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 is squeezing every penny from his underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchett,
(03:00):
refusing to give money to charity for the poor, and
growling bummbug at anybody 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
(03:21):
remarkable happens. Marley's ghost appears to Scrooge, draped in heavy
chains forged from cash boxes, keys, hadlocks, 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
(03:43):
throughout the night. The ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost
of Christmas Present, and the terrifying ghost of Christmas yet
to come takes Scrooge on a journey through his own life,
what was, what is, and what will be. If he
doesn't change more, Scrooge is a different man. He sends
a prize turkey to the Cratchett family, increases Bob's salary,
(04:07):
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, actually. But here's what I find fascinating. Dickens,
whether he fully intended it or not, wrote something that
(04:27):
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
(04:48):
abundant life. The ghost of Jacob Marley shows up first,
and he is not there to make smalltock. 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
(05:09):
every greedy choice, in 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
(05:30):
their money changing whole. 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.
(05:53):
The apostle Paul describes this in Romans two, verse four,
asking whether we show contempt for the riches of God's kindkindness,
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,
(06:16):
like a ghost in chains. I think at the times
of my own life when God has sent Jacob Marley
ghost 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 or as intelligent as
(06:38):
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,
(07:00):
and honestly, that is 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
(07:24):
the same thing we're doing and tell ourselves, well, 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
(07:45):
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 chain 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.
(08:10):
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 is still time. He tells
(08:33):
Scrooge he has a chance and a 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 towards salvation. That's what conviction is
supposed to do, not condemn us into despair, but wake
(08:54):
us up to the chance we still have. As it
says in two Corinthians seven vers 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
(09:16):
been ignoring in our own lives? What chains are we
forging link by link, yard by yard while pretending everything
is fine. 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,
(09:38):
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 au speel everything we felt in
the original moment. I'll talk to my bride about something
(10:00):
that happened to her back in high school, and she'll
still get his angry and red faced when relating the
memory to me, as she felt when it was actually
happening all those decades ago. He goes to Christmas past
takes Scrooge on a journey through his own history, and
this is where the story gets emotionally devastating. We see
(10:20):
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.
(10:42):
We see Scrooge's sister Fan arrive to bring him home,
telling him that their father is so much kinder that
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
(11:06):
Scrooge as a young man working for Old Feziwig, a
generous employer who threw wonderful Christmas parties for his workers
and their families. Beziwig could have been a template for
who Scrooge might have become, and then we see the
moment everything went wrong Scrooge's fiancee, Bell releases him from
their engagement because she realizes that money has become more
(11:30):
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 six,
(11:50):
verse twenty four that no one can serve two masters.
Will 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 shows money, and
Belle saw it happening and loved him enough to tell
him the truth, even though it cost her everything she
(12:12):
had 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
(12:35):
the same thing, not to wallowing guilt or to excuse
ourselves because of our difficult backgrounds, but to understand our patterns.
Psalm one hundred and thirty nine, verses twenty three and
twenty four says to search me God and know my heart,
Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there
(12:56):
is any offensive way in me, and lead me in
the way lasting. 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 were still walking.
Maybe you had a father like Scrooges, distant and cold,
(13:20):
and you've spent your whole life trying to earn approval
you never got. Maybe you had a Feziwig who showed
you generosity, but somewhere along the way you forgot those lessons.
Maybe you had a bell 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.
(13:43):
Scrooge tries to do that. At one point, he wants
to linger at a happy memory of Feziwigs 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 Lamentation three,
verse forty, let us examine our ways and test them,
(14:03):
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 spirit's head, over its head, covering its entire being.
But even pressed to the earth, the light streams out
(14:27):
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 and anxiety, anger, broken relationships, and addictions.
Better to let the ghost of Christmas Past show us
what we need to see while there is still time
to heal. The second spirit arrives in a room transformed
(14:52):
into a feast, walls hung with green, a roaring fire,
and more food than Scrooge is 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 this single day of Christmas. But he
(15:15):
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 has been
so focused on his own concerns, his money, his routine,
(15:38):
his resentments that he has 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 Cratchett family's Christmas dinner.
