Recently I was sitting at the head table of the Bill Glass annual dinner for his prison ministry, and at the first table in front of me was a man whose face shone with glory. In the middle of his talk, the speaker stopped and said he wanted to introduce someone to the audience. He called this man up, and as they stood at the microphone the speaker said to him, "George, I'm going to tell these people what I said to you the first time I met you, and you're going to tell them what you said back to me." With this the speaker said, "George, I understand you're an ex-convict, you're an ex-druggie, you're an ex-pusher, you're an ex-mean dude. And what did you say?" The man whose face shone said quietly, "Sir, I said, ‘I'm no ex-anything. I'm a new creation in Christ Jesus."
The Good News is, we can be changed; we can be clean, not just tolerated. My friend Ray Stedman was telling me how he went to a homosexual gathering on the campus of Stanford, where a gay minister and a lesbian were chiding the church about how judgmental it is. The lesbian pointed to how Christ didn't judge the woman at the well. Without disclosing that he was a preacher, Ray simply said, "But she was never the same after she met him."
Likewise, the Christian obligation is not self-righteous judgment but self-sacrificing love. Recently I was talking with the best-known jewel thief of our time, "Murf the Surf." He did the eulogy for famed Chaplain Ray of prison ministry. I asked him what Chaplain Ray had that was so attractive to prisoners. Murf replied, "Chaplain Ray never saw you as a convict. He always saw you as who you could be with Christ. He would sit in a group and say, "Bill, with Jesus you could be President of the Bank; Joe, you could be mayor of your town if you had Jesus. He always saw beyond the prison."
How does this transformation occur? Stanley Jones in a college chapel told how he went out as a missionary and came back not seeing a difference in his belief and others' until he read the Scripture: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." In other religions the word remained the word, while in Christianity the Word became flesh. If all religions are the same, then the martyrs are fools. Yet the Scripture has a special place at the throne for them.
Moreover, if the Cross is unnecessary, the missionaries presumptuous, and the martyrs foolish, then Scripture is untrue, for it says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father except by Me." I always have a twinge of conscience when I quote that, for I remember walking down Fifth Avenue in New York one morning with an unbelieving executive friend who said to me, "Fred, do you believe that anyone who doesn't accept Christ will go to hell?" When I told him I did, he said, "If I believed that, I'd crawl on my hands and knees and tell every friend I've got." I have never lost the sting of that.
One of the great ministers whom some would consider a liberal was standing at a busy intersection in New York with another of my friends. He turned to him and said, "Do you believe that all these people who don't believe in Jesus are going to hell?" When my friend said he did, the minister said, "You don't live like it." Society expects us to be tolerant about sin, to embrace moral relativism. God is not tolerant toward sin. "The soul that sins shall die." The Good News is that God is not tolerant but forgiving. We as humans have to tolerate the person in his fallen condition, but God can restore us to newness of life when his conditions are met. How much better to be forgiven than tolerated! How much better to not be reconditioned but be a new creation! We are no "ex-anything."
New Creature in Christ
Fred Smith shares some poignant stories of people who are new in Christ.
By Fred Smith
