EPISODE 92 ROMANS CHAPTER 1 Part 2 " What in the world happened to Karla?"

Welcome to Share the Word. You know, as I was editing today's podcast, I found myself stopping the recording and sitting in silence, giving great thought to Carla's story and the many times that I looked at those like Carla through a different lens. Listen carefully. Here we go. Romans chapter 1, part 2. What in the world happened to Carla?

If you've been listening for a while, you know the Share the Word podcast was designed for each episode to cover the biggest ideas found in one chapter of the New Testament. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that's what we do. I think once or twice since the beginning, we've covered two chapters in one episode because a narrative was ongoing and we didn't want to break it up. But for Romans chapter 1, we're really going to break this pattern. This is such a key section of the New Testament, I couldn't do it any justice in one 20-minute podcast. So Margie introduced this important epistle last time and covered Paul's introductory remarks up until chapter 1, verse 15.

As she explained, Romans is the most complete writing in the New Testament summarizing essential Christian doctrine and practice. Unlike other letters we've already studied, Galatians or Thessalonians, Romans was written to a church in a place Paul had not yet been. No apostle had. So in this extensive letter, I think it's safe for us to assume we have a pretty good summary of the information Paul shared when he was able to spend extended time in a city preaching the gospel of Christ and then grounding those who believed it in the Christian faith. I'm going to pick up the ball now in this podcast at verse 16 and focus on one very significant claim there. But first, remember back in middle school when your English teacher assigned you vocabulary lists?

One of my daughters really got into that idea, and every time she heard or read a new word, a word she didn't know, she made herself a flashcard. She put the new word on one side of an index card and its definition on the other, and she reviewed them regularly. By the time she was in high school, she had a big stack of these cards and a corresponding big vocabulary. In fact, she talked like a graduate school professor. This would be a good idea for anyone, too, who wants to learn the big ideas and the big terms in the New Testament. Put key theological terms we define on a card with a concise definition of them on the back, and then review them till you think you've mastered their meaning.

I'll get you started today with some essential-to-know words that show up in Romans chapter one. So if you want to take up my challenge, get yourself some index cards and start these terms, putting the term on the front and the definition I give you for them on the back. You have to know what Paul, the author, meant by these terms to clearly get what he's saying. So let's set up today's lesson by defining a few of these words, and I'll add more as we proceed through Romans, okay? First, gospel, literally the good news. Paul says at verse one he was set apart for the gospel, by which he meant God specially had called him to proclaim the gospel message.

In the Christian context, gospel came to mean the message about Jesus, who he was, what he did for us through his life and death, that can reconcile us to God. The message about Jesus, who he was, what he did for us, that can reconcile us to God. The good news of the gospel is that whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you've done, you can be reconciled to God through the atonement Jesus made for your sins on the cross. The gospel, it's the message everyone needs to hear. It's as necessary now as it was to Paul's audience in the first century. At verse 16, Paul writes this.

This is my favorite verse in the Bible, by the way. I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. The gospel is the power of God for salvation. Salvation means being in the place of having been forgiven and accepted by the God who made us. Being in the place of having been forgiven and accepted by the God who made us, our Creator, the Judge of all the earth. One who has received salvation, according to biblical theology, is saved.

They are in a spiritually safe place, accepted by God, and that's certainly where we want to be. The gospel is such a powerful message, it can not only change your life now, but much more importantly, will save you from a holy God's judgment in the future. Therefore, one who has been saved, the way the New Testament uses this term, is in a right relationship with God now and will be for all eternity. That brings us to the next key term, which is believe. That's the verb form. The noun form is faith in the New Testament.

The fundamental idea in these terms is to trust in, to rely on. When we went through the Gospel of John, I used the modern English equivalent to buy into, much more than mere mental assent, which is the way we use the word conversationally today. That's how we say believe. Saving faith is when we buy into Jesus, believing into all that he was and all that he did for us. Faith, faith in that, who Jesus was, believing into him and all that he did for us, believing with your mind, your emotions, and your will. With our mind, we hear and understand the message.

Emotionally, we are convicted of sin and realize we are lost without the Savior God sent for us. But with our will, we place our trust in Jesus as our personal Savior. We turn our lives toward following Him as our Lord. Every preacher who has ever spoken on this section of Scripture has pointed out that the word power, which Paul used when he wrote, The gospel is the power of God for salvation, is the Greek word dunamis, from which we derive our word dynamite. Kaboom! The gospel message is explosively powerful, Paul is saying.

The message changed the world in the first century and is still radically changing lives and destinies today for anyone who genuinely believes it. I'm going to do something different today, and in the rest of our time, I'm going to share the testimony of someone who's no longer here to share it herself. But I believe her story perfectly illustrates what Paul claimed about the gospel and its power. It's about a woman named Carla Fay Tucker. That name sound familiar to you? On February 3, 1998, she was put to death by lethal injection in the state of Texas, only the second woman executed in the U.S. in the last quarter of the 20th century, and the first in Texas since the Civil War.

