Biography
A former White House counsel to President Nixon, Charles W. Colson experienced a spiritual awakening in 1973. The following year he pleaded guilty to a Watergate related charge and served seven months in prison. He contemplated a return to private practice after his release, but was unable to forget the human tragedies he had encountered behind bars. Soon, he was returning to prison to visit friends and fellow Christians. Chuck Colson founded Prison Fellowship in 1976. This remarkable organization is actively involved in the rehabilitation of prisoners and ex-prisoners. Chuck is a prolific author, with titles that include, Loving God, Kingdoms in Conflict, and his latest, Against the Night. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The One Thing Man Can't Fix" 
This is the fourth time I have been privileged to be on the Sunday Evening Club. It is a great honor, but also a little bit intimidating.

When I am invited to speak in the same place time after time, I am always reminded of George Buttrick, one of the great Presbyterian pulpiteers. George Buttrick died a few years ago at age 92, but he preached up until the time he died. He had one of the great churches in New York; he was chaplain of Harvard. Over the many, many years that he preached, George Buttrick kept a diary of things that people said to him at the end of his sermons. One woman said, "Oh, Dr. Buttrick, your messages meant so much to my husband after he lost his mind." Another woman with a bit of a mixed metaphor said, "Dr. Buttrick, your messages are like throwing water to a drowning man." Yet a third, and I always think of it when I come back to preach in the same place, is the woman who said to him, "Every message you preach, Dr. Buttrick, is better than the next."

Well, I hope that won't be the case with those of you who have been in the audience when I have had the opportunity and the privilege of being here on the Sunday Evening Club. I really appreciate the Sunday Evening Club and the wonderful opportunity to share thoughts about the most important questions in life.

I was reflecting a little bit recently about the twentieth century. I love to read history and I've read all of the history of western civilization. I'm struck by the fact that we have made more progress in the twentieth century than probably any other century in human history. Just think of what has happened in the twentieth century.

Take medical science, for example — open heart surgery, organ transplants, cures for diphtheria, typhoid, polio, the development of antibiotics and fiberoptics. As a result of the extraordinary progress in medical science, life expectancy has been extended from what it was at the beginning of this century — from 47 years then to 75 years today. Just look at infant mortality. In 1900, 150 babies out of every thousand died. That is 15%. Today it is ten out of every thousand.

Look at travel. What an explosion has taken place. Remember that great book Around the World in Eighty Days? A ship actually took 123 days to circumnavigate the globe. One of Rockefeller's ships held the record. Today we do it in hours. I was in the Far East recently and spent seven days in four countries. We think nothing of satellites spinning in orbit around the world.

Think of communications — computers which enable us to communicate around the world, instant data transmission. You can have the entire Bible packaged in one little hand-held computer. FAX machines enable us to communicate paper instantly by telephone lines. People could never have imagined such things at the turn of the last century.

Just think of human progress in terms of our standard of living. Today most Americans have homes they not only live in but own. There are facilities in the homes that were unimaginable at the turn of the last century. Unemployment insurance, welfare, social security — the good life has been achieved in the twentieth century.

With all of that progress, there is one area in which we have made absolutely no change at all. If anything, perhaps it has changed a little for the worse. That is the condition of the human heart. I am not talking about open heart surgery where you can take a heart out on a table and put new valves in place. I am talking about what goes on inside the human heart. The condition of the heart — sin. That is its natural condition. We have done nothing to change that in the twentieth century.

As a matter of fact, this has been the bloodiest century in human history. More people have been killed in wars — more people killed by their own government in the twentieth century — than in all previous centuries. This country is beset today with a crime epidemic. Over twenty thousand people were murdered last year in America alone — more than in the worst of the Viet Nam War.

G. K. Chesterton was right when he said, "The doctrine of original sin is the only philosophy empirically validated by thirty-five hundred years of human history." We have been able to improve everything in the twentieth century except the condition of the human heart and man's inhumanity to man.

Jesus dealt with it best — so poignantly — and brings home a point which we so desperately need to understand in our culture today. Jesus said that which proceeds out of the heart of a man — fornication, theft, murder, adultery, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness — all of these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.

Can man be good without God? This is the great question that moral philosophers have asked from the beginning of time. The answer I would submit is no. Oh, yes, maybe they can be good for a time but they can't stay good. Who is to make them good? Who is to bring virtue into our society?

If I am right, that in the twentieth century we have been able to improve the condition of life in America, western civilization and around the world, but haven't been able to do anything about the sin within us which causes hatred, anger, rivalries, bitterness, moral decay and crime, then who can make us good?

Can government do it? No. Scientists and laboratories? No. The media? No. Schools? No. It comes only when the power of God begins to work in our lives and brings forth righteousness. It is something which happens from the inside out and not from the outside in. It is the one thing man can't fix — the condition of the heart.

