The year 2003 was a very remarkable year for me in that I retired from two jobs. In January I had been relieved of my duties in the State House of Representatives (GA) for the first time in eight years. On August 31st I retired from my 31-year flying career with Delta Airlines.
For a little while I was concerned about what I would do with all my free time.
Praise God, Chuck Colson and the Centurion Program (now Colson Fellows Program) showed up in the summer of that same year with recruiting messages for the program through the BreakPoint broadcast. I liked What I heard about it and applied somewhat excitedly. Shortly after my retirement from Delta, I was notified that I was accepted into the program.
The program looked a little daunting, especially with the prerequisite reading of Chuck Colson’s book, How Now Shall We Live? Before my time in politics, I spent 15 years in a lay renewal ministry, which was an evangelistic ministry to which I was called. While the ministry for one hour during the long weekends emphasized stewardship, evangelism, and other ways to serve God as a committed Christian, the emphasis on that ministry reflected the “great evangelical error” (my words) made in the 20th century. That error was expressing openly only a two-point gospel, sin and redemption. I was never comfortable with that, but I didn’t know why.
I’m so grateful that Colson’s book clarified for me, and for the first time, that the gospel was bigger than that expressed in the ministry I was serving.
I now realize that trying to condense the Gospel into even 4 good points might be a bit simplistic, but it is hard to argue that within those four points a much better understanding of the Gospel exists than in what I had been taught before. Yes, sin and redemption must be emphasized, as points 2 and 3 in this broader explanation of the Gospel insisted. But God’s plan began with creation, and that same creation was good, very good, before the fall and the reign of sin. I learned therefore that the Gospel really began with God’s intention for His entire creation to be good.
The next two points of the Gospel include the same sin and redemption that I was taught in that earlier commitment. Probably the most difficult challenge for Christians is that once we have the Holy Spirit living within us because of Jesus, and we therefore possess the hope of eternity, we are called to identify that part of God’s creation that needs to be restored as we need to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12). We are not called to reflect on the hope of heaven and withdraw from the world. Rather we are called to be agents of restoration for the broken parts of the culture in which we live.
The entire next year unpacked all four of those points as we were taught and challenged to teach Biblical worldview. I must point back to How Now Shall We Live? by Colson as the first mind-opening understanding about the broader and more difficult call on the lives of Christians – again, to be agents of restoration.