Historian Will Durant said, "There is no humorist like history." Recently I picked up a copy of the Washington Post and read an article pointing to the irony of today's events. It was entitled "The Revolution Surrenders: From Freedom Train to Gravy Train," written by Charles Krauthammer. He was commenting on the fact that Bobby Sealeone of the radicals of the sixtieshas now released a cookbook and a video entitled Barbequeing with Bobby. He has become the Jane Fonda of the Weber Grill. There have been other transformations. Jerry Rubin is now running a brokerage house. Dick Gregory, the antiwar civil rights activist, is conducting nutritional weight loss and business opportunity seminars.

Krauthammer pointed out, however, that at the same time the yippies of the sixties were becoming members of the new establishment, the old establishment was going the other way. He pointed out that Bob McNamara, former secretary of defense, McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, architects of the Vietnam War, are now leaders in the new peace movement. The former pinstriped boardroom types who represented all that the radicals of the sixties were revolting against are now themselves becoming radicals in the eighties. Then Krauthammer says the prime example of the trend is Charles Colson, who "follows the trail of spirituality from Nixon to prison to religion." Krauthammer concluded by saying he could understand how yesterday's yippies could become today's yuppies, and yesterday's reactionaries today's radicals, but he confessed "I can't figure Colson out at all." Apparently my transformation was just too radical.

It's an amazing commentary upon our culture that we can understand a shift in values from radicals to establishmentarians, but we can't understand a conversion to Jesus Christ. I should be the simplest of all people to understand. I am what I am because of what Jesus Christ has done in my life. But I suppose if one doesn't believe in a Converter, one can hardly believe in a conversion. But one part of the label I will gladly word radical. We have lost that word. We've lost its meaning. The word derives from the Greek word radix, meaning the root. A radical is one who goes to the root of the matter. And the root of the matter in this or any other generation is the revelation of God himself through the person of Jesus Christ. I will take the label "radical." Nonetheless I share Krauthammer's sense of the irony.

Durant is right, there's no humorist like history. A decade or so ago had I stood on this platform, I would have been the epitome of the establishment giving a graduation address to graduating radicals. Today you're part of the new yuppy establishment, and I stand here today as a radical. It's something of that dramatic role reversal and conflict in values that I want to speak to today. Yuppies, as most of you know, are simply aging hippies transformed by $20 haircuts and upper middle class values. This baby boomer generation has assumed such significance in American life that Newsweek put on the cover "The Year of the Yuppy."

Let's take a look at the values Yuppies embrace. They are thoroughly convinced money is the root of all much so, the editor of Money magazine wrote that money has become the obsession of Americans, "the new sex." (There goes any future baby boom.) One frank young yuppie quoted in Newsweek said she could be comfortable with $200,000 a year. Newsweek said yuppies have acquired a new plane of consciousness: "transcendental acquisition." One student who was going to be a social worker upon graduating said, "I realized that I would have to make a commitment to being poor to be a social worker, so eventually I was able to shed the notion that to prove to everybody that I was a good person I had to parade around as a social worker." The honesty would be admirable if it weren't so appalling. Newsweek had a picture of one college graduate fondling a bottle of Perrier Jouet and saying "This is our substitute for children." It all defines a mentality of a people who define themselves by what they own.

I had a firsthand look at this phenomenon recently when I went to rent a compact car. I was three deep in line behind a man who was insisting he had to rent a black Lincoln Continental. I don't think he was going to a funeral. The woman at the counter was being very accommodating. She found a dark gray one and a dark blue one. He said, "No, I must have a black car. I'm going to a party tonight where everybody will be driving black cars. I must have a black Lincoln Continental." My impatience was growing, but I restrained myself, and he found out there was no black car anywhere to be found, and he finally took a dark blue one after we'd waited ten minutes. As he turned around, his T put the whole event in context. It said: "The one who dies with the most toys wins." What a tragic commentary on life. Is that the object of life?

The pursuit of material happiness has even dampened the sexual revolution. Brooke Shields explained that she is remaining a virgin because "Like me, there are plenty of college girls who do not want to be bogged down in demanding involvement. We are more concerned about getting ahead." The yuppies made up an unusual amalgam in American politics last year. Their political profile melds economic conservatism with social libertarianism. One young lawyer, in a chilling comment for anyone who weeps for the clinical murder of unborn children, said, "The social program that Reagan is talking about is really scary because abortion is part of our lives."

