On January 22, 1973 the highest court in our land ruled that a woman has the right to prematurely end the life of an unborn child. By the end of 1973 the highest government officials in our land were engulfed in scandal after scandal. It seemed that each day new revelations of corruption were exposed. As a young teenager, I didn’t understand the darkness of Roe v Wade or Watergate… but God did.
I became intrigued with Watergate after becoming assistant principal in our high school a few years after graduating from college. So many discipline situations begin with one hidden truth being exposed. The arrest of five burglars at the Watergate hotel a few months before the election of 1972 led to intense investigation of the most powerful men in America. Nixon won 49 states and 61% of the vote in the November election, but little did he know that within two years he would resign the presidency in disgrace. In April of 1973, Nixon’s top aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resigned, as did Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Everyone in governemnt seemed to be scrambling to defend themselves. In October, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned for non-Watergate related scandals. When a relatively unknown aid named Alexander Butterworth revealed that Nixon taped every conversation in his office on a hidden machine, the noose tightened around the President’s neck.
But God loves to shine light into darkness. Of his inner circle, perhaps the man with the worst reputation for ‘playing dirty’ was an ex-Marine named Charles W. Colson. Engulfed in the political turmoil, this lawyer known as Nixon’s ‘hatchet man’ gave his life to Christ in 1973 after a friend named Tom Phillips took the time to share how Jesus had changed his life. The press and political cartoonists had a field day in the newspapers after hearing that Chuck Colson was ‘born again.’ But when he surprised everyone by pleading guilty to wrongs committed, even his harshest critics took respectful note. The judge sentenced the President’s former Special Counsel to one to three years in prison.
While some judged Colson’s motives as impure, others welcomed him into the fellowship of Christ and prayed for him to walk faithfully with a new Master. In prison, Colson read how Jesus chose to leave Heaven and identify fully with man by coming to earth as one of us, enduring hardship and temptation just as we do. “For the one who makes men holy and the men who are made holy share a common humanity. So that he is not ashamed to call them brothers.” (Hebrews 2:11) Chuck Colson knew he deserved punishment for wrongdoing in government, but now as a ‘new creation in Christ’ he wondered what God planned for his life.
While in prison, Colson discovered a part of God’s purpose for him. Only by being a prisoner can a man really understand what prisoners feel and need. In 1976 after his parole, he established Prison Fellowship to share the light of Jesus Christ with men and women in prison. Over the past thirty-six years, thousands have come to Christ because one guilty man surrendered to God in 1973. Charles Colson knows personally the power of Christ and speaks clear words of truth in the battle between darkness and light.
“All the trees of the field will know that I the Lord bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.” Ezekial 17:24