Main news for 25 May 2022

The Kingdom's entrance into the world begins on the day of Pentecost with the descent of the Holy Spirit. God's breath permeates the Kingdom, forming its nature, or rather what replaces nature in the Kingdom. And the further spread of the Kingdom through the world continues in the same way: it becomes a continuous Pentecost, repeated again and again.

Not some other, new Pentecost, but the same one, manifesting itself now here, now there, everywhere there are people seeking the Kingdom and wishing to enter it. God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, enters the world, but always through people. It cannot be otherwise: the Kingdom consists of people who have firm, stable, and entirely real relationships with God and with Christ. These relationships form the structure of the Kingdom, insofar as they can be called a structure at all. But despite its apparent dependence on a person and his choice, the power of the Kingdom is fully real. So real that when it has already entered the world, everyone feels the action of this power.

Although, of course, in different ways: for while the power of the Kingdom can be felt on oneself anytime and anywhere, its breath, full of God's love, can be felt only by opening one's heart to it and entering it. It is no accident that the Book of Acts so often mentions magicians who sensed the power of the Kingdom and left their former path: they felt the power of the Kingdom very well, but they could not feel the breath of God's love behind it until they themselves became its inhabitants, and therefore Christians.

It cannot be otherwise: one cannot simply make use of the Kingdom. Yet there were those who wanted to, like the "exorcists" who tried to use the name of Jesus to achieve their own goals. They had apparently heard the words about the name of Jesus by which one can be saved, and decided that it possessed power in roughly the same sense in which the names used in their magical practice possessed power. The result was a failure, and the newly minted exorcists barely escaped.

The power of the name of Jesus manifests itself only when you yourself become an inhabitant of the Kingdom, and only to the extent that you have become one. It cannot be otherwise: God's power always changes a person from within, and God always wants not simply to make a person His instrument by supplying him with certain special abilities, but to renew him, turning him into an inhabitant of His Kingdom. This is the main thing. Everything else is only forms and means, which by themselves give a person nothing.