There does seem to be some continuing interest in war and peace, but the slogans of the eighties have taken a new twist. The T today say "Nuclear war? What about my career?" What are we to make of all this? On one hand, it's good that young Americans are rediscovering the values of hard work and have abandoned the social utopianism that fueled the 1960s. But on the other hand, there's the grotesque . The result is a lie, a promise of meaning to life which it simply cannot provide. I know. I grew up in the Depression years, the grandson of immigrants. I can remember thinking, If I could ever get to college, that would be my security. I dreamed of the day that I could get my degree. No one in my family had ever done it, and I thought that would surely bring me security.

Then I went on to the Marine Corps and the Korean War, and I remember when those bars were pinned on, and I thought, That will be my security: a lieutenant in the Marines. Then I worked for a doctorate of law at night and went through law school and started a law firm. I thought, That will be my security, my meaning, my purpose in life. And then on to a successful law firm and to money and prestige and then to the office next to the President of the United States as the special counsel. Surely I'll find security in those things. But when I left the White House in 1972, I never felt less secure, emptier, in my entire life. You see I discovered the great paradox of life. Jesus said, "He who would lose his life for my sake will find it," and that's a great truth because it wasn't until those things of the world that I thought would give me security were gone, and I was in a prison cell with all of that behind me, that I discovered the only security and meaning and identity that one ever knows, and that's in a relationship to the living God through Jesus Christ. There is no other security. It's all bankrupt, empty. All mirrors and illusion. The world is telling us that we can find fulfillment in things. And it's a fraud.

The great paradox also is that every time I walk into a prison and see the faces of men or women who have been transformed by the power of the living God, I realize that the thing God has chosen to use in my life, paradoxical though this will seem, is none of the successes, achievements, degrees, awards, honors, cases I won before the Supreme Courtthat's not what God's using in my life. What God is using in my life to touch the lives of literally thousands of other people is the fact that I was a convict and went to prison. My great defeat. The only thing in my life I didn't succeed in.

The kingdom of God is the kingdom of paradox. God does not demand our achievement; he demands our obedience. He does not demand our success; he demands us, the whole of our lives, because what really matters is what a sovereign God chooses to do through you, not so much what you do. Oh yes, work hard, excel. Do the very best you can in life. Do everything to the honor and glory of God in excellence because the Bible commands it. But don't believe that's the measure of your life. The measure is your obedience to Jesus Christ and how he then works through you. American culture, which believes success is all that matters, simply cannot comprehend this great truth. This is where the true radical, Jesus Christ, confronts the American establishment today. If those of us who follow Christ are called radical because we confront the obsessive materialism and bankrupt idealism of American life today, glory in the title of radical.

Now I know many of you are sitting here thinking, This is Eastern Nazarene College. This is a Christian institution. What in the world is Colson doing preaching to the choir? You all know yuppyism is bankrupt. Sure. But just because you're Christian, don't think you are immune from the blandishments of power, success, prominence, money, materialism. You're not. You turn on a Christian television station today, and you will see the yuppyized gospel telling you that all you have to do is worship God and he'll give you everything you want in a material way. How many times do you turn on a Christian television program and hear a message about repentance, conviction of sin, and the desire to serve God out of gratitude for what he's done in our lives, not for what he can do for us? All too seldom. CBS, at a National Religious Broadcasters convention this year, interviewed a man who said about Christian television, "Well the main thing is just to create an image. You've got to present a product that's a little bit more appealing than the others." He was speaking of preaching the gospel. Don't tell me Christians are not in danger of transforming the gospel into a what' message.

Don't buy into the values of our culture.

What must we do? Four things. First, use the minds that God has given you to be discerning. Challenge all the presuppositions of American culture. Don't buy them. Think about them and say, "Maybe they're so and maybe they're not so," and do the same with all the comfortable cliches you hear passed around in the Christian world. Stop and think: Are they the whole gospel of God as presented in the Bible, or is it just something that we Christians have used? Check those prepackaged simple solutions, the political and economic agendas labeled by their zealous promoters as Christian. Maybe they are. Maybe they're just a prop for somebody's vested interest. Then let's be honest with ourselves.