Bob Cratchett earns fifteen shillings of week from Scrooge, barely
(16:01):
enough to survive. His house is small, and the Christmas
goose is small, and the pudding is probably small. But
the Crunchittt 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.
(16:22):
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 churity workers ask Scrooge for donations to help the poor,
he asked whether there were no prisons or workhouses for
(16:44):
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
(17:07):
Luke sixteen 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 even seeing him.
After they both died, Lazarus went to Abraham's side, kind
(17:30):
of like heaven, while the rich man went to torment
hell 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
(17:52):
presents one of the most terrifying scenes in the book,
at least for me. Toward 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 warrens Scrooge to
beware of them both, but most of all to beware
(18:14):
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 is a spiritual truth
here too. When we remain ignorant of others suffering, when
we ignore the wants and needs of our neighbors, we're
(18:34):
not just failing them. We're forming ourselves into people incapable
of love, and that's its own kind of doom. Hebrews thirteen,
verse sixteen tells us not to forget to do good
and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God
is pleased. Verse John three, verse seventeen asks how God's
(18:56):
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 that we've
convinced ourselves don't exist or don't matter. So here's the question.
(19:20):
This spirit asks, who are the crotchet 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, our school or business that we've trained ourselves
not to notice. I'm talking to myself here too. It
(19:43):
is really 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 reac that other people are struggling
in ways we might be able to help with the
(20:05):
Ghost of Christmas Present tears away those blinders, and if
we're willing to let him, God will do the same
for us. 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,
(20:28):
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 go to the
funeral if lunch is provided. Another can't remember who died,
(20:51):
just that it was the old man with the counting house.
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 anybody else could get to them.
The thieves laugh about how unpleasant the dead man was
(21:12):
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 futeral home,
no friends gathered to remember him, no legacy of kindness
(21:35):
or generosity. And then Scrooge sees the Cratchet home again,
but this time it's quiet, too quiet. The family is
dressed in mourning clothes. Bob Cratchett speaks of his poor
little child. His poor little child, Tiny Tim is dead. Finally,
(21:56):
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
(22:16):
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. Second Peter three, verse nine
(22:38):
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 thirty three,
verse eleven that he takes no pleasure in the death
of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their
(23:00):
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 three, verse nineteen says that
(23:20):
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 from mercy at the grave.
He says he's not the man he was and will
(23:43):
not be the man he must have been. He pledges
to honor Christmas in his heart and to 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.
(24:08):
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
(24:29):
set up a committee to investigate charitable giving. He doesn't
promise to start being nice next quarter after he's reviewed
his finances. Now he acts right now. He sends a
prize turkey, the biggest one in the poultry shop, to
the Cratchitt family anonymously. He increases Bob Cratchit's salary. He
(24:50):
gives a large sum to the gentleman who had asked
for charity donations the day before, but he'd pushed out
of his office. He goes to his nephew Fred's Christmas
party 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.
(25:12):
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.
(25:32):
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, mat nooia,
literally means a change of mind, a turning around, going
in a completely different direction. Second Corinthians five, verse seventeen
(25:57):
says that if anyone is in Christ, the new creation
has come. The old is gone, the new is here.
Scrooge became a new creation. The old miser died in
that bedroom that a generous, joyful man woke up. And
here's what I really love about the ending. The ghosts
(26:17):
don't stick around. 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.
(26:40):
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.
(27:02):
Romans twelve, verse two 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
(27:23):
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, he creates
more grace. Scrooge's transformation blesses everyone around him. Tiny Tim lives,
The Cratchets celebrate, Fred has his uncle back. The businessman
(27:47):
who spoke callously about Scrooge's death in the vision of
the future, well that future never happens now. Those words
are never spoken, because a change to life changes everything downstream.
