I remember once when I was teaching a course at the University of Pennsylvania, I picked on a student in the front row and I said, "Young man, how long have you lived?"

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "How long have you lived?"

He said, "Twenty-three years."

I said, "No, no, no. That is how long your heart has been pumping blood. That is not how long you have lived."

I told him about the time I went to New York City and went to the top of the Empire State Building. I was nine years old at the time and we ran around the top of the building. Suddenly, I caught myself and I said to myself, "Tony, you are on top of the Empire State Building."

In one mystical, magical moment, I took in the city. I lived that moment with such intensity. I focused on what was before me with such spiritual energy that if I were to live a million years, that moment would still be part of my consciousness because of the way in which I lived it. I was fully alive.

I looked back at the student and said, "No. Let me ask you the question again. `How long have you lived? How long have you lived?'"

I remember the student looking back at me and saying, "Doctor, when you say it that way, maybe an hour, less than that, maybe a minute, maybe two minutes. Most of my life has been the meaninglessness passage of time between all too few moments when I was genuinely alive."

What an interesting commentary! Most of us do not live life as we should. We let it slip away from us. I don't know where my life has gone. It seems to me that just as soon as my pimples cleared up, my hair fell out. It just slips by. It's gone. It's over and one has to ask whether or not one has lived life.

The only people that I really see living life with any degree of joyful spontaneity are children. That is why Jesus said, "Unless you become as little children, you will in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven."

Children are so intense. They cry with agony; they laugh with joy; they are really turned on to what life is all about. Jesus said, "Unless you become as little children, you will in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." Unless you can approach life with their kind of enthusiasm, you can't be part of what I am about.

What did Jesus see in children? Well, a number of things. First of all, I think He saw this: I think he saw kids who had no doubts about their own importance. People who are worried about their self-image, their worth, their value usually cannot go on about life without being overly concerned about themselves.

I have a friend who has a five-year-old daughter. He ran upstairs to see her one day because there was a thunderstorm -- lightning, thunder roaring, light flashing. When he got to her room, his little girl was standing on the window sill, leaning spread-eagle against the glass, lightning, thunder flashing, roaring outside. He said, "Jennifer, what are you doing?"

She said, "I think God is trying to take my picture."

Not a bad statement. Here is a little girl who knows who she is, who knows her value, who knows her worth. If you are going to live life fully, you first of all have to feel good about yourself.

That is one of the reasons why Jesus came. Jesus came into the world in order to do something to you that would enable you to feel differently about yourself. Most people I know are down on themselves. Most people I know really don't like themselves very much. They can name the things in their lives that are wrong. They beat their chests and say that there is so much wrong with them. Of course there is a lot wrong with you. There is a lot wrong with me, too.

But here is the good news of the gospel: Jesus Himself comes into the world not only to die for our sins but -- listen -- to come into your life and to absorb from you everything that is dirty and ugly and negative and make you His own -- to free you from all of that. Jesus not only cleanses you from the dark side of your personality, removes those things that ought not to be, but He imputes to you His righteousness.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get to heaven. You can walk in -- I am going to strut. I am going to yell at the angels, "Out of my way angels!" (Well, they are only messengers.) "You there, get me a hamburger!"

I am going to go up before the standard seat of Christ and I am going to look at God and I am going to just stand there. I am not going to say anything. I don't have to because Jesus will be there and He will say, "Father, I would like you to meet my friend, Tony, the perfect one."

I hope my wife is there.

You say, "How can you get off with that?"

This is what the scripture says, "Your sins are blotted out. They are buried in the deepest sea. They are remembered no more."

And, it says this, "He shall present you before His Father spotless, without blemish."

All the things about yourself that you don't like. Jesus says, "Let me take them upon myself and make them my own."

If you were to go to a psychologist for psychotherapy, after a brief while you would feel terrific because everything that is negative about you gets transferred over to the psychologist. At the end of a session, a good psychotherapist is feeling terrible and you are feeling great because everything negative about you has been moved over to him or her through the process of discussion.

That is what Jesus does -- the ultimate Counsellor, the ultimate Psychotherapist, who takes upon Himself everything that is dirty, ugly, rotten, everything that has you down on yourself. He takes it upon Himself. He makes it His own. That is the Good News of the gospel and you can have that childlike freedom that comes from deliverance, from all that is negative and dark. That enables you to live life passionately and intensely and with great excitement.