C.S. Lewis was once asked, "Which of the world's great religions would bring the greatest happiness to its followers?" C.S. Lewis replied without hesitation: "While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best. I have an elderly acquaintance who has lived the life of unbroken selfishness and from the earliest years and he is more or less, I regret to say, one of the happiest men I know. I haven't always been a Christian. I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want religion to make you really comfortable, I certainly do not recommend Christianity." What refreshing honesty! Can you imagine if we put that on television today"Don't come be a Christian because it's going to make you feel good. Come be a Christian because it's truth, and it may convict you, and it may turn your life upside down, and it may be very uncomfortable." My gracious, you could hear television sets turning off all over America. But that's true. Be discerning. Nothing is more radical than to go to the root, to the Word of God, for the solutions for the problems that beset modern man.

Allow God's Word to radicalize your life.

When I first became a Christian, I took this Book, and as a lawyer I decided to see if it were true. I read this Book cover to cover three times. I was looking for that one verse of Scripture, the only verse I could quote from memory: "God helps those who help themselves." I went through three times. I tried two translations. Amazingly, I couldn't find it. As a matter of fact, I found exactly the reverse. " 'Is not that what it means to know me,' declares the Lord. 'To do justice and righteousness to plead the cause of the afflicted and the needy.' " But I made a study of this Book because I was really concerned. Could this Book really be the Word of God? I started to read everything I could get my hands on. I don't have time today to take you through it, but I believe today, as a result of reading everything I could and listening to all the scholars I could, I came to the conclusion, intellectually and by faith, that this book is the inerrant, inspired Word of God, and you can live and trust your life under its authority and nothing else. Be careful.

I was speaking recently before a state legislature in a western state where they're very conservative. Someone said afterwards, "Chuck Colson? He was that Nixon Republican, that conservative. He certainly has become a radical. Prison must have radicalized him." They love to say prison radicalized me. The secular world can understand that. I say, "No! Prison didn't radicalize me. I walked out of that prison; I wanted to put it behind me. I never wanted to see the inside of a prison again. What radicalized me was reading this Book. And I believed it." This Book will radicalize your life. I dare you. Try it.

Live a life of true holiness.

The central tenet of the Christian faith is this: God, a holy God, says "You shall be holy because I am holy." So we must go out of our homes and our businesses, wherever we are, and live in this world as a holy people. Every time I mention holiness, people start getting uncomfortable. They say, "You're not preaching, Colson, you're meddling. That's smoking and drinking and all those things." Well that's part of it. That's piety. I'm not talking about rules. Holiness is, as Mother Teresa puts it, "conforming to the character of God." Accepting the will of God. If our God is a God who demands justice, we're a people who demand justice. If our God cares for the poor and the needy and the downtrodden and the suffering, we care for them. A nation that will sell the poor for a pair of shoes stands in judgment by God, and we are a people who take that message into a materialistic, yuppyized world. Yes that's radical. That's what we're called to.

John Wesley, one of the great models for my life, once said there is no holiness but social holiness. To turn Christianity into a solitary religion is to destroy it. It was Wesley's understanding of this great truth of the Christian faith that led him to begin the campaign against slavery. One of his disciples, William Wilberforce, a young member of Parliament, went off and led the campaign against the culture of the day for 20 years to abolish slavery. They went out and abolished the most barbaric practice man has known in modern times. It means we go into this culture in which we live.

In Prison Fellowship, we see daily the witness of holy people making a difference in the lives of others. We take inmates out of prison. We work them into the community. They live in the homes of volunteers. Recently in Washington, D.C., we went into a city block with a group of inmates, every day coming down to study their Bibles in the morning and every day rebuilding a home of a poor family. Four blocks away, you could see the Capitol, where they were debating all the laws to help the poor, but in the shadow of the Capitol these poor people were living with no one caring about them as individuals. And so a group of convicts came up and restored their home, and it sits today like a gleaming jewel on that street, and the neighbors are beginning to fix up their homes. Why? Because it's brought back a sense of community, because God's people are sharing of themselves to help others in need. That's holiness.