When Carla was a little girl, her world came apart when her parents divorced. She grew up with feelings of rejection and anger. Even her sisters rejected her because she was born as a result of one of the many affairs her mom had. She was never acknowledged by her biological father and never accepted by her stepfather. Like most kids, she just wanted to belong. And Carla, as she grew older, was willing to do whatever was necessary to belong, to feel accepted or to feel loved by someone, by anybody.

By the time she was 10, she said she was already doing drugs given to her by older kids, her sister's boyfriends. By the time she was 12, she had been sexually molested and was numbing the pain in her life by alcohol she stole here and there. When she was 15, she was living on the street and prostituting herself, looking for intimacy in all the wrong places. She became a very hard case and was going headlong in the wrong direction. Soon she gravitated toward the outlaw biker crowd because there she did find some acceptance, but then became involved in a life of crime. One night in 1983, during a drug and alcohol binge, she and one of her biker boyfriends broke into the home in Houston of a man looking to steal anything they could turn into drug money.

When they were confronted by the homeowner, Carla's friend smashed him in the head with a hammer. And this is awful, but as he lay moaning on the floor, Carla grabbed a pickaxe and struck him in the chest several times. She said later to stop the gurgling sounds. When Carla was arrested, she was defiant and remorseless. Sneeringly, she told the detectives who interrogated her she got pleasure from killing the man. The gruesomeness of this crime, especially committed by a 23-year-old young woman, shocked the fairly shockproof city of Houston at that time.

Carla Faye Tucker was an animal, many said, as depraved as a person can get. She never denied the killing. She was found guilty of capital murder and condemned to die. But the wheels of justice in America, as you know, turned very slowly. She spent the next 14 years on death row. When her execution date was finally set, her case began to get a lot of attention.

Once I became aware of it, I followed it with great interest. What fascinated me was that from the very first time I saw her, in an interview, I mean, I was struck that this woman was not anything like I would expect an axe murderer to be. She seemed nothing like an animal. She was very calm, seemed serene, actually. She was poised, clear thinking, well-spoken. She seemed joyful.

She came off honestly as a radiant person. Over the months, I kept watching shows and reading articles dealing with her case, and they were usually devoted to some angle like whether the death penalty is really a deterrent, or whether it's appropriate for women, or whether Texas really had a fair board of parole, and every other thing you can imagine. Everything but the glaringly obvious question: What in the world happened that changed Carla Faye Tucker? I mean, something apparently radically transformed this woman. How about some in-depth reporting from someone in the media on that question? Not that the subject didn't come up at all.

Carla was not hesitant to tell what happened to her when given the chance by her interviewers, and some of it even made it past the editors. I learned that only a few weeks after being arrested, before she even started going to trial, while she was still being held in a county jail, she was invited to a Bible study being held there by a team from a local church. Carla said she went just to get out of her cell for a little while. But there in that meeting, she heard for the first time in her life the message of the gospel. She heard that God loved her so much that he sent Jesus to die for her sins, if she would turn from her sins and come to the cross of Christ sincerely. Asking God for forgiveness and cleansing, she would find acceptance and forgiveness, healing inside, and the power to change.

That was the kind of acceptance and unconditional love that she had always wanted. It sounded almost too good to be true, she said, but that night, Carla Faye Tucker asked God to forgive her many sins, put her faith in Jesus Christ as her Savior, and committed herself to His leadership from that point on. As the Apostle Paul wrote in another of his letters, when someone comes into a relationship with Christ, when someone responds to the gospel message in faith, they become a new creation. Old things in their lives pass away, and new things come. And that is exactly what happened to Carla Faye Tucker. This kind of puzzled Larry King.

He actually interviewed her for his whole show for two nights running. He wanted to know, I know you're religious now, he said, and all that stuff, but what actually changed you? Charles Grodin was at the time one of my least favorite talk show hosts. He could actually get me worked into a lather, which is no easy accomplishment. As he listened to Carla's testimony, he had his most condescending smile on. Why, of course you have Jesus now, he smugly said with his eyes rolling.

Jesus changed your life. All right, all right, whatever. It was inconceivable to someone with his worldview that the power of the gospel could actually do that. I was reminded of 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 18, where the Apostle Paul also wrote, I know very well how foolish the message of the cross sounds to those who are on the road to destruction, but to us who are being saved, it is the very power of God. There's that claim again. Regardless of whether Larry and Charles and the rest of the cynical media types believed the power of the gospel changed this woman's life, there is one fact that is beyond dispute.

She was completely changed. When her attorneys appealed her death sentence to the Supreme Court of the United States, they didn't argue that she was innocent and needed more time to prove it. They didn't ask for a new trial based on legal technicalities or procedural issues. Their argument was simple. If you allow this woman to be put to death, you are putting to death a different person than the one who committed the crime. Carla Faye Tucker is a completely different person.

One attorney intimately involved in that case named George Sechrist said this in an interview: I've represented a number of folks on death row, and as an attorney, I believe all of them deserve their day in court, regardless of what they've done. But I have never, ever seen anyone who has been genuinely transformed in any way like this woman. From the attorneys involved to the inmates around her to the prison guards to the chaplains to the warden, no one who watched her up close for those 14 years she was incarcerated doubted the transformational change in Carla Faye Tucker, that it was real and profound. On the day of her scheduled execution, I was following the events online. A conservative Supreme Court decided to decline her case. There also was no last-minute call from the governor of Texas, which I remember hoping for.