There is another thing. Get this, it is very important. Children have a quality of spontaneous joy. I love kids because they are so spontaneously joyful. I was with my son in Disneyland when he was just a little tyke. We were leaving Disneyland. It was back in the days when they had tickets and you had to pay for the rides. He said, "I want another ride on Space Mountain."

I said, "Wait a minute. I'm out of money and I'm out of time."

He said, "Jesus wants me to go."

I said, "I'm not reading you."

He said, "When you were in church, you said that whatever we feel Jesus feels, that when we cry, He cries. Jesus feels every emotion we have. You said that."

I said, "That's right."

He said, "If He feels every emotion we have, then when I am laughing on Space Mountain, He is having a good time, too. I think He would enjoy it if I had another ride on Space Mountain."

Not bad theology. We have a God who wants us not only to be freed from the burdens that keep us from enjoying life and living it intensely, He wants to fill us with an excitement, a childlike joy that enables us to live life with incredible enthusiasm, spontaneous joy.

Do you have that in your life? That is what Christianity is about; that is what spirituality is about. It is not about heaven; it is about a Jesus who can invade your life and create in you a spontaneous excitement about living. That is why you need to surrender to the Lord.

I like that quote of Lord Chesterton who said, "I think that God is the only child left in the universe and all the rest of us have grown old and cynical because of sin."

What a good line! How did God create daisies? I say, "Like a child."

You take a child; you throw them up in the air; you bounce them off your knee; you set them on the floor. The first thing the kid says is, "Do it again."

Throw them in the air; catch them; bounce them off your knee, set them on the floor. The kid is going to yell, "Do it again."

Throw them in the air; catch them; bounce them off your knee, set them on the floor fifty times. The fiftieth time the kid is yelling hysterically, "Do it again. Do it again."

The excitement of a little child. That is how God created daisies. He created one daisy. I am sure of this and in the childlike heart of God, He clapped and said, "Do it again." And He created daisy number two and something within God said, "Do it again." And He created daisy number three and four and five and fifty billion trillion daisies later, the great God of the universe is still creating with childlike excitement and joy and yelling, "Do it again."

Remember when you were a kid and you were so full of life and so vital and so dynamic? It has kind of grown dull and slow and boring. No wonder Jesus said, "Look, why don't you come to me and be born again. Why don't you become like a little child once again? Let me do my thing in you. Surrender to me and allow me into your life. I am resurrected from the grave. I will take possession of you and I will change you. I will give you not only a sense of worth about yourself so you will be free of the burdens of negativism, but I will so fill you with my excitement that you will know joy like you have never known it before."

That is why the gospel is called "Good News."

There is a third thing that children have that comes to all of those who are fully alive in the Lord and it is this. It is absolute confidence in the future.

I work with inner-city kids and society hasn't beaten them down yet. I deal with African-American kids and Latino kids on the streets of Philadelphia and society hasn't beaten them down yet. They still believe in the future. You ask them, "What are you going to do? What are you going to be?"

They say, "I am going to be an astronaut. I am going to be a surgeon. I am going to be a doctor. I am going to be a musician. I am going to be a pro-basketball player." They believe in the future. As they grow older, little by little, ugly realism set in.

I don't know whether you saw the movie "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." One of the most painful things is when Malcolm X realizes that the system will not allow him to be a lawyer and his dream is shattered.

Here is the Good News of the gospel. We have a Jesus who creates dreams and visions for us. Here is what the scripture says, "When the young no longer dream dreams and the old no longer have visions, people perish."

Listen to me. Children believe they can do something incredible with themselves, that there are no limits. They can be anything and I say to you that the Jesus who imparts that spontaneous joy and the glorious vision of the future to children can impart it to you.

So often people don't have much of a future. I always say a person is old when his dreams are more precious than his visions of the future. You are cynical when, in fact, you don't believe in tomorrow. I want to tell you about a God who wants to make you believe in the future even when you are old.

