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Have you ever felt renewed? Have you ever felt the weight you were carrying lifted off your shoulders?

Maybe it was after stepping out of a warm shower, where the grime of the day is swirling down the drain? Maybe after a bout of sickness, when that first full, clean breath is taken in?

If you have experienced this, then you understand how Ebenezar Scrooge felt.

After his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Future, Scrooge awakens in his room. His impending death becomes the breaking of dawn on life.

“Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!”

This sets him in a whirlwind of emotion. He learns that it is Christmas morning and that his encounters with the Spirits all were done in one night. He sends a boy off to purchase the biggest turkey in the local poulterer’s and sends it to the Cratchit home anonymously. He dresses in his best and enjoys the festivities of the day by going to church and engaging with strangers as he passes them by. He runs into the charity workers he brushed off the day before and tells them that he will be donating a large sum.

He then goes to his nephew’s home and is welcomed warmly in for Christmas dinner and games.

The next day, Bob Cratchit comes into work late and Scrooge pretends to be outraged. Just when poor Cratchit believes he is about to be fired, Scrooge reveals gaily that he is going to raise his salary and do all he can to aid his family.

Remember that feeling of renewal I mentioned earlier? Now, I want you to try to imagine the feeling of salvation. The feeling of being given a second chance. The feeling of seeing, touching, breathing what you thought you’d never see, touch, breathe again. You might not have to imagine too hard. However, if you do, read Scrooge’s reaction to this feeling of salvation and put yourself into his slippers for a moment.

“‘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.”

It’s a wonderful feeling. I can attest to that. It’s the feeling I knew when I realized what I had been saved from when I chose to follow Jesus.

That choice changes you. You see the world differently. You treat the world differently. And so may the world do the same to you. Not always for the better either.

However, that is of little consequence when weighed against the Gift of Gifts: the sacrifice of Jesus. As it is said:

“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.”

Do you see now, my friends, when I say that “A Christmas Carol” is the story of the redeemed? Of second-chances? Of the lost being found? Of the Christian?

May we Christians never forget that, without Jesus, we are just as wretched and selfish as Ebenezer Scrooge. May we never forget the daily pleasure of being redeemed and the lifelong process of renewal as we seek to know and imitate Christ.

May we dance uninhibited like Ebenezer. May we welcome the world, even at its ugliest, joyously like Fred. May we love and live humbly like Bob. May we remember God’s blessings always like Tiny Tim.