I guess I see it best in prisons and in crime, the areas in which I work. I see the total breakdown of the criminal justice system in America. We have doubled the prison population. Everyone has said that if we just build more prisons and put more people away, we will stop the crime plague in America. We have doubled the prison population; crime went up last year 5.5%. Murders have gone up steadily to the point where one person a night is being murdered in the District of Columbia, the capital of this country. Projections are that we are going to double the prison population again aver the next ten years.

I have seen why the system doesn't work. I have been in prison. When I was in prison seven months in Montgomery, Alabama, I ran the washing machine in the prison laundry. The former chairman of the board of the American Medical Association was running the dryer. Some days he would run the washing machine and I would run the dryer for variety. In that prison we saw people lying on their bunks staring into the emptiness — no place to go, nothing to do. We realized that there was no way that institution could change them. Seventy-four percent of the people who go to prison go right out and commit another crime. Why? It doesn't matter how good the institution or prison; we haven't figured out how to get inside the human heart.

Drugs may be the best example. Eighty percent of the crimes in America are drug related one way or another. If you listen to the politicians, they will tell you that we can win the war on drugs. All we have to do is build more prisons, hire more prosecutors and seal off the borders.

I watched President Bush last fall when he announced a war on drugs. He said he was going to spend billions of dollars to accommodate the federal prison population, to hire more prosecutors, to put more judges and police to work. I worked with President Bush for four years when I was in the government. I know him and respect him. He was immediately followed on the air by a Democratic Senator who responded for the Democrats in the Senate. He said the only problem with President Bush's proposals was he was not talking about enough police, enough prosecutors, enough judges, enough prisons. He felt we ought to do even more and then we will win the war on drugs — the same answers we have been hearing for years.

The problem is you can't stop drugs by putting people in prison. You could seal off the borders of this country; you could triple the prison population; you could hire more police — I know this is going to sound radical to many of you — and you would not stop drug use one iota in this country. Why? Maybe the best example of that is my own experience in prison. We had guard towers and watch towers around us. Everybody who came in and out of the prison was searched. Yet, I never went to sleep at night without smelling marijuana burning.

If you can get drugs into the prisons, you can get drugs into the country. The problem isn't the supply. You can seal off the borders. You can send the marines into Colombia. You can hire the police. You can put everybody in jail. But as long as people want to get stoned, they will get stoned. You can make "ice" (a type of drug) in your basement today. The problem is not on the supply side. The problem is on the demand side.

I am convinced that young people today are addicted as much to a false idea as they are to a chemical. Young people today are from broken homes where they are not taught values. They don't learn right from wrong during those morally formative years between the ages of one and six.

You parents who are watching, there is nothing you can do that is more important than to teach values to your children between the ages of one and six. Professors Wilson and Hernstein at Harvard did a study on the causes of crime a few years ago. They discovered that it was the lack of moral teaching in children, ages one to six. The family has such a responsibility.

Then there is the school system. I know there is a great debate over teaching values in the schools. Most people think that schools are value neutral. I tend to think schools are often value hostile. They teach that there are no values. So, children are not learning right and wrong in school. At home they watch this instrument by which you are watching me for seven hours and some thirty-six minutes a day. They watch commercials which say that you only go around this way once, so grab for all the gusto while you can. They go out in the street and think that if the object of life is pleasure, then why not sniff cocaine because that will give them pleasure. They sniff cocaine. We arrest them; throw them in prison; they think we are crazy and so do I. They are simply doing exactly what we teach them to do.

If we are going to do something about crime and drugs, there are no solutions in our institutions. There are no solutions in our laboratories; there are no solutions in science. The solution is in our hearts. People have to be given a better way to live.

It is up to us — those of us who profess to be Christians, those of us who follow Judeo-Christian teachings, those of us who believe we have a strong faith — to show the young people that there is something more important to live for than personal pleasure. Our culture is obsessed with the belief that all that matters is pleasure. You are to be made to feel good. The kids believe that and that is why they are on drugs. We have to show this generation that there is an absolute right and wrong.

There is a God who sets standards for right and wrong. There is such a thing as absolute truth despite the fact that everyone says that truth is what you find it to be. Most educational institutions are teaching that today — that truth is relative. No, there is absolute truth and there is hope. There is something more important to live for than just personal pleasure. That something is to know, love and worship the God who created us. Then, we have got to be able to take that gospel, that "good news" that Jesus Christ died on the cross that our sins might be forgiven, into the places where people are hurting and suffering. That's why I go into the prisons. That is the answer to the drug crisis.