So what do we do with all of this? Charles
Dickens give us a story about transformation, and I don't
(28:07):
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, ourself over our neighbor,
(28:33):
and we know deep down that, yeah, 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
(28:55):
is wrong and there is still time to change. To
Christmas Past is the honest examination of where we came from,
the wounds that shaped us, the choices that defined us,
the patterns we have 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
(29:17):
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
(29:41):
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.
(30:03):
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 thirty six, verse twenty six,
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.
(30:25):
That's what happened to Scrooge. His heart of stone became
a heart of flesh. And if a tight fisted hand
at the grindstone, the 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 have forged, no matter how dark hour past,
(30:50):
no matter how blind we have 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 version
(31:11):
that I've narrated of the classic free to listen to
on my website. 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.
(31:34):
Let's let the ghost of Christmas yet to come sca
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
(31:57):
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
(32:17):
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 cannot
end this message without being a bit cliche. God bless
us everyone. If you like what you heard, share this
(32:47):
episode with others whom you think might also like it.
Maybe the person you share it with I'll want to
join this weird o congregation too. To listen to previous messages,
visit weird darkness dot com slash church. That's weird Darkness
dot com slash church. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining
me weirdos and until next time, Jesus loves you, and
(33:07):
so do I. God bless
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
(00:23):
story and see why it still lands so hard nearly
two centuries later. Hello, Weirdos, I'm Pastor Daron. Welcome to
the Church of the Undead. Here in the Church of
the Undead, I step away from being the host of
(00:45):
Weird Darkness and step into the clothes of a reverend.
I still share things that are dark, strange, or macabre,
diving into the paranormal, true crime, monsters, and more, but
I try to find a biblical take on the subject matter.
I have to say it's a fun challenge if you're
a Weirdo family member from my Weird Darkness podcast or
a weirdo in Christ from this one. Welcome to the
(01:07):
Church of the yon Dead. And I use the word
undead because as Romans six, verse eleven says, in the
same way, count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to
God in Christ Jesus, and as Ephesians two States. Even
when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us
alive together with Christ. If you were dead and now
(01:28):
are alive, that makes you un dead. If you want
to join this weirdo congregation, just click that subscribe or
follow button and visit us online at Weird Darkness dot
com slash church. In this episode, four Ghosts, one Night,
and a transformation so complete it's been pointing people toward
(01:48):
a baby in a manger for nearly two hundred years.
Full disclosure before I get into the message, I might
use the term pastor because I've branded this feature as
a church and I got a minister's life license online.
But I do not have a theology degree, nor did
I ever go to Bible College. I'm just a guy
who gave his life to Christ at the age of
twenty one and has tried to walk the walk ever since,
(02:11):
and has stumbled a lot along the way, because like
everybody else, I am an imperfect, heavily flawed human being.
So please don't take what I say as gospel. Dig
into God's Word yourself for confirmation, inspiration, and revelation. That
being said, Welcome to the Church of the Young Dead. Wow.
(02:38):
Charles Dickens published a Christmas Carol in December eighteen forty three,
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 is squeezing every penny from his underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchett,
(03:00):
refusing to give money to charity for the poor, and
growling bummbug at anybody 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
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remarkable happens. Marley's ghost appears to Scrooge, draped in heavy
chains forged from cash boxes, keys, hadlocks, 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
(03:43):
throughout the night. The ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost
of Christmas Present, and the terrifying ghost of Christmas yet
to come takes Scrooge on a journey through his own life,
what was, what is, and what will be. If he
doesn't change more, Scrooge is a different man. He sends
a prize turkey to the Cratchett family, increases Bob's salary,
(04:07):
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, actually. But here's what I find fascinating. Dickens,
whether he fully intended it or not, wrote something that
(04:27):
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
(04:48):
abundant life. The ghost of Jacob Marley shows up first,
and he is not there to make smalltock. 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
(05:09):
every greedy choice, in 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
(05:30):
their money changing whole. 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.
