Rehabilitating Your Inner Scrooge

By Scott Harrup

Originally printed November 27, 2005

A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, is small. Other works by Charles Dickens — David Copperfield or A Tale of Two Cities, for example — are phonebooks by comparison. But Carol’s characters stand as giants in the world’s collective Christmas lore.
Front and center lurks Ebenezer Scrooge.
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”
Scrooge and his business partner, Jacob Marley, amassed their wealth with no thought to anyone but themselves. After Marley died, Scrooge continued their business, working round the clock for the next pound sterling. Nothing and no one else mattered.
Early in the book, when two representatives of a charity solicited a Christmas Eve donation on behalf of the poor, Scrooge had no qualms about rejecting their plea.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly.”
But sitting at home alone, with Christmas only hours away, Scrooge had an unexpected visit from his dead partner. Marley had discovered too late that the “business” of others really did concern him.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
A Christmas Carol is fantasy. Dickens penned the caricature of a flinty Victorian miser and introduced a quartet of ghosts to guide him to Christmases past, present and future. In the process, Dickens created enough literary insulation to let readers examine their own bent toward selfishness from a comfortable distance.
But the Book that narrates the first Christmas is more direct. Our deepest emotions and personal traits come to the surface with glaring clarity in the Bible.
In the first place, all of us are separated from God. We all have an evil nature. Like Scrooge, every one of us deserves the title of “sinner.”
The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one (Psalm 14:2,3, NIV).
But God reaches out to us in love. Through Jesus Christ, He offers us the chance to come to Him in faith and be transformed from the inside out.
To all who received [Christ], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12).
Once we take that leap of faith, everything should be OK, right? As long as we’ve made our peace with God, what other concerns could we possibly have? But this “everything’s OK as long as I’m OK” philosophy is really the same attitude Scrooge expressed; only it sounds holier when “God” happens to be mentioned.
God never intended our walk of faith to be a private matter. God connects the love that people are to show Him with the love they are to show to one another. Jesus explained this connection in Matthew 22:37-40.
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the fi rst and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Think about what He was saying. “All the Law and the Prophets” — in other words, all of God’s Word and its detailed guidelines for living — boils down to these two concepts: Love God passionately, and love others selflessly.
These two supreme duties in life are inseparable. We may think we have a deep relationship with God. We may believe that we really do love Him with all that is in us. But the way to test that is by examining how much we love others. James said it this way:
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).
It’s easy to get that backwards, to place enormous emphasis on all the do’s and don’ts we think will keep us from becoming “polluted by the world.” But James, under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, didn’t start his definition of religion with a list of do’s and don’ts. He started it with a brief list of other people who are in need.
Once our view of our faith expands and we take in the needs of those around us, the Bible calls on us to act on that awareness. Listen to James again.
Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? (James 2:15,16).
So how do we rehabilitate our inner Scrooge? Consider these simple biblical mandates.
• Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfi ll the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).
• Do nothing out of selfi sh ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves (Philippians 2:3).
• As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience (Colossians 3:12).
Dickens ended his little Christmas morality play by transforming Scrooge.
He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.
It’s a happy image, but incomplete. Dickens was writing a fable. He could afford to let Scrooge pick himself up by his moral bootstraps. The Bible reminds us that that simply isn’t possible. What is possible — thanks to the One who came that first Christmas — is to allow God to do the picking up for us.
Then, standing tall and walking through life with joy, we can give outer evidence of our inner change by reaching in love to the hurting and lonely and lost around us.

Scott Harrup is senior associate editor of
Today’s Pentecostal Evangel.