Many thanks to our faithful officers and Henry Holmer, who stood forth and took care of last week's Sunday service. As some of you know, many of you know, Mrs. Campbell and I had opportunity to go on our annual pilgrimage to Columbia to our tartan ball, which we try to make every year. and enjoy that opportunity. And then we worshiped at the First Presbyterian Church, which is the flagship church of our denomination, also in many ways of Southern Presbyterianism. And it was such a pleasure to hear the Rev. Dr. Neil Stewart preach the gospel. That church has been preaching the gospel for over 200 years and has made a huge impact on the state of South Carolina. And he has just did an amazing job preaching, and we're just so grateful that the Lord has preserved the wonderful tradition of that church, and we just enjoyed going back and being good old Scottish Presbyterian Columbiites again last weekend. It's also renewed my desire for us to have our own bagpipe band, which will be in next year's budget, by the way, so we hope. Have you ever been to a watch night service? Have you ever heard of a watch night service? I've never heard of a watch night service. It is a practice of the Church of Scotland at times. Usually it is practiced on New Year's Eve, but we had a friend that talked about going up to Washington D.C. for a watch night service some years ago, so I did a bit of research on that, But basically a watch night service is practiced by many of the black churches in the United States. And it goes back to the original watch night service that was held on the New Year's Eve of 1862. And it was there that many of the emancipated slaves had worshipped. and they called that Freedom's Eve because the next day the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been signed by President Abraham Lincoln, was to take effect January 1st, 1863. So it was a bunch of folks who got together and they worshipped the Lord in anticipation of the shackles of slavery to be gone. and that they would be welcomed citizens of the United States on the next day. And in many ways, that's a wonderful symbol of Christmas, isn't it? We look at how many people for so many centuries longed for a time when the shackles of sin would be taken care of with the coming of a Messiah. And we're going to see here in today's passage as we look at, go through our series of Christmas in the epistles, the Apostle Paul remind us that for centuries the people of God had a watch night service and hopeful expectations of deliverance and that deliverance would come at Christmas. And as a result of that Christmas, that first Christmas, the coming of Jesus Christ our Messiah, we traded our shackles for sonship. being adopted into the family of God, being made heirs of eternal life. Just as the little town of Bethlehem says, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. So let us prepare our hearts to worship the Lord and learn from him from Galatians chapter four on what does it mean to be a son of God? Father, we do turn to you now. We pray blessings that you would show us truth, Lord. Lord, this passage is so often is the case with Paul when he is having to defend grace against the law. Perhaps it could be taken too far. And it sounds like sometimes he's anti-law. That's not the case. But I pray God as you show us this text that we would understand the important part of the law being a tutor to lead us to Christ, but that we are under grace and not under all of the Old Testament law. that that law has been fulfilled in Christ Jesus, satisfied in Christ Jesus. Help us, Lord, to live not as a slave to sin, but as a free son of God, even as we look at this passage tonight or this afternoon. In Christ's name, amen. Please do turn to Galatians, and we're going to be looking at chapter 4 and verses 1 through 7. I will read that text in its entirety. God says, the apostle Paul writes, I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything. But he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father, so that you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. you'll find your home group helps insert of assistance to you. We're going to look at three different components here. We're going to see the arrangement of the time in verses one through three, the appearance of the time in verses four through five, and then the affection of the time in verses six through seven. So first of all here, he starts off here and I'm going to have to give you a little bit of context within the book of Galatians because we're sort of picking up this passage here in the middle of the stream here. But the preceding passage states this, For as many of you who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ, one of Paul's favorite terms regarding the union of Christ, it's like a garment that we put on. There is no, there's neither Jew nor Greek. neither slave nor free, there's neither male or female, for you are all one in Christ and you are our Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to a promise. So he explains now what this principle of what it means to be an heir as opposed to a household servant. So as long as the child is an heir, he goes on to say here in our text, basically there's very little visible difference between a young child who is heir of the household and a servant in terms of the rights and the privileges that they possess. He's no different from the slave, though he is the owner of everything. So what Paul is kind of taking you to, to Greek Roman law, that say that there's a household with a young father, that young father and he leaves behind minor children, children who are at age 9 or 7 or 10, something like that, and he's kind of talking about that particular child there, that he's not really