Three words floored gang leader Nicky
At 86 years of age, Nicky Cruz still speaks with the urgency of a man who knows what it means to be rescued. Once the feared leader of the Mau Maus gang in New York City, he is now one of the world’s most recognisable evangelists, and he insists that the secret of his transformation can be summed up in three words: “Jesus loves you.”
Appearing on American Christian broadcaster TBN’s ‘Praise’ show with Matt and Laurie Crouch in September, Cruz revisited the night in the late 1950s when a skinny Pentecostal preacher named David Wilkerson stepped into his territory in Brooklyn.
“I was totally, totally lost,” Cruz recalled. “There is no God,” I told Wilkerson. “Get out of here. You don’t belong here. You can get killed here.”
But Wilkerson refused to back down. Instead, he shouted words that would echo through Cruz’s mind for weeks: “You can cut me in a thousand pieces and throw them in the street, but every piece will cry out, ‘Jesus loves you, Nicky.’”
Cruz spat, cursed and walked away. Yet the damage was done. For two weeks he could not sleep. “Even my girlfriend thought I was going crazy,” he said. “I kept hearing that voice – ‘Jesus loves you.’”
The confrontation came to a head when Wilkerson invited Cruz and some 75 gang members to a rally. “He was naive,” Cruz admitted with a wry grin. “You don’t bring 12 gangs into one place unless you want blood. But that night he preached the cross – the blood of Jesus that can cleanse from all sin.”
Cruz, then in his early twenties, found himself on his knees before his fellow gangsters. “For the first time, I cried,” he said. “I humbled myself, and I felt Jesus touch my life.” That moment marked the beginning of a ministry that has since reached tens of millions across the globe.
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