The Bible records God’s command to “Love God, heart, soul, strength and mind and your neighbor as yourself.” This is the heart of Christian living, but how many of us really know what it means? Charles Colson wrote a book, Loving God, to answer these questions.
Colson had been a tough, powerful attorney, Nixon’s personal lawyer who went to prison for his part in the Watergate scandal. After he was released, he started Prison Fellowship for prisoners and their families which now can be found in over a hundred countries. He also started Justice Fellowship, for prison reform, and authored some 22 books and had a radio broadcast. His life mission was to not just minister to prisoners, including in Bilibid prison in Montinlupa, but to challenge secular thinking with a Christian world and life view. This excerpt is from Loving God, 1997 ed.
“Twenty-one years ago on January 31, 1975, I walked out of prison gates, free after seven months inside. But as a new Christian, I was unsure of the future, groping for God’s will, trying to understand the tumultuous events that had brought me to this place. I had surely known the heights and depths of life: from power, wealth, prestige, and an office next to the president of the United States to the confining walls of a dreary prison. But along the way I had made the most important discovery anyone can make. That came about on a hot, sultry night in August, 1973. As the Watergate scandal was rocking the Nixon presidency and the nation, I—proud and self-assured on the outside, fearful and trembling within—visited a close friend at his home. Tom Phillips was a successful business executive and client who, I had learned, had had some kind of religious experience. That evening Tom told me of his encounter with Jesus Christ, how his life had been dramatically changed. I listened intently. I had never heard anyone talk this way. Though something stirred within me, I kept my emotions in check, too proud to let him know how I felt inside.
“I left my friend that night, promising only to read a little book which he gave me, Mere Chris-tianity. But in his driveway that night, the dam burst. I could not drive the car; I was crying too hard, calling out to God with the first honest prayer of my life. I sat there alone for a long time—but not alone at all. From that day on, nothing about my life has been the same. It can never be again. I have given my life to Jesus Christ.
“In that first year out of prison I published my autobiography, Born Again, which God used mightily. But I also wrestled with Him. I knew what had happened to me had been for a purpose. What was it? I longed to return to a quiet life with family. Business and law beckoned, but Patty and I dreamed of long walks in the woods, more time with the children, and above all, being out of the glare of the public spotlight.
“But I couldn’t. I knew my call was ministry to prisoners, and in the summer of 1976, six of us gathered for prayer, launching Prison Fellowship. Little did I dream that this ministry would spread around the globe — 75 countries, 2,000 prisons in the U.S. alone, thousands of volunteers — to become the most massive outreach of the Gospel to “the least of these,” prisoners and their families. In those early years I yearned to grow, to know the fullness of the Christian life. I studied under the guidance of godly scholars such as Professor Richard Lovelace and Dr. Carl Henry. I read voraciously. But I was perplexed that Christianity seemed to be having so little impact on modern life. What was it, I asked, that God really wanted from His people? How should we live? And it was out of this struggle, . . . that I wrote the book . . . Loving God. Few things God has done in my life have surprised me as much as this book. . . . (it) went through 26 printings, was translated into twenty languages, over a half-million copies have been sold in the U.S., hundreds of thousands more distributed by the Billy Graham Association, and countless hundreds of thousands more overseas. . . Over the thirteen years since this book was published, I have been humbled by the thousands of letters it has prompted from people in every station of life—from prime ministers to prisoners. The message is always the same: The writers’ lives had been deeply affected. Some became believers; others discovered the true meaning of being a Christian—to love God and to love one another.”
