The Profiteer Who Wept

In Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, we witness one of cinema's most staggering transformations. Oskar Schindler arrives in wartime Kraków as a pure opportunist — charming, self-serving, eager to exploit cheap labor for his enamelware factory. He wears fine suits, drinks expensive cognac, and sees Jewish workers as nothing more than a business advantage.

But something shifts. During the liquidation of the ghetto, Schindler watches from a hillside as a little girl in a red coat wanders through the chaos below, and something cracks open inside him. The man who came to make money begins spending every pfennig he has to buy lives instead. He bribes, he schemes, he risks everything — not for profit, but for people. By war's end, he has rescued over eleven hundred men, women, and children from the death camps.

In the film's most devastating moment, Schindler stares at a gold lapel pin in his trembling hands and sobs, "I could have got more. This pin — two people. This car — ten people."

Transformation had turned a profiteer into a rescuer.

The Apostle Paul understood this kind of overhaul. "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here" (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Almighty does not merely improve us. He changes what we live for — turning self-serving hearts into self-giving ones, one surrendered moment at a time.