I was in Kansas City recently. The Governor of Missouri was there to introduce me for a dinner. It was a grand and glorious evening, but the man who stole the show was a fellow who stood up before the governor and me to tell his own experience. He said he bad been a main-line heroin addict. He had spent most of his life sticking needles into his arm. He said that one day as he was sitting in his cell, a copy of the first book I wrote, Born Again, which tells the story of my conversion to Jesus Christ, was dropped in his cell. He picked it up. It was dog-eared and tattered and he started to read through it. He read what had happened to me and he heard the gospel for the first time in his life. He surrendered his life that night. He got down on his bunk in his cell and he gave his life to Christ. He asked Jesus to come into his life.

He told the most marvelous story of how he woke up the next morning and instead of being hooked on drugs, he felt free. The desire for drugs was gone. That was five years earlier and after that God began to work in his life. He changed his life. He stood at the platform that night with a beautiful wife and said, "Since my release from prison, I have started working with other people who have been in prison and on drugs. Jesus Christ has set me free." You see, that is the one thing that man can't fix — the heart. The only way the heart is fixed is when the righteousness of God comes into our lives.

The real challenge I would leave with you tonight is to take a look at your own life. If, indeed, I am right that we are living in a century in which we have made extraordinary human progress in every area except crime; every area except the breakdown of moral values; every area except that which relates to the human heart, then how do we live with one another in a sense of community? Do we really love one another? Do we really care about our societies, our communities? Is there something more to live for? You see, that can only come from within us. The only way we fix the anger, bitterness and hatred that is in us, that causes the moral breakdown in our society, is when the righteousness of God comes into our lives.

It was just seventeen years ago that I gave my life to Christ — right in the midst of Watergate. I know the whole world laughed and scoffed. I kept the cartoonist market clothed and fed for a month. No one believed it and I understand that. I can only tell you that over these seventeen years my faith has grown and deepened. I am more convinced of the reality of Jesus Christ today than I am of my own reality.

I reflected recently on what God has done in my life. I thought back on all those years when I was such a successful politician and lawyer and had a very, very lucrative law practice. I remember all the partner meetings I used to go to in which we would quibble over who was going to get what share of what. I would end up hating the people I was working with. I've thought about myself in those years before I really knew Christ and had surrendered to Christ. I might have looked successful and prosperous and happy on the outside but I was miserable inside.

God will change our hearts when we invite Christ into our lives. I have seen not only how He has worked in the lives of thousands of people around me, I have seen how He has worked inside my own heart to remove hatred, bitterness and anger. We can fix just about anything in our society today — but only God can fix the human heart.

I would challenge you tonight — maybe when you turn this program off — if you have never thought about your own relationship with the Living God, to do so. Remember that Jesus says He stands at the door of our lives knocking, asking to come in. More important than any of the things that we have accomplished in the twentieth century — improving our standard of living, giving us unemployment insurance and welfare, giving us beautiful homes and wonderful automobiles — is whether we have peace within.

Are we able with the righteousness of God to overcome that which defiles a man, that which comes out of his heart? Only Jesus does that — the One who died on the cross in our place, whose blood was shed as a sacrifice that we might be free, be born again, and that we might have a new life in Christ. You will discover as I have that all your relationships change. Your relationship with your family becomes deeper and so much more meaningful. You learn love instead of anger and hatred and bitterness.

I have got a long way to go. We all do. We walk along that path, growing as a Christian, but I can assure that God takes you by the hand and helps you to grow. Then if you want to do something about the society in which we live, don't sit back in your home and simply wring your hands when you read in despair of all the terrible things that are happening in our society — the moral breakdown, the loss of character and the betrayal of public figures, and the rampant scandals in business and religion, every area of life. Instead, decide that you are going to live the way God teaches us to live.

What we need in this society more than anything else is a massive dose of God's righteousness — people living by the standards of the holy scripture; people who take Christ into their lives and then say, "I am going to live that way, that the love of God might be spread around; that relationships might be healed; that people might come to know the true joy of having a new heart — their heart fixed because the righteousness of God has come into their heart." We then share that love with others around us in need. That is the greatest thing that could happen in the life of any individual and the most significant thing for the twentieth century — any century. God bless you.

Interview with Charles Colson
Interviewed by Gunther Knoedler

Gunther Knoedler: In your very fine message you said that 80% of crime is somehow involved with drugs. What are we going to do about that?

Charles Colson: It is a real scourge on our society. There is no question that this is the cancer that is eating at the heart of our inner-cities. Drugs are rampant throughout our society, in all classes of society as a matter of fact. You have to change the moral image of a society. You cannot simply do it by saying that we are going to win the war on drugs and we are going to lock everybody up. We just don't have enough jails. We have run out of money to build prisons. Twenty-five billion dollars worth of new prisons are under construction in America today. When they are finished, we will still be hundred of thousands of beds short. There has got to be a different solution.

