"Chuck Colson kept pestering Jack Eckerd. And eventually one day he read some things including the story of Watergate and the Resurrection out of my book, Loving God, and decided that Jesus was, in fact, resurrected from the dead. He called me up to tell me he believed that, and I asked him some other things. When he got through telling me what he believed I said, 'You're born again!' He said, 'No, I'm not, I haven't felt anything.' I said, 'Yes, you are! Pray with me right now.' After we prayed he said, 'I am? Marvelous!' The first thing he did was to walk into one of his drugstores and walked down through the book shelves and he saw Playboy and Penthouse. And he'd seen it there many times before, but it never bothered him before. Now he saw them with new eyes. He'd become a Christian.
He went back to his office. He called in his president. He said, 'Take Playboy and Penthouse out of my stores.' The president said, 'You can't mean that, Mr. Eckerd. We make three million dollars a year on those books.' He said, 'Take 'em out of my stores.' And in 1,700 stores across America, by one man's decision, those magazines and smut were removed from the shelves because a man had given his life to Christ. I called Jack Eckerd up. I said, 'I want to use that story. Did you do that because of your commitment to Christ?' He said, 'Why else would I give away three million dollars? The Lord wouldn't let me off the hook.'"
I love this story and it makes me think about the saying, "you cannot unknow what you know or unsee what you see." Once you know, you know. The same is true with us as new creations. 2 Corinthians 5: 17, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" The moment we surrender our lives to God, He sends the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and begin our transformation. We begin a new life.
God slowly transforms us into the image of God. 2 Corinthians 3: 18, "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." Sometimes this transformation feels like a battle because it is. The Holy Spirit shows us all areas of our lives that we need to surrender to in order to live in obedience to God's will.
Colossians 3: 10, "....and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator." Paul wrote to the new believers telling them to put to death sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness. They were to stop speaking with anger, wrath, malice, slander and obscene talk. They were not to lie. These things were to be put to death because they were a new self being renewed in the knowledge in the image of its creator.
We will always have battles between the flesh and the Spirit. We must remember that we are not bound to our old life. We have been made new in Jesus. The old life has passed away and the new has come!
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