Babies are born with a brain highly perceptible to stimulation from outside and have an incredible potential to lock these stimuli into their brains forming permanent patterns. This is what gives them the potential to learn and grow at a phenomenal rate. Many of these first impressions on the almost void brain will be permanent and very difficult to change later. It is called N grams of the brain. That is why we all have accents so specific to our own mother tongue languages and even specific to the area where we grew up in and why it is so difficult to learn a new language and speak it in a way that sounds like the original speakers. Think about the accents of Chinese or Korean people who speak English and learned the language only later in life and vice versa. It is very difficult to change these patterns that were formed in the early years. Even cultural habits that we grew up with are fixed in our brains and a reason for the yearning for those ‘familiar’ things that had become part of who we are.
In a certain sense we can also call it ‘brain wash’. So, the way in which I raise my child will have an influence on him for the rest of his life. And even so the environment that he grows up in; the climate, the culture, the school, teachers, the television he watches, everything will form patterns in his brain and will affect his thinking and behavior to a lesser of larger extent for the rest of his life. Thus, I, as a parent, have a choice of what I will write into my child’s brain and very importantly also with religion, how he will think about it and react to it.
So some 'enlightened' people might say that they do not want to ‘brainwash’ their children with specific ideas or religions. But the fact is that if you don’t, you ‘brainwash’ him anyway in being insensitive to religion or worse, to not being religious at all. Statistics show that the younger people are when they hear the Gospel; the more likely they will react to it which is not surprising in the light of the above. Research have shown that 60-80% of responses to the Gospel are made by young people. It is stated that if a human has never heard about Jesus as a child they will most likely never follow Him. Only 10% of people coming to Christ are above 60 years of age.
So it is not surprising that Jesus said in Matthew 18: 3-4 ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child, is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven’. Fixed patterns (N-grams) and pride keep people away from God. (In his pride the wicked does not seek Him, in all his thoughts there is no room for God. He says to himself, “Nothing will shake me; I’ll always be happy and never have trouble” “He will not call me to account” Psalm 10: 4, 6, 13)
Everybody is born with an emptiness in his heart that only God can fill. Just as we have a natural yearning for a life partner. But if that life partner does not come and we get older, this yearning becomes less and less as we get set in our ways without him/her. So would we become less and less conscious about the emptiness that only God can fill as our brain patterns get more and more fixed the longer we live without Him. And the peace that God intended will always elude us. (Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee. Saint Augustine 354-530 AD)
But God is above the laws of gravity, above the laws of brain patterns and N-grams that He created and through, and only through His Spirit, would He defy these stumbling blocks and change lives. Birth is never an easy process and so not spiritual birth either. He said in John 3:3 ‘I tell you the truth, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again’ 3:6 ‘Flesh gives birth to flesh (natural birth), but the Spirit gives birth to the spirit (so man’s spirit can live, and the reality of life outside the physical world will open up to him) And this birth through the Spirit, that radically changes lives, only take place in human lives because Christ is alive and people are drawn to Him. One has to become like a child, not in the sense of not thinking, but in a change of attitude and of humbling yourself in total dependence and surrender to God. Matthew 16:25 ‘For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Me will find it’
So the older we are the more difficult it is to come to Christ. But it is also where we often see the most radical and dramatic changes in lives as it often needs a lot of pain in someone's life to draw Him to Christ. Pain as in serious or terminal sickness, divorce, sudden unemployment, natural disasters and others. Sadly so many people die without the opportunity to turn to God, without having had the proverbial ‘second chance’, and continue without Him as they are so used to their set ways without Him until their death. But reading this is a second chance from God. Fixed habits and pride can be overcome by the Living Christ through His Spirit if we seek Him with all of our hearts.
Christ is alive and changes lives against all odds, all backgrounds, all laws and any impossible circumstances. More than a superficial change, a change to a new life, and in a very deep sense new.
Romans 6:4 '... just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life'
Christianity is not about committing oneself to a set of religious doctrine and the following of rules. It is about finding God Himself and experiencing a moment to moment living relationship with an incredibly loving God.
- You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13)
- Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened (Matthew 7:7-8)
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