Discovering the Good Life

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Well, Chuck, you mentioned another great paradox of life when you say that we have to understand the evil in ourselves before we can truly embrace the good of life. This is more than just an intellectual contemplation, isn’t it?

CHUCK COLSON: It sure is. In my case, it is very real. When I think back on thirty-two years ago when Christ came into my life in my friend’s driveway, and I realized that He had died on the cross for my sins and I could be forgiven, it was the most liberating moment of my life. I think I would be dead if I did not know this for a fact that my sins had been forgiven. I have seen all around the world. I tell the story of the Good Life preaching in a prison in Dehradun, India, where people in the Hindu culture believe that what they have done in this life will be done to them in the next life. There is no hope. I preached the gospel, and over a thousand men surrounded me afterwards with their hands reaching out touching me. Why? Because, they didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t a celebrity they would recognize. They probably didn’t even know who Richard Nixon was. But somebody came and loved them and told them about forgiveness, and they wanted to touch and see if that was real. So, there is hope in the gospel which comes from no other way in the world, but you have to first understand your own sin and be repentant about it. We don’t do enough preaching about that in the churches. We tell people it is a happy thing. Come to Jesus, and everything is going to be fine. Nonsense. You’ve got to confront your own sins and be convicted of them. The greatest tragedies I know in my life are people who have denied the reality of sin. The greatest tragedies in human history are people who have denied the reality of sin. Therefore, give power to this Utopian leader, this Utopian vision, and people end up in chains. You’ve got to understand the evil within you before you can live the good life.

LAND: It starts with, you don’t have to teach children how to be their own little despites; they come that way.

COLSON: They come naturally.

LAND: We have experienced recently where we were with a family that had a two-year-old that was completely out of control. We were sitting there at dinner. He was throwing food over his shoulder, banging stuff on the tables, and they said, “Oh honey, don’t do that,” and he tried to bite his mother. My wife and I said you know, I told her, it would not take you more than two weeks to straighten that kid out. She said it wouldn’t take me two weeks. You don’t have to teach children how to be self-centered, totally self-focused. As our Baptist Faith and Message says, we are born with a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. We have a fatal flaw. Human beings are not neutral. They are not good. They are self-centered, selfish, self-oriented sinners. That is an essential truth about humanity.

COLSON: R.C. Sproul used to say we are much more like Adolf Hitler than we are like Jesus Christ. I said that once to a man in Texas at a prayer breakfast. He got furious at me; he got red behind the neck. He said, “I’m a good person.” I said, “No you’re not,” and went through that. He later came to Christ, but I think all of us need to confront people with a reality of sin and evil because, otherwise, you are going to have a dysfunctional life in one way or another. You find the Good Life once you recognize this. You can’t find it otherwise.

LAND: Well, that’s right. I mean, you find that there is a way to deal with this, and the way to deal with it is to accept Christ and let Christ deal with it.

COLSON: And to seek God’s forgiveness and then you’ll understand what God’s grace is.

LAND: That brings me to the next point I want to ask you about, Chuck. You say that Watergate was the best thing that ever happened to you.

COLSON: Yes. I have just been on a lot of national television programs, as you probably know, Richard, on “Deep Throat.” Many of the times when I would say that Mark Felt, “Deep Throat,” was not a hero because he stole documents basically and handed them to the press in the dead of night, secret documents. When I’ve said this to the people, they’ve said, you are a historical revisionist. You are trying to revise history and say Nixon was really a good guy. I said, no, no, you don’t understand. I went to prison. I deserved to go to prison. I plead guilty to go to prison and thank God I did because look what God has done with my life. It has been one of the great witnesses I have been able to make to people that because I was in prison, because I went through the suffering and the adversity, because I was totally broken, God could then use me. That’s one of the supreme…I mean, that is the Jesus paradox. Seek to save your life, you lose it. Lose your life for My sake, you will find it.

LAND: That’s what happened. You know, prison fellowship would never have happened without Watergate and without your conversion.

COLSON: Today, because of my going to prison, there are viable, and in some cases, very strong ministries in 105 countries around the world reaching out to the least, the last, and the lost—the people who are totally written off by society, thrown in dungeons in many places and abused. Christians are coming for them. I was just reflecting on this this morning and an old interview I did, that more people come to me on the street, non-Christians, and they will say, “You’re Chuck Colson.” I will say, “Yes.” This happened to me twice yesterday. “You are Chuck Colson.” I say, “Yes.” Oh, and then they want to say something else. It’s not like, “Well I’m a Christian too,” but often they will then say, “I really appreciate what you’ve done.” I’m not quite sure what it is, but I think our witness is strengthened when people see us overcome adversity and when, instead of letting it destroy us, we submit to God and let Him use us. That becomes a very powerful witness for the faith.

LAND: So, the problem, as you see it, rests in us seeking to define our own lives, choosing to live life on our own terms, and in essence, trying to be our own god.

COLSON: It’s the original sin, isn’t it?

LAND: That’s right.

COLSON: In the Garden of Eden, this is exactly what the original temptation and the original fall comes from—that desire to be our own god. To be a proud individual image. Dennis Kozlowsi, that’s really all he wanted, more than money or anything else, he wanted to be his own god. That party he had in Sardinia had all the trappings of a Greek festival where he was celebrating his being god. This is a certain prescription for disaster because the minute we try to exalt ourselves, we blind ourselves to the reality of life around us? Most of us are by nature, as you pointed out with these kids, basically self-centered. The thing about the gospel is that it forces you to be Christ-descended, to see the world through God’s eyes instead of your own. When you do, it is a totally different place. If I saw the world through my eyes, which I say when I got to prison and saw those inmates in prison, I would have suddenly, seeing it through my eyes, say I don’t want to be with all of these criminals and thieves. I was reading my Bible one day in the prison dormitory. It was raining and so I couldn’t be working outside. I came upon Hebrews 2, that Christ became lower than the angels for a period of time so that He would not be ashamed to call us His brothers. I looked around that prison, the drug dealers and murders and thieves. I realized, “Wait a minute. I’m not ashamed to call these men my brothers.” That changes your life when you see the world through God’s eyes instead of your own.

This For Faith & Family insight has been produced by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Join the conversation at Insight.FaithandFamily.com.