You say, "I'm an old man." Abraham was 94 years old. God gave him a vision. You are never too old and you are never too young to surrender to a God who will take you and make you not only believe in yourself but believe that the future will be better than the past.

If there is any argument that I have with modern sociology and psychology, it is that they are too oriented to the past. They say, "You want to understand a person? You have got to understand his case history. Worries come from his background." I am here to tell you this. What is more important than your past, what is more important than how you were reared or what people did to you in the past, is your vision of the future. What a person is is more controlled by his vision of tomorrow than his dreams of yesterday.

The gospel -- the gospel that makes people fully alive, that makes us into little children; the gospel that makes us believe in ourselves; the gospel that makes us spontaneously joyful; the gospel that makes us believe in the future, to be fully alive -- let Jesus have His way with you.

Floyd Brown: I thought of two songs when I was listening to you today. One of them is an old song that I did when I was playing rock and roll music on radio. It says, "Tell me something good. Tell me that you love me." You preached that so well when you talked about the life in Christ.

Another song was "This Magic Moment." You talked about that kid who had a magic moment. You talked about that time that you were on the top of the Empire State Building. I bet you are creating a lot of magic moments for the young people in your movement, the new breed of activists, I think you call them.

Tony Campolo: I have coming to work with me every summer as many as 250 young men and women from across the country and from other countries as well. We had about 15 from Great Britain, several from Australia, Canada, some from Sweden. They come and they want to work in the inner-city. We work in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey among the poorest, the most oppressed, the most beaten-down kids in the world. They come at their own expense. We provide them with food to eat and a place to sleep, although the places where they sleep aren't very good. We generally take over old crack houses in the slum areas, clean them out, run some water in, hook up some electricity. After we are finished with them, they usually tear down the buildings. We kill off the rats.

These young collegians and university students come and live there and work there because they have a vision of doing something great for other people. You are right. At the end of the summer, they are always thanking me for the privilege of having come, because they go away with a hundred moments and more of genuine aliveness when they were talking with a child here, ministering with a person there, listening to somebody's troubles over here because there is no excitement like the excitement that comes in ministering in a relational way with somebody who hurts.

Brown: A real magic moment. You also talked in that same article for "Religious Broadcasting" about trickle-up.

Campolo: You know the difference between the sixties and the nineties is that in the sixties young people wanted to change America and they thought they could change it from the top down. They thought that all they needed to do was to elect their people to office. All we needed to do was to get in positions of power and we could impose a new and better world upon the entire society. Well, it doesn't work that way.

Jesus said it doesn't work that way. The kingdom of God doesn't come from the top down. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. I always tell my students that we are part of a mustard seed conspiracy. We do a little thing here and a little thing there. We work in a project here and we work in a project there and it begins to grow. It begins to move up through the entire system.

All across America people are becoming actively involved. I hate to say it but they are not really primarily concerned about national politics. They are interested in building a house with Habitat for Humanity in their own neighborhood. They are interested in working out of their local church or their local service club. They want to do something that they can see, that they can get their hands on. They want to deal with people face to face and they want to make a difference that they themselves can witness. That is what is new. It is not this macro-change; it is micro-change. The belief is that when there are enough micro-changes going on society will change.

Brown: It is such a wonderful movement but for many of us we seem to be a little helpless. Here you are out in Philadelphia with this marvelous organization of people. You go to universities. What can I do to help you?

Campolo: You don't have to help me because what you really have to do is participate in the kingdom. Stop to consider the fact that in your neighborhood there are people who have AIDS that need to be visited. There are old folks who don't have anybody to drop in and see them. There are kids on the street who are just hanging out. You know, to get those kids together and say, "Let's go to a ballgame." To go down and get that gang off the corner and say, "I want to go and see the Chicago Bulls and I would like you to come along as my guests."

Just give a little bit of yourself to those who are right around your own neighborhood. You don't have to come to Philadelphia although if anybody does want to come to Philadelphia and work with me, I will more than welcome them if they write to me at Eastern College in St, Davids, Pennsylvania, but do it right where you are.

Brown: I love it. The old commercial, where the rubber meets the road. That is where your religion is.

Campolo: That is where it always is and that is where it always was. Jesus didn't talk pie in the sky when you die. He talked about a kingdom and He said, "Thy kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven."