Leila was a Ukrainian lady in her early seventies who used to love coming to our church services on a Sunday morning after attending mass at her Ukrainian Catholic church, which was just a few hundred meters up the street. She was proud of the fact that she attended two services and participated in, “two holy communions today.” Doing such, gave her the (misguided) belief that this practice would make God very pleased with her and that it would also bring her closer to Him. In other words, Leila thought that if she wanted to get to heaven, then she’d better work hard at it so God would be impressed with her efforts.
She dare not miss the Ukrainian Catholic mass however. She told me that if her attendance was limited to just this service (ours), then it would be as though she had not, “really been to church.” Leila was one among millions of traditional religious practitioners to think and act this way. She, like those millions, was not motivated by her love for God, she was motivated by her fear of God. As the months went by we were able to share the true message of the gospel of Christ with her, which she readily accepted, but she still kept the double-service practice up for quite a long time afterwards. Freedom in Christ is believed in the heads of many, but not in the hearts of many.
Leila was a married lady, but she told me her husband Raymond, was not interested in attending either church, which concerned her because he was poor in health and, “if he was to die, where would he go?” So she used to invite me to her home for coffee with the hope that I would get an opportunity to speak with him. On the first couple of visits Raymond would come and sit for a while and we would talk about Ukraine, which genuinely interested me, because my friendship with two other Ukrainian families at that time went back twenty-one years.
One time I called at their home uninvited. Raymond came to the door looking like death-warmed-up, but he welcomed me with open arms – a complete transformation in comparison to previous visits. He had been in bed so I asked him to hop back into it and that I would speak with him from there. No sooner did he do that when he immediately opened up the conversation to talk about God. He told me that, ” Jesus is not God as God is God, we only need to pray to the Almighty.” By that statement he was saying that Jesus was not equal with God the Father. He saw Him as a lesser – junior God. That’s a common belief, and it’s been adopted by more than one “Christian” organization.
Basically they see God as a God of justice, power, wisdom and love. They believe that He is a Spirit Being. They believe that He always existed and always will exist, that He is all-knowing, all-powerful and the Creator of all things. They believe in His sovereignty over the universe and that He alone is to receive worship from mankind. They claim to believe in one God as Christians do, but the similarities stop there. They deny the one God who exists in three Persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Not only is Jesus rejected as equal to God, but most often the Holy Spirit is rejected altogether as God.
Nevertheless, Raymond knew more about Jesus than most who hold those or similar views. It appeared that he had not thrown out all his Ukrainian Catholic teaching but he got very confused in his attempt to justify his beliefs. I responded by saying that his viewpoint contradicted Christ’s viewpoint because in His gospels we read of the Lord Himself telling us that when we see Him, we see God. When we know Him, we know God. If we believe Him, we’re believing God. If we receive Him, we’re receiving God. If we honour Him, we’re honouring God.
I then asked Raymond if he thought Jesus was a liar. He said no. Next I suggested to him that if Christ was not a liar, then perhaps He was deluded because of such claims. Raymond could not see Him as deluded. So I said, “Raymond, you are left with no other alternative than to accept Christ for who He is – God.” I could see him thinking that challenge through. From there he moved on to the Trinity, asking me if I could explain to him the reality of God as a three-in-one Being. Like most of us, he struggled in his endeavours to grasp such a reality.
I explained that if a chemist in a laboratory can put ordinary liquid water in a vacuum tube and then create some ice and gas from it while retaining the water – all at the same micro-second – then it would not be too hard for God who created the water to be three-in-one at the same time. I suggested that if he was willing to accept the New Testament’s declaration he would clearly see the Trinity revealed at Jesus’ incarnation Luke 1:35, at His baptism Matthew 3:16-17, and in what is known in Christian-speak as the Great Commission Matthew 28:19. In Jesus’ resurrection the doctrine of the Trinity is also clearly taught.
By this time we were sitting in the kitchen having a coffee and it was there that he asked more about the function of the Holy Spirit. So I gave the biblical account – God the Father sits on His Throne in heaven, Jesus sits at His right hand and the Holy Spirit is here with us waiting to be given the opportunity to open our understanding to the things of God. He will teach us and guide us into truth and He will impart Christ’s life to us. I then took a drinking glass from his shelf and put in some garden dirt, filled it with water and stirred it till it was discoloured.
The discoloured water represented us with our sin, guilts, fears, worries, confusions, anxieties etc, – all of which the Bible calls death. I then held the glass under a running water tap and asked him to think of the Holy Spirit continually pouring His life into us and at the same time continually casting out that death. I then explained it as receiving the “abundant life” that Jesus promises we will receive, but only if we turn ourselves over to Him. The Holy Spirit never works independently of the living Lord Jesus Christ nor of the Bible that He (the Spirit) wrote.
Raymond’s understanding was at that very moment being opened by the same Holy Spirit who was working through me. Sitting at the table, his eyes lit up and he smiled saying, “You have opened my eyes today.” He agreed when I corrected him and brought to his attention that it was God Himself revealing this to him. I encouraged him to trust the word of God as he read it because it was there that he could hear the Lord minister and speak with him. He told me he was a soldier in the Waffen SS Ukrainian Division, fighting the Russians during the second world war.
Prior to that day I sometimes had the thought that Raymond was carrying a lot of deep guilt. Leila said he used to consume a lot of alcohol. So when he told me of his SS days I simply said, “Raymond, the war was a long time ago but if you did something back then that constantly haunts you and fills you with guilt – tell the Lord about it and ask for His forgiveness before this day is over. If you do so, forgiveness will be granted and you will know it.” Often people told me about their past. I’ve heard some bad stuff, but that day I encouraged him to give it to Christ alone.
I was invited for lunch on my next visit and both he and Leila shared much about their hardships in Europe during the war and afterwards as refugees. Both saw Nazism and Communism as dreadful evils and they were grateful that Australia had been their home since the late forties. Raymond told me that when he was a young man he did not drink alcohol. But he once met two well-spoken (Ukrainian language) men who invited him to a hotel to drink. Despite his reluctance, he was made to drink. That was the second time a European migrant of the same era had shared such a story with me, or similar.
He does not remember skiing home in the snow. He said, “Only God got me home. It’s a miracle.” The next day he went back to trace his path. He found out that the two well spoken young men were Russian soldiers. Only God knows the true heart of a person and what starts them off. I thank God for His mercy. The oppression some of those people were put under must have been horrendous. As time marched on, Raymond and Leila sold their home and moved to a smaller, regional city. “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us by God.” 1 Corinthians 2:12.