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THE MIND OF A MAU MAU GANG LEADER

It was a hot summer night, July of 1958. And a skinny Pentecostal preacher named Davie Wilkerson was about to stagger into the final night of a failed Christian evangelist meeting for the teen gangs of New York City. Night after night, he'd been preaching sermons to an almost empty hall, sermons that pretty much fell on deaf ears. But tonight, at least, quite a few kids were there with their leather jackets, the girls in their halter tops, bottles of cheap booze, marijuana cigarettes. Right on the front row were the Mau Maus, one of the toughest, switchblade-packing gangs of all New York City.
Still, even tonight, the sermon just wasn't going anywhere. Here this week on the radio, we've been studying the idea of having the "(quote) mind of Christ," and these gang members, these bored, sneering kids, just didn't have that. Wilkerson might as well have been preaching in German or Swahili. "Like reading the stock market report." And at one point in this lame, going-nowhere sermon, David tried to tell the teenagers about the command of Jesus that they should love one another.
And all at once a light bulb must have gone on because one of the guys literally jumped out of his seat. Here's how Wilkerson relates the story in his classic book, The Cross and the Switchblade.

"Suddenly someone jumped up in the second row. He stood on his chair and shouted: ‘Hold on, Preacher! Hold on! You say you want me to love them blanks" — and he used a racial profanity. "One of them cut me with a razor. I'll love them all right — with a lead pipe.'"

And suddenly the place was buzzing with interest. Here's what happened next.

"Another boy, this one from the Hell Burners' section, jumped up and ripped open his shirt. ‘I got a bullet hole here, Preacher,' [he screamed]. ‘One of them blank" — another racial slur, a vicious "N" word — "one of them blank gangs did it. And you say we're supposed to love them? Man, you're not real.'"

Well, the place was just going nuts. And this was the kind of testimonial meeting Wilkerson had never anticipated. These gang rivalries went back for years, even decades. Every kid there had watched someone die; most of them had been involved in stabbings, gang warfare, retribution, guarding their precious turf in that ugly, steaming-hot city. And that accusation hung in the humid air: "Love each other? Man, you're not real!"

"It didn't sound real," he wrote later, "not in that room so charged with hatred. It didn't sound humanly possible. ‘It isn't anything we can achieve through our own efforts,' I admitted. ‘This is God's love I'm talking about. We simply have to ask Him to give us His kind of love. We cannot work it up by ourselves.'"

Well, some of you know the story. The place was crazy with hate, with shouting. And Wilkerson, right at that moment, just gave up preaching. He bowed his head and began to pray for the Holy Spirit. For the three longest minutes of his life, he stood up there, vulnerable, alone, silently praying. And slowly that huge auditorium, St. Nicholas Arena, grew quiet. He just kept praying, kept waiting. And then he heard people crying. He looked up and the Mau Maus were crying. Other rival gangs were crying. They came forward to accept Jesus Christ. The Mau Mau gang, the entire gang, every member, came down to the altar, knelt down, and gave their hearts to the Lord. The gang wars, at least for the miracle summer of 1958, came to an end. Forty years later, Nicky Cruz, former vice president of that Mau Mau gang, is still a hugely successful Pentecostal preacher and evangelist. Some of you have probably read his wonderful book, Run, Baby, Run.
Here's the point. Kids who did not have the mind of Christ, who had no concept whatsoever of "love your neighbor," who couldn't in a million years comprehend the idea of "return good for evil" or "do good to those who despitefully use you," came to the foot of the cross that hot July night and experienced the miracle of getting the mind of Christ.
This Nicky Cruz, telling his story to some Christians not many months later, described how the very next day he threw out his drugs. Word was out on the street that this Mau Mau killer had religion now. Check it out. And two little kids, who used to be terrified of him, came up to Nicky, wanting him to measure them to see which one was taller. Just a little thing, but now he put his arms around them to show them he was different.
A few weeks later, a rival gang member from a group called the Dragons, accosted him. "Hey, baby. Is it true you don't carry weapons any more?" "That's right," Nicky told him. The guy pulled out a ten-inch knife and went straight for his enemy's chest. And Nicky just caught that knife with his bare hand, just held it there, blood dripping down, and the speechless Dragon gang member ran off down the street. Nicky went home and bandaged up his hand, and now instead of F-words and thoughts of revenge and planning for a midnight "rumble," he had go through his mind instead:

"The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin."