(05:53):
The apostle Paul describes this in Romans two, verse four,
asking whether we show contempt for the riches of God's kindkindness,
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,
(06:16):
like a ghost in chains. I think at the times
of my own life when God has sent Jacob Marley
ghost 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 or as intelligent as
(06:38):
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,
(07:00):
and honestly, that is 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
(07:24):
the same thing we're doing and tell ourselves, well, 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
(07:45):
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 chain 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.
(08:10):
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 is still time. He tells
(08:33):
Scrooge he has a chance and a 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 towards salvation. That's what conviction is
supposed to do, not condemn us into despair, but wake
(08:54):
us up to the chance we still have. As it
says in two Corinthians seven vers 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
(09:16):
been ignoring in our own lives? What chains are we
forging link by link, yard by yard while pretending everything
is fine. 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,
(09:38):
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 au speel everything we felt in
the original moment. I'll talk to my bride about something
(10:00):
that happened to her back in high school, and she'll
still get his angry and red faced when relating the
memory to me, as she felt when it was actually
happening all those decades ago. He goes to Christmas past
takes Scrooge on a journey through his own history, and
this is where the story gets emotionally devastating. We see
(10:20):
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.
(10:42):
We see Scrooge's sister Fan arrive to bring him home,
telling him that their father is so much kinder that
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
(11:06):
Scrooge as a young man working for Old Feziwig, a
generous employer who threw wonderful Christmas parties for his workers
and their families. Beziwig could have been a template for
who Scrooge might have become, and then we see the
moment everything went wrong Scrooge's fiancee, Bell releases him from
their engagement because she realizes that money has become more
(11:30):
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 six,
(11:50):
verse twenty four that no one can serve two masters.
Will 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 shows money, and
Belle saw it happening and loved him enough to tell
him the truth, even though it cost her everything she
(12:12):
had 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
(12:35):
the same thing, not to wallowing guilt or to excuse
ourselves because of our difficult backgrounds, but to understand our patterns.
Psalm one hundred and thirty nine, verses twenty three and
twenty four says to search me God and know my heart,
Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there
(12:56):
is any offensive way in me, and lead me in
the way lasting. 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 were still walking.
Maybe you had a father like Scrooges, distant and cold,
(13:20):
and you've spent your whole life trying to earn approval
you never got. Maybe you had a Feziwig who showed
you generosity, but somewhere along the way you forgot those lessons.
Maybe you had a bell 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.
(13:43):
Scrooge tries to do that. At one point, he wants
to linger at a happy memory of Feziwigs 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 Lamentation three,
verse forty, let us examine our ways and test them,
(14:03):
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 spirit's head, over its head, covering its entire being.
But even pressed to the earth, the light streams out
(14:27):
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 and anxiety, anger, broken relationships, and addictions.
Better to let the ghost of Christmas Past show us
what we need to see while there is still time
to heal. The second spirit arrives in a room transformed
(14:52):
into a feast, walls hung with green, a roaring fire,
and more food than Scrooge is 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 this single day of Christmas. But he
(15:15):
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 has been
so focused on his own concerns, his money, his routine,
(15:38):
his resentments that he has 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 Cratchett family's Christmas dinner.
Bob Cratchett earns fifteen shillings of week from Scrooge, barely
(16:01):
enough to survive. His house is small, and the Christmas
goose is small, and the pudding is probably small. But
the Crunchittt 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.
(16:22):
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 churity workers ask Scrooge for donations to help the poor,
he asked whether there were no prisons or workhouses for
(16:44):
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
(17:07):
Luke sixteen 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 even seeing him.
After they both died, Lazarus went to Abraham's side, kind
(17:30):
of like heaven, while the rich man went to torment
hell 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
(17:52):
presents one of the most terrifying scenes in the book,
at least for me. Toward 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 warrens Scrooge to
beware of them both, but most of all to beware
(18:14):
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 is a spiritual truth
here too. When we remain ignorant of others suffering, when
we ignore the wants and needs of our neighbors, we're
(18:34):
not just failing them. We're forming ourselves into people incapable
of love, and that's its own kind of doom. Hebrews thirteen,
verse sixteen tells us not to forget to do good
and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God
is pleased. Verse John three, verse seventeen asks how God's
(18:56):
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 that we've
convinced ourselves don't exist or don't matter. So here's the question.