old enough to come into his inheritance even though he is, as it says here, the owner of everything. So he would be the young heir of the household, but there's nothing he can really do about it right now. He's just too young, he's too immature to be able to handle the affairs of that household. Therefore he is, as Paul says here, under guardians and managers. Paul says in Galatians 3, therefore the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under or tutor For all of you are sons through Christ Jesus, and for all of you who have been baptized in Christ, you've clothed yourself with Christ." So again, he's bringing in this quality here of the law and the purpose of the law. Now, why does Paul have to explain the purpose of the law? You remember the Galatian church was under attack by a group of people called the Judaizers. and the Judahiters had been Jewish, they had made professions of faith, of Christianity, but they had a hard time unloading all of that old baggage that came to them by misunderstanding the point of the Mosaic Law, by embracing many of the teachings of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Scribes, that legalism that was so much a part of their culture, that they were so steeped in, So basically, after Paul went through, brought the gospel to the Galatians, those churches in Asia Minor, and then he left, these folks came in and said, yeah, well, Paul, he's right. You need to be a Christian. You really do. Yeah, you're saved by grace, but you're not a real Christian until you become a Jew first. Yeah, all that grace is really important, but boy, I tell you, just look at the Old Testament. You've got to be circumcised. Look at the Old Testament. You've got to eat kosher foods. Look at the Old Testament. You've got to celebrate the great festivals and you've got to keep all the Sabbath days and those kind of things. And they came in and they just covered them up with this legalism. To the point where Paul writes to the Galatians, said, you have fallen from grace. That is, you have left grace and you're now embracing the law. You are forgetting the whole point of what it was that I was teaching. You're basically jettisoning genuine Christianity for this hybrid legalism grace Christianity. So Paul compares the privileges of a child to those of a servant with the figures of a child and the servant representing under the law and the figures of an adult son representing life in Christ Jesus. Why would you go back? Why would you go back to be like a servant when you've been called a child? And as he's doing this, he's kind of doing a reflection on the culture at the time and also the Jewish culture. In Jewish culture, on the 12th birthday, a Jewish child would celebrate their Bar Mitzvah. they would become a son of the law, and that is at the point in time when they are officially declared, in a sense, adults, and they can have a lot of responsibilities of adulthood. In the Greek culture, around the 18th birthday, young Greek men and women would go through apothuria, where the sons would become a cadet for two years of training as an adult, and then they would cut off their long hair that would demonstrate that they were children, and then they would burn it as an offering and a sacrifice to the god Apollo. In Roman culture, there would be a ceremony for boys and girls where their toys and their dolls would be sacrificed to the idols to demonstrate their passage from youth into adulthood. So, Paul is kind of pointing back. All of this then would have been very familiar, this great passage to adulthood. And he's basically saying, you're going backwards. You're going backwards. Now, folks, we understand this theologically, right? What Paul's talking about in Galatia, the importance of the law leading us to grace. But so often in our daily practice, we forget grace. And we beat ourselves up because we're not meeting the principles of the law. And we feel this burden that is a burden not dissimilar to the legalism that was being foisted onto the Galatians at the time. He goes on to say, and the same way also when we were children, we were enslaved to what? The elementary things of the world. In other words, the ABCs of human religion. This is a theme, again, throughout Paul's epistles. In Galatians chapter 4, he's going to go on to say, however, at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who were by nature no gods. But now you've come to know God, or rather be known by God, how is it that you, and this is the problem, turn back again to the weak and worthless elemental things to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? To the Colossians, he writes in Colossians 2.8, "...see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world rather than according to Christ." These weak and elementary things are powerless to change the heart, but it's what most people grasp hold of. You can see this, if you have a conversation, and many of you will, Lord willing, during the Christmas season, if you're around, perhaps some, you go back to your hometown, you run into old friends, you're with family. If you have a conversation with a non-Christian, that weak and elementary stuff that they're holding on to becomes apparent. that you can tell they don't have a relationship with Christ. They don't really understand that He is Lord. They don't really understand how important the cross was and that they were in fact sinners separated from God and that they need a Savior because of that. And the way they talk is like, well, I do these good things. Or I'm a member of this particular church. or my pedigree and my family history has always been part of this particular denomination, or I believe this, or to me God is this, fill in the blank, right? You've