As she was escorted from her cell to the area the execution would take place, Jim Brazil, a chaplain at her prison, was with her. They were talking and praying together. When he left for a few moments to talk to the warden, Carla asked to borrow his Bible. Some family members of her victim came to the execution as Texas law allowed. A few reporters were there as representatives of the press. Carla's husband, actually a prison minister she had met while incarcerated.

He was there, her pastor, and a few Christian friends came as her witnesses. Before she was strapped down to the table, she was allowed to make a statement. First, she turned to the victim's family, some of whom were still filled with hatred and bitterness. According to the reporters in the room standing in front of a glass in the death chamber, she looked them in the eyes and said, I want to tell you how sorry I am for what I have done to you. I hope God will give you peace through this, meaning her own death. When she turned to her husband and those friends with him, she said, I am going face to face with Jesus now.

I'll see you when you get there. I love all of you. The reporter said there was no struggle or resistance as they strapped her down, hooked an IV to her arm, and began injecting the poison into her body. Intermittently, her lips were moving in prayer, and at another point she was humming a hymn as she waited for the drugs to take effect. It took about seven minutes. Chaplain Brazil said he didn't notice till a few days later, while working on Carla's funeral service, that she had written him a note in his Bible while he was out of the room for those few minutes.

And it said simply, Thank you for sharing the love and fellowship of Jesus with me in my final moments as I was preparing to see Him face to face. I love you in Christ, Jim. Let me ask you, what do you make of this? I can only think of three possible explanations. First, some might offer that Carla was rehabilitated through her years in lockup. What do you think?

Rehabilitation means someone changing from the outside in. The truth is— Many convicts actually get worse in prison. The anger they come in with just seethes and deepens while they're inside. Many get involved in gangs in prison. The recidivism rate in our country for serious crimes is very high. That is, people who go to jail and serve out their sentence are often released only to commit more crimes and end up back in jail again.

Some do calm down for sure, change over time as they age. But Carla, rehabilitated? I don't think so. Her change came dramatically only a couple weeks after she was in county lockup, not after years of reeducation and psychotherapy. Others probably argued that Carla was doing an unbelievably masterful job of pretending, and for some reason she played that out to the very end. Can you believe that?

She was pretending for 14 years. And you don't think the people around her and the transparency and the drudgery of prison life would catch on to that? And she goes to her death pretending? Why? Nah, I don't think that's a reasonable explanation in light of the extensive evidence. Too many people saw her close up over too long a period of time.

Which leaves us with only one other option, and that is that Carla Faye Tucker was in fact thoroughly changed through the power of the gospel. In one interview that I saved a copy of, the interviewer said, Everybody has a point to make. Maybe their point is political or legislative. It might be a death row issue or whatever their agenda is. And you have agreed to talk to all these people. So what is Carla's issue?

What is Carla's agenda? Her answer was, To share the love of Jesus. I see all this. Is God giving me one big open door to share the love of Jesus, and I'm just trying to do it. My heart since I have known Him has been to share the love He's poured into me, the forgiveness, the mercy, the way He's changed my life. I want to let people know that right where they are, no matter what they have done, God loves them and wants to come into their life and change them.

And it's never too late. Who could say it any better? You know, I have given this some thought, and here's a theory of mine. The reason God was able to break through in such a remarkable way, even to a very hardened person like Carla Faye Tucker, or a proud man like Chuck Colson, you might remember I told you about in another podcast. In those two cases, people from completely opposite ends of the human spectrum, but equally lost souls before God. The reason the gospel was able to penetrate them in prison, I think was because that was the first time in their lives that they had so much quiet time on their hands to think, to think about themselves, where they had been, what they had done, to think about the really big questions of life concerning God and sin and guilt, their consequences and the hereafter.

Most people are simply too busy. Their minds are too preoccupied. They're too distracted for that kind of serious thought and introspection. But in the quietness and humbleness and boredom of a prison cell with nothing but time on their hands, they thought about these things they had never thought deeply about before, and someone was there to share the gospel with them at that point and put a Bible in their hands at that point, and the voice of God for the first time they clearly heard, and the powerful message of the gospel broke through. And they responded in faith. Carla Faye Tucker, in my view, received a just penalty for her crime, no argument there.

But that's not the issue. The really big question is not at all about her death. It's about her remarkably changed life. What changed Carla Faye Tucker? How do you account for that? That question cries out for an answer, I think.

I have zero doubt, in fact, that she was transformed from the inside out by the power of the gospel of Christ, just as she claimed, just as was Saul of Tarsus, who first penned the great promise, my favorite verse in all of God's Word: I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation for anyone who believes it. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks again for joining us at Share the Word. And thank you, Paul, for not only bringing eye-opening and thought-provoking information, but also for bringing the Word of God in a way that opens our hearts to His unconditional love. As I mentioned at the beginning, what gave me pause was the statement that her conversion was from the inside out rather than the outside in.

Think about that. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.