(19:20):
This spirit asks, who are the crotchet 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, our school or business that we've trained ourselves
not to notice. I'm talking to myself here too. It
(19:43):
is really 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 reac that other people are struggling
in ways we might be able to help with the
(20:05):
Ghost of Christmas Present tears away those blinders, and if
we're willing to let him, God will do the same
for us. 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,
(20:28):
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 go to the
funeral if lunch is provided. Another can't remember who died,
(20:51):
just that it was the old man with the counting house.
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 anybody else could get to them.
The thieves laugh about how unpleasant the dead man was
(21:12):
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 futeral home,
no friends gathered to remember him, no legacy of kindness
(21:35):
or generosity. And then Scrooge sees the Cratchet home again,
but this time it's quiet, too quiet. The family is
dressed in mourning clothes. Bob Cratchett speaks of his poor
little child. His poor little child, Tiny Tim is dead. Finally,
(21:56):
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
(22:16):
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. Second Peter three, verse nine
(22:38):
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 thirty three,
verse eleven that he takes no pleasure in the death
of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their
(23:00):
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 three, verse nineteen says that
(23:20):
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 from mercy at the grave.
He says he's not the man he was and will
(23:43):
not be the man he must have been. He pledges
to honor Christmas in his heart and to 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.
(24:08):
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
(24:29):
set up a committee to investigate charitable giving. He doesn't
promise to start being nice next quarter after he's reviewed
his finances. Now he acts right now. He sends a
prize turkey, the biggest one in the poultry shop, to
the Cratchitt family anonymously. He increases Bob Cratchit's salary. He
(24:50):
gives a large sum to the gentleman who had asked
for charity donations the day before, but he'd pushed out
of his office. He goes to his nephew Fred's Christmas
party 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.
(25:12):
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.
(25:32):
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, mat nooia,
literally means a change of mind, a turning around, going
in a completely different direction. Second Corinthians five, verse seventeen
(25:57):
says that if anyone is in Christ, the new creation
has come. The old is gone, the new is here.
Scrooge became a new creation. The old miser died in
that bedroom that a generous, joyful man woke up. And
here's what I really love about the ending. The ghosts
(26:17):
don't stick around. 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.
(26:40):
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.
(27:02):
Romans twelve, verse two 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
(27:23):
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, he creates
more grace. Scrooge's transformation blesses everyone around him. Tiny Tim lives,
The Cratchets celebrate, Fred has his uncle back. The businessman
(27:47):
who spoke callously about Scrooge's death in the vision of
the future, well that future never happens now. Those words
are never spoken, because a change to life changes everything downstream.
So what do we do with all of this? Charles
Dickens give us a story about transformation, and I don't
(28:07):
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, ourself over our neighbor,
(28:33):
and we know deep down that, yeah, 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
(28:55):
is wrong and there is still time to change. To
Christmas Past is the honest examination of where we came from,
the wounds that shaped us, the choices that defined us,
the patterns we have 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
(29:17):
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
(29:41):
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.
(30:03):
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 thirty six, verse twenty six,
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.
(30:25):
That's what happened to Scrooge. His heart of stone became
a heart of flesh. And if a tight fisted hand
at the grindstone, the 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 have forged, no matter how dark hour past,
(30:50):
no matter how blind we have 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 version
(31:11):
that I've narrated of the classic free to listen to
on my website. 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.
(31:34):
Let's let the ghost of Christmas yet to come sca
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
(31:57):
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
(32:17):
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 cannot
end this message without being a bit cliche. God bless
us everyone. If you like what you heard, share this
(32:47):
episode with others whom you think might also like it.
Maybe the person you share it with I'll want to
join this weird o congregation too. To listen to previous messages,
visit weird darkness dot com slash church. That's weird Darkness
dot com slash church. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining
me weirdos and until next time, Jesus loves you, and
(33:07):
so do I. God bless
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