March 16, 2012 - Chuck Colson, part two

Read Psalm 37:1-7

In the Summer of 1973, the world was closing in around Chuck Colson. His legal problems were mounting, he was the subject of many critical newspaper articles, and he had agreed to represent the vice president, Spiro Agnew, regarding Agnew's unrelated legal problems. During this time, he often thought back to his earlier meeting with Tom Phillips, which led Colson to call and arrange a meeting with Phillips at his home in Massachusets on August 12, 1973. After several hours of talking about Phillips's relationship with Jesus Christ, the meeting came to a head. Phillips started to read from his copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis:

As Phillips read... Colson felt a hot flush burning into his face. Lewis's words were hitting him hard:

It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God. ...

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that -- and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison -- you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and of course as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

Colson felt mercilessly exposed by the power of this passage. Lewis's words are describing me, he said to himself in anguish. Then as Tom Phillips continued, Colson was stunned by one particular sentence that seemed to summarize exactly what had gone wrong in his life, and the lives of so many who were working in the Nixon White House: "For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love or even common sense."

After Tom Phillips read this passage, Colson and Phillips prayed together, but Colson left the Phillips home that evening with lingering doubts. He pulled his car over on the drive home, though, and began to pray.

I had the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks but surging through my whole body a well, cleansing and cooling as it went. They weren't tears of sadness and remorse, nor of joy -- but somehow tears of relief.

And then I prayed my first real prayer: "God, I don't know how to find you but I'm going to try! I'm not much the way I am now but somehow I want to give myself over to you." I didn't know how to say more so I repeated over and over the words "Take me." ...

I stayed there in the car, wet-eyed, praying, thinking for perhaps half an hour, perhaps longer, alone in the dark of the quiet night. Yet for the first time in my life I was not alone at all.

Excerpts from pages 203-207 of Charles Colson: A Life Redeemed by Jonathan Aitken, published by Waterbrook Press in 2005.

The contained quotation from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis appears in Chapter Eight, "The Great Sin."

Prayer: Lord, we ask you to help us resist the great sin of Pride. Set our sights not on what we think is below us, but on you who are above us. Amen.

Prayer Concern: those serving our nation's leaders.