My little attempts to do
missionary work in my area gave me insight into religious attitude of many
people. The moment I talk about Jesus to them, they become defensive.
Straightaway they suspect me of attempting to convert them to Christianity.
So, they take stance
against Jesus, I would not say against me because I do not preach myself. It
did not take long before I realized that they weren’t quite religious, and were
not so much driven by their faith in their religion as by their vain egotism.

Because they follow their
religion for themselves and not for the sake of religion, whenever anybody
finds fault with it, they think he/she is finding fault in them and in their
choice. So it is purely to stress their ‘self’ that they stand up for their
religion. And since they don’t know much about their religion, their attempts
to defend it are absolutely irrational. One good example of this is the
Anti-conversion Law in India.
In many parts of the
country, the missionary work has shown light to many, bringing them to Jesus.
The Hindu fanatics aren’t too happy to see this. Therefore, they have put in
place the Anti-conversion Law to check the influence of Christianity here. It
works by putting checks on the missionary work and also on the people who want
to embrace Christianity. It has made it mandatory for the people who want to
become Christian to make affidavit, stating that they are not changing their
faith for money or under pressure. When they make such an affidavit, they expose
themselves to persecution from the Hindu fanatics in various ways.
Now, the Hindu who
consider this law to be an effective way to check the missionary work and stop
the Hindu from becoming Christian, are quite unmindful of the implications of
this law and how it affects them. They don’t see that it is not working against
Christ’s last instruction to His disciples to preach His gospel to the world;
rather it has compromised their own freedom to choose which religion they want
to follow! If it becomes impossible, the missionaries would stop the missionary
work. Simple! They are not going to lose anything.

Regarding such people Jesus
once quoted the Book of Isaiah in Matthew 13:
“Hearing
you will hear and shall not understand,
And
seeing you will see and not perceive;
For
the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their
ears are hard of hearing,
And
their eyes are they have closed,
Lest
they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest
they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So
that I should heal them.”
People don’t want to be healed!
The sickness that Indians have been suffering from is slave mentality. It
tell-tales a spiritual condition. That is the reason why in its entire history,
India has hardly experienced 70 years of freedom. It seems this freedom they
have found difficult to digest. Small wonder that they are well on their way to
lose it again. And this time that they lose it, they won’t have another chance
to get it back.
Coming to the point, Jesus
has come into the world to spiritually liberate it. He said that the Holy
Spirit that He would send into the world after His departure would lead people
to the Truth, and the Truth will set them free. Let me remind my readers of the
fact that Jesus has said that He is the Way and the Truth and the Life. We can
learn from His teaching that life is no life at all if it is not free. Bible
says that God created Adam and Eve to be free – free to enjoy His blessings.
Therefore, He gave them the ‘free will’. It is Satan who turned them into
slaves – slaves of sin, curse, diseases and death. They became full of sorrows
because of this.

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