got a philosophical approach to how God is. Weak and elemental. They have not been introduced to who Christ really is. They're still a slave. They're still under bondage. They've not learned the lessons of what the law was supposed to teach to them. They're enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. You know, there's this idea of bondage. Charles Dickens picks up on this in a brilliant way with The Christmas Story. And that's worth a read. I know you've probably seen a number of episodes. We just recently watched The Muppet Christmas Story. I mean, it's a winner. Theologically, it's a little lame, but you need to watch the Muppet Christmas Story. But if you read that text, it's very good literature, for one thing. But there's this frightening experience when Scrooge looks out over London, and he sees all these spirits flying around, and they're all shackled with chains. the sins that they committed in this life. And they're doomed to fly around eternally. And one of the things he says is that they're not even, they look at the burdens of mankind and they feel shame for how selfish they were in this life, but they're unable to even help people. And how that just vexes them even more that they are just in a situation where they now know the need, but they're not willing to do, they want to meet the need of people, but in the other life, they were not able to or they did not even try to meet the need of people. They live for themselves here. So you see these phantoms that are going around, they're chackled with the chains and everything. Well, that's exactly what the Judaizers are doing. They're trying to throw the chains of legalism back on to the Christians and the Christians were listening to them. And the Christians were undergoing circumcision. And the Christians were turning their nose up of non-kosher food and that kind of thing. They have gone embraced the elementary principles of this world. So we see here the appearance of time here in verses 4 through 5 here. And I just love that statement here. But when the fullness of time had come. This is one of those great transitional statements of the Apostle Paul. God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law. to redeem those who are under the law so that we might become adopted as sons. So as Hendersick points out, until a son attains the age previously stipulated by the father, he is an heir de jure, that is by right, but not de facto, that is by fact. So he goes back to this whole principle that the child is not young enough to come into age. And that age is stipulated by the Father, the Father in heaven, and also the Father of this household that he's describing here. The fullness of time. There's a big transition here in human history here. Joey Piper calls it the prophetic clock. The prophetic clock was ticking towards the time when God would become man, moving forward, and God was working all these preparations out for that moment, for that first Christmas, for the birth of Jesus Christ to the Virgin Mary, when all of that stuff would come in together. For example, he foretold the coming of his prophecy all the way back to Genesis chapter 6. We saw the keeping of David's line. We saw Isaiah's prophecies of the virgin birth and the great branch, the wonderful counselor, the new covenant being prophesied in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the coming of the new covenant. And of course, and even this idea of a kinsman redeemer, this principle in Jewish law of a redeemer coming in to help someone be able to become an heir. We saw that back in Ruth chapter 4. The text says this as the book of Ruth is closed. So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife and he went into her and the Lord gave her conception and she bore a son. Then the woman said to Naomi, Blessed be the Lord has left you this day without a redeemer. And may his name be renowned in Israel. And they named him Obed and his father Jesse and the father of David. The word David is the last word in the book of Ruth. Because it was through the line of David that Messiah would come. One of Jesus' favorite names for himself was Son of David. Son of David. All of that had to be worked out in this prophetic clock in order to be fulfilled. The Hebrews finally forsook idolatry after the Babylonian captivity. The Old Testament was completed through the work of scribes such as Ezra. He prepared the people and the law through national statehood of Israel. Israel enjoyed a time of independence away from Greek interference there so they could establish themselves more. He prepared the world through the conquest of Alexander the Great. The whole Mediterranean world spoke Greek. There was a united language there. He prepared the world through Roman rule, through Pax Roma, the Roman peace, the sea lanes were safe, there was a Roman judicial system that was put into place, a mail system, international trade so that many cultures began to get to know one another. He established a Jewish synagogue system. The diaspora of the Jews that went out through conquests all around the Mediterranean world, wherever they went, they established synagogues. Synagogues, if you go to a synagogue, it's very much like a church, very much like a church service. He established those synagogues all over the Mediterranean world. Whenever the Apostle Paul went out with the gospel, where did he start? Where did he begin to preach? At the local synagogue. that he'd gone out 200 years before, that they may not have been there. And yet, God had prepared it. He prepared a messenger, John the Baptist, which we learn about in Malachi chapter 4. And then he prepared the peoples. He prepared Joseph. He prepared Mary. He prepared the wise man for the coming of