With less than 48 hours to go until the polls close on the 2016 presidential election, many Christians feel anxious over the pending results. The tension and worry are understandable, but we should resist feeling like the situation is perilous. Recall beloved evangelical leader Charles “Chuck” Colson understood first-hand that political failure and corruption actually served as harbingers for God’s glory in his life and ministry.
From 1969 to 1973 Colson served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon. Power, pride, shrewdness, and corruption littered Colson’s career in government. Political corruption eventually led to Colson’s conviction of a felony and prison time. But after public humiliation and paying his debt to society, Colson elected to place his hope in Jesus Christ.
Colson found redemption in the wake of corruption. God blessed his ministries including Prison Fellowship International, Angel Tree, and Justice Fellowship – efforts which have shared the Gospel and aided the lives of millions of inmates and their families across the globe.
No matter what the election results are tomorrow, Christians can be certain that God can redeem what seems like a hopelessly lost individual or circumstance.
Here are ten Charles Colson quotes that will encourage us all to place our hope in the Almighty, not political ends:
1.) “I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. Where is the hope? The hope that each of us have is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed, or what great things that we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people, and that’s where our hope is in this country; that’s where our hope is in life.”
2.) “Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture.”
3.) “Christian patriots spend more time washing feet than waving flags.”
4.) “The lure of power can separate the most resolute of Christians from the true nature of Christian leadership, which is service to others. It’s difficult to stand on a pedestal and wash the feet of those below.”
5.) “When the church aligns itself politically, it gives priority to the compromises and temporal successes of the political world rather than its Christian confession of eternal truth. And when the church gives up its rightful place as the conscience of the culture, the consequences for society can be horrific.”
6.) “[T]he church has allowed itself to become dangerously polarized into two camps: politicized and privatized views of faith. The problem is, neither view has anything to do with historic Christianity.”
7.) “What is true has never been a question to be decide d by polls or popular opinion. Truth isn’t ‘democratic’ –it’s something that God has written into the very fabric of nature.”
8.) “Our character is determined not by our circumstances but by our reaction to those circumstances.”
9.) “Suffering is rightly called “the school of faith,” for it is only through trouble, difficulties, and setbacks that we are brought to the end of ourselves. The normal human tendency, particularly for strong-willed people, is to rely on our own strength and resources. But when those are not available to us, when everything has failed, when we have to abandon every other hope, we are forced to trust God alone.”
10.) “Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.”
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