"The mind of Christ." Friend, it makes such a difference. And the world of the Christian faith is awash with stories like this: "From Gang Member to Preacher." "From the Mafia to the Mission Field." When people give their hearts to God, they get a new brain, a different kind of mind.
And yet, as we've also been saying, it's not an automatic process. Israel, the president of the Mau Maus, gave his heart to God that night too. He accepted a great big King James Bible from Davie Wilkerson and paraded happily out into the New York night. A few months later he was arrested for murder. Getting the mind of Christ is not an easy overnight miracle. Even Nicky Cruz spent years studying the Bible, taking seminary classes, in order to become a preacher. He's 61 years old now, and still eager to grow, to learn, to have more and more of "the mind of Christ."
We've been studying some very helpful Bible passages which were written by a gang member too, named the Apostle Paul. He had rather a dramatic conversion experience of his own, and in the book of Ephesians chapter four, he talks about how kids like Nicky Cruz, and maybe you or me, are babies when we first come to God. What kind of a "mind of Christ" does someone like that have? A baby mind, of course, with a baby vocabulary, and infant selfishness, and teenage-type immaturity. There's nothing wrong with that, nothing unnatural about the fact that a brand new believer starts off the Christian walk on Square One. But then all of Ephesians four talks about growing up, being built up in the faith, learning to do works of service. Lately we've been reading to you some of these verses out of a paraphrase called The Message, by Dr. Eugene H. Peterson. Here's how he renders verses 14-16:

"No prolonged infancies among us, please . . . God wants us to GROW UP, to know the WHOLE truth and tell it in love — like Christ in EVERYTHING. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love."

Doesn't that sound like good "growing up"? "Robust in love"?
It might be interesting sometime to simply make a list, right there on a piece of paper, about what the mind of Christ must be like. Go ahead, why don't you, and do it? Don't we all know that Jesus hated sin . . . but loved sinners? That's right. He had a mind that hated sin, but was drawn to the very people struggling with sin. He loved to heal people. He wept over their pain. He wanted to rescue everyone He could. He wanted to perfectly reflect the love of His own Father to a world where people had lost that understanding.
Then take that list of yours, that daunting piece of paper, and ask God to daily give you that kind of mind too. Let's think again about that desperately lonely, angry, simmering-mad, vengeful gang member: Mau Mau vice president Nicky Cruz. For a while there, he loved sin. He loved promiscuous sex. He loved drugs and knife fights; he loved power. He snickered when he saw blood; he loved to see a rival member lying dead in the street.
And then he gave his heart to God and got the mind of Christ. Not all at once, not miraculously. But he began that process. Today I can tell you that Rev. Nicky Cruz hates sin. He hates the hopelessless of heroin, the spiritual poverty felt by prostitutes and pimps. He hates what drugs do, what violence does. Here in 2001, I'm sure that blood and crime sicken him, make him weep on his knees. On the other hand, Nicky Cruz loves sinners; he's been involved in ministry to them for decades now. Just like Jesus, he loves to rescue. Just like Jesus, he loves to reach out and heal, to operate a halfway house, to take heroin addicts and crackheads into his own house. Just like Jesus, he loves to tell kids with needlemarks on their arms and tears on their cheeks about a God who can set them free and a Holy Spirit who can enter their lives and baptize them into a new identity. And yes, he loves the wholesome embrace of a good Christian wife named Gloria.
We sometimes wince when someone looks us in the eye and says, "Grow up!" But the evidence out of New York City, July 1958, is that it's actually pretty good advice.