Читать книгу Beyond the Horizon - Harry A. Renfree - Страница 26

January 20

Many of you, I know, have read about—or at least heard about—one of the most controversial figures of the United States during the Nixon years—Charles W. Colson. “Chuck” Colson, as he was popularly known, was one of the most powerful members of President Nixon’s staff and played a part in the Watergate Scandal. Colson, as well as others, spent time in prison for their involvement in the scandal that caused Mr. Nixon’s resignation.

In the early 1970s, when the Watergate revelations mushroomed across the media, Colson was undergoing a spiritual crisis. He wrote that he experienced a terrible deadness inside, not only because of involvement in “Watergate’s dirty tricks, but the deep sin within me, the hidden evil that lies in every human heart.”

One day a visit to a friend changed his life. The friend was Tom Philips, a prominent businessman who had become a Christian. Colson writes: “But while Tom’s explanation that he had ‘accepted Jesus Christ’ shocked and baffled me, it also made me curious. He was at peace with himself, something I surely wasn’t.”6 That night Charles Colson, too, became a Christian, began a new life, and went on to become a powerful witness for his Lord and Savior.

“Therefore,” writes the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Christians at Corinth: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). To a seeking and puzzled member of the Jewish high council, the Sanhedrin, who had timidly come to Jesus under cover of darkness, the Master Himself put it to him straight from the shoulder: “I tell you the truth,” Jesus declared, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (John 3:3). Then Jesus soon added the words that have become the Bible’s “golden text”: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Any one of us can change or, rather, be changed.