Jefferson City, Missouri: state capital and also the place where the penitentiary is. For years 6,500 inmates were there, and when their families used to come to visit, they had no place to stay. Most of them would drive from Kansas City or St. Louis, and they would sleep in their cars or under park benches. Our volunteers saw that and got together and bought an old $46,000. They raised the money from twelve churches. Volunteers fixed up the house, opened it four years ago, and named it Agape House. Ten thousand women have stayed there for $3 a night. They get a Bible, a place to stay, a clean bed, a center for their children so they can visit their husbands in prison. And one of the neatest things is it's run by a former Southern Baptist missionary and a Catholic sister.

A woman was sitting in the house one night feeling despondent. Sherry lived on the underside of life. Had been in prison herself. Was there visiting her husband. Never been in church. You're not going to get the Sherrys of this world in our churches, but they would come and stay in Agape House. One night Sherry was sitting there tapping on the Bible she had been given, and she said, "I don't know if there is a God, but if there is, he must be something like the two women who run this house." That's the witness of a holy people. It isn't enough to go sit in sanctuaries and listen to wonderful sermons and to lift your hands to praise God on Sunday morning. Get your hands dirty helping those around you, and you will make the invisible kingdom of God manifest in our midst. That's what we're called to.

Live a changed life out of thankfulness to God.

Christians are called not only to believe but to repent, to be a different people. In gratitude to God for his grace in our lives, we are to be changed, to do what God commands. I could give you some wonderful quotes out of the history of the church, but maybe the best illustration I know is a recent one.

A housewife from New Hampshire, Cathleen Webb, accepted Christ into her life, and she walked into her pastor's office one day and said, "I feel wonderful that I'm a Christian. God has blessed me with a wonderful husband and two children, but I have a sin I've never confessed." She had falsely accused Gary Dotson of rape. The pastor said, "The only thing you can do to repent is to want to be changed, to confess, and to make right what you have done wrong." In today's yuppyized gospel, all God has to do is come into our lives. We don't have to do anything. Cathy Webb knew better. She knew she had to confess. The world has not understood her. The judge said, "I don't know why Cathy Webb came in and gave the testimony she did." The governor of Illinois said, "I don't believe her, but I'm going to set Gary Dotson free anyway" (which has to win some award for sophistry in modern times). The whole world disbelieves. Every place I've been with Christians lately I've said, "Do you believe Cathy Webb?" And they've said, "We'll have to wait and see." We're so used to seeing the prosperity gospel, the gospel of ease and comfort, that when we see the real thing, we can't recognize it.

That's the real thing: I'm not going to take the grace of God in my life for granted. Out of gratitude to God, I'm going to change, go out and live it. Cathy Webb had a beautiful statement on ABC's "Nightline" when asked why she did it: "Because the Lord would not let me alone." I could boil my whole message down to one simple phrase. I pray for your life that the Lord will not "let you alone." That he will force you to be a different people. That he will make you instruments of holiness, yes, in this yuppyized culture.

My final warning: If you are committed to radical Christianity in direct opposition to a culture consumed with self, your course is not without peril. We've just commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Holocaust, vividly reminding us of the horror that man can inflict upon his fellow man. To me, it was sad that no mention was made that there were some Germans, particularly the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who refused to go along with the spirit of the times. He said no to Hitler, and he paid with his life. To be radical in a yuppyized culture may not cost you your life. Maybe it'll cost you your job.

A judge in Indiana, who refused to send a man back to prison who had already done his prison time, said, "If I have to choose between God and man, I must choose God." But I will tell you one thing, if your Christian commitment does not put you in direct opposition of the values of this culture, if you don't have to make those kind of choices between God and man, if you do not feel that this culture is making you make some hard choices, check your Christian commitment, because it's inevitable in the value system of this culture, that your Christian commitment is going to put you on a collision course. If it doesn't, you better wonder if God's really at work in your life.

May you leave today not just as men and women who have had some do's and don'tsmostly don'tsdrummed into their heads, but as men and women committed to obedient Christian living. Take your stand on the holy Word of God, and in whatever vocation you enter, pursue it with excellence to the glory of God to make a difference for him in an age which glories in what Scripture calls sin. "Gird your mind. Keep sober in spirit. Fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourself in all of your behavior because it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy.' "

Charles Colson is the president and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries. He is also an active speaker and prolific book author.

Charles Colson

Preaching Today Tape # 26

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