(Do you know an unlikely convert, too?)
Friends, if you need something encouraging to read today, this true story – shared with permission - just might amaze you as it has me. But first, a prayer to settle our hearts this Election Day.
Our Father in heaven:
You are sovereign and rule all things well.
We trust you for the results of this election,
whether our candidates are elected or defeated.
We trust your kingdom to come, your will to be done
in every precinct and county as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread:
of faith, hope, and love;
of humility, generosity, and compassion.
Forgive us our misplaced hopes and outsized fears
As we forgive others the wounds of their idolatries.
Lead us not into the temptation of hatred.
Deliver us from the evil of violence.
For yours, Lord Jesus, is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.
Nothing surprises you, and nothing threatens your rule.
Amen. – Jen Pollock Michel
********************
If you were asked to name the least likely person to convert to the Christian faith, who might that be?
It could be a world leader or celebrity known for a profane, hedonistic lifestyle, or some Mafia kingpin or drug lord you’ve read about who cares nothing for human life.
It might even be an adult child, sibling, or spouse--one who has rebuffed every attempt you’ve made to introduce the one you love to the Lord you love.
In the first century, Jesus’ followers would have named Saul of Tarsus – the Pharisee who self-righteously presided over the persecution and murder of countless believers in Israel.
If you were to ask me, it would be the man I met two weeks ago--the spy who came to dinner.
It was a Saturday night. Our friends Sallie and Ron invited Mike and me to their home to meet a houseguest visiting from Moscow, a slender man who appeared to be in his late 50s. Maybe 60's.
The guest’s round spectacles gave him the appearance of a mild-mannered academic, but the pale blue eyes behind the lenses missed nothing. Our hosts introduced him as Sasha, but that was not the name he was known by in Russia.
This was the Tin Man—a highly skilled operative for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.
The KGB.
The man without a heart.
The man who as a member of the former Soviet Union's internal security agency would not blink those blue eyes if ordered to kill people like you and me.
And that’s exactly what the KGB did. With little emotion, the Tin Man told us that under 70 years of Communist rule, 200,000 Christian leaders in Russia were murdered and nearly a half-million imprisoned. In 1920, there were 100,000 church-owned buildings, but by 1940 all but 1,000 had been seized or destroyed.
According to Operation World, the Church in Russia has suffered the most severe and sustained persecution of any nation in recent history.
And it was at the hands of men like the Tin Man.
Yet despite being raised as an atheist by his Communist parents, Sasha had a believing grandmother who secretively had him baptized at age five in an Orthodox church miles outside Moscow. Though he was too young to remember, the God his government insisted did not exist did not forget Sasha.
In his teens, Sasha joined the Party himself and was hired by the KGB, his salary five times that of the average Russian worker. Marriage and a daughter, Julia, followed. Life was good, and if it was also expendable for those who got in the way, that was of no concern to the Tin Man.
If one has no heart, one can hurt others without ever feeling the pain himself.
Then came a day in 1993 when Julia arrived home from school excited to have made a new friend. An American friend. A friend whose parents were missionaries.
The Tin Man was immediately suspicious. To a man with no God, these so-called Christian workers had to be spies.
Sasha arranged for his wife, Natasha, to serve as the American family’s language tutor – convenient for continual surveillance. Yet over the months to follow, Sasha became increasingly puzzled by the behavior of these American Christians.
“I was awestruck by the humanitarian aid distributed by these foreigners,” he told us. “And I was irresistibly drawn to their joy for life, for each other, and for the Lord. Step by step, I began to realize their generosity and joy stemmed from their love for God, a God I was taught did not exist. I decided to give God a 50/50 chance. Since no one could prove God’s existence, no one could deny Him either.”
When praying one day, Sasha had a vision of God on a mountain pouring the Holy Spirit into a jar of clay. The truth whispered into Sasha’s ears in secret by his believing grandmother became a reality in his life.
“From that day on,” Sasha said, “I needed no evidence for God’s existence, for I knew God in Jesus Christ.”
When he arrived home, the smile Sasha wore gave him away, prompting Natasha to confess that she, too, had become a Christian but had been too scared to tell her husband, a KGB agent.
We may think that the salvation of our loved ones is all up us, friends, but it’s not. It never was. God has ways to draw his children to himself that are more powerful than any words we can use, any pleadings we can utter.
So what is our responsibility?
Simply this: To live our lives in such a way that our genuine love for others, our joy in Christ, and our generosity of spirit is our witness to a skeptical, warring world.
“Like the Apostle Paul, I presided over the death of Christians,” Sasha told us. “But like Paul, I have seen Jesus. And like Paul, I may die one day for the gospel. But I cannot lose what was never mine to keep.”
No longer the Tin Man, Sasha is now President of Moscow Evangelical Christian Seminary, which has sent out nearly 1,000 graduates across 11 time zones to plant new churches to replace those communism destroyed.
No longer a spook for the State, Sasha is now an agent for the Holy Ghost.
No one is beyond the reach of God’s loving embrace, friends. Absolutely no one.
- Maggie Wallem Rowe, 2024
If you have a loved one you long to see return to Christ – or meet him for the first time – I promise to keep those names in my own prayer journal. You can reply directly to me at maggie@maggierowe.com or leave a first name or initials in the Comment section below.
For more information about Moscow Evangelical Christian Seminary, visit here.