In God's Word we see what happens when the Pharisees accused Jesus of driving demons out of people with the help of the prince of demons. The Pharisees said…

Mat 12:24 …This Man drives out demons only by and with the help of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. (AMP)

Mat 12:25 … Any kingdom that is divided against itself is being brought to desolation and laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will last or continue to stand. (AMP)

Jesus asked us to check our hearts and allow Him to purify them. Our hearts are, as I said, what we think into. All our thoughts cumulate in our subconscious minds (our hearts) which create our individual worlds. It is the human sin-nature to look quite critically at other people, forming theories about what they are thinking about us. However, Jesus has asked us to do something different with the data we gather. He has told us to stop judging others, and love them as we love ourselves. This attitude taken (because we have free will and can do so, despite its difficulty), will lead to a re-training of our modules (if you want to put it that way) as we, through Jesus Christ, embrace forgiveness and peace. Even though forgiveness is often one-sided, it still stops the endless cycles in which humans have repeatedly fought, out of vengeance, and then needed to fight again as the other side retaliated. Praying for our enemies and others will actually (over time) correct our mis-trained modules, and will lead to our sound minds.

Why does all this need to be done through Jesus Christ, who is our Lord and Savior? It is because we have a tendency to place ourselves higher in our own minds than we ought. We do this because of pride. The natural world, also known as the carnal world, is a world of pride. A true revelation of God, through Jesus' teaching and His Spirit, will humble us. As Christians we reverently share the story of how Jesus died for us on the cross. He was the Son of God, He was God incarnate, He was of high standing in heaven, and yet He came down to our level and spoke from our humanness, to our humanness, teaching us, as one of us, and then dying in place of us for our sins. It is quite obvious that all sin didn't instantly disappear in this world. There is still plenty of sin going on. But His death on the cross DOES eliminate our sin, by our faith in Him and our faith in His work on the cross. There's that word "faith," again. Believing God did this for us, sending His only begotten Son to earth to die for us because He loves us so, remains the foundation of Christianity. Operationally, sin wanes proportionately to the level of belief a person has that Jesus Christ is one's Lord and Savior and that He died for us on the cross, taking away our sins. The less one believes this, the more one's sins show themselves. We keep making our own selves, our Lord and Savior, and, consequently, drift toward the world's ways of self-sufficient secular humanism, which is an error. This error is correctable by sincere repentance and a recommitment to Christ. God is always ready to extend His grace to us, no matter how many times we fail.

It might be well to look at an event in our recent history, which I read in a book by Philip Yancy , entitled What's So Amazing About Grace? Some amazing and wonderful things happened as the Soviet empire was deteriorating over a decade ago. The author of that book was invited as part of a Christian delegation to the collapsing empire in October of 1991, as the Russian leaders were desperately in need of help in "restoring morality" to their country. The meeting took place at the KGB headquarters. General Nikolai Stolyarov, Vice-Chairman of the KGB was to pleasantly shock the delegation by his words. Here is that quote from page 116:

"Meeting with you here tonight is a plot twist that could not have been conceived by the wildest fiction writer. We here in the USSR realize that too often we've been negligent in accepting those of the Christian faith. But political questions cannot be decided until there is a clear repentance, a return to faith by the people. That is the cross I must bear. In the study of scientific atheism, there was the idea that religion divides people. Now we see the opposite: love for God can only unite."

Stolyarov replied, "I have spoken of repentance. This is an essential step...there can be no perestroika⁸ apart from repentance. The time has come to repent of the past. We have broken the Ten Commandments, and for this we pay today."

The one who had been translating for Stolyarov rose to speak. His name was Alex Leonovich who, since Stalin's regime, had been exiled from his home in Russia. For 46 years he had been broadcasting Christian programming to the land of his birth. The broadcasts were often jammed, however. He had known of many Christians who had been tortured and persecuted for their faith. Here is what he said:

"General, many members of my family suffered because of this organization. I, myself, had to leave the land that I loved. My uncle, who was very dear to me, went to a labor camp in Siberia and never returned. General, you say that you repent. Christ taught us how to respond. On behalf of my family, on behalf of my uncle who died in the Gulag, I forgive you."

When hardened hearts are made soft by God in response to the many prayers of people all over the world, there can be no legitimate response, except tears of grateful joy, and if that is misfiring of modules, we need more of it. This is what will happen to Professor Dawkins, as he finally realizes how many people have read his books, but rather than accepting his premise of there being no God, they see his unspoken and unrecognized need of prayer. So they storm heaven so that he might come to know Jesus Christ as his Savior and receive His grace and mercy. It is a scenario that I delight in imagining.

Just as the Russian communists had persecuted Christians and separated families, so, too, have people who poorly represented the Christian faith in the past, separated honest souls from the "Way" as presented by Christ. It is a travesty that such a thing happens since, in the Bible, it is clearly stated that we must love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. Christians must pray for the disillusioned of this world to forgive us of all the times we retaliated against people for "murdering" Jesus, and of all the times we oppressed people in the name of Christianity. We would extend a warm hand of friendship to all atheists and humanists (because we are not to judge, but love—even as we pray to our God that they be led on a path of truth and shown that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.) Many in our history, and many even today, are very poor representatives of the wonderfully challenging and correct belief system known as true Christianity. Peel away the outer and flawed skin of human error and see the Lord, lift our burdens and reveal the true nature of our forgiving, loving and intimate God, whom we all are supposed to emulate. And forgive us all the times both we (and those in our history) have fallen so short in representing Christ. Please forgive us…and give us a bear hug, too.

8. Perestroika means, among other things, overcoming the stagnation process, breaking down the braking mechanism, creating a dependable and effective mechanism for acceleration of social and economic progress and giving it greater dynamism. I got this definition from the History Guide at http://www.historyguide.org/europe/perestroika.html. Back.

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