A few months ago, Bill Bennett, the drug czar, was saying in all of his speeches that by locking everybody up we would win the war on drugs. He has changed. Now he is saying that the community has got to get involved. We have got to have education programs; we have got to get the family teaching values; we have to get kids either disciplined not to watch television or get some of this stuff off television. TV is teaching kids that pleasure is the only object of life. There has got to be counseling very early in the schools. There have got to be drug treatment facilities made available as soon as kids get hooked. Instead of just housing inmates, our prisons have got to provide treatment resources.

Every place we go we say, "Look, instead of bulldozing the cells, let's put some community treatment centers in." We just had a study in Florida — 260 drug addicts, crack addicts — committing 800 crimes per year per person to support their habit. They go to prison; they get drugs in prison; they get out and commit new crimes when they get out. You have got to deal with it one-on-one; you have got to deal with community education and the community has to get involved. People have got to stop just sitting back and listening to the political rhetoric which says to build more prisons and solve the drug problem. It won't happen. We have got to get involved as individuals in our families, our schools, how we teach our kids and in the treatment facilities that we make available once the drugs do get into the community.

Knoedler: Let me switch gears a moment. We are presently witnessing the virtual collapse of the Communist-Marxist ideology in Eastern Europe, something that many of us would have said was virtually impossible a year ago. You wrote a fine book, Kingdoms in Conflict, which I just reread. What would you have written if you were writing your book, Kingdoms in Conflict, today?

Colson: I wrote about Communism and the Kingdom of God and how Communism had tried to destroy the church because the church stood as the one independent source of authority against the government. That is why the Jew and the Christian have been persecuted by tyrants through the ages, because we worship another King, a higher loyalty. I wrote at length about that in the book.

When I wrote Kingdoms in Conflict two years ago, I never would have dreamed that those who bore allegiance to that King — the King of Kings, the God of the Universe, more powerful than all the tyrants through history — would start going out on the streets in the desire for human freedom and topple Communist governments. I don't think I would have written anything differently in Kingdoms in Conflict except I would have written that that King is a lot stronger than Mr. Gorbachev thinks.

When you look at what is happening in Eastern Europe, it is really interesting. I was just with a journalist a few days ago who has come back from East Germany and Czechoslovakia. I have talked with a number of Soviet dissidents. Look at what happened in Poland. It all started when the Bishop of Cracow erected a cross in the streets. They wouldn't allow him to build a church, so he erected a cross in the streets and had open air masses. That was back in the seventies. The Communists kept tearing down the cross and they would keep rebuilding the cross. The masses began to spread through the streets. That Bishop of Cracow is John Paul II, who became Pope.

Someone once said jokingly to Stalin that they didn't want to send troops into Poland because the Pope might object. Stalin derisively said, "The Pope, how many divisions does he have?" I suspect it is very warm where Stalin is today and he can't see what is happening here. If he could, he would see the Pope's divisions because it was out of the church and the Solidarity movement in Poland that freedom. was born. It was out of the Lutheran church in East Germany where the people began to meet and the protests began that protest spilled out in the streets. It was out of the Reformed Church in Romania that the protests began to spill into the streets. This is a movement of God's people proving that the King we worship, the King of Kings, is more powerful than Gorbachev or all the petty tyrants of Eastern Europe.

Knoedler: I have recently heard that the intellectual community in Russia is now deeply concerned that with this collapse there is now a moral vacuum within the country that needs to be filled.

Colson: Vaclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia, who is quite an extraordinary fellow — a playwright and poet — gave a speech to the German book sellers in Frankfurt before he became prime minister of Czechoslovakia. Havel began his speech, "In the beginning was the Word." He talked about the importance of virtue and the importance of really Biblical faith. He said, "We live in a time of great decadence where we have lost our values and they need to be restored."

This is a tremendous opportunity for the church to bring the Gospel our church brethren in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. If there is going to be a spiritual awakening in the twentieth century, which everyone has been praying for, I'm not so sure but what it may not start in Eastern Europe instead of here.

Solzhenitsyn gave his famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978. 1 would recommend that for anyone to read because it is one of the most prophetic speeches of the twentieth century. Solzhenitsyn said that there will be a great spiritual awakening, but it won't begin in the west where we are experiencing spiritual exhaustion. It will begin in the east. That is what we see happening in the east. There is a vacuum, but I think the vacuum. is going to be filled by the church which, though largely underground and persecuted, has kept its spiritual vitality. Here in the west, with all of our materialism, with all of our possessions, with all of our self-obsession, we have gotten spiritually weak. I think they are spiritually strong over there.

I just talked to the most marvelous woman, Irina Ratushinskaya, the Soviet poet. She wrote the book Gray is the Color of Hope. She was four and a half years in the gulag and she said that there are more Christians today in the Soviet Union than there are Communists. Her faith kept her alive. It is her faith and the faith of people like her that is causing this tremendous upheaval in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Knoedler: Chuck, that is fascinating. Thank you very much for those comments. I wish we could talk longer.