Messiah. One of my favorite texts comes to us from Luke chapter two, where he also prepared Simeon. Now, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him, and it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came in the spirit in the temple, and when his parents brought the child Jesus to do according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word. For my eyes have seen your salvation, that you have been prepared in the presence of the people, in the light of the revelation of the Gentiles, for glory to your people Israel. And then I love this statement, and his father's mother marveled at what was being said to him. What a precious moment that is. Here they are, taking the baby Jesus to dedicate him in the temple, and this old man just comes up and just takes Jesus out of their arms and said, he's Messiah. Lord, now I can come and be with you in heaven for the rest of eternity. I have seen the Christ. That's all this preparation, all this preparation for the transfer from people of darkness into people of light, from slaves into sons. So we see the mystery of the incarnation seen in these two phrases here is God sent forth his sons. This proclaims the pre-existence and deity of Jesus Christ. It's what we call the kenosis, the emptying of God himself into human form. Now, y'all folks, this is one of these principles that sets our church apart from other churches and many of the mainline churches. They get awkward and they feel embarrassed to say that Jesus Christ is God. They, in a sense, because of their silence, will often deny the deity of Jesus Christ. But it's very clear in Scripture that Jesus Christ is God. He is the Son of God. Philippians chapter 2. Although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be brash, but he emptied himself. Kenosis. He empties him, taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of man. He was found in the appearance of man. He humbled himself. by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Wow! And we think about humbling ourselves by... waiting in line, serving somebody else, doing somebody else a favor, not getting your way, maybe not getting the last pizza pizza. I don't know. You fill in the blank. We think, wow, we're really being humble right now. And think about how far did God have to go to become a baby? How far did God have to go to become an impoverished baby? born of a woman, born under the law, as it goes on to say here. Our confession of faith asks this question in question number 22 of the Shorter Catechism. How did Christ, being the Son of God, become man? The answer is Christ, the Son of God, became man by taking to himself a true body. He was not a phantom. He bled, he had to eat, he had to rest just like we do, and a reasonable soul, he had reason, being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary and born of her yet without sin. If you deny the virgin birth, you are not a Christian. You're not a Christian. It's very clear that that is taught in Holy Scripture. Martin Luther loved music and he actually sang about this in his hymn, All Praise to The Eternal God. Says this, once did the skies before thee bow, a virgin's arm contains thee now. Angels who did in thee rejoice now listen for thine infant voice. Isn't that amazing? Think about the angel. You know, most men miss this. God allowed a glimpse of this to a number of people, but most people miss this. Think about what the angels saw. God's becoming a baby? What a marvel it was. How he must love these humans. How much he must love these people. And then, of course, he's born under the law. You know, one of the definitions of a bad boss or just a hypocritical anybody is that there's one standard for themselves and another standard for you. And, you know, if you want to have a boss, you want a boss who's willing to do everything and has done everything that he's asking you to do. This is one of my great frustrations with the political sphere, right? You've got all these people who are making laws to keep you from doing the very thing that they do all the time. If you had done some of the things that many people in Congress and the presidency had done, you would have been put in jail, but they seemed to get away with it. That drives us crazy. But Christ was born under the law, the same law. that He gave to people, He was born under its authority as well. He maintained the same standard, and He therefore expects us to have that same standard. The catechism goes on in question 27. Wherein did Christ's humility consist? Christ's humiliation consists of His being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God, and the curse of death of the cross. and being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time. Wow. God did that for you. God did that for you because it had to be done for you for him to be able to save you, which is what he wants to do. Then you see here's two purpose clauses in verse 5 that explain why Christmas is necessary to redeem those who were under the law. Remember that idea of redemption means to buy out of the slave market or to buy back someone who is in bondage. It's used of slaves whose freedom was purchased through the payment of the required price. So he removes the curse of the law from us. He restores our inheritance with us as our redeemer. Hendrickson says this, there was nothing wrong with the law given at Sinai, but when the Jews began to look upon law observance as a way whereby salvation could be achieved, and when the Jewish religious leaders began to add their own multitudinous rules and regulations to those previously received law, it became their tyrant to which they became enslaved. You know, so there's this kind of love-hate relationship we have with the law. The law tells us God's expectations. We understand those principles. We love the law. Once you become a Christian, you actually learn to embrace the law. You love the Ten Commandments. They condemned you before, but now they give you a view to God's character, your father's personality, in a sense. And yet we also recognize that the law has never been intended to save anyone. But the Jews really forgot that in so many ways. Thursday morning Bible study, you'll be quite familiar with what we're talking about because we struggle a little bit with this, right? Because that's the inspired word of God. It's the Old Testament, the law of Moses. It's a good thing. And yet sometimes Paul seems to be writing against it. I think this will help you a little bit as Bunyan summarizes. Faithful has given an account of something happened to him to Christian. Now when I had climbed up about halfway uphill difficulty, I looked behind and saw someone coming up after me swift as the wind. Soon he overtook me just about the place where the arbor stands. This place, said Christians, where I sat down to rest, fell asleep and lost my scroll. Faithful says, Dear brother, hear me out. So as soon as the man overtook me, without saying a word, he struck me and knocked me down unconscious. When I came to, I asked him why he had thus assaulted me. He said it was because of my secret inclination to follow Adam the first. And with that, he struck me with another deadly blow on the chest and beat me down backward, and I lay at his feet as if I were dead. So when I came to, I cried to him for mercy, but he said, I do not know how to show mercy. And with that, he knocked me down to the ground again. And he would have beat me to death, except one came by and told him to stop. Who was it that told him to stop? Faithful went on. I did not recognize him at first, but as he went by, I saw the wounds in his hands and in his side. Then I concluded that he was our Lord. So I continued up the hill. Christian then explained the man who overtook you was Moses. He spares no one. He does not know how to show mercy to anyone who transgresses his law. When I first read that, I thought, well, yeah, Moses is a good guy. We like Moses, right? We like the Ten Commandments. We like Charlton Heston. You know, we like the Prince of Egypt. Moses is a good guy. But it's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant description of what the law is never intended to do. The law convicts. The law is a tutor. When you realize I cannot keep this law, you'll be willing to cry out and say, well, there is one who can. I need a savior. I need mercy. That's really where Paul is going through. The Galatians had forgotten this. The Galatians were following the same Moses who was beating them with this law. They had fallen from grace. And then he goes on to say, "...so that we receive adoption as sons." Paul borrows from Roman legal code here. In Roman legal code, a natural-born child could be disinherited, and they very often were. The Romans were kind of temperamental folk. They'd get upset at a son, they would disinherit him. But an adopted child could not be disinherited. Speaking of Charlton Heston, you saw this in the movie Ben-Hur, right? Charlton Heston saved this admiral's life and the admiral ends up adopting him and he receives all the wealth and the praise of the admiral and that kind of thing. That was very, very common in the Roman world. So he's basically saying, you cannot be disinherited. You're now adopted sons. This whole idea that we become part of the family of God, God himself becomes our father. So with adoption comes not only change of status from slave to child, but also a change of our nature from sinner to saint. And because God did all that, God did all that. Orphans don't leave the orphanage and go around neighborhoods and say, and I'll take this family. No, those families go into the orphanage and they'll say, I'll take that baby right there. I'll bring him into my family. And then you see this affection of the time. A lot of what we've pointed to is doctrine. But doctrine is not cold. Doctrine speaks of love and a relationship that God has for us. But Paul emphasizes that point by bringing out some affectionate ideas here. God has sent forth a spirit into our hearts. This is a down payment on the house. We understand we're going to be saved because we now have a spirit within our hearts here. And the purpose of this is to help us to actually experience the truth, these doctrinal truths that we're having here. He sends forth, God sends forth this spirit within us. And what do we do? What's our response to God in this grace that he's given us by adopting us as children? We cry out, Abba, Father, Abba, Father. He uses the Aramaic term Abba and the Greek term Father here. He combines those together. And we know, we know because the testimony of the spirit within us, we're actually saved people. We've actually been adopted into the family of God. It's interesting here, the spirit is the one that cries out, Abba Father, but in Romans 8 we find out it's actually we who cry out for Abba Father. For all who've been led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you do not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back to fear, but you receive the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry out, Abba Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. So that's one of the wonderful assurances of salvation. You just know you're a Christian. Now, that doesn't happen, I think, immediately, but it happens over time as you grow in your faith. You know you're a Christian. You love God. You love God within you. That's the spirit that's within you. So we're no longer a slave, but we're now a son We have been freed. We don't have a detached, intellectual-only relationship with God. We actually have a relationship with God Himself. So basically, the Galatians are starting to doubt their status as children of God. And Paul is reminding them what this actually looks like here. He's pointing out the fact that they have been given the Spirit of God, but they're going to lose that if they keep keeping count of their experiences based on the law of Moses instead of upon the grace of God. Now, it's interesting, too, because notice the emphasis on sons, sons, sons, sons, and half our audience are female. What about daughters? What about daughters? Well, Paul is deliberate in using those terms. Now remember, he has just talked about this no longer male and female. He knows half of his audience is female as well here, but he keeps emphasizing this idea of sons. Paul is not some sort of chauvinist. If you knew what Paul was doing, you would never want to change that. Because sons would be the same term the Romans would use to talk about heir. So women are just as equal heirs of all the blessings of God, of eternal salvation, as are men. And when Paul uses the term sons, he's not trying to upset the feminists, though he does. He's not trying to upset the feminists. He's trying to say women have just the same amount of inheritance rights as do men. Women are also heirs. Women are also sons. What a blessing that is. Sinclair Ferguson sort of sums up some of these thoughts here. The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, is the mainspring of Christian living. Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption. So what do you do with it? What do you do with it? Well, as with any sermon, there's two audiences. There's there's people who need to go from darkness into light, and there are other people who need to go from some light into other light. For those of you who are already Christians, you know, you need to look at what Paul has to say about how you are to live as sons. You're to avoid these elementary principles of the world. Romans chapter six says this. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to Christ. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body. It's you should obey its lust. Do not go on presenting the members of your body, your body parts, to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourself to God as those alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall not master you, for you are not under law, but under grace. What a promise that is. Sin shall not master you. That's important because when you're tempted, one of the things you think is, I really need to go ahead and sin. I have an obligation to listen to my body right now. You do not. You do not. Sin shall not master you. So if you think of the exalted position you have as an adopted son of the living God, what Paul is saying, act like it. Act like it. be done with the worthless elemental things of this world. Then for non-Christians, non-Christians. Thank you. There's a good lesson, Charles Dickens, for you. You remember that Scrooge? The various spirits come and appear before Scrooge. And the last one is the Christmas future. And the scene ends there in the cemetery. And Scrooge sees this gravestone. As he gets closer to it, he realizes it's his gravestone, Ebenezer Scrooge, and that he's going to be just like Marley and those other spirits, chained with their sin, going around doomed to an eternity of misery, chained with their sins. And then Scrooge says this, men's courses. And he's speaking to the spirit future, who's very quiet. Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends to which if preserved then they must lead, said Scrooge. But if the courses be departed from and ends will be changed, that is repentance, say it is thus with what you show me. Good spirit, your nature intercedes for me and pities me. Assure me that yet there may be changes, these shadows that you've shown me. by an altered life. I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past and the present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing of this stone." And there he's kind of hugging the spirit and then he wakes up and he's hugging his bedpost and the sun comes to the window and he, in a sense, is born again and he ends up celebrating Christmas, saving Tiny Tim's life, getting the big turkey and all that fun stuff that you need to see the Muppet movie. Y'all, that's conversion. That's conversion. If you're not a Christian, I can't think of a better time to become one than Christmas. Stop. Stop the trajectory that you're on. Get rid of the elementary things in your life. Stop thinking you're going to earn God's acceptance with your good behavior. You need a savior. You need a savior. Call on him as Scrooge did. Call on the Christ of Christmas and be saved. O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in and be born to us today. We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell, come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel. Father, I do pray, God, that we would see people come to know the Lord during Christmas time. Lord, that they would just lay aside this pride that keeps them from admitting that they need a Savior. that they would see that they have broken the law of Moses countless numbers of time. They have lusted. They have hated. They have been angry. They have committed idolatry. They have worshipped themselves. They have been embittered towards you. They've been people of hatred and violence. But it's just such people that Christ came to the earth to die for. Pray, God, that they would know that, that we would know that. and that, Lord, we would walk as true sons and daughters of the living God, heirs of eternal life